Be Aware 11
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Paul Berkbigler: Design Education
This will quickly betray exactly where my thoughts are turning as I slog through grading the mountain of final projects from my beginning and advanced layout and design courses, but here are a pair of books that anyone teaching these courses should have close at hand (and likely at least use as recommended reading for students if not as the course texts) to help combat the student tendency of throwing type wherever the please on the page:
• Grid Systems by Kimberly Elam
• Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop by Timothy Samara
Both would make lovely bookends on your design resource bookshelf - maybe a little design elf will drop these off at your house this Christmas! For the sake of my students I’m hoping Santa shows up with some magic layout symmetry dust sometime in the next few hours, but I suspect I”m not going to hear the tinkling of that particular set of bells.
Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes
DEATH OF THE DESIGNER: I came across a reference to Roland Barthes’ 1977 essay “The Death of the Author” in the book “Visual Research
…a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination…. it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Similar to Donovan’s Award show manifesto, I think Barthes’ desire is to shift focus to the place were design interacts with real people. Maybe its not about the death of the designers as much as it is about giving more power to the viewer, and the contexts that give designed artifacts their sense of pleasure. This is the space where our work is experienced a thousand times, by a thousand people… all different.
Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip
For the InDesign novice: text wrap can do more than basic rectangles. The option highlighted, “Wrap Around Object Shape,” allows you to base your text wrap on the transparency already included in a Photoshop or TIF. To use this, all you need is a layer in Photoshop with a clear/transparent background surrounding whatever you’ve cut out. Then save as a .psd or .tif file with layers and place into InDesign. In the InDesign text wrap palette, choose the “Alpha Channel” option. You may need to choose “Show Options” in the palette’s pop-up menu. Now your text should wrap around the edges of your specific image.
A similar option, “Detect Edges,” wraps to the light edges of your layer (whereas Alpha Channels wraps to a mid-value range) and even wraps to the irregular edges of a Freehand or Illustrator diagram. In either case, once you’ve selected a method, you can take the direct selection tool/white arrow, and customize the text wrap path as needed. All this is possible while maintaining 256 levels of transparency in your image.
Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress
If you have a pica of interest in letterpress you have probably visited Briar Press. If you want to know how to get started in letterpress or would like some answers about any letterpress question, jump into the forum over at Briar Press. Read past topics, create you own or throw your own expertise into the mix. If you fear that you won’t recognize any names in that forum, never fear, regular design blog commenter JonSel, is also a part of the discussion.
P.S. Check out the brand new article on Hatch Show Print in the February issue of HOW (The Typography Issue). I can never read or hear too much on Jim and the gang at Hatch.
Daniel Schutzsmith: Design Business
CLOSING THE DEAL: When trying to close a new project you may feel the temptation to lower your price to ease the tension of negotiations. Instead of lowering the value of your work, promote your studio’s dedication to quality. Insist that if the client wants to have a successful project that is of high quality, then they will need to go with your original price. If the client doesn’t want to pay for quality, then you do not want them as a client. NOTE: Obviously non-profit and charitable projects are completely excluded from this statement!
Nate Voss: Grunt Designer
STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY IS RUINING THE WORLD, reason #12
Call service centers have become the phone-sex lines of the non-“adult” business world. How do I know this? Because stock photography is ruining the world, that’s why. Take this woman, for instance:
Young, smart, attractive, nay! Beautiful. And obviously very eager to attend to all of your customer service phone call needs. There are thousands of photos just like this one. Attractive, friendly people ready to put their jobs on the line to make you happy. Now compare that to photos from say, an adult 900 number. No, I’m not going to post a photo for that. Those ads show incredibly attractive people, too, all of whom are ready to focus their complete attention on you.
In reality? Both are staffed by a bunch of ugly jerks who couldn’t care less about you or your customer service phone call needs. And they are most likely based out of India. But you go to Getty, you type in “woman” and “phone” as your search terms, and you get this on every service center brochure or ad in America. Is this real? No!
Stock photography lies to you. Don’t use it. (And don’t worry about all those photographers who make money through stock. If you stop buying stock images, they’ll book more photoshoots anyway.)
*Photo Stolen from Getty, obviously
Comments (9)
Nate Voss said:
Paul, my only problem with Grid Systems is that it reads like stereo instructions. If I gave that book to my students they’d all either drop my my class or die of intense boredom. Sure the information is good, but it’s so stale… If you’re looking for an all-encompassing book (when you teach by the quarter like I have to) I fully recommened Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type. The book is chock full of great information and, suprisingly enough, a very enjoyable read.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Bobby Dragulescu said:
Nate, and photoshoots are different how? Other than being $10,000 more expensive, that is. They’re still shot in a studio, with meticulously art directed props, and using beautiful models.
