Listening is imperative

The most important principle you need to know about clients is that they want to be heard. Some more than others for sure. But everyone wants to be heard. When you hear a bad idea, a stupid idea, a ludicrous idea, or even a great idea you just don’t have time for due to some circumstance, you need to navigate around the client and not have conflict with them.

The secret is saying whatever you say with a smile. You need to exude a quiet and pleasant confidence. When you sound relaxed, confident, and not defensive or aggressive, you’ll win the client to your point of view. They’ll heed the voice of their design master-shepherd: you.

These “templates” are essentially exactly what I use. Not literally, like a script. Rather, I always make them up on the spot and so you.

Rinse, wash, repeat

It’s the same tactic nearly every time: acknowledge, praise, redirect, suggest. Do those four things and you’ll be in the driver seat. Add a dash of compromise if you get to an impasse, but with the intention of following this exact same protocol at the next design review! If you keep that up, you’ll win nearly every time. And if you don’t win in the short-term with a long-term client, don’t worry, because the long-term is yours for the taking and keeping if you keep using this basic approach. It’s a dialogue that you win, eventually.

Everyone wins only when everyone wins

All of these need to be said with a tentative tone and a smile. Run through them, imagine that last job that didn’t go according to your better plan. Deconstruct the strategy from wording, to implied tone, to diversion, to suggestion. There is more than a little psychology going on her. Everyone needs to feel like they own a part of the winning decision, so you have to open up the dialogue to that possibility, even when this or that client doesn’t deserve it. But, you want to give it away if you want that client to be happy and keep you on this and subsequent projects.

And so I deliver these to you with a nod and a wink! Read’em, and download the PDF for printing and posting in your lunch area for a “that’s SO true” moment with your graphic design colleagues.

20 “convince your client of anything” templates

1. “I know a lot of people liked _____ when they first came out, and it was the latest and greatest. Faster than anyone thought possible, _____ is now really a part of the old paradigm of how this is done. The new standard, which is very exciting in some new ways, is _____. Let me show you a couple cool examples of what I’m talking about.”
2. “I can see how on the surface, _____ looks like a good idea, but there are _____ very important reasons that developers who struggle to stay up-to-date don’t do this anymore. I’m as surprised as anyone that _____ is now considered passé, from a _____ point of view.”
3. “Yes, I agree that could look good in the right context, but the current design trend with _____, which is our specific context, is away from _____. Now if we stick with _____, we run the risk of coming across a little too _____ when compared to, say, _____. It’s incredible how fast things change, so we want to be future-proof as much as we can.”
4. “If you put _____ as a design element all over the place, though, it’s going to make it more expensive to maintain AND confuse visitors to the site. We’ve seen this countless times, and nobody does it on purpose, but this is an excellent case of _____, and we’d love to avoid that.”
5. “____ could work, but it does introduce several cost factors in the short term, but also in the longer term. Are additional resources going to be a problem?”
6. “Now that is a great idea—that could work. But in our context, it actually will increase cost right now and will likely add _____  or _____ to the project.”
7. “We could pursue that if you want, but it does mean we have to essentially scrap _____ and start that part of the _____ over again. Now we love getting paid, but we are primarily watching out for your budget, so don’t think we are being petty or _____ or anything like that.”
8. “I see your thinking on this, but we want to avoid adding _____ to _____ because it introduces _____ which will affect both budget and time. Let me explain…”
9. “That would be a _____ change for sure. Hmmm…but it does reverse a common UI ‘best practice’ of _____. We know that when we break standard UI paradigms, users have a harder time finding _____ and simply end up having to _____ more. I’ve even seen users _____. I would suggest going with the standard UI convention of _____ and not trying to reinvent the wheel on this one.”
10. “It’s important to remember that your screen is likely not the same screen your users will be viewing the site on. Your screen style is only one small part of the overall demographic we target, so we don’t attach too much weight to _____.”
11. “So here is the original, and here is the revision based on feedback from the last meeting [show screen shots]. The new version does _____ quite well, but…it unfortunately introduces a new issue we’d likely have to get some discussion started on.”
12. “We played with adding _____ to the _____, and while it works here, it’s a little less _____ than the original, which could be applied a bit more universally throughout the _____ without causing any other design clashes, but it’s up to you. But I think our concern is pretty valid and that it will return again as an issue if we don’t stick to the plan.”
13. “Ohhhh…that’s an interesting idea [reflective pause, stroke of chin, long silence]! You know what: I think we might be simply kicking the can down the road a little bit by adding that here right now. I think, in the end, the client is still going to have to simply_____.”
14. “You’re right! Adding _____ would like nice here. We can do that [dramatic pause]. But…that also means we’d have to update _____ and your other _____, if you want to be consistent about this. We either roll this out everywhere and break with the past, or we stay the course and don’t add any new design elements. It’s entirely your call.”
15. “I think when we looked at the original design, there was some excellent input about changing _____ to _____. But as we’ve progressed, _____ has become a little problematic, which was unexpected. So now we can either _____ or we can _____. It’s simply a matter of budget and time, but the choice is yours.”
16. “We certainly could do that! That would be a great feature for the end user [dramatic pause]. Hmm…this introduces a whole new round of _____ which would increase _____. It certainly would affect the _____, which up to now you’ve been very clear about not changing. If you want to look at this now, we can set up some time to explore it.”
17. “Yes, I would agree that _____ doesn’t look good—on this screen! Our screens are color-calibrated. Umm, you’d have to get IT or someoneto fiddle with this, but it probably won’t look much different if they did. No, I agree with you totally about what we are looking at here. If this is what it was really going to look like, I’d be disappointed.”
18. “[After a pause] I was thinking: this new direction for the concept sounds more _____ than what we started with. Was the original idea that far off, or are we missing what was right in the first idea? I think we should step back and _____ or maybe _____ with the first idea and see what we can do there before chucking all that work.”
19. “Now, listen: I’m not trying to pick a fight [say with a big smile]. I know _____ was popular just a few years ago. But I have to say that things have progressed quite rapidly since this was a convention, and now _____ more of a mark of being behind the times. Let’s look at some up-to-date ways of doing this.”
20. “So let’s look at the color you requested, from the sample screen shot you sent. Now, _____ is a nice color in and of itself. Here are some popular uses of it: [show screen shots]. Now, in the context of our design, it has a few slight problems [express as an understatement]. First, it increases _____ with the rest of the palette. But more important, is that in the long run, this color is going to _____ with _____ which is possibly, maybe even likely, to cause us to have to _____ all the _____.”

Download the PDF and print it out

Grab a copy or click the image below to open the PDF version. It’s much classier than the web version .

Additional Reading

• The article that sparked me to write this! Give the Client What they Want over at RobotRegime.com speaks truth so do stop by and read it.

In no particular order of importance…

1. Combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. The farther apart the typeface styles are, as a generic but not infallible guideline, the more luck you’ll have. Fonts that are too similar look bad together. Go for concord or contrast but avoid the murky middle ground where all you end up with conflict. Put Garamond and Sabon together to see what “murky” means. Or try Helvetica and Univers together, which is just as bad.
2. Don’t choose two serifs or two sans serifs to create a combination, unless they are radically different in some way.
3. Avoid choosing typefaces from the same categories, like Script or Slabs. You won’t get enough contrast, and will end up with conflict. For instance, Clarendon and Rockwell together is not a good thing at all.
4. Get enough difference in point size between the various fonts to make contrast.
5. Assign distinct roles to each font and commit to them without variance.
6. Try finding fonts from different categories that have similar x-heights and glyph widths. For instance, Futura with Times New Roman just doesn’t work that well because there is too much contrast between x-heights and widths, but in this case, mostly widths. However, if you are going to work with a condensed font, you can overcome this problem because now you’ve gone for an extreme contrast.
7. Find some kind of relationship between the basic shapes. For instance, look to the letter O in upper and lower case. Round letter O’s and taller oval O’s, in general don’t seem to like each other when creating pairs.
8. Contrast the overall weight of the fonts. For instance, Didot and Rockwell look really bad together for many reasons, but one clearly because they both have a heavy presence and just look mad at each other on the same page.
9. Pay close attention to what makes your eyes dart around. If your eyes are unsettled, something is off.
10. Create different typographic colors. By color, I mean the overall tint a block of type has when you squint at it. If both of your type samples with different fonts blur to about the same color, try playing with font size, line spacing, kerning, or even substituting one font for a heavier or lighter one from the same typeface.
11. Look for clever ways to create contrast. Increase the leading or tracking of one face while decreasing the other and see what happens.
12. Don’t neglect the fact that using different fonts from the same typeface may also be perfectly suitable. That is why we provided them at the beginning of each font chapter in the Font Combinations book. You might do well with a Helvetica Black for a header and a Helvetica normal for your body.
13. Try using typefaces from the same historical period. This will take a little bit of leg work, but not much.
14. Don’t forget to consider how the italics of each typeface look. You might get a nice match with a bold / normal pair, but then discover that their respective italic fonts have a cat fight right in the middle of your composition. Don’t overlook this!
15. Fonts that are too disparate may not work at all with a large amount of copy, but might work in a logo or strictly minimal text setting.
16. Try your variations with larger and smaller amounts of text. Personalities multiply or get obscured with varying amounts of texts.
17. Study and learn the classic typefaces on their own. Print them out and stare at them at lunch. Once you know them pretty well, then think about how they work with other typefaces. You’ll know much more going in to solve your design problem.
18. Go for a neutral contrast where neither font overpowers the other, and they both are content to play different roles without usurping all the attention one way or another. This kind of neutral contrast allows the interior personality of each typeface to speak on it’s own.
19. Find a combination that you didn’t make that you like and study why it works. The answers for further combinations are likely in there for you to extrapolate. The entire web is at your disposal for this research.
20. Stick with high quality typefaces you know the names of. Many free or cheap typefaces are going to be missing important glyphs, and this will kick you later if you don’t take care of this up front.
21. Stick to two typefaces, but use the natural fonts within those typefaces. This would give you up to 8 fonts to work with: normal, bold, italic, and bold italic. You could possibly have a third very unique font used in a very limited way, such as in the header of a magazine or logo. But if you require 3 or more fonts to achieve your objective, you might be working too hard at it.
22. If you can’t put your finger on it, change something even if you are not sure what to change. Just change it. Keep moving, keep iterating. You’ll either find it, or change the font for something else.
23. Change the font sizes. At certain point sizes, a font pair might not agree at all, but at a different point size, everything falls into place.
24. Avoid mixing monospaced fonts with proportional fonts. Well, you can try it, but don’t say you weren’t warned. I can’t ever get combos from those styles to mix well to my eye. I want to like OCR-A with something, but OCR-A only seems to like itself with nothing.
25. Contrast a distinctive header sans with a neutral body serif. It’s easy to get a golden combination when following that recipe.
26. Don’t mix moods: work with complimentary ones. A light-hearted Gil Sans is not going to play well with an all-business Didot, at least not very easily. Either get two fonts in the same general mood, or get one with some personality and another with a neutral personality.
27. Look for similar proportions, out of the box, and then set the fonts in distinct roles.
28. Make it obvious. Typeface choices need to have clear distinctions  in order for a document to be legible. If there is not enough contrast, the visual hierarchy breaks down, and the roles you assign to different fonts won’t be clear.
29. Break the rules. See what happens. There are no absolutes, and a clever designer can make just about any two typefaces combine to work to one degree or another.

