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?‚Äù
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!‚Äù to yourself. Or “Good Afternoon!‚Äù, or even “Good Evening!‚Äù, 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.

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‚Äù 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

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 800×600 pixel screen, as the old 640×480 monitors have sadly/wonderfully (your choice) been disappearing. According to The Web Site Style Guide, an 800×600 pixel monitor has a ‘safe area’ of 760×410 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.

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:

‚Ä¢ 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‚Äù and “phone‚Äù 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

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.