Nature of the business, man. Remember what they taught you in college, advertising doesn’t sell the product, it sells the desire for the product.
Posted on December 15, 2005
DC1974 said:
Thanks Nate. I was going to suggest Lupton’s book as well. I actually keep the book at my desk at work. I find it very inspirational. She covers the whole range of options and offers a condensed history of type. It’s great to just pick up and flip through the pages to job my imagination. (Much better than the biology textbook-like tomes that I had in school: Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design and Rob Carter’s Typographic Design: Form and Communication.)
Posted on December 15, 2005
Emory said:
I’ve got to agree with Nate Voss. I have all three, Grid Systems, Breaking the Grid, and Thinking With Type, and the first two just don’t make typography seem as interesting as it really is. I never really cared about type until my senior year which is when I got Thinking With Type and my work suffered because of it. I read enough boring textbooks in other classes that I didn’t feel like reading another one for a class that I felt was excitiing.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Kevin Steele said:
re: Stock Photography
In 1997 I took over a small web studio that was part of a medium sized ad company. Web design budgets and timelines were squeezed because: creative was already done for the general ad campaigns; the ad company was used to making its profit on the media buy; they had yet to understand how online was different, etcetera.
Additionally, creative was being squeezed by the technical requirements of creating a functioning web site in the late 90s. The studio was primarily operating as decorators. The design process was more about sourcing and assembling rather than creating.
For a while, easily available okay stock photography was a life saviour for a team constrained by time and money. Once we started seeing the same photos in other ads we knew we had to set our sights higher.
Eventually we (the online group) pushed for a bit more room to create on some projects. We bought a digital camera for the studio and I challenged the designers to create images in-house, at least during the initial design phase. The camera became a huge part of our studio. (As well, we would document the creative process with creative snap shots and use slide shows and/or scrapbooks to bring the client in on the process.)
If a designer’s process includes a lot of sourcing stock photos as part of idea generation, they are likely relying too much on stock photography. Forget the image search and keywords and get out the pencils, markers and camera!
—
Bobby D brings up a different point, that eschewing stock does not mean that we are automatically creating truthful images.
He’s right, of course, but when we invest more of ourselves into creating an image there is more opportunity for us to take responsibility for its content.
Personally, I think truth is going to make a comeback at some point.
—
And I love TWT, too. The grid stuff in there is more than enough for me.
Posted on December 15, 2005
p.berkbigler said:
No argument with any of you on the dryness / formalist approach in both Elam and Samara’s texts, and most definitely no argument on how much more vital, vivid, and enticing Lupton’s text is (certainly a new standard, particularly in typography classes). I frankly based my endorsement of the first two as geared first at the educator and then secondarily at the students they’re working with.
I’m still new at the whole teaching game and assume I’m like most professors who sort of geek-out initially at the idea of a text that packs a ton of principles and underlying guidelines into itself so that students have them available to browse WITHOUT the professor having to go through the extensive writing and research hours required to compile something similar.
I’d actually cite the top two books as being very intentionally like the stereo instructions Nate is pointing to - these are texts that are more dictionaries than they are novels, and I’m quickly realizing that if my students are going to have any sort of solid architecture to vary and experiment on later in their careers they’re going to need some rigid structure early that opens up to much more freedom at a later point.
Ultimately, if we haven’t been provided with enough texts that offer great information but also enliven it with writing that is as engaging, inviting, and rich as Lupton’s, it may simply be a call for more of us to work on writing them ourselves.
In this case, I should have reached for these books much earlier this semester to lay down some good groundwork for the larger amount of text the students ended up needing to set in their latter projects.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Bill Kerr said:
Making and Breaking the Grid is a really nice book that shows how different types of grids can be utilized to create vibrant, yet orderly layouts. Probably the best part about it, though… is to show the novice that grids are not something to be feared… but rather somthing to be embraced.
Posted on December 15, 2005
Chad said:
I disagree with the stock photography. I work at a small rural community college and we use stock photography all the time. Mainly for three reasons, we have had a studnet killed in a car wreck and the family requested the picture not be used anymore. Being a “community” college we had to ablige. So the entire ads were pulled, which can be very costly when you are a non-profit. Secondly along the same lines we had to pull a brochure because a couple on the cover had a really nasty divorce! ANd lastly We took a photo of a BLET Class, and published it in the paper with the sutdents names, one of the guys had been working undercover and his cover was then blown by that. So thats whay we use stock photos, no worries and its cheaper than doing it ourselves! If the money is there I would say go for ur own shoots, b/c you can get more waht you want, but just be leary of the possibilites.
Chad
Posted on December 15, 2005
kadavy said:
I haven’t cracked open my Thinking With Type yet, but I have to say that my students were fascinated with Elam’s book when I presented select pages of it from class. It probably would have gone over differently had I simply required them to read it, though.
Posted on December 16, 2005