In an effort for our site to be even more “group” oriented we are going to have a group post called “Be Aware” twice a month. This is the first of many to come. Half of our authors will be in the post at the first of the month and the other half in the middle. Each author on our site will consistently write about a chosen subject that they are passionate about. It is amazing what you can observe if you are aware of your surroundings. Enjoy!

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

It’s still early in my practice as a teacher, so my fervor for the subject of typography and drive to nearly hammer it into the brains of any student I come into contact with may still mellow as my career continues. All that aside, though, if you have a need to brush up on typography basics or find yourself faced with a classroom of folks looking to know more about it, Ellen Lupton has again been prolific and generous enough to compile an excellent type primer and a great website companion to it - take a look at a copy of Thinking With Type the next time you’re in a bookstore, or browse the fairly extensive content that she’s also offering on thinkingwithtype.com.

Among my personal favorites that she’s included are the “Crimes against Typography” section and her “Tools for Teachers” section - simply terrific little supplies to dole out in the classroom.

Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes

“Designers can no longer only be concerned about the interaction of word and image; they also must be concerned about the interaction between the audience, the content of the communication and the outcome of the design. In order to create dialogues that effectively persuade the viewer to adopt a new belief or change behavior, the communication designer can no longer rely solely on intuition.

Designers have to devise methods for creating empathy with the viewer who will play a part in constructing meaning from the message.”

Jodi Forlizzi and Cherie Lebbon. “From Formalism to Social Significance in Communication Design” in Design Issues. Autumn 2002.

Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip

InDesign Guides

Do you know how much InDesign guides can do for you? You’ve probably already realized you can select one, and enter an exact (x,y) value in the Transform window. You can also select multiple guides of the same orientation and align/distribute. Or, just move a bunch of them at the same time by selecting only guides (although once you select an object, your guide selection will be lost) and either drag or type a new value. This is particularly helpful for adjusting book layouts to new spine sizes.

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

If you happen to be in north central Kanas anytime soon I would recommend visiting what I would like to call the “ghost” letterpress shop. Jewel Kansas has a little history museum with an old practically untouched letterpress printshop in the back. It is sad to see the rollers melted on the ink plates, but it is fascinating to look at the tympan paper and still be able to see what the last job printed was. Just be sure to call and make an appointment before you go, because that is the only way to get in.

Nate Voss: Grunt Designer

Stock Photography is saturating the world with tameness. A quick search of stock-site Photos.com for “Anger” gives you near-emotionless, unevocative, frowning portraits. The problem? In order to sell photos, the shots need to fit as many applications as possible. My “Anger” photo could fit the square-hole for “Need a New Printer?” just as easily as it could fit “So You’ve Committed Murder?”

There’s such a glut of non-specific imagery in the world right now that it may-well become this decade’s design trend.

Welcome to the second installment of our Be Aware group posts.

Donovan Beery ��� Web Tips

website _ file _ naming _ for _ search _ engines.html
When creating your website files, take the extra few seconds to name files properly. Rather than naming something “image.gif,” changing the name to. For example, “graphic _ design.gif” will help search engine rankings for “graphic design.” But remember, spaces and special characters like “&” can cause problems with old browsers, so leave these out of your file names. A simple underscore (_) will be read as a space by search engines, so use them instead.

Drew Davies: Seen and Noted in the Design World

Let’s face it. As designers, we hate being called “graphic artists” or worse yet, “commercial artists.” Rest assured that’s still true for me, but recently I’ve been taking note of the work of the people who still wear those badges proudly. These days they’re calling it “window splash,” but we know it as custom, hand-painted type and images. You’ll find it on big signs, sides of vehicles and vast windowscapes, and often associated with pawn shops and quick check cashers. It’s the epitome of “commercial art,” and some of it is downright gorgeous.

If you haven’t recently, stop by one of these places sometime soon and take in some of this art. No, it doesn’t involve heady concepting, deep strategy, or any “brandscaping.” (Bless his heart, my grandfather did huge, custom-lettered banners for local grocery stores for years, and still never quite understood what I do for a career.) But if you find the right piece, you’ll see that it’s crafted with a honed skill that is almost extinct in our digitally-evolving world. Only a few people are left who really do this well, and their work should be celebrated.

Travis Gray: Flash Animation

With the advent of Flash it has become very easy for anyone to produce their own animated cartoons and shorts. And since I wanted to be an animator before I wanted to be a designer, I still occasionally get the urge to animate a few characters every once in a while. So here are a few references and resources that you might find helpful if you also animate for a hobby.

Books:
Hollywood 2D Digital Animation by Sandro Corsaro & Clifford J. Parrott
The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams
Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right by Jason Osipa
Timing for Animation by Harold Whitaker and John Halas

Websites:
Macromedia Flash Animation Examples
Flash Filmaker
Cold Hard Flash
Sound Dogs

Adrian Hanft - Alternative Photography

An easy way to create a unique photo is to use different lenses. Here are a few very unique (and relatively cheap) cameras that use non-traditional lenses.