This year we got two iPod Nanos: one in silver and one in blue. I placed the order and opted for 2 day shipping. In my mind, 2 day shipping simply means that I get it in 2 days, plus maybe a day to get the package out of the warehouse. So, I figured if I placed the order on a Wednesday, it would be en route Thursday or Friday, and be at my house at the latest on Saturday.

I got the tracking notice from FedEx. It showed an order date and an arrival date, but they were 4 days apart. The order date was one day after the day I placed the order at Apple. That is the one day I figured it took them to get FedEx to come get the package from Apple. So, doing a bit of meager math, the whole transaction took 5 days.

I called Apple and got to talk to their version of a customer support HAL. But it was the nicest computer I ever talked to. After about 2 minutes of going over the order, Apple HAL decided I needed to talk to a person. I was talking to “Christian” about 15 seconds later. Christian explained that shipping was 2 to 3 days, despite what the FedEx tracking said, and that it didn’t include weekends. He explained how it could be as late at 5 days total, but was likely to be 4, which was still more than the 3 I thought it was going to be. At this point, I was resigned to just thank him for the courteous and friendly explanation.

But then Christian did something unexpected. He said, in paraphrase, “I can see how you’d be confused by that, and I admit it’s not very clear. Since you paid extra for 2 day shipping, I’m going to refund your shipping fees. You’ll see that in your account in 3-5 business days.” I didn’t know what to say. I fumbled for a sec and blurted out a pronounced “Thanks!”

This was a reasonable thing to do. First to treat a customer like this makes them happy. I know I’m happy to get a few bucks back for simply asking a legitimate question. Second, Apple’s policy here clearly isn’t focused on just me. Apple is thinking about the next 10 people in the queue. If they can get me off the phone that much quicker without quibbling, and do it for cheap so they can get to the next person, why not do it? It makes all the customers happy. Apple knows that attended-to customers are happy. Why not make everyone elated by moving the line as fast as possible and maximize individual customer happiness along the way?

Apple’s customer service just went up a few notches higher in my book, though they were already stellar. I had gotten 2 new Mighty Mice with nary a whimper in each case. I had a fried motherboard on a G5 iMac repaired in less than 24 hours through the Apple store. So where I had been inclined to “sell” Apple to friends and family before, I’m doubly-resolved again.

With customer service like Apple’s, who needs traditional advertising? I’ll sell Apple products for free.

First, some background context

I’ve run the BonFX blog since September 2009. Way, way, way back then, I didn’t get Twitter. I was just getting a handle on blogging. I had a Twitter account, because, well, I was supposed to. I didn’t know what to do with it though. Should I post what cool pizza place I found? Nah. In those early days, I was interested in SEO best practices in HTML and wondered primarily if I should have images or not in my posts. How quaint!

It takes time, quite a bit of time, to learn what blogging is all about. It takes time to get it demystified. I’d say it took a solid 6 months before I grasped the power of Twitter, and what the real fundamentals of SEO were. I’m still learning that of course, but I’m not running down the wrong path, at least. If you are reading this, you obviously already grasp these fundamentals. That is half the battle. I won’t get into why Twitter is important to bloggers—enough is said about that other places.

The other half of the battle is the stuff of SEO basics: interesting writing, written for humans, in a personal voice, filled with meaningful, timely, useful advice. All the SEO tricks and tweets in the world are just a footnote after the issue of content.

So let’s say you have great content, great SEO, great exposure, and now your graphic design blog is starting to get some traffic. Great! What is a great way to measure you traffic? Well, I figured if I was growing my blog the way the other “big hitters” in the graphic design field were, I figured I’d be doing good. So I set out to figure what good Twitter growth looked like.

Poor man’s statistical analysis

What I did was simple: I copied down the number of Twitter followers that some of the graphic design bloggers that I follow had, about a month ago. I don’t follow that many people, so of those I do follow, I focused on the few that met some simple criteria, such as:

• I really liked them and their content
• I liked what they tweeted
• They tweeted often
• They posted to their blogs often
• They had a sense of humor
• I had that sense of anticipation each day to see what they’d tweet
• They had a big (to me) Twitter base and a decent number of RSS subscribers

These few criteria gave me a pretty wide cross-section of graphic design bloggers. Some new, some old, some huge, some not so huge. The most important common denominator, I’d say, was that they were busy on Twitter.

So I wrote down the number of Twitter followers for each of these bloggers in the beginning of July 2010. And then I wrote them down again today, August 4th 2010, and did some simple math:

• x = Today’s Number of Twitter Followers
• y = Number of Twitter followers from 30 days ago
• z = Percent of change in 30 days
• y/x = z

So how did my favorite graphic design bloggers / blogs fair in 30 days of Twitter growth? Take a look:

I don’t know about you, but I find the data really interesting.

So, how fast should my Twitter followers be growing?

I mixed my own data for BonFX in the chart. As you can see, as a relative Twitter and blogging newbie, I don’t have many Twitter followers. But look at David Airey or Jacob Cass (Just Creative Design). They both, in the last 30 days, have a slightly lower growth rate than mine. But I’d sure like to have their numbers! Of course 30 days isn’t a very big sample. I’m sure this rate goes up and down as Twitter and blog activity ebbs and flows throughout the weeks and months with project and schedules and vacations and life in general. I’m not collecting data like Google, but you can see the point: everyone on the list added more followers last month than I have total, including those with a slower growth rate than mine.

Can we draw a meaningful conclusion then or not?

Flunk me out of stats class—I don’t care! But here is what I think is good advice based on my little-layman-analysis. Percentage wise, if you are growing 3% to 7% a month, you are on par with some pretty well known bloggers and their growth rates.

Like interest on your cash in the bank, a slow steady growth rate can yield big dividends if you are patient, and just keep doing the hard work of what is right: write good content and tweet interesting tweets over a long period of time. Period.

The point is this: Twitter growth is relative. It seems quite clear that the bigger you get, the bigger you get. Look at Smashing Magazine. They added 14k followers in 30 days. That’s about 500 new followers a day. They are doing something right!

And what is the lesson on getting bigger and wider in regards to your audience? Great content on your blogs and interesting tweets will keep people coming back and spreading the word.

So, take what you will from this! Your mileage may vary. I do this kind of thing from time to time because it’s fun, and a little inspiring. What do you think?

And hey, looks like we could all send a round of applause to Duane over at Logobird for an incredible 32% growth rate over the last 30 days! Congratulations!

So what do I have to share with you today? I have the preliminary cover artwork concept done for the “The Big Book of Font Combinations“. The entire book has a sparse design ethic, and the cover is in keeping with that design language. Our blog branding does the same, and our lead in preview images for the book from some months back established the look and feel we are following through on.

My favorite aspect of the design is that it shows (as of right now) all the fonts that are used in the book to create all the font pairings. The cover is a preview of the entire book. I’m very happy with the concept, and we’ll let the design concept rest a while as the production of the content entire the final stages.

Find my typos and tell the world about them!

So, in the interest of generating buzz and hopefully some tweets and facebook mentions, I’m posting this sneak preview of the design. If you have any feedback, I’d love to get it as soon as possible, since nothing is written in stone at this point. I’m also known as the worlds worst copy editor when I’m in design mode, I kid you not. So be a pal and let me know if you find an egregious typographic oversite!

In the meantime, check out the “Font Combos” app for iPhone, which also has the same branding and works from nearly the same set of fonts for creating pairings. It will give you something to do while you wait for the book .

Concept cover art for “The Big Book of Font Combinations”

(click to enlarge)

Why these typefaces?

Simple – our research as well as the independent research of other qualified typography lovers have identified these faces, on a variety of quantifiable levels, as either most owned, most used, or most popular. This list is not arbitrary but rather represents the fonts in the “spike” area of a chart, while hundreds and thousands of other typefaces make up the “long tail”.

Don’t shoot the messenger

I’ve gotten some interesting flak for presenting these typefaces as the most popular among designers because it seems to eschew modern typefaces designed by very-alive and relevant type designers and foundries. Point taken. A great conversation was had about it over at typophile.com. My defense of the typeface “choices” is one simply based on good and reasonable research. I did not “choose” any of the typefaces: a zillion designers did over not a few decades. If someone wants to do the research again, I’m sure they’ll come to the same conclusion myself and others did, for the most part, give or take a font or two.

I’ll lift part of the dialogue from the typophile.com thread, which I think sums it up:

It just happens that the last type book I purchased a few weeks back, “Typeface: Classic Typography for Contemporary Design” by Tamye Riggs is a real delight to read. The list of typefaces she works with contains 46 typefaces, all of which are on the lists and research I did. She got a lot of flack from her “fellow type fanatics” about what should and shouldn’t be on the list.

Her concluding sentence in the intro rings true for me:

“What is included is ultimately not the preference of the authors – the content evolved organically from a thorough exploration of typography in the design world.”

Her research mirrors mine nearly identically. She did more research than I, so I’ll defer to her list, even though I did my research before her book came out earlier this year.

But the second paragraph of the intro is even better:

“I could see tremendous potential for such a type book. Let me preface this by saying that I’m a big fan of living type designers and I support their efforts as much as possible. But while plenty of graphic designers employ new typefaces in their projects, there is still a tremendous amount of stunning work being produced using type that originated in the twentieth centuries and much earlier.”

I couldn’t say it any better myself, so I won’t try!

The working list of serif and sans serif typefaces used to make combinations in the book

Without further delay and maybe a typo or two:

• Akzidenz Grotesk
• American Typewriter
• Antique Olive Light
• Arno
• Avante Gard
• Avenir
• Bell Gothic
• Bembo
• Berkeley
• Bernhard Modern
• Bickham Script
• Bodoni Caslon
• Century Gothic
• Chaparral
• Clarendon
• FF DIN
• Egyptienne
• Eurostyle
• Formata
• Franklin Gothic
• Frutiger
• Futura
• Garamond
• Gil Sans
• Goudy Old Style
• Helvetica
• Interstate
• Jensen
• Letter Gothic
• Lucida
• Meta
• Minion
• Mistral
• Monotype Grotesque
• Mrs. Eaves
• Museo
• Myriad
• New Baskerville
• New Century Schoolbook
• News Gothic
• OCR
• Officina Sans
• Optima
• Palatino
• Rockwell
• Rotis
• Sabon
• Souvenir
• Stone
• Thesis
• Times Roman
• Trade Gothic
• Trajan
• Univers
• Warnock
• Zapfino

I thought this was interesting: a partial screenshot of the big spreadsheet we are using to keep track of progress. Um, it’s slightly unreadable on purpose .

There you have it: the list as it stands right now. It’s subject to change, but one way or another, we’ll see you in the Fall with complete book.

Follow me on twitter/dbonneville and subscribe to the RSS bonfx.com/feed!

From today until June 22nd, Font Combos will be on sale for .99 cents, which is 50% off the list price of $1.99.

• We want to increase awareness of the Font Combos app in preparation for the publishing of our graphic design resource book “The Big Book of Font Combinations” which is the expanded print companion to Font Combos.
• Font Combos is an iPhone app that makes is very easy to create interesting font pairs from 45 of the most popular typefaces of all time. You can match fonts to create over 2000 variations.

Read the full description, see the screen shots, and consider taking Font Combos for a spin at 50% off for this limited time!

We’ve designed a master page that has a little bit of just about everything on it. It’s an article, phone book, ad, callout, magazine, text book and general wall of text kind of design.

You’ll also notice we include the exact font name used (including bold or italic) along with the exact point size and leading amount used.

