Be Aware 15

A once in a lifetime experience here. Be Aware 15 falls upon the 15th day of the month. The designs are all in alignment and hopefully your type is as well.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Design Business

SCOPING A NEW PROJECT: Who says you have to take every project that is offered to you?! Before taking on any new project there are some key questions that you should ask yourself to determine whether this project is right for you.

What is the objective?
Who is the target audience?
What is the timeline?
What is the budget?
Where does the project fall on the Design Triangle (Good, Fast, or Cheap)?
What will I gain from taking this project on?
How much time will it realistically occupy?
Does the client have a history of being difficult?

If you answer “no” or “I don’t know” to any of these, then you may want to find out more about the project or think about passing on it entirely.

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

I thought it would be nice to share a little bit of my letterpress collection with all of the readers of Be A Design Group. While a single “sort” of my limited collection of wood type wouldn’t do you much good, I thought a scan of a letterpress alphabet (800 KB) might be useful. Feel free to use this as a you would a royalty free image. One catch. If you end up using it in a piece of design, send me a jpeg or post a link to it on this very post (email to: bennett at beadesigngroup dot com). As with most royalty free images, please don’t use this on, or as products you are going to sell.

Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip

When software is improved, things are changed. I’m assuming these “improvements” are why last week’s magazine reprint did not go as planned.

I opened my InDesign 2 file from 2001 to simply lighten a few background color tints, and then burn to DVD. This was a reprint to simply increase inventory. Then I realized this was not going to be an exact reprint because text was re-wrapping around photos, and text was moving between pages–oh my! After studying and changing about a third of all the pages, I surmised a) text wrap offsets must have changed a tiny bit, just enough to make changes in line breaks; and b) the Paragraph Composer must have changed as well, because pages without text wrap were also different.

Be aware, in case you need to update some old InDesign files. Maybe it was the way I made my document back in 2001. After all I did a lot of weird things back then, like naming files with slashes, asterisks, and percent signs, but maybe it was an improvement to InDesign I have experienced first-hand.

Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes

What’s more important? How we go about producing our designs? What the designs look like? Or how and where our designs interact with various viewers? In, Visual Methodologies, author Gillian Rose (2001) suggests that these are the three stages at which visual images are interpreted.

“Interpretations of visual images broadly concur that there are three sites at which the meanings of an image are made: the site(s) of the production of an image, the site of the image itself, and the site(s) where it is seen by various audiences.”

As a designer, I am tempted to cut corners at each of these three junctions with my design. I might, as Donovan suggested a few weeks ago, cut corners in creating an image by using technology rather than more human methods. Or maybe, I am tempted to compromise a concept slightly to make way for the $99 stock image. Or maybe, I protect a concept from real audience evaluation by smoke and mirrors. Presenting myself as a rainmaker to swooning clients who marvel at my “magic” with little regard for how the design will be interpreted within culture.

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

I’m going to cross paths with Bennett’s area of focus this week, but wanted to share a resource that I just used in a History of Graphic Design course that I’m leading this semester. It’s always a challenge to visualize what historical printing processes actually look like when you’re trying to introduce students to their heritage – woodcuts and etchings only give you so much of the sense of the look and feel of the pages coming off of the press.

While the image illustrating this post is a little misleading (no presses of this vintage are actually shown in the film), this is a beautifully produced segment detailing multiple bits of letterpress equipment in use at Firefly Press in Massachusetts – it’s lovely to see the C&P, Vandercook, Linotype machine, and monocaster in action. It’s better still to be able to “grab this on the go” when you want a “living” example to show in your class sessions.

Major thanks to John Kristensen (printer / proprietor) and Chuck Kraemer (filmmaker / producer) for sharing this with us all.

Enjoy the short film.

Nate Voss: Grunt Designer

This car had Minnesota plates, but it was stopped at coffee bar near my brother’s house. A bright yellow Chevy Cavalier, of indeterminate age, with nothing special about it unless you look at the trunk.

Like the Doritos packaging, I was stopped in my tracks. But this time it was in a good way. Most car art is big, obtrusive, and features Toupac in some way. This was small, unobtrusive, and used the car’s existing paint job to its advantage. I was blown away. So hats off to you, Person From Minnesota Who Appreciates Design (or art, or advertising, or WWII-era propaganda). You have made the best car art of all time. I just wonder how you even arrive at this idea. You know, my car’s yellow, just like the background of that WWII poster. I should paint the WWII poster on the trunk of it! Probably something like that.

In case you live in a cave, it was based off this 1943 poster by J. Howard Miller.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 10:36 am and is filed under Be Aware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.