The Horizon 202: A swing-lens panoramic camera that captures 120 degrees
(buy here, gallery here )

Fisheye Camera: The only camera with a built-in fisheye lens.
(buy here, gallery here )

Oktomat: A camera with 8 lenses
(buy here, gallery here )

Holga 120s: Don’t forget the classic Holga with its plastic lens.
(buy here, gallery here )

David Kadavy - Design and Technology

A post and conversation at The Long Tail examines blog design in the age of RSS, and hints that with RSS, maybe the graphics aren’t as important anymore. If so, this would make clear typography increasingly more crucial. Personally, I stopped using an aggregator because it gave me RSS-induced ADD, but I’m sure Aldus is jumping for joy in his grave over the accelerating rate of information transfer.

Tom Nemitz - Awesomely Bad Website

Billy Zabka. You know him as Johnny Lawrence of the Cobra Kai dojo, and the guy who loses to Daniel-san at the end of Karate Kid. Prepare to know him as the subject of a bizarre club — The Fraternal Order of Zabka (FOZ).

From a design standpoint, you’ve got to, um, love the sloppy site navigation and the unnecessary frame-action which forces you to scroll about twice as much as you’d really need to. And the quote from Billy’s dad, “Good job with the website!”, is classic. But what seals the deal on this being an awesomely bad website is the photo of The Godfathers of the FOZ.

Sweep the leg, indeed.

The group post that needs no introduction … Be Aware number 3.

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

Continuing on last month’s theme of typography tools to add to your classroom repertoire, I’ll borrow a link from Veer’s blog and mention a fun little Flash instructional piece that the University of Delaware’s Visual Communications department put together - it’s an extremely nice “illustration” of the rigors of letterspacing. This buttresses Ellen Lupton’s “Type Crimes” illustrations nicely and really works with the ability of interactive media as well.

Check it out at: http://typography.art.udel.edu/

Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes

“Designers should understand that the forces shaping dominant design norms run deep. The governing mentalities that shape what is “good,” “right,” and “true” are the most difficult to identify and the most important to challenge. While governing mentalities cannot be rejected outright, they can and should be continuously challenged in design practice.”

Dean Nieusma. “Alternative Design Scholarship: Working Toward Appropriate Design” In Design Issues: Volume 20, Number 3 Summer 2004.

Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip

Productivity is something I value a lot in my work. I quickly switch tools by pressing letters on the keyboard, and quickly choose menu commands by using combinations of Command/Control and other keys. Especially helpful are keystrokes for those character styles and paragraph styles you choose every other second. It sounds like a no-brainer that keyboard shortcuts save you time, but you should really try it—especially if you have multiple large monitors.

You can learn which key is assigned to each tool by mousing over the tool for a few seconds. For example, the selection arrow is v. The direct selection arrow is a. The text tool is t. My favorite: press w to toggle to preview, bleed, or slug mode. In normal mode, you can see all your guides and baseline grids, paragraph markings, whatever. But when you switch to preview (by pressing w), all those go away…all you see is your art with a nice grey field outside the document edge (or outside the bleed edge if you choose bleed mode.)

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

If you would like to read an overview of the history and current state of letterpress, check out David Jury’s book, Letterpress: The Allure of the Handmade. There are some great examples of work and an overview of where letterpress has come from and where it is today. To someone just mildly interested in letterpress, it might be a little dry. However, this is also not an instruction manual of how to do letterpress. It does come off as a bit snobish in some parts as well. The complete exclusion of Hatch Show Print is one thing that confused me. Mr. Jury also doesn’t appreciate the deliberate use of inconsistent printing or printing that shows up on the back of the paper (both of which I am gladly guilty of). Most of the examples shown are helpful and beautiful, but some of the photography is lacking. Overall this book is a great resource despite a few flaws.

Nate Voss: Grunt Designer

Your Spam Will Not Get You Hired

As I grow in the world of the designer, and become a little more recognized in my own community (these are baby steps, people), I find myself working at a well-known and respectable ad agency. My photo, if not my work, was just featured in Graphis (that’s me, waaaay in the back), and we were listed as one of the Top 20 agencies in the country. I wonder if my company’s newfound standing is why my email is now flooded with photographer’s junk mail? I sure didn’t get them before.

Welcome to the fourth installment of our Be Aware group posts.

Donovan Beery - Web Tips

If nobody sees it, does your cover page exist?

This is the one thing that you always need to keep in mind when designing for the web. As a large amount of viewers get to your site through search engines, links from other sites, and links sent to them via email, they may never see your homepage. Always be sure that any one page of your site will make sense by itself. It’s no fun making sure links back to your homepage, and site identifiers are on every page, but it is a necessity. Links labeled “back” make no sense to viewers who don’t even know where they were suppose to have come from.

Drew Davies: Seen and Noted in the Design World

Design for the Movies

I’d always wondered about something, and recently had a lot of my questions answered by a clip that Joe from my office forwarded to me. Turns out, by all outward appearances, being a designer on the crew of a major motion picture may be one of the most awesome jobs ever. For those needing any convincing, just check out this mini-documentary on the design team for the new Superman film.