The point size and leading amount will be different for each font so that the text best fills up the allotted space without changing any wording. This makes comparisons based on relative space easy since the text will not change and give you a feel for size and word count fluctuations per font you look at.

This page layout will be replicated across all the font combinations so that the user will have a baseline with with to flip back and forth very easily.

Since the book will be available in PDF format, it will be very easy to print out 2 or 3 pages and compare them as you wish.

Below, our example shows the master page layout using a classic Myriad and Minion combination (click to enlarge):

Please share your feedback and we’ll do our best to incorporate it into the final product!

A lot of popular blogs went through an early phase were posts were frequent, varied in content, and long by comparison to recent material. Older posts tend toward lists and tutorials, while newer posts tend towards fragmented, highly-segmented interest posts. For example, in the archives of some popular blogs, you might find a time-consuming study of the branding in a certain industry with lots of text, images, and references. Newer posts might have content focused on, say, one designer or one logo they came across with a few words, one central images, and then a link directly the resource.

Let me say that I don’t think this is laziness or bait-and-switch or anything negative at all. I’m wondering about it strictly in terms of my own strategy, and prefer using a wheel instead of reinventing it.

Hypothesis about the success of graphic design blogs

Here are some possible principles that we could deduce from the blogging activity of some of the more popular independent graphic design bloggers. Each suggested principle, however, is fraught with difficulties because of underlying assumptions about cause and effect:

• Readers prefer shorter articles in these days of big posts everywhere, due to “big article burnout”.
• Bloggers know that big articles don’t yield any better results than small articles, and have limited time, and therefore simply are being smart rather than altruistic about what “quality content” is.
• Bloggers know that short or long, because of their momentum from past hard work, they don’t need to work as hard (which is the principle I’m secretly hoping is true), and thus write shorter articles because they yield exactly the same results.
• Bloggers know that reader preferences have shifted towards small, more personal and arbitrary opinion type posts, because of burn out with big, personality-less list posts propagated all over the design blog community
• Bloggers learned that list posts work, if done correctly
• Readers always click on headlines with certain tried and true formulas, and always will
• Bloggers simply learned to write better! Less is more, and a lot less is a lot more!

Any and all of these possible principles could be true. You could juxtapose any of them as mutually exclusive, or you could see them all as simultaneously true.

My hypothesis is that many popular design bloggers originally wrote longer and more varied material, but learned how to write better and shorter, more focused articles over time. While they learned, they gained a following for being consistent and informative, and have the benefit of their initial momentum still working for them. Now that they 1) write better and 2) have a cemented readership with readers and 3) have great inbound links, they can “rest” in a sense. The “rest” means that they don’t have to worry about building a foundation week in and out in their niche. The foundation is built, and now they can take time to build at their discretion.

Can this translate into a strategy going foward?

Test the strategy for success

So here is a working strategy:

• Write a lot (still)
• Write shorter and better now rather than later
• Discover the niche I’m best at writing for
• Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary
• By the end of 24 months of blogging like this, the foundation will be built

I think the key from this strategy is: write shorter and better now.

So, I’m experimenting this year with writing more frequently and including more opinions with shorter, less researched and time-intensive oriented materials, with the aim to getting readers who are interested in short & sweet, entertaining, and informative graphic design articles, with a dash of opinion.

Fun facts about BonFX.com

• 60% of traffic comes from Google (and other search engines)
• 30% of traffic comes from referrals from other sites
• 30% comes direct, which may be Twitter but could also be RSS subscriptions
• The vast majority of visitors come for articles about typography
• Other popular topics are iPhone related

Among the other various kinds of posts, one popular selection is our goofy graphic design limerick post, from which I have culled an apropos example for this post:

There once was a blogging designer
Who said “I will sooner retire!
I’ll write blogs all day,
And sip my latte.”
But soon found his finances goner.

What next for BonFX.com?

• The long, meaningful slug to 1,000,000 unique visitors
• A focus on typography, a book or two, more iPhone apps for graphic designers, and creative processes from brainstorming to sketching. This will help concentrate our topics and thus benefit our SEO optimization efforts around our products.
• More subjective opinion
• I might finally do something about the portfolio and about page I have not touched since we launched. Really bad. I know. But our focus won’t be on client acquisition in 2010 as much as product development.
• I’m sure something else interesting will crop up.

Thanks for stopping by!

If you have a favorite graphic designer who also has an online portfolio of artwork in addition to their design work, I’d like to see it. Why?

The interest for creating an article like this stems from some earlier posts about graphic design and drawing. Some designers make do with confessedly little drawing skill, and some swear by it.

So, how does being a fine artist affect graphic design work, and vice-versa? I’d like to see, so I will write the article when I collect enough references.

So, if you are a fan of a particular graphic designer who doubles as an artist, let me know!

Please leave comments and links below.

If design is not your passion, where do you find the inspiration to deliver great design solutions?

Let’s be honest: getting the job done in graphic design with excellence requires some kind of serious inspiration. I have found that above all things, for me, deadlines are the most motivating of all factors. The job must be done, it must be done right, it must be done on time, it must be excellent, and it must be clever. Pressure provides a great atmosphere in which the necessary creativity can thrive. Listen to what Erik Spiekermann has to say:

“Pressure…I get inspired by just finally sitting down and looking at a problem, looking at it really deep, taking it apart like we used to take our cars apart as little boys, or as youn adults. And then you look at the parts and think, “oh, this is easy, now I know how it works. Now I know how the carburetor works, because I took it apart.” You put it back together again and there’s always a piece left over, but it always works again. And you’ve learned something. And you grease everything, clean everything up and it works really.”

~ Erik Spiekermann, quoted in Inpsirability: 40 Top Designers Speak About What Inspires, p17

In the end, I solve graphic design problems because I get paid to, because I like having things like food and clothes and a roof over my head. That skill affords me the opportunity to engage in some problems I want to solve for myself, like iPhone apps, books, pro bono design projects for causes I believe in, etc. My interest in graphic design stems right out of my childhood love for art, but when I realized I wasn’t likely going to have an easy time raising a family the way I wanted to on the income of a fine artist—especially an early career one—I found growing appreciation for the trade of graphic design. I have never looked back, and have been designer full-time for about 20 years now.

I connect inspiration directly to getting the job done under pressure. It’s rare I find a job so interesting that I can’t wait to work on it. The most interesting projects are usually my own. Excitement for commercial work does happen, and it happens with regularity, but it is something that regularly happens only a few times a year. I wish it was several times a month, but that is not the case.

Pressure can drive the process

With pressure as my taskmaster, I find that I can make both left and right brains march in step to deliver on-time for a client. I do this, and value this, because it’s the right thing to do when you said you were going to do something. It also helps that I may have signed a contract. And what better way to get the job done that to “take apart the carburetor” while knowing you need the car running correctly in order to get to work?

I think this is why I procrastinate: I create pressure situations in which I know certain thought processes engage from which consistently appropriate design solutions emerge.

Are the results great or good? Honestly, few clients know the difference between bad and good design, even less so between good and great design. I subconsciously always aim for great, but am always content with good, because that’s usually all I have time to hit. A good grid or good source of inspiration are half the battle. But if the budget and timetable was unlimited on a project, I wouldn’t settle for anything but the best. I think even some passion would kick in, knowing I’d be allowed to take a problem as far as my own ability could take me. But how often is this the case in day-to-day business? It’s rare indeed. Time and budget are always short. So I’m quite content with consistently good solutions delivered under pressure and don’t worry about the truly great solutions. Great has a way of showing up when it wants to.

So, pressure is my favorite catalyst to creativity. Not because pressure is nice, but because pressure gets the job done. And graphic design is very much a job: hard but good.

I’ve done the homework for you so that you don’t have to! Let’s take your blog from bad to worse, like a slow train wreck, over the next 12 months. All you have to do is follow these 10 steps:

1. Make a fake sticky note and coffee stain ring and use it all over your site. It shows you are sophisticated yet down to earth, friendly yet professional.
2. Tell everyone something like “Hi. I’m Fred. I design beautiful websites.” That way, people will know that you are Fred, and that you design beautiful websites.
3. Make sure all your fonts are being rendered in Typekit. Please use at least 9 different typefaces.
4. Make a post about “25 minimal WordPress Themes”.
5. Make a post about “15 amazing Photoshop Tutorials”.
6. Litter your links, banners, footers, and text with important keywords every other word like “graphic designer” and “freelance”.
7. Make sure you have huge, giant, really big, and easily clickable icons for Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds. They should be at least 1024 pixels wide each, have  a drop shadow, and a little character pointing to them. That way, people will see the icons and not miss the icons.
8. Include most colors from the entire visible spectrum in your design. Use some ultraviolet too so a visitor can see the site if they happen to be in a room with a blacklight.
9. Find a very well-known blogger you like, and copy his or her site literally, down to the last pixel. It worked for them, it will work for you too.
10. Very important: write an article about how to get freelance design work. It should say things like “ask your friend for business” and “print business cards” and “try and get freelance business”. Also, a good tip to include is “use the internet” to get freelance work. It’s amazing how many people miss that one.

Ok, that was sarcastic. Don’t do those things.

Instead, get a nice clean design and write in a personal voice and make sure you have 3 or 4 search engine things figured out. It’s worth reading Copyblogger.com and sites like that, but don’t go nuts. Just write good stuff and relax. Post frequently and you’ll be fine.

Blogging, whatever you blog about, is a chess game and not a game show: think then act.

Enjoy the game!

This article was inspired by:

• 2 Reasons Why Your Portfolio Site Sucks over at Drawar.com. If anything, Scrivs is opinionated. It works.

It has a fantastic glossary of typographic terms all designers should be familiar with. Here are the main topics:

• What’s in a Letter
• Serif and Sans Serif
• x-height
• Measuring Type
• Spacing
• Typographic Color
• Using the Right Character
• Alignment
• Copyfitting
• Choosing and Using Typefaces
• Combining Typefaces in a Publication
• Glossary of Typographic Terms

The illustrations are perfect, and the PDF is oriented to be easily read on screen:

The entire PDF is only 20 pages, very condensed, and is one of those rare little gems of information that gets merit for both visual and textual brevity while still being information-dense.

So download Typography Primer from Adobe and enjoy!

First, we have the application icon. Apple requires a 512 x 512 file in JPG or PNG format. It uses this large file to create the application icon which can be seen on the iTunes landing page for the rosary app and it’s parent page in the iTunes App store:

The leather background and bevel was done in Fireworks. We were going for a classy but subdued look, and avoid any sentimentality. We also wanted to appeal to men to help get around that fact that some people see the rosary as an “old ladies” prayer. Hardly! Read the recent Wall Street Journal article about how tough guys are getting on their knees with a rosary lately.

The “gem” itself was created in 2 part in Blender (an open source 3D drawing and rendering program), and composited in Photoshop. Here is the original art for that. The jewel was created as a translucent box that we subdivided at angles until we approximated a hand-cut gem. We then set lighting as a jewel photographer might:

The interface

The interface is linear, from top to bottom, left to right. A traditional rosary is circular, but trying to emulate that in the iPhone created affordance issues. As it is, we have some fat-finger syndrome in the interface due to the number of “gems” needed to complete the prayer cycle. While you can click any gem at any time, the large arrow button at the bottom is the main navigation tool. Simply click the arrow and the rosary advances, lighting up each jewel along the way.

We used the Symbols feature of Fireworks which was indispensable because it took many tweaks to get each gem right. While we tweaked, we only had to make changes to the master copy and all the others would update. What a time saver!

