Be Aware number five is alive.

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

On education this time around, I'd just like to highlight two somewhat sobering concerns that have presented themselves in the recent weeks:

1. I know that in addition to the millions of people displaced by and disrupted by the events of Katrina, there are a healthy number of students who have found their academic plans drasticly altered for this year. I heard from a colleague about LSU sending out a request for art supplies for the many additional students who are now part of their population - check out their site for contact info: Read more at: www.lsu.edu/

They have graphic design studies listed within their offerings so I'm certain students would welcome more design-specific supplies as well.

2. The AIGA has been looking for requests / replies related to design relief for Katrina on their site, but also recently posted an article by Steven Heller analyzing the imbalances between the amount of design students enrolled in / graduating from GD programs and the amount of design jobs in the market. Heller calls for design educators everywhere to examine their respective programs and see whether we're acknowledging this imbalance or not...

Read more at: designforum.aiga.org

Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes

"The process of ordering, disordering, and reordering design is revolutionary, and I believe we are now in the midst of such a revolution. Instead of focusing on symbols and things, designers have turned to quite different places to create new products and to reflect on the value of design in our lives. They have turned to action and environment.... It is certainly important that designers know how to create visual symbols for communication and how to construct physical artifacts, but unless these become part of the living experience of human beings, sustaining them in the performance of their own actions and experiences, visual symbols and things have no value or significant meaning."

Richard Buchanan in Design Issues: Vol. 17, No. 4 Autumn 2001

Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip

Find /Change, under the edit menu, is another way to increase your productivity, especially on long documents. I use it to change double spaces to single; double paragraph returns (^p^p) to single(^p); double tabs(^t^t) to single(^t). Those are easy. Here's one example that continually amazes people. Say I have bulleted/indented lists and I want the bullet to be the "4" character in Webdings, but 1.5 pt smaller, baseline shifted .5pt, and blue. I already have my paragraph style setup with a nested character style to format the bullet character, but not the rest of the line. Now all I need to do is search for spc spc tab • spc spc spc (that's how the author typed it) and replace with "4^t", choosing my paragraph style under Change Format Settings. That's it. If you don't want to type out "^t" for tab, just click to the right of the "Find what" or "Change to" fields on the little pop-up menu for a whole list of choices. The possibilities are endless. Try Find/Change to make all time formatting consistent.

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

On a recent trip to Portland, Oregon I had the opportunity to stop by and visit Oblation Papers & Press. They are a letterpress printer/paper maker/boutique shop. While they specialize in designing and printing letterpress wedding invitations, their retail store is enough to entertain for hours on end. You can take a look at the century old presses in action, feel the grain of their handmade papers or look through some of the fascinating letterpress work from other artisans from around the country. If you happen to be in this neck of the woods, head on down to the Pearl District and do your best to restrain yourself from buying too many letterpressed greeting cards.

Oblation had a good number of companies represented in the varied greeting cards that they sold. I purchased beautifully crafted cards from each of these companies: Egg Press, Manifesto Letterpress, Old School Stationers, Pancake & Franks, Saturn Press and Two Piglets