Sure, there’s no actual strategy involved, no deep concepts, no measurable results. But look at all of that awesome stuff they get to design from scratch: identities for dozens of companies, complete city maps, a city-wide signage system…every last artifact of design you see in the movie. Maybe it’d get old after a while, but I’d sure trade jobs with any of them for a year.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Adrian Hanft - Alternative Photography

Does size matter? Here are some links to a few unusual sizes of cameras:

Bite size - Justin Quinnell builds pinhole cameras and takes pictures looking out his mouth.

Oversize - Justin also makes large pinhole cameras out of trash cans.

World’s largest camera - The Mammoth camera was built in 1900. It weighed 900lbs and made an 8 x 4.5 foot negative.

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

With the merger of Adobe and Macromedia, there has been a great deal of talk about a possible integration of PDF and Flash. That sounds good to me, but I want to see an integration of Flash, and a page-layout program such as InDesign.

Sure, someone can learn to automate tasks in InDesign through scripting, but with the increasing need for designers with web and print skills, why not harness a great language these people already know - ActionScript - to make automation even easier?

Imagine, for example, that you have a series of business cards to create. You could try automating it with scripting or even Illustrator Data Sets, but why learn yet another language, or use a very limited method of automation? Your master pages could hold arrays of the various people’s names and other information, as well as functions that dictate placement of various elements on the business card based upon the characteristics of that information. For example, you may want to place a graphic element based upon the length of someone’s name. All of the elements on the page could be “Movie Clips” so it would be easy to call them with scripts and dictate their placement. The individual pages could be “frames” that could hold still more variables and functions.

This would of course take some adaptation, but it would give a familiar language and conceptual model a new and powerful use.

Tom Nemitz: Awesomely Bad Website

There’s been an awful lot of spoof/parody websites lately purporting to be promotional material for a celebrity running for President in 2008, some better than others. The Christopher Walken site is an example of a spoof done well, as it was just good enough to put some doubt in your mind as to whether it was actually real. Some just are done so poorly, they never fool you for even a moment. In that vein, I present to you MacGyver For President: 2008. (Suspend your disbelief for a moment that the entire site is an offshoot of a blog and doesn’t have a distinct URL, and humor me.) This site has it all: wretchedly pixellated photos, hideous kerning, murderous widows, canyon-esque leading, sloppily inexcusably bad grammar spelling and punctuation. That makes it bad. But, a staple of political sites is quotes from the candidate, and its here where this site goes from “bad” to “awesomely bad”. These gems that randomly appear on different pages don’t disappoint: “A paperclip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot”; “Human nature. I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me, like not kill me. Next thing you know, we’re friends.” I’m speechless.

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

Be Aware 6 has arrived. They don’t call us Group A for nothing….

Donovan Beery - Web Tips

JPEG vs. GIF or Why I stopped worrying and send people their logo in a GIF format even when they request a JPEG

The general rule of thumb is that line art, text and solid shapes work better as GIF files, and photographs work better as JPG files. GIF files also hold the advantage of allowing transparency and animation (well, sometimes that’s an advantage). For those who never trust a good rule of thumb, learning how the two image compression methods work will explain it better.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Adrian Hanft: Alternative Photography

This week I finished building my newest camera: a medium format pinhole lego camera. What should I call it? LegHole? Pinholego? Pinhole Lego? Anyway, this camera even has something that my Holga doesn’t - a film counter! You gotta love legos. I will tease you with a picture of it for now, and check out FoundPhotography.com later this week for a tutorial and some of the pictures I took with it…

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

I recently attended a “Mobile Web and Wireless” presentation put on by the Silicon Valley Web Guild, and it seems that the mobile web is growing at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, the rise of mobile web is bringing with it a vast array of operating systems, browser types, and screen sizes to develop and design for. Those of you who have been breathing a sigh of relief over the success of the web standards movement, take a breath because web development won’t be getting any easier, and how hard is it going to be to purchase one of each of these mobile devices to develop for?

Number seven is a good number, and a great opportunity to introduce the newest member of our Be Aware cast. Daniel Schutzsmith from Graphic Define will be writing about design business for Group B. Welcome aboard Daniel.

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

In a classic “it-was-never-this-way-when-I-was-growing-up” moment, I was amazed this evening as I started to research some possible items to mention in the design / education realm. Although I’ve talked with some good friends who teach high school about the “design education” that’s started to move into their art programs, it looks like it may be making a swifter trip than you might expect.

designeducation.org

While the site itself is a little unsightly, the fact that the NEA is willing to offer funds to K-12 programs exploring design education speaks to a serious sea change occuring. As of the moment, it seems that most K-12 design education might fall primarily into a “Learn the Adobe Applications” model, but this funding and the design focuses that come attached to it signal a serious devotion to really teaching design THINKING as much as design practice.