Text helps and guide

Using Objective-C, we created the logic for the app, including the modal screens that are launched from the secondary icons above the arrow bar. The text was set in standard HTML imported into XCode, but styled by hand in Dreamweaver. The modal graphics are deliberately muted so the iPhone doesn’t glow too much. It would have been very bright, by contrast, to go from a muted UI screen to largely bright white UI screen, so we opted for a toned down textured look:

Splash screen

Although Apple didn’t quite intend to allow the use of a “default.png” to substitute as a splash screen, it is quite often used that way. This is the screen that launches when you first click the icon from the iPhone UI. This was also created in Fireworks. We used the custom polygon tool and a drop shadow that knocks out it’s own shape to create the 12 stars. The text is Trajan with a gradient fill to simulate gold, along with a slight indented emboss to simulate metal being set into leather.

The overall goal for this screen, as well as the other UI elements, was to create something that had a handmade feel, along the lines of a leather money clip or key fold:

And that’s it’s for “Rosary Gems”. We have more novel rosary UI’s on the way. Stay tuned!

Try a rosary on your iPhone!

Give “Rosary Gems” a try. Even if you don’t use a rosary normally, it’s a calming and peaceful use of a few minutes on your iPhone, and you never know what a few minutes of thoughtful exploration might yield.

I would have to say that the copyright, trademark, and em dash symbols are probably the most common for me to have to dial up on the keyboard. How about you?

Here we have an HTML version and a graphic version which is really a preview and a link to a special alt key combinations PDF I typeset so I could print it out and leave it somewhere conspicuous in my work area. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

Alt Key Combinations (HTML version)

Alt Key Combinations (click to download and open PDF version)

Graphic designers can get by without drawing

But only just so.

I don’t necessarily mean that classical still life drawing is somehow indispensible to being a good designer, but drawing by hand is nontheless critical at some level, especially during the initial stages of a design. Brainstorming with a pencil is simply impossible to improve on. Many designers get by without drawing, but it’s to their detriment, whether they know it or not. All the great design schools and great graphic artists would concur. Those that don’t concur, well, they probably have a lesser degree of greatness.

But, even though I’m quite convinced to be a great designer you must draw, you still don’t have to draw to be a good designer. In fact, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do! But, the benefits of drawing as a habit in any form at all are just too clear, history would show. I’m sure there are some exceptions to the rule out there, but they would be anomalies: curiosities to be considered but not emulated.

Digital tools are approximations, not replacements

All the digital tools we use as designers are imitations of the real deal. Hence the “pen” and “pencil” tools, “erasers” and “brushes”. The marketing campaigns of the greatest design applications are almost always “looks more natural” or something along those lines. The latest release of Photoshop CS5 is really highlighting just how “more natural” the new brush tools work. These digital tools approximate their analog parents. In some ways, they are better, as is the case with “undo”. But the Holy Grail of all design applications is really being as close to analog as possible, while sneaking in some digital goodness.

So, if you are working only and ever in the digital approximations (the toolbars of your various apps) you are missing out the very thing they are trying to approach. Again, you can get by as a designer without drawing. The shear ease of some aspects of design software make hitting the bullseye of competent design pretty easy, whether one is cognizant of it or not. That is beside the point. Rulers, grids, undo, color palette applications, templates: it’s much easier today than 20 years ago to pull off being a “designer”. Adobe gets singular credit for that! But it’s a bit like feeling around in the dark and figuring out that the thing in the room is an elephant, instead of simply turning on the light and seeing it all at once. You can get there the hard way, but, that is the hard way!

Don’t just “play it by ear”

Being a designer who never draws is a bit like being the musician who never learns a scale and simply plays by ear. That musician might be able to eke out some great tunes, maybe make some great recordings, but in the end, they will never escape the limits of their self-imposed exile from even greater achievements.

For instance, great color palettes can simply be copied. But there is math and hard science behind color theory that one can learn. Great layouts can be copied too. But again, there is demonstrable math and theory as to why a great layout is truly great. Drawing, along with study of things like composition and typography, all work in concert to make us designers even better designers than we would be without them.

Drawing is fundamental to getting the best results with the least effort

I must repeat though. You don’t need to draw to be a good designer. You don’t need to do anything any “expert” might suggest. It’s simply too easy these days to create competent work, and even make a living, without a lot of what designers from a generation ago struggled to achieve. I personally have found this troublesome, as someone that now finds competition where there was none before.

For example, order some Letraset transfer letters. Google that if you don’t know what it is. Open the package and grab a sheet and try to “wing it” as you set type. Right. I thought so. You’d better sketch that first! Letraset gets really expensive really fast. Yes, sharpen a few good old No.2′s and grab some scrap paper and have at it until you are sure each .10 letter you scratch out and burnish is in the right place in all respects.

Learn to solve problems like a Master by drawing

All the elements of design are rooted in drawing, as is painting. Drawing is the fundamental skill of visual artists of any stripe. The better we draw, the better we paint, and the better we design, because drawing contains all the problems and pitfalls we must overcome as designers. If we never fully deal with the problems with a pencil, we never fully solve our graphic design issues with much cruder tools.

Further reading:

• Should graphic designers be able to draw / illustrate? – Graphic River
• 10 steps to great logo designs – David Airey
• The logo design process from start to finish – Jacob Cass
• Do designers need to know how to draw? – Creative Opera

(UPDATE: Uninstall any Beta Flash plugins and install the current player (Mac). Zero crashes now)

It seems that two actions will cause Firefox, at some random point in time, to just disappear or hang for a few seconds and disappear, or just hang permanently. These two actions are:

• Creating a new tab by either clicking in an empty space on the tab bar
• Searching in the Firefox default search box in the top right of the browser

When I browse, I’m using shortcut keys or moving so fast that often I’m not sure exactly what the last action I did was the point of a crash. Firefox has been crashing so much, and I have found so little help, that I had to learn to slow down and see what it was I was doing that was causing the crashes.

The eureka moment

Yesterday, I browsed really slow all day. Normally this would drive me nuts, but it was an experiment. I finally nailed the crash culprit down to one specific action: when I click in the Firefox search box and hit the first letter…BOOM! No more Firefox. I tried it again. After a few tries, I realized it was simply typing that first letter that would just BOOM Firefox into the application black hole of non-existence.

Yes, I was really sick of the “Oops, we are so embarrassed” message. That message page was practically my surrogate starting page, I’ve seen it so much. I hadn’t thought about it, but the default search box is really the only way I search. I and really like the auto-suggest. What could I do? I needed to replace that search box with something else.

The Solution

I normally don’t like toolbars that get in the way, but I knew from prior usage that the Google Toolbar has a very diplomatic setting that basically hides the toolbar 100%, but at the same time, allows it to take over the default search box that Firefox provides. My guess was that if I replaced the default search box, at this point, I’d never see another crash caused by simply searching.

Four days later, not a single crash. Wow.

So, install Google Toolbar to stop crashing if you have similar crashes like I describe, and change the settings as follows:

Good luck! And happy no-crash Firefox surfing!

I like to think of drawing in vectors as more like modeling with clay than, say, painting. When I paint, or simply use bitmap tools in Photoshop, I think in 2D. I don’t see layers as much as I see the final product. But with vectors, I’m aware at every step that each object is like a little piece of clay I can mold, add to, or remove as necessary. As multiple brush strokes quickly fade from my frontal lobe memory, each little bitty I draw in a vector program remains in my memory (more or less) and I’m always cognizant of the constructed nature of what I’m doing. Maybe it’s even a bit like Lego’s, where I know I can “undo” and “reattach” anything I do at any time.

Now, with a process like that which is very iterative, a linear tutorial just doesn’t make sense. A time lapse video might work too, but then it would take way too long to sit through. So, what I’m going to do here is start with the final product and work it backwards, using the tear down method, to reveal what I did. Hopefully looking through this will be of some use to someone wanting to get started creating realistic vector illustrations.

The problem, even with the tear down, is that it might give the illusion that showing the layers that together make up the image represent a linear process of creation. This is not the case. What you see here are the finished layers that combine to create the button at the end. You can’t really see my unending fudging and tweaking, but you can see the end result.

It’s very important to remember that each layer has some kind of effect on the overall image. Unfortunately for some people, I’m the guy that can spot 1 pixel being off by 10% from across the room on a dirty LCD. So some of these layers might not look like they affect the final product much or at all but they do in some subtle, cumulative way.

Let’s start with the final product in Flash, and tear down the layers from there:

What we have here is two PNG images cross fading over one another in Flash. The “off” layer sits on the bottom, and the “on” layer fades in, and then out, and so on, on top of the “off” layer. The transparent PNGs with their shadows are sitting over a brushed metal texture I also imported into Flash.

Here is the final “on” layer with typography after being reduced before being imported into Flash.

I reduce some vector artwork when I convert to bitmap for the same reason that many illustrators using traditional media work at a slightly larger size than the final reproduction. Reducing artwork has a tightening, polishing effect you just can’t get by hand. Same applies to vector artwork, at least for me.

Here is the final “off” layer after reduction.

This is the final, full size “on” layer that shows the interaction of all the layers. I did not add typography to this, as I wanted Photoshop (and not Fireworks) to set the final type so I could carefully control the kerning between letters as I had to get it just right, as well as the aliasing. Fireworks CS3, as any Fireworks user knows (before CS5) has a lousy type engine.

We removed the vector reflection, which is filled with white and white set to transparent, giving it the fade out effect. One great strength of Fireworks is the ease of which you can create and edit gradients on vector objects that have transparencies in it.

I removed the flat black circle to reveal another simple circle filled with a gradient.

I turned off a dupe of the orange ring. It’s subtle, but if you look at this image and the preceding one, you’ll notice the preceding image has more orange glow casting ambient light on to the lower part of the bevel of the button.

Here, I’ve turned off the inner area of the button that is “scooped out” in the preceding image. Notice how the “scoop” circle above has a slight glow which adds white to the “rim”. It’s this complicated interaction between glows and gradients that gives wonderful, sometimes accidental effects.

Another orange glow layer has been turned off. Notice how there is almost no ambient orange on the underside of the button, but there is some at the top of the button.

The large fundamental black gradient circle with black inner glow has been turned off. We now see the base orange shape (arbitrary color) with a stroke of orange, and a slight glow.

Here, we just have the base circle I started with.

I deleted the orange circle to reveal a set of black circles with have their shadows and glows interacting for a complex shadow that simulates diffuse lighting coming from a few different directions.

How did this get here? At some point, I grabbed the shape used up higher in the layers that had the right glow on it, and I duped a copy to the back and played with it’s shadows yet again. I do this a lot, not caring what is in the layers that I can’t see, kind of like how a clay sculptor doesn’t care what some parts of his wireframe actually look like.

Messing with a few more shadows…

This layer supports a hard, dark shadow that is important for the contrast it creates.

The final layer here is one of the oft-duped circles but with a motion blur at a slight angle.

And finally, our base metal texture.

And to recap, the final “glow” image once more:

Putting it all together

The process of creating realistic graphics using vectors is a very personal, customized, iterative process that requires the use of the following tools and tricks:

• gradients
• gradients with transparency
• translucent layers
• shadows
• glows
• multiple dupes of core shapes with different effects applied to them to create complex visual interactivity.