I sincerely look forward to meeting any of the college freshmen who have come out of a design foundation study like this — it might make for some seriously intense and exciting programmatic futures…

Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes

“Our society may have its superstitions — there is always the crank fringe of astrologers, foot reflexologists, and so on — but when it comes to the media, particularly among executives and academics, many expect a rational discourse to prevail. But it doesn’t. People hold beliefs about the media for which there is no evidence, and when they are asked to explain their beliefs they offer arguments which are identical in form to the arguments offered in other societies to justify magical practices.”

David Sless in Media Information Australia in 1988 No 48, 22–24 (Now Media International Australia)

Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip

SmartTransform, a Mac OS X plug-in for InDesign CS, is a helpful plug-in I’ve used for over a year. Let’s say you have 20 little boxes on a page that are approximately the same size, and you need them to be exactly the same width so they’ll line up in a column/grid. Simply size the first one, then add the other 19 to the selection, and click the button in the palette. SmartTransform will scale them all proportionately. That’s it — it’s quick and easy!

I am in the process of upgrading to/learning InDesign CS2. As you may already know, Adobe included 4 different “Transform Again” functions in this version. Even though SmartTransform does not work with CS2 (why would it need to?), Mac users who aren’t upgrading anytime soon could still benefit from this InDesign CS plugin.

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

When you live in a small town, you have to seek out things that would interest a designer. I was pleased to find out that our local history museum owns one of the original Chandler & Price presses that Edwin Perkins used to print materials for Kool-Aid. In the late 1920s, Mr. Perkins invented Kool-Aid in the small town of Hastings, Nebraska. There is an entire section of the museum dedicated to Kool-Aid. Side Note: Before he became an inventor and successful business man, Edwin Perkins was a printer.

I am looking for a little advice from the more experienced letterpress printers out there. Here is a photo I took of an enlargement of the original “Kool-Ade” packaging. I assumed that Mr. Perkins used letterpress to print these packages, but something tells me this isn’t letterpress. Does this look more like lithography than letterpress to anyone else? Please advise.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Design Business

CLIENT WISH LIST: Don’t sit around waiting for clients to come to you, instead take action by creating a list of your dream clients.

On a sheet of paper write out a list of the companies and industries you’d like to work with. Next, take a packet of index cards and write each company on a seperate card. Lastly, go through each card and write at least one way you can get closer to working with this client. You could write down the contact info for a friend who once worked for the client, or a specific conference coming up that the client will be at, or maybe the name of a charity they sponsor.

Once you are finished you’ll have a substantial list of clients you’d like to pursue and an idea of the resources available to you to make that connection.

Nate Voss: Grunt Designer

Working late? Is your 14th consecutive listening to Iron and Wine putting your sharp young designer mind to sleep? Check out Design Matters with Debbie Millman, now available in Podcast form through iTunes, for hour-long interviews with such prolific design visionaries as Michael Bierut, Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, Adams Morioka, and Milton Glaser (my personal favorite). If you can put up with the occasional commercial break and “conference-call” sound quality, you’re in for a real treat as Millman, prolific in her own right, delves into the creative minds of these great designers.

Eight is definitely not enough …

Donovan Beery: Web Tips

Redirecting Pages

Sometimes you want a short URL to send people, need to create a promotional URL for tracking, or just want to move some files and don’t want the links to those pages to come up as the dreaded ‘page not found’ warning. As sometimes there isn’t a programmer available to write the code for you, or one to make the changes on the server itself, here is some code I’ve found very easy to use. All of these do the same thing, which is sending the viewer from the page the code is in, to a different page.

On a server with ColdFusion support, simply create a blank page with nothing but the following code below the <BODY> tag (file must have a .cfm extension):

If any programmers out there have better options for server languages not listed, please chime in.

Drew Davies: Seen and Noted in the Design World

The World’s Most Awesome Millennium Logo

For those young designers out there still pursuing the height of perfection when it comes to logos capturing that “Turn of the [21st] Century” feel, it’s time to hang up your mouses. I have found the very logo we’ve all been chasing. This logo caught my eye the very first second I saw it, and I’ve been unable to shake it since. Who’d have thought that anyone would ever actually be daring enough to include the three most trite, overused visual elements of the last 10 years of logo design — the ubiquitous globe, the “digital” pixels, and yes, the Millennium Swoosh — into the same logo? I found this beauty on a large sign just off West Bay Road north of Georgetown in Grand Cayman. (That’s right, no US designer would have the cojones to try such a daring gambit.)

What’s it for you ask? Well, the company name won’t shed any light on the matter: Precision Industries, Ltd. Turns out the organization behind this logo is not global, nor digital, nor “Millenniumy”. They’re a local roofing company. Genius or insanity? I’ll let you make your own decision on that one. All I know is that my search is finally over.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Adrian Hanft: Alternative Photography

I thought I would share part of an email I received this week. Arul tells me that “There’s an ancient ruined city in South India called Hampi, the remains of the capital of a vast empire. Among the ruins is a magnificent rock cut temple. Within the temple’s many rooms, all carved entirely out of stone, there is one room which is in complete darkness, except for a tiny hole in one wall that looks out on the courtyard. As you would imagine, the result is a camera obscura, which the architect of the temple apparently included just for the wonder of it all. A pinhole camera, made out of stone! The camera projects an image of the main temple tower, which stands across the courtyard form it. The really interesting thing is the date when the temple was built - around 1450 AD! Maybe around the same time that da Vinci was writing about the concept”. Thanks, Arul for sharing that with our group.

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

Throw away your Flash books, because AJAX is poised to become the vehicle of choice for internet applications. Ever since gaining attention as the mechanism that makes the amazing Google maps possible, the buzz around AJAX has been enormous. AJAX primarily uses XMLHttpRequest and Javascript to create interfaces that have the standardization / accessibility / search engine friendliness / semantic organization that makes HTML appealing along with the ability to update information on a page without a refresh that makes many people prefer Flash for internet applications. Here are some examples of AJAX at work.

Tom Nemitz: Awesomely Bad Website

www.beercats.com

You know what, folks? I’m gonna let you pick your favorite part to enjoy here. Mine is the ginormous menu that takes three scrolls to completely see. But maybe yours is the welcome sounds that change each time you visit (“Hello. Hola. And Bonjour”; “Are you ready to rock”). Or maybe its the several java applets that don’t seem to load. Or maybe its the ten thousand graphical links/phrases/animated GIFs at the bottom. So much good stuff, how can one pick one’s favorite? Actually, I see they won the “EarthLink Monthly Homepage Contest Beginner Runner-Up” award, so perhaps I shouldn’t…ah, of course I should! As should you. Enjoy. You bet.

I’m sure David Carson rotated a “9” 180 degrees at some point so it looked like it was a “b”. So it is very appropriate that Group B brings you Be Aware number 9. Just go with it. I challenge Group A to create a post this divine. Student logo competitions, designing trains, rowdy revisions, letterpress word scramble …

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

We’ve mentioned it before on the site, but an e-mail I received just this morning reminded me again of why it’s especially important as a design educator to discuss the merits and detriments of various design contests and “create a design” competitions.

I found a request in my Inbox this morning from a company inviting students to “Submit your best logo designs for our new business! One winner will be picked and three runners up can list this experience on their resume!” - It’s always so nice to find such stellar business ethics on display in my e-mail right away in the morning!

We have to work as a community to educate companies, practitioners, and students alike in why this practice directly devalues the work we all do - a colleague of mine used the example of a business inviting artists to bring their work to decorate a new building so that they’ll gain “exposure” for their creations. Nothing like saving the company the legitimate cost of purchasing any artwork they would choose to display by offering such great “exposure”, eh?

Delete these requests, but also take the time to write back to them and let companies know that this won’t be tolerated, especially when students are involved.

Kyle Heinemann: InDesign Tip

InDesign’s Book feature has rescued me from hours of boring, repetitious tasks in the last year. Nestled under the File menu at File > New > Book, it’s real power shines when you export a PDF or print 50 documents at the same time. A book is simply a collection of InDesign documents. They could be chapters of a book, sections of a magazine/catalog, or 50 different 1-page documents. I’ve even had success at sorting multiple multi-page documents of 3.5 x 7ft. tradeshow signs into sections through the use of books. Once added to a book, documents may reordered so the pages are continuous. All sorts of styles and colors can be synchronized/updated at any time. To export or print, go to the palette options pop-up menu for that book (upper right corner). Will this help you save time? Perhaps—try it out for yourself, or post a question.

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

Letterpress Word Scramble: When an acquaintance gave me his small collection of letterpress equipment he immediately became a good friend and also started my very “weighty” addiction. Amongst the varied type cases and press pieces was some orphaned metal type (aka pied type). I was of course drawn to the larger sizes and started sorting. There was not near enough to create an entire font, but I automatically tried to figure out what this 48 pt. and 60 pt. type once spelled out (if anything). A couple months later I tried again, and this time I figured it out! It had some small historical significance as well. I was even able to track down a piece that was printed from this type.

If you like … try to figure it out for yourself. Anyone living within 50 miles of Grand Island, Nebraska has a distinct advantage, if that gives you any clue. I will post the answer in a few days. And yes, the two different typefaces spell the same thing.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Design Business

ROWDY REVISIONS: When you find yourself getting deep in the muddy waters of the revision swamp take some of these possible escape routes into consideration for the future:

· Explain that further rounds of revisions will take more man-hours and must be billed as such. Be up front about any overages that might occur as a result of extra revisions.

· Don’t be afraid to sell your design to the client. Chances are, the client may want more revisions because they just don’t understand the solution you’ve provide to them. Show them why it works and how it will help them.

· Remember to always firmly outline the number of rounds of revisions in a contract at the beginning of the project. I’ve found the standard to be 2 or 3 rounds.

Nate Voss: Grunt Designer

Here’s to the variety.