The Flemish Renaissance painting Masters developed a technique of painting that relied on optical mixing of layers and colors to achieve their depth and brilliancy. I’ve applied some of those same concepts here, as it’s most important to realize you can’t get the right effect with just one simple shape and effect layer. Let the layers mix for you and dazzle you with unexpected exhuberance!

You can see the “real” button live in use on a client site if you’d like.

Happy vectoring!

First, the tips.

1. Focus on quality, not quantity
2. If you want a friend, be a friend
3. Keep it real
4. Be who you are, not what you are not
5. Find some niches
6. Be different
7. Be opinionated and personal
8. Ditch the ads unless you have a zillion hits a day
9. If you are going to do a list post, do a useful, original one. Add a twist.
10. Follow, befriend, and learn from other blogger / gurus in the design community. Many followers, few learners.

Now, a few notes.

A note about list posts

I like lists. I don’t like boring lists. If you are going to do list posts, do something clever with the content. Make it an interesting niche list, or make some commentary about each item in the list. I’m not sure the design community needs yet another straight-up “25 minimal WordPress themes” post, but it should could use an original post about that topic. There is another angle, be it personal or clever, on the same old material.

One more thing about lists: if you publish a list that is truly useful for yourself, your list will be great. If you are publishing a boring list of what you think will drive traffic, it will probably fail. Our best list posts (based on traffic) took time and effort to make and were very interesting to us as we made them. Passion and effort always yields good results.

A note about ads

Unless you have a huge amount of design related traffic, the addition of ads to your page just looks funny. I tried a couple ads for a while. We’ve had 150k unique visits since last fall and made enough off of ads to pay a few road tolls. Essentially, to get revenue off of ads, you need a huge readership. I mean huge. You need thousands and thousands of reader, not just thousands or hundreds. My advice, and the advice of some other fellow bloggers is to just wait. Gain trust and then if you want to put some high-quality ads on your site, try it out. I’ve heard great things about, for instance, BuySellAds. Just wait until the time is right and don’t clutter your site up with anything other than great content. If you have 112 followers of your feed and a right column full of ads, it just makes you look kind of desperate. Don’t do that! Then again, maybe you don’t ever want ads. Try developing a product (iPhone App, Book, eBook, etc.). You will likely make way more off of a product or line of them than you ever will with ads.

A note about posting frequency

As a small or solo blog team, it’s just not feasible to get design work done and do more than say one or two quality posts per week. I’m revising our goals this year to be to post four quality posts per month, and leave room for a few fluffy ones (read: post that are just fun and quick, out of pure joy). It’s a very modest goal. Some may think that’s too low, but if you do one great article a week that REALLY makes the rounds in the design community, you will gain a solid readership and a golden reputation. Frequent, cheap content is damaging. Infrequent, quality content is golden, even if it’s not that much gold. So yes, if you are going to lay an egg, at least lay a golden one .

A note about the state of blogging in Graphic Design

There is a lot of noise in the blogging design world, and I expect 2010 to be a shake up year. Don’t make noise for noise sake. Make good noise. Be something someone wants to read once a week and always be real and interesting. That should be your “brand” above all else. Personally, I love the infrequent but quality graphic design blog collection I have going. I have a “check once in a while” folder in Google Reader, and a “check every day” folder to go with it. Things move in and out of the folders as I’m impressed or underwhelmed by various posts. That might be a post in and of itself: “Low volume, high quality graphic design bloggers”…

That’s it for lists and tips. Now, our top posts since September 2009.

Top 10 Graphic Design Posts at BonFX

1. 23,000 hits: 19 top fonts in 19 top combinations
2. 12,000 hits: 72 Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients with PDF Chart
3. 7,000 hits: 16 Top Useful iPhone Apps for Graphic Designers
4. 6,000 hits: 14 Top Typeface and Font Combinations Resources
5. 6,000 hits: 15 Top Graphic Design Limericks for your Amusement
6. 6,000 hits: 23 Really Bad Font Choices
7. 5,800 hits: 19 top fonts most preferred by graphic designers from around the web
8. 3900 hits: Top 10 Fonts for Graphic Designers with PDF Chart
9. 2400 hits: Top 10 annoying graphic design bloggers
10. 2000 hits: The Logo Psychologist: 26 Mouth-Watering Restaurant Logos and Profiles

All of these posts continue to gain hits as the weeks come and go. The most popular posts, as one might expect, accumulate hits faster than the other ones, and maintain a pretty steady rate. For instance, our most popular post “19 top fonts in 19 top combinations” still gets 100-300 hits a day average since the peak leveled off late 2009. There you have it. I hope it was fun and useful!

We’ve seen some graphic design bloggers disappear in 2009 and 2010. We’ve seen once-busy bloggers slow way down from their usual pace. That’s OK. Life happens.

Sometimes you get a better job, an illness, a new baby, a broken foot, a sabbatical, a new guitar, or even a new professional focus. There could even be a traumatic life event that puts the blog on the lowest possible rung of “what’s important.” That’s fine too.

We see lots of advice on how to build your graphic design blog, how to get more Twitter followers, a billion Photoshop tutorials, a zillion list posts, and all kinds of graphic design bloggy goodness. But how do you tank your blog? I mean, how do you get rid of it? How should you get rid of it? Have you thought of that?

It’s like of like a will. Something you don’t want to think about really, but if you do the thinking up front, it can save you or your loved one some hassles should certain situations arise.

Here are some thoughts I thought as I thought about this:

• Create an emergency post and save it as a draft. Maybe even make a “Hiatus” or “Leave of Absence” category to find it later as the draft moves down stream in your blog entries, as it might get hard to find.
• Give your admin credentials for your hosting account and your blog account to a friend or relative so that someone can post for you if need be.
• Create an instruction sheet and print it out or email it to a select few on what to do. Use screen captures to explain things.

I’m sure this gets the wheels turning for many of you…I know I’m thinking about this now!

But let’s just say you want to just ditch the blog. What should you do? I don’t think I’ve seen a post on “10 Best ways to shut off your blog”. But let’s try that here, now:

11 Ways to shut off your graphic design blog

1. Make a personal post, short and sweet if need be. Let your readers and passersby know the blog is now defunct or will be at a certain date.
2. Consider leaving the blog up if your hosting costs are inconsequential.
3. Let your readers know, if it’s good news, what you have moved on too.
4. Reminisce with us about the highs and lows of your design blog experience. Recap your entire blog history—short and sweet if need be.
5. Maybe “wind down” with a series of posts. Give loyal readers a heads up.
6. If the writing is on the wall for the end, let your readers know as soon as possible. After all we like you!
7. Ask readers for input, like what their favorites posts were and then post all of them in a final post.
8. Suggest your favorite design blogs, or other bloggers, that you think are worthy to fill your vacant shoes.
9. Maybe one of your readers would like to take the blog over from you! Put out some feelers on that one.
10. Don’t just drop off the planet, if you actually have not literally, God forbid, done so.
11. Let your readers know your vision, if possible. They’ve spent time reading your articles, staring at your mug, laughing at your witty asides. They like you! Give’em a swan song.

Well, this was a truly random post, and certainly applies to any blog, not just graphic design of course.

Blogging is about people, their need to communicate and fellowship, and their need to learn. Let’s keep that in focus as we blog our way into the future, whether we are the blogging designer or not!

Thoughts?

Yes, there are lots and lots of graphic design related apps to pick from in the App Store, but many are just not that useful—sorry! The list below represents the consensus from many different sources about the apps that are most useful for getting actual work done.

(NOTE: Any new apps are added below the numbered list)

My 2 Favorite Graphic Design Apps for iPhone

• My personal favorite on the list, which I’ll list first, is the Font Game app. It’s just great to be able to see some of these typefaces up close and learn how they look and feel. The great thing about the game format is that you get to learn and apply that knowledge right off, albeit in a game format. This does relate to work of course because it’s education. The more we know, the faster we are able to work and turn out great design for clients. Time is money!
• My second favorite on, which I’ll list second, is SimpleMind Touch. It’s the best simple mind mapping tool I’ve come across for iPhone yet. For simply getting out the way and requiring the least amount of learning curve or operational savvy (it will take you 13 seconds to learn!), it gets my highest personal recommendation.

The rest are listed in no particular order.

Since our own Font Combination App is so new, we can’t list it among the other 16 (yet), but we’d sure love for you to check it out. If you love typography, and even more so if you love the Font Game, you’ll appreciate Font Combinations. You can mix and match fonts to create over 2000 different combinations faster than you could do in a desktop app. It includes the top fonts used by graphic designers. Click below if it sounds interesting:

Now for our list of links direct to the iTunes Store:

16 Top Useful iPhone Apps for Graphic Designers

1. Font Game
   From I Love Typography comes the long-awaited, the definitive Font Game for iPhone & iPod Touch. Guaranteed to be absolutely the most fun you’ll have with fonts anywhere, any time, any place. Think you know your Arial from your Helvetica, your sans from your sans serifs? Then step up to the plate. With three levels of game play from the ease-yourself-in, ‘Somewhat Difficult’ through to the incredibly challenging ‘Exceedingly Difficult’, there’s lots of fun to be had for novices and typographic experts alike.
2. SimpleMind Touch
   SimpleMind Touch is a Mind Mapping tool that turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a brainstorming, idea collection and thought structuring device.
   (The interface on this one is very easy to use. The lite version is free. If you are new to mind mapping, I strongly recommend trying this app and see how it goes. This link is to the paid version. Look for the free version.)
3. Palettes 2.0
   Palettes is a powerful iPhone productivity tool for creating and maintaining color palettes. Turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a portable color creation tool. Now you can create a color palette anywhere at anytime. Great for creating color schemes. Grab colors from a photograph, a website, or add colors using any one of 5 color models. Quickly find matching colors with support for many different color schemes.
4. cliqcliq Colors
   Colors is an easy-to-use color picker for discovering, converting, and managing colors and palettes. If you’re a designer or developer working with CSS, HTML, Flex, Flash, Objective-C or other media-centric technologies, you’ll spend a good amount of time finding the exact colors you want to use and converting between various scales and formats. With cliqcliq Colors, you can create palettes based on colors you like best and quickly convert between RGB, HSB, and CMYK as well as integer and floating point scales.
5. Palettes Pro
   Palettes Pro is a powerful productivity tool for creating and maintaining color palettes. Great for creating color schemes. Now you can create a color palette anywhere at anytime. Grab colors from a photograph, a website, or add colors using any one of 5 color models. Quickly find matching colors with support for many different color schemes.
6. Color Expert
   Color Expert is an interactive color wheel and swatch library that helps artists and designers indentify, tranlsate, capture, and showcase color. Designers know inspiration can come anywhere at anytime. Now with Color Expert, you’ll have the tools to capture the moment, the moment a color captures you.
7. iBlueSky
   iBlueSky is a brainstorming and mind-mapping solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Collect and organise ideas you have at odd moments, then email the complete project in PDF and PNG formats to any contact. You can even print a hard copy of your work from the PDF file.
8. WhatTheFont
   Identify the fonts in a photo or web graphic! Ever seen a great font in a magazine ad, poster, or on the web and wondered what font it is? Whip out your iPhone and snap a photo, and WhatTheFont for iPhone will identify that font in seconds!
9. FinDaFont
   All the fonts that you’ll ever need, right just in your iPhone !!!
10. Font Shuffle
    “FontShuffle is the fastest mobile source of typographic inspiration. 650+ font families are sorted by visual similarity. Without any previous knowledge about type design, you can quickly discover 6 typefaces of similar style in just two taps by navigating the simple category menu. Choose the list view to examine up to 24 similar typefaces. “
11. Typography Manual
    The Typography Manual has several useful features and resources for designers, including a visual type anatomy glossary, a font size ruler, an em calculator, and enough content to fill a 60-page book. It has all the essentials of a desk reference in a regularly updated pocket resource.
12. Sketches 2
    Jot down your notes, scribble your thoughts and annotate your pictures using only your fingers and your imagination! Illustrate your ideas with simple but colorful diagrams, notes and sketches.
13. Pixelpipe
    Liberate your media with Pixelpipe and get your photos off of your iPhone and out to your favorite social network, micro-blog, photo/video and blog services. With over 110 supported destinations from around the world to choose from the choice is really yours. Free your media and share your life.
14. Loupe
    A color picker for your iPhone: You never know where you are going to find the perfect color. With Loupe you can capture your color inspirations so you don’t have to try and guess what that shade was when you are back at your computer. Simple and thoughtfully designed, Loupe lets you create color swatches from your photo library or using the camera to save colors as you find them.
15. ColorToy
    The color scheme generator for iPhone and iPod Touch. Whether you’re a web designer, interior decorator, artist or just a lover of colors, ColorToy can help you find your ideal color scheme. This simple, flexible app lets you generate, modify and store complementary color palettes.
16. Paper Sizes
    International Paper Sizes is an ideal resource for looking up a variety of paper standards. It’s ideal for those working in graphic design, illustration, printing, export and packaging.