Yesterday I was concepting a brand-refresh for a new client. The day before that I was designing a train. Today I am tracing Helvetica Condensed Medium from a printed InDesign page—that I laid out—into a marker comp. Why? Because it gives it the quality of an unfinished thought. It makes it more alive to the client. Those are things that I’m being told as I’m using a worn Sharpie marker to trace the curve of the lowercase Helvetica “a” and the near-serif finish at the bottom of the stem of a “t.” It makes me think of my shiny new copy of Elements of Typographic Style, currently occupying the passenger seat of my car. I never read it in college, and I’m planning a full-on, wide-eyed, adoration-free book review for the Design Cast as soon as I finish it. I purchased the 2005 printing of it in hardcover, and a part of me hopes there is a section at the end about how to do everything I’ve just learned in InDesign quickly. Tonight I’m grading projects for my class. After that I’m planning an AIGA event. Tomorrow I’m figuring out how to make a capabilities brochure with a cover made out of cement.

So, if nothing else, I’ve got the variety.

A perfect score. Be Aware ten has arrived…

Donovan Beery: A Bit Off-Topic This Time

While growing up, I found that Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, in particular, had unique shaped buildings, making them easy to spot. The building’s shape seemed to be an extension of their identity, making it more effective than a sign alone could do. The shape of the windows alone gave it away. Years later, I see the downside of having an identity that is so consistent. When you eventually sell the building, and it becomes a different restaurant like the one I ate in this weekend, or even worse - a tobacco shop or quick loan center. Every time people drive by these places, how can they not think of the original company that made the shape of the building so unique?

Drew Davies: Seen and Noted in the Design World

As the President of AIGA Nebraska, I think it’s prudent that I use my time to highlight a piece of design that’s particularly good because of its content. Last month, AIGA Nebraska published a handy brochure called the Business Resource Guide. As its cover states, it is, simply put, a guide to why “good design is good business.” It’s a guide meant to explain the value of design, which was developed for the business community at large. The piece covers topics from why design makes good business sense to the ethics of design, and includes a comprehensive “Client’s Guide to Design.” It explains to the business community that design is an invaluable tool which will help them achieve their goals.

AIGA Nebraska has a large quantity of the Guides available for free distribution. I’d like to encourage all of you to request as many copies of the Business Resource Guide as you can use, and distribute them to colleagues, clients, potential clients, and the general business community. Simply send a request to president@nebraska.aiga.org with your mailing address, and the number of copies you would like. Boxes of 40, or smaller quantities, are available.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Adrian Hanft: Alternative Photography

Jurgen Kreckel is the man to talk to if you are in the market for a medium format folding camera. His site, certo6.com is a gold mine of information about these beautiful old cameras. For my birthday I got an Iskra that was refurbished by Jurgen, and it is truely a beautiful machine. It has a coupled rangefinder, a film counter, an outstanding lens, and it folds down to a size that almost fits in my pocket. It is amazing what an old folder can do all without any batteries.

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

Google recently launched Google Analytics, which is extremely sophisticated, and free, web analytics software. One of Analytics features is the ability to track the value of a site visitor based upon monetary values given to certain site goals. Now it will be relatively easy to estimate the ROI of a site redesign, or even a layout change on a page in the site that is critical in generating revenue.

Everyone Loves Engaging Visually Enticing News

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 - Definitely the precisionist / Swiss-influenced approach to utilizing grids within layout and design, but it certainly never hurts to at least build a foundation in using geometry wisely to establish underlying order and symmetry to the page. I get a little wary when this approach becomes uber-religious, but it’s a fantastic foundation for a student to vary and experiment on top of.

• Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop by Timothy Samara – A nice counterpoint to Elam’s much more classicist and formalist base, Samara takes the grid as a starting point and then elaborates nicely and widely upon its many uses and creative misuses.

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” by Ian Noble and Russell Bestley. Barthes short essay is focused on writing, but I think his thoughts are equally thought provoking for designers:

…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

Enjoy the first Be Aware of the year, #12.

Donovan Beery: Web Tips

When designing for the screen, always keep in mind the typical screen resolutions used by your viewers, and the amount of area taken by a browser’s attributes such as its scrollbar. Currently, the typical size to design for most audiences is an 800x600 pixel screen, as the old 640x480 monitors have sadly/wonderfully (your choice) been disappearing. According to The Web Site Style Guide, an 800x600 pixel monitor has a ‘safe area’ of 760x410 pixels. When designing a site that photographers are the main audience of, and considering every photographer I’ve met has a monitor the size of my living room, it’s probably safe to bump it up a notch.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Some interesting type related links for everyone to enjoy at the beginning of the new year:

Typographica’s Favorite Fonts of 2005 - Yes, I decided to hop on the bandwagon and link to this like everybody else.
Veer’s Top Typefaces of 2005 - What the heck is up with the script fonts?
DAIRY - A sweet time-lapse font experiment done in Flash.
TypeBase - A bucketload of typographic website links.
Movie Titles Designed by Saul Bass - A must for the motion typographer.
Alvin Lustig Typographic Gallery - The rest of the site frickin’ rocks as well.
Bembo’s Zoo - A typographic picture book for children.
Slanted and TypeMuseum - And a couple of German type/design websites thrown in for good measure.

Adrian Hanft: Alternative Photography

Leaves are sensitive to light, and it isn’t a coincidence that they call it PHOTOsynthesis. Here is a link to a tutorial that explains how you can use the light sensitive properties of leaves to make a photographic print on a geranium leaf.

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web relates principles of Bringhurst’s book to the web medium. So far (it is being updated periodically) I think it has done a good job, but some of the details would be nightmarishly tedious to implement on a large-scale dynamic site.

Tom Nemitz: Awesomely Bad Website

www.superbad.com

I’m going to tell you a story now, maybe its true and maybe its not, maybe its funny and maybe its not, but maybe its true…Some time ago, I was in the mountains with a goat, two chickens and a backpack of hay. I chanced to bump into a wise man riding a hornless unicorn and brandishing an invisible cane made of good strong hickory, who told me “Chuck Norris can touch MC Hammer.” He also told me to go to superbad.com — leaving me to ponder whether I had just encountered a most bizarre form of viral marketing, a deranged Chuck Norris fan or just a guy upset that he only got 2 bucks for “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em” at the used CD store a scant 10 minutes prior.

I learned that day that there is really nothing so fierce as a wise man scorned. So because I live in fear of the fierceness of invisible hickory sticks weaponized by old wise men, I spread the Awesomely Bad message of Superbad to you. Listen to me: Click everywhere, anywhere, all of the time, and the only guarantee I can make — as I’ve journeyed to Superbadia many times myself — is that every journey to Superbadia will be different than the last.

You bet.

We take a short break from our continual STEP Off coverage to bring you Be Aware 13. Friday the 13th was a couple of days ago, but we think this 13 is much less scary. This also marks the six month anniversary of our Be Aware posts. This is a good opportunity to lets us know what you think of our variation on the group post.

Nate Voss: Grunt Designer

I NEED THIS POSTER IN MY OFFICE: Having recently completed my quest for a comfortable chair away from my desk as well as hanging a few pieces on the walls (CSA’s Design Camp poster from a few years back occupies the prime spot), I would like to continue pursuing greatness to surround myself with.

When I spotted the cover artwork for EA Games’ From Russia With Love title I almost wrote a story about it for the site. Or the Design Cast. I was astounded at a modern marketing machine producing such a stunning display of illustration as their main graphic element. A little research proved me wrong: they co-opted the original theater poster artwork and fit it into their packaging design.

Fine by me. But, having now been introduced to it, I have decided I need that poster in my office. So I am turning to you, the loyal and industrious readers of Be A Design Group, to help me track one down. I know 007 posters are rare and expensive, so a full-size reproduction for a lot less money would be superfine. Also any information you can provide on the highly talented illustrator who crafted this beauty would be greatly appreciated.

Daniel Schutzsmith: Design Business

OLD CLIENT, NEW TRICKS: Many design studios focus heavily on getting new clients - always pushing for the next hip company to work with. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, concentrate your attention on what you do. Look at your current clients and identify possible projects that they may be interested in or that you feel they should undergo. You will find that those clients whom you’ve already established a repoire with will be eager to work with you again, and furthermore, they will appreciate that you have their best interest in mind.

Bennett Holzworth: Letterpress

SAVE THE PRESS: Some of you may have heard me say that I have an old letterpress in my garage. I had promised to show it on the site, but I have neglected to do so. I am sharing these photos with you for a few reasons. One reason is to just share what inspires a fellow designer. Another reason would be to encourage you to be active in pursuing other interests outside of the monitor. The third would be to let you know that it is possible to acquire something like this with minimal financial resources.

If you have any interest in letterpress and some extra space in your garage (sorry New Yorkers), then it is entirely possible that you could pick up a vintage letterpress for next to nothing. Just keep your eyes open. A family member knew that I had an interest in finding an old letterpress, so she started calling small local print shops to see if they had an old one sitting around. Within a couple calls she found that one such shop had one sitting outside their back door (rust and all). A few calls later, two borrowed fork lifts, one new ink roller, some elbow grease and I had a running letterpress in my garage. Of course you might want to start out with a little hand press to make sure that this sort of thing interests you. I now have a 12” x 18” 2000 lb Chandler & Price clamshell press, circa 1918. Click here for larger image. In this GIF I have included a before photo, a restored photo and a photo of the press in action. The print shop didn’t charge me a penny, although they did charge for the few trays of wood type they had sitting around. If I wouldn’t have saved this press, it would probably have been melted down and sent to Detroit (just a guess). I also hear that old metal type is often used to make bullets. If you can’t find a press locally, check out the presses for sale at Briar Press.