NOTE: Reviews of these and other graphic design related apps are forthcoming, so please subscribe to BonFX one way or the other over on the left column. And thanks for stopping by!

Updates from readers since publishing this article:

• 3/20/2010: myPantone
  Now with the myPANTONE for iPhone and iPod Touch app you have access to a variety of PANTONE® color libraries and the ability to build color palettes and share them with colleagues and clients. myPANTONE offers graphic, web, fashion and apparel designers a way to take PANTONE colors with you wherever you go. Can’t remember what a color looks like, now you can have Portable Color Memory™. (Hat tip to simonkoležnik)

You can explore design options for a new project, for your own learning, or perhaps just play with it over lunch when you are sharing cool graphic design apps on your iPhone with your other graphic design compadres. Creating new typeface pairs is as simple as swiping the header or body copy to the left or right. There are over 2000 font combinations possible in this version.

Take a look at the details about the app by clicking the big icon over on the right or visiting the landing page directly.

You can also take a look at the iTunes landing page.

More graphic design related apps are in the queue, so please sign up (on the left) for the BonFX feeds, or the graphic design newsletter to get updates by email.

The iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) was also, in the end, a lot of fun to work with. More on that later too! By the way, if you have basic to intermediate coding skills, you could pick up iPhone development without too much pain.

Further Reading

• Font Combinations for iPhone – Graphic Design at About.com review (4 stars)

Step 1: Go to MyFonts.com

You’ll see the logo on the left. You are in the right place!

Step 2: Start searching for your favorite font

Look on the far right for the search box and start typing.

Step 3: Get some search help

MyFonts.com will assist you in finding what you are looking for.

Step 4: Review your search criteria in the results

Notice how you could have searched for a string, like “neue” or “bold” or “old style” or even “script” and MyFonts.com would have given results based on those partials searches. Try it out to narrow your results if need be.

Step 5: Review the results for the right typeface or font

In this case, since we searched for Helvetica Neue, we got a link to the entire typeface, not just a font within it.

Step 6: Review the different fonts in the typeface

Step 7: Change the default text

Type in something different and change the font size. If you blow up the text to the max size, there is a brief lag while the display redraws the font at the new size. Fonts done really big in this tool look fantastic.

Step 8: Reset the values

If you play around and get the text all screwy and font size all out of whack, just click here to reset everything. The baseline texts are pangrams, which give you a nice random selection of letters other than “a quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”.

Step 9: Play with ligatures, fractions, and more

Step 10: View a font up close

You can get a very, very detailed full page sample sheet of each font in a typeface family. It goes from 144pt all the way down to 10pt.

Step 11: Buy a font or typeface!

If you see what you like, you are ready to make a purchase! MyFonts.com makes sure it doesn’t get much easier than that.

So, visit MyFonts.com and poke around and have fun.

I had the idea to take some classic typefaces and combine them with some illustrative elements for no other reason than it sounded interesting, even a little mischievous—just the kind of off–beat thing like I do for entertainment. It feels a bit like graffiti—scribbling all over an otherwise–perfect uppercase Helvetica Bold. But it was so fun! I may or may not do more in a series like this, but if you think you can get some mileage out of either the idea or the source files themselves, have at it! I have provided the sample below long with flattened PDF of the vectors, ready for you to further play with if you so choose. Have fun!

(FYI UPDATE: this post was inspired by Sketchetica by Hiekka Graphics. Visit MyFonts.com if this post makes no sense to you!)

And now, I present to you, Smilevetica for viewing or for downloading as a PDF:

The graphics are ugly, but they are straight from the main Google search page, reduced a tad to fit the page.

My personal favorites are:

• graphic designers…can’t draw
• why designers can’t think
• how do graphic designers dress (one pant leg at at time?)
• why do designers use helvetica

Under the “why does adobe…” section, notice how there are no “…make such cool stuff” suggestions. You might want to pay a visit to Dear Adobe after reading this.

• How to create an iPhone/iPod Application: Lesson 1, the basics
  A great article with an easy app that is filled with great comments in the code. Very verbose, non-techie language. If you want to see what’s under the hood of simple app, here you go.
• iPhone Developer Center at Apple
  You’ll be spending a lot of time here getting great content to help you develop an app. You’ll find Getting Started documents, the Application Programming Guide, Objective-C primers, help working on your first app, and lots of sample code to mess around with. Don’t forget the forums you get access to after you pay the registration fee.
• How to write an iPhone app
  This article is a gem if you are really a clueless newbie. It’s a short, non-technical overview of the entire process which covers how to get started with an idea, right through to the approval process to get your app in the App Store. If you have no understanding of how iPhone app development works from soup to nuts, this is the one article you should read today.
• Writing code for the iPhone. How?
  Writing software is a very human process. This poor sod seems to understand that quite well. With humility like this, he’s bound to succeed, for he begins his request for information in this manner: “How does a moron like me learn how to write code for the iPhone?”. If you identify with this meek attitude, read the short dialogue. It’s not going to teach you much code, but I think this banter reveals a lot of the paradigm you’ll encounter as you struggle forward in your development efforts.
• Stanford University iTunes U “iPhone Application Development”
  Open iTunes and go to the last tab on the top of the iTunes Store front page called “iTunes U”. Look for or search for Stanford University free lectures in video or audio format. A real gem.
• How to Write Your First iPhone Program (PDF)
  A short, pithy, smart article on how to write the simplest iPhone app that has one button, and nothing more. All the basics to meditate on are here. Basic, indeed, but necessary. Nice big visuals including screen shots of XCode, the Apple iPhone and Mac development platform, are included so you can see the development process in action.
• My first iPhone application
  This is a GREAT read! It is like a diary of what happened along the way from the idea of an app to the approval of the app in the App Store. It’s as much a human interest story as there can be in the world of programming. From an emotional perspective, reading success stories (as in developing an app and getting it on the Store) like this is the fuel you need to make it over the hump of learning how to do iPhone application development.
• iPhone Programming Tutorial – Connecting Code to An Interface Builder View
  This is fantastic hands-on tutorial of what is involved to get Interface Builder to wire up some buttons for you in your app. It’s long, has lot’s of screen shots, and there are excellent comments at the bottom of the article. The comments are great because they really help you understand the mindset needed to program.

During one exceptionally busy time some years ago, when I used to manage the design and pre-press department of a local printing company, we got a hold of a then-new but very troublesome direct-to-plate laser printer. The boss was very excited about the addition to the department, and was convinced that for spot color budget jobs not requiring more anything than 133 lpi, it would be great. Well, it was great in concept but no so great on execution, the product being so new and quite hard to configure correctly.

Without going into great detail about the technical difficulties I encountered getting this machine to play nicely with the rest of our Apple ecosystem, I’ll jump right to the dream sequence. Anyone who has struggled with printer drivers for expensive niche printing products may well know what kind of painful experience getting something new to work right, all the time, can be.

So, the dream: I was trying to get a job to print on this new machine. I could see the lights blinking, hear the sound of printer motors and gears working up and winding down, and smell that familiar hot-electric smell of static charges and hot plastic. But no print. But then, in the strange ways that dreams let you do things, I could suddenly see inside the printer. Then I could see out of the printer from inside the printer. That little sliver of daylight was my goal – to get out through that horizontal opening just ahead, just beyond the paper rollers and dust skirt. I finally made it out of the printer, as it were in dreamland, into my waiting hands now that I was me again, outside the printer. But then, I looked in dismay at the output. After all that waiting, struggling, stressing, and finagling, I was in fact not the image I thought I was going to be. Yes, I was the designer but I was also the finished output on paper, however those things happen. I in fact was not a hi-res TIFF. I really thought I was press-ready! Instead, after all that work, I was simply a lo-res TIFF, a proxy-image, an FPO — just an EPS preview image. There was no more time — I had to go to press as-is. I was lo-res. I fooled myself and everyone around me. Boy, would my boss be mad, and so would the anxious client with the deadline. I was a fraud.

And then I awoke.

I was immediately depressed! I had to get up and go to work and confront that stupid machine who had invaded my dreams and assaulted my self-worth!

Well, there is a happy ending. I mastered that stupid machine. We got excellent quality, low-cost direct-to-plate vinyl output that saved our department and company a good deal in labor and expenses.

What is the moral of the story? I don’t want to get too philosophical, but there is a lessons for designers in all this: don’t give up. When a project, client, computer, printer, vendor, or whatever gives you a hard time, just keep on going. You’ll eventually figure it out if you don’t quit. Most people don’t know how hard being a designer is, nor what goes into the daily grind of a typical designer. We are a multi-faceted, multi-talented, multi-tasking, and multi-tempered lot, us designers. From technical issues to personality conflicts to creative blocks, we deal with a wider variety of challenges on a daily basis than many other professions.

Remember, as a designer, it’s easy to get beat down at times, and be tempted to think you are nothing but a lo-res TIFF, a scanner preview image, an inkjet draft, a watermarked FPO stock photo image, an overly compressed JPG from the web, or even (gulp) a clipart of an outdated computer monitor from the Corel Draw “freebies” CD. But don’t you believe it. Each one of us is a masterpiece, no matter what the printer says.

Did you use a template provided by your printing service?

If you are using an online quick printer, you have to be sure follow the templates they provide perfectly, or you will get poor results. If your printer provides, say, a PSD template for a business card, either use their template or at the least compare your dimensions and bleed lines to make sure they are the same. The most common mistake with templates is missing your bleeds, so triple check this. The results of bad bleed trims are wasted time, wasted money, and damaged client relationships.

Did you include fonts?

While many print shops can work directly with PDFs with embedded fonts, many print jobs still require source files from InDesign, Quark, etc., along with all the attached images and fonts. Now that designers in fact do get to submit more self-contained PDFs than ever to print shops, it’s that much easier to create an “old fashioned” zip file of a print job and forget include the basics. Like fonts! And never assume that your printers “Garamond” is going to be your “Garamond”. For instance compare “Adobe Garamond Pro” to “ITC Garamond”. One of those typefaces is a dream and the other is a nightmare. I’ll let you google that one. Don’t trust anyone’s font substitution judgment calls but your own!

Are you submitting the right PDF format to your print shop?

Many print shops have requirements, based on their software, for a certain format of PDF. It very much depends on the type of job you are running and what machine or software package your printer will process the job on. Don’t assume! Give the pre-press department a call and find out exactly what they need from you before you lose time after the fact, or they just print what you sent and you get unexpected results. Overly-compressed JPG files are easy to miss in the wrong format PDF. What your screen might hide, the press reveals, in terms of poor quality images.

Did you set up your bleeds correctly?

If you are printing edge to edge color, you will have had to set up bleeds correctly. The size of the bleed is completely dependent on the type of job and the size and type of paper it will print on. Don’t assume your arbitrary bleed amount is enough or too much. Talk to the pre-press department or your print shop sales rep. While many print shops can fix incorrect settings, sometimes they don’t know if they can until they try, and you might end up with extra pre-press charges or delays because your bleeds were not to spec for that job. Save money and time by setting bleeds to accurate specs.

Do you have stray layers in your documents?

It’s best to remove any unused layers in your Illustrator or InDesign files before making PDFs or packaging source files for your print shop. It’s very easy to miss having turned on a layer by mistake and not notice it until you get your proof back from the shop. Extra guides, random “clip board” elements you were saving, text layers you were messing around with, etc., all can get turned on by mistake by you or the pre-press department. The sneaky little mistakes on stray layers aren’t caught sometimes until the presses have stopped rolling. Ouch!

Did you rip your PDF to PhotoShop before sending it to your printer?

This is one final fool-proof way to make sure the printer will see what you intend them to see. Ripping a lo-res PDF into PhotoShop is like having an unbiased third party evaluate your files. Flip through each page, if possible, and look at the raster version up close. You’d be surprised what you might find using this method of proofing. It’s different enough so that your eyes might catch something here that they wouldn’t normally catch from inside InDesign or Illustrator, or whatever other program you might be using.

Did you double check your die cuts?

This is one you want to be very sure of. Either use a die template provided by your printer or from a reputable source online, and make sure the printer has double-checked them, especially if you have modified them. What could be more expensive than incorrectly cutting a freshly-printed pile of, for instance, presentation folders, with the incorrect die?

Did you use rich black or regular black?

There are lots of articles on the net about rich blacks and regular blacks. Make sure you know what you’ve used in your design. Clicking a black color chip in a color palette does not mean you have selected a rich black, or that you have selected the correct rich black. Is your rich black warm, cool, or neutral? Please find out before you print!

Did you use CMYK-colored text with small font sizes?

Depending on the font, you want to make sure you have not applied complex CMYK colors to small type. A 9pt Garamond italic is simply not going to print nicely in a color comprised of all four process colors due to print registration limitations. Small type should be made of one or two colors at most. Very small or very delicate type should be made of one color at most. The same applies to knocked out type. Very small or very delicate type should not be knocked out (colored as “white” or “paper”) in richly colored CMYK backgrounds because it will be blurry in any case on a good number, if not all, of the print pieces. Printing is simply not accurate enough to prevent registration and dot gain from blurring those tiny strokes and shapes under a certain point size.

Did you check your varnish layer?

It’s worth triple-checking. You may have moved the type layer over which the varnish type layer originally sat. Or maybe you changed the font size or altered kerning just a touch and now the varnish copy you made earlier does not line up. You want your varnish or aqueous coat layers to be spot on, not spot off.

Did you check if any imported graphics have extra spot colors?

When using third-party art like native AI files or EPS files, it’s easy to overlook any spot colors that those files may have been created with. Though you may not have any spot colors in your layout, the imported spot colors will trigger the pre-press department to generate a plate for that color when you are not expecting it. While a press is not going to start printing a 5 color job (CMYK plus Spot) without your approval of course, it’s a needless waste of time, and may cost you pre-press charges. Proof your files carefully and convert any problematic vector files to a CMYK PSD or JPG at 100% of the size you need them to be, at 300 dpi, and re-import them. It’s not an optimal solution, but is the fastest way to fix the problem especially if you can’t edit the source file.

Did you double check to make sure all of your placed graphics are up-to-date?

If you work on a team, you want to make sure anyone working on imported graphics got their latest update accounted for. If they changed the size of something and you didn’t update the display, you could end up with a design gaffe that you catch in the proof you get back from the printer. It’s better to make sure everything is updated before it leaves your studio.

?

Well I hope you enjoyed this reminder. There are a dozen more things you could check over, but these are the ones I often double check personally because I have indeed been the victim of my own forgetfulness. What are some things you check before going to press? What are some things you have forgotten? Comment below!

This doesn’t need to happen to you again. All you need to know is a few of the methods of a dyed-in-the-wool time-wasting information leach. You can identify and avoid them and get back to real work.

So who are they and what do they do? Watch out for the following behaviors — they are great indicators they are not going to award you any business no matter how much due diligence you put into their Request for Proposal:

They ask too many detailed or technical questions

This type of potential client is asking you too many questions about technical minutia from either “What font will you use?” to “What plugin in WordPress will allow us to do XYZ?” This kind of client is looking for, and getting, free consulting out of you if you answer their questions beyond a low-level, reasonable set of questions.

They ask for too many changes in scope in the RFP

You are being snookered if the potential client comes back to you somehow “smarter” than they were in your last call. They suddenly want to add something you knew they couldn’t have known about in your last email or call. Essentially, the potential client has gotten free consulting from another designer or firm, and is playing your knowledge against theirs. They play firm against firm for free information they would otherwise have to pay for.

They are impersonal

This is a sure sign they aren’t really interested in what you do, and the value you bring, to their web or graphic design project. You are a number, the project is already awarded, and the potential client simply has to have a certain number of responses to fill some interal quota for RFP’s.

They ask for spec work

If they ask for “some samples of your design work”, you have to wonder if they have been to your website at all. If they have not reviewed your online portfolio, just stop now and don’t waste another minute.

They don’t know the basic details about your company

I got this one recently after a “we’d love to work with you” call: they didn’t know where in the country we were located. Time to hang up.

They ask for too many phone meetings

Again, these types of potential clients know that they can educate themselves at your expense. They have no conscience about wasting your time. It’s amazing people like this have the nerve to call. They are armed with just enough information to be dangerous, and try to get you to fill the blanks for them. Once you sense this is the case, it’s time to say goodbye!

They want you to talk to their IT person “for a minute”

While this isn’t necessarily related to just the RFP problem, it’s one to look out for in the bidding process. This kind of “IT” person simply wants to pick your brain and ask you if you have ever heard of some obscure open source CMS or if you have ever been to so and so’s website. They will offer you some advice you didn’t ask for. Lovely. What this means is, that even if you do get the project, this person will be “helping” by “bringing things up” to the project leader (like how the background color has a non web safe color in the gradient, and that you should be using XHTML and not HTML 4.0 Transitional, or that your PNG is not compatible with MSPaint) and essentially drag all profit potential for the project right down the drain. This person has made a career out of not knowing how to actually do anything (since learning FrontPage in 1995), and sticking themselves in the middle of every new project that comes along. As long as the project managers know less than they do, they have job security. Stop now and hang up!

Further Reading:

• RFPs are not for underdogs
• Top 8 Sins For RFPs
• Suppliers Ignore “Rigged” RFP’s

While Providence, RI did not make the cut, I take comfort that we are sandwiched right in the middle of these great cities. In fact you can’t get to one from the other without passing through Providence on I95. I’ve been to all these cities, and while they all have vibrant arts communities, the main factor in determining the list was average wages compared to the cost of living on a per-city basis, along with overall employment opportunities for creative professionals.

Finding good graphic design talent is very easy in all these cities (including Providence). A great place to start is to simply google “graphic designer” and then add the city name, like this: “graphic designer providence“. Google will give you a local map based on your location (if Google can tell where you are based on your IP address from your internet service provider) and show you the closest matches to your location.

Right below the local results, you will see links to graphic designer and artist portfolios, mixed in with some garbage results from out-of-town companies that try and trick local searchers into considering their businesses by using bait-and-switch page titles on their sites, like “Rhode Island Graphic Designers”, which is really just a computer-generated boilerplate page usually filled with ads for a thousand other things. If you carefully read the links before clicking, you can learn to tell a real graphic design firm portfolio web page or graphic design blog from a spammy, link-baiter type of website.

The legitimate listings at the top of any search results you may find (not the obviously bogus results) are usually the result of the hard work of the firm to optimize their site to win your attention, favor, and business. You will notice for instance that yours truly ranks highly in the results from the link above for Providence. Have fun browsing the results – lot’s of wonderful designers have great websites in all the New England metro areas, and there are many to chose from. Find the right designer for you – and don’t give up looking until you find that right match!

Without further ado, here are the 4 cities that made the cut:

• #24. Hartford, CT
• #21. Portland, ME
• #20. Boston, MA
• #3. Bridgeport, CT

Please click through to see information about each city, including a brief overview of each city, average salary (for all industries), and cost of living rank.

Ok, now that you are here I’m going to tell you upfront I’m not actually going to publish a list of annoying graphic designers. Instead, you are going to publish the list! In your head!

Hey, you already started but you haven’t gotten the instructions yet! Wait up!

I want you to read the following bullets and see for yourself what names appear magically in your minds eye and project it onto each line below:

Top 10 annoying graphic design bloggers (from the depths of your subconscious):

1. ________
2. ________
3. ________
4. ________
5. ________
6. ________
7. ________
8. ________
9. ________
10. ________

There, you admitted it to yourself. You let yourself in on the truth. Now it seems so obvious! What happened to these bloggers? Try to put them in order from the most annoying to the least most annoying now. Who is number one on the list. Ouch!

(Psssst! Hey you, Number One on this list, you might know who you are as you read this! Uh-oh!)

(Pssst again! Did you really think your name might have been on an actual list like this? Yikes, you need to keep reading, mon frere…)

Now dear reader, why do you think you feel this way? Why do you have any of those bloggers in your RSS feed, and why do you feverishly check them over and over for “new” content? Perhaps we’ve been hoodwinked! Is it possible?

Yes, it’s possible. And it’s a trend! But let’s dig deeper.

Now for a tougher question: What do all these ageing-design-rock-star bloggers on the list you just created have in common? Why did you subconsciously list out a few of them so easily? Let me suggest a few reasons:

1. You discern a pattern of shallow content at one point you thought was exciting.
2. You were hoping their mojo would rub off on you, but now you realize maybe you don’t want that mojo.
3. They borrow a little too freely from other sources. You know that feeling – “…didn’t I read that before somewhere?”
4. You can tell they kind of cut corners. You can’t tell exactly how, but you get the sense a lot of work didn’t go into this or that post, but that post somehow – in the title or the stock images or the scant text – tries to come off more original or content-laden than it really is. How’d they do that?
5. You sense the blogger revealed, crack by crack, that the blog is really all about them and that the “giving” either has stopped or waned. Honestly, it looks like their best content is behind them.
6. You feel slightly duped.
7. They have posted several 3 sentence posts in the last few months that simply state something obvious and then ask for your opinion.
8. They make list after list of freely available content. You are hooked, and now it turns out that about 1 in 10 lists they post are the result of actual work, not surfing and collecting the most obvious and easy content. They don’t add any value or insight to these kinds of posts. You think to yourself, “hey, I could have done that…”.
9. It’s not clear to you what the point of their content is anymore.
10. You know, their posts just aren’t showing craftsmanship or desire or creativity.
11. You read their latest post and immediately thought “They made a post about what? Are you kidding?”
12. At one point, they had a really unique voice and a made distinguished contribution to the graphic design community on the web. Now, for some reason, their voice is gone and all we have left is the vague memory that this blog was cool at one point.
13. And on and on…

From scrappy upstart blog to doltish sales-pitch drivel-holder

This tranformation from exciting blogger to something less design-worthy will be a phenomenon for several major design blogs this year. Blogs that move in this direction are becoming like…magazines. Or worse, they become little more than ad platforms that serve up lackluster content and along with an ad for an e-book or some affiliate link to a WordPress theme disguised as commentary.