Kyle Heinemann: Not an InDesign Tip

MAKING PHOTOSHOP FASTER: In this edition of Be Aware, I would like to digress from InDesign tips to highlight some new parts of Photoshop I learned this past week. Do you ever work on large Photoshop files, or many Photoshop files at the same time, and do you have more than 1 GB of RAM installed? Try activating the Bigger Tiles plug-in. This causes Photoshop to take advantage of your RAM and redraw more quickly. If you really want to get into it, read this Adobe document on scratch disks and allocating RAM for more information.

Now, I realize all designers don’t care about the exact speed of their computer, but I’m telling you, this made a huge difference last week. Previously I had 2 GB of RAM, with no special memory settings. After I brought my total to 4 GB, and told Photoshop to use 100% (3072 MB), and enabled the Bigger Tiles plug-in, performance skyrocketed! I opened a 760 MB greyscale TIF in 1/10th the time! I then converted that file to RGB in about 1/4 the time. It wasn’t just the extra RAM that did it, it was the combination of settings. The two Adobe docs I linked to are straight-forward. If you have the RAM, I would suggest using it to the max. Feel free to post questions or comments.

Clinton Carlson: Design Quotes

“Design is most often understood by the public as an artistic practice that produces dazzling lamps, furniture, and automobiles. This is how it is generally presented by the media and the museums.11 One reason why there is not more support for social design services is the lack of research to demonstrate what a designer can contribute to human welfare.

A broad research agenda for social design must begin by addressing a number of questions. What role can a designer play in a collaborative process of social intervention? What is currently being done in this regard and what might be done? How might the public’s perception of designers be changed in order to present an image of a socially responsible designer? How can agencies that fund social welfare projects and research gain a stronger perception of design as a socially responsible activity? What kinds of products meet the needs of vulnerable populations?”

Victor Margolin and Sylvia Margolin
A “Social Model” of Design: Issues of Practice and Research
Design Issues: Volume 18, 24 Number 4 Autumn 2002

Paul Berkbigler: Design Education

As the semester starts up again for another round of collegiate graphic design study for me, I happened onto an article by Katherine McCoy from 1997 that continues to hold a lot of resonance for how we’re handling the education of the next generation of graphic designers - considering she published this first in 1997, it’s especially interesting to consider whether much has changed in terms of governmental and others’ attitude about design.

Nonetheless, here’s another look at the article if you’ve read it before, and if not, as NBC likes to say, “then it’s new to you!” - www.highgrounddesign.com/mccoy/km7.htm

Donovan Beery: Web Tips

Why do I keep forgetting that I have a digital camera and a scanner? After finding another tutorial last week on how to emulate something in Photoshop, I asked myself, wouldn’t it be more effective to just scan that in? I’ve been as guilty as the next person at it, but it’s never a bad idea to add some life and energy to your projects by adding in those hand drawn elements (even on a website). Why try to make a page tear or polaroid photo border on your computer when it’s more authentic to just scan one in and use it? I tell myself that next time I will try to listen to my own advice on this one.

Drew Davies: Adobe Space Monkey

I know it’s a little off-topic, but this month I made a find that certainly relates to most of us as designers. After doing some housekeeping on a secondary machine, I needed to do some photo retouching, and launched what I thought was Photoshop. Turns out, something I’d deleted related to Photoshop, and sent it into lockout mode. However, turning what should have been a frustrating experience into a true find was the splash screen for what launched in Photoshop’s place: Adobe Space Monkey. The team at Adobe is known for hiding Easter eggs in their software, but this one was so odd and unexpected that I had to grab a screen capture to share with everyone. Sure, others have found this egg before, but I thought as designers, we’d all appreciate it a little more than the average user. Click here to see the full splash screen in all its glory.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Adrian Hanft: Alternative Photography

I was blown away this week when I learned about Mike Golembewski who is building cameras out of flatbed scanners. Since the scanner camera records the image as it moves across the bed, things that are moving in the pictures appear warped and blurred in the photos. In another stroke of genius, mike used the scanner camera as a timelapse camera. Check out the resulting movies that are beautiful, surreal, and haunting. Am I going to build one? Let me just say, I have already destroyed one scanner, and I am not discouraged…

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

Derek Powazek has posted some short and sweet guidelines for designing a successful home page.

1. Answer the question, “What is this place?”
2. Don’t get in the repeat visitor’s way
3. Show what’s new
4. Provide consistent, reliable global navigation

Numbers 1 and 4 we have heard over and over again, but 2 and 3 are relatively new, yet internet users have come to expect these things from the websites they visit.

Tom Nemitz: Awesomely Bad Website

http://www.malia.co.uk/wildrose/index1.asp

This website is so hard to read, I won’t even try. But you totally should, because cyan text on flower-print wallpaper is a great way to say “Good Morning!” to yourself. Or “Good Afternoon!”, or even “Good Evening!”, just depends on when you read this and subsequently go visit this site. One thing is for sure, you’ll have a headache. So on second thought, maybe don’t visit this site. Or do. Your call. Just don’t blame me when your head hurts later.

You bet.

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.