How often in the past, for those who have been around a few years, did you rush out to get the new issue of this-or-that design magazine only to realize it was 95% fluff, mostly ads, and the one article that was most promising from the hype actually turned out to be kind of shallow? And you felt kind of robbed of your $7.95, though you did willingly fork it over.

Well, I stopped buying those magazines. When blogging came along with the rising tide of the net, many of those magazines evaporated because economics simply revealed the truth of what they were – a rip-off – and people stopped buying them.

It’s expensive and time-consuming to come up with quality content. That is why magazines will base an entire issue on one or two good articles and fill the rest with drivel. It makes economic sense to hoodwink readers at the newsstand. And this reality is slowly dawning on some better-known graphic design blogs. You know it’s true. Sad, really. But what to do?

How to rescue your favorite graphic design blogger from utter blog-destruction

I hope some big graphic design bloggers (you KNOW who you are!) out there find their way to better, more honest and verdant content pastures this coming year. Have you lost your first love, love? Pastures where real work and real creativity and originality come back and take the place of quick-burn flashy titles and cheap rehashed content and pointless lists. Lists can be great, don’t get me wrong. But enough shallow, goofy list posts and content cleverly scrubbed and disguised from other blogs and sources already! Go back to square one and learn to give again!

The next time your blogger-hero posts a lame article, just lovingly suggest you know they can do better. Be kind, be courteous, be constructive. Be positive, but be real and don’t let them get away with it. Remind them of why you subscribed way back when in the first place!

P.S. My two favorite foods are in fact Marshmallow Fluff and Marshmallow Peeps, I must mention. Next favorite would be Circus Peanuts and Licorice, but I digress.

Additional Resources

• The Top 50 graphic design blogs – David Airey

But first a quick intro: my first taste of anything CMS-like was Dreamweaver 1.0 from back in mid 1997. The “templates” feature (those pesky .dwt files) were amazing in their day for those of us not sure what an .ASP page was. Then followed ColdFusion and databases. Then ActionScript and Flash. Then followed PHP and more databases. Then Mambo. Then Joomla. Then several other CMS experiments including some homebrewed ones. Then sadness. Then Expression Engine and some joy. Then WordPress 2.8. Then Hybrid and a rebirth of web development joy. OK – done with that. You get the picture now.

So what is so great about the Hybrid theme framework? Here are 10 reasons you should check it out. No, I’m not on commission (like some, ahem, other framework situations out there). I’m an unpaid third-party end-user who pays his own way. But let’s get started.

10 Reasons to use the Hybrid Framework for WordPress

1. Support
   Justin Tadlock has provided nothing short of exceptional support. Other forum members know this, and fully well understand the time and effort he puts into running the support forums and keeping up on Hybrid development. So forum members also do a great job helping out with support issues. The community is fantastic. All my support questions are at least responded to in a matter of hours, and not one has trailed off without being resolved. When you log in to the support area and your profile, the first thing you see is a list of your support questions in a super-clean list, with the time of the last update anyone has made to your request, along with their name. I love this feature because I can see my progress from the first question (how naive!) up to the present (a little less naive…). I find that on this or that tough topic, manh times I want to go back to the very-thorough answers that are provided for me and re-read. More often than not, Justin or someone else will provide a link to an external resource, usually one that needs to be read carefully. All of this astuteness makes one want to work hard not to post superfluous support questions and prove to the community that I can actually read. If it were only so on all forums .
2. Skeleton
   This is my favorite thing about Hybrid. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are a CSS Hero, it most certainly is. Skeleton is a Hybrid child theme with ZERO CSS defined. However, everything that can be defined (all the classes) are in the main CSS file ready and waiting for you to fill in the blank. A unique approach Justin takes is using careful indentation to organize the classes hierarchically, which makes scanning them even easier. So, as a developer, all you need to do is pop open Firefox with Firebug installed, hover over an element you want to style and it get the line number in the CSS. You pop over to your favorite editor, make a change in 2 seconds and refresh. Basically, you can take a simple PSD web design through this process in an hour or two and have a working template ready to go. Wow! This blog (bonfx.com) is a Hybrid child theme developed from Skeleton, by the way.
3. CSS
   In addition to how the CSS is laid out (see “Skeleton” above), Hybrid also supplies ready-made access, commented out by default, to Eric Meyer’s Reset, The Holy Grail layout, several pixel-based line-height typography solutions, along with the option to include the most basic set of typography and formatting of the basic Hybrid theme. There is simply no way to lose if you know your way around CSS. It’s just a time saver. Never waste time on these repetitive web development chores again!
4. Hybrid Themes
   Hybrid is a framework, but comes with a default theme called Hybrid. So, there is the Hybrid Framework with a base theme called Hybrid. But, there are also another half-dozen incredibly high-quality child themes ready and available for free. Hybrid News is very popular and is a much sought after layout. All of the templates are better quality than most templates you will come across. The code is lean and mean. They all share a sophisticated approach to typography and feature a tasteful and welcome use of white space in the layouts. Ahh…no gratuitous transparencies and glittery stuff cluttering up a too-busy layout!
5. Child Themes
   Creating child themes are incredibly easy thanks to WordPress 2.9 combined with Hybrid’s unique development approach. You can take any of the themes (see “Skeleton” above) and quickly and easily create a variation of it without having to modify any of the source code. For instance, if you like Hybrid News child theme, but want to change several things around, following some simple instructions will set you up with your own “My Theme” ready to install in a development environment, and ready for you to customize away.
6. Hybrid Hooks & Filters
   WordPress is known for it’s easy-to-use hooks and filters, once you know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, I can’t go into that here. Google it. But if you do know what they are, know that Hybrid offers many more unique hooks and filters to speed up the process of customizing your site to your hearts content. Hybrid is about reducing the amount of time spent coding to get to great customizations quickly. Take a look at this list here and you’ll see what I mean: Hybrid Hooks and Hybrid Filters.
7. Hybrid Widgets
   One of the great features of WordPress is it’s widgets. It makes adding standard types of content to primary and secondary  and other areas very easy. Hybrid takes and one-ups many of the stock WordPress widgets and adds a slew of features based on standard WordPress functions. Widget Logic is also available for all of the widgets, which allows you to control when and where and how each widget shows up using simple WordPress conditional statements, right in the widget flyout. So simple! Saves a lot of time!
8. Search Engine Optimization
   There is no need for all kinds of plugins to optimize each post for search engines. While there are some great plugins out there for sure, Hybrid makes the need for them pretty much moot, as all the SEO functionality you are going to need (after your excellently-written and original content on a topic other than “ipods”, “how to make money blogging”, etc.) to get good site rankings is built right into the post form. It’s all right there. Install Hybrid and take a look! You don’t need anything else except good content and some goals.
9. Free & Inexpensive at the same time
   Hybrid and it’s child themes are free for the taking. The code is GPL, and Justin Tadlock is vocally and thoroughly for the open source community. But what differentiates Hybrid from some of the other commercial CMS frameworks is that while the code is free, it’s support you have to pay for. But, a full year membership is only $25 bucks. The fee seems like it should be a lot more considering how much goes into Hybrid and what you get out of the support forums. I’m more than willing to pay that annually without thinking about it. It was clear from my time spent noodling around the site and the nonmember support area that the paid support was serious and high quality. It was also clear that Hybrid was a very serious product. I spent the bucks early in 2009 and honestly have to say it’s the best $25 bucks on anything web related I have ever spent in my 15 years of doing web development. I’ve paid ten-time as much for other licenses, and paid even more for other software packages and proprietary solutions. I’ve paid a lot more to consultants over the years too. Nothing beats, for me, so far, my investment in Hybrid. I encourage you to drop the bucks and jump in the deep end today. You won’t be disappointed. But if you are, feel free to complain to me here on the blog .
10. I’m going to pull an old trick here and suggest you re-read reason #1 again. It’s so important, I wanted to mention it twice.

If you have any thoughts about any other WordPress theme frameworks to balance out these objective views, please post them below. I’d love to hear more about the other framework available, and how they compare to Hybrid.

Additional Resources

• Hybrid theme for WordPress

Rhode Island is a very diverse place, and each design firm below has it’s own unique niche, style, and design process. Take a look! Rhode Island has enough design savvy to meet the design needs any business might have.

Rhode Island Graphic Design Agencies:

1. Malcolm Grear Designers
2. Black Door
3. Mad Creative
4. Ninedot
5. The Fenton Group
6. Michael Boardman
7. Glad Works
8. Imaj Communications
9. Speery Communications
10. MDG
11. Logica
12. eDesign
13. B. Boyle Design
14. BER Inc.

And of course your’s truly here at BonFX…

Enjoy!

1. My first assumption is that most logos were going to be cheap copies of the Toys R Us logo. That was not true for the most part. A few logos exhibit perhaps some influence, but it’s muted, if present at all.
2. A second assumption was that I was going to come across many unseemly uses of Comic Sans or other derivative fonts. We did find, as expected, a few child-handwriting type logos but they evoke none of the ill-will that Comic Sans does. However, we did find some Tekton (a second-cousin of Comic Sans) and Mistral (The snazzy brush script equivalent of Comic Sans) related entries. See if you can spot them below.
3. The most surprising finding was the use of elegant and understated logotypes with sophisticated typography. There are quite a few minimal and beautifully-crafted treatments below.

The wide array of design treatments reveals that the children’s toy and clothing market is very diverse and segmented. Since children are in every socio-economic level, it follows that that stores catering to different demographics will have different branding strategies and retail experiences to accommodate them. Of course this is obvious in hindsight.

If anything, my assumptions reveal the masterful job that Toys R Us (and offshoot stores) has done in dominating the market (in my mind at least)!

The research and findings were very interesting to us, and we hope for you as well.

What do you think? Please comment below…

Typefaces have personalities. If their personalities don’t match the essence of your business or message or text, you can create a conflict which distracts your audience.

We had fun below creating some absurd and extreme examples of bad font choices to make a point, but they are based – at least in spirit – on examples we’ve come across over the years. Hyperbole? Indeed. Fun? Of course!

So browse through these lovingly-typeset typographic wonders and consider font choices a little more closely on your next design project.

NOTE: Please put your coffee down before reading the commentary. You’ve been warned.

“Softer please…I said softer. SOFTER! SOFT…AHH-GATHA!!!”

Like, maybe we could, like go for a ride later? Or like, right now? M’kay?

Typographer you are not.

I can see it now. Ashley is going to fill out my tax forms with multi-colored pen. Maybe even one of the metallic kind that bleed through the page, but look all shiny on the front.

I find your request…difficult. Just give me a minute, k?

Yoga mats, bamboo incense sticks, and mirror walls…could be dangerous.

Well, they say the cobbler’s kids don’t get any shoes.

I must hurry up and get my space pegged and claim an adirondack chair in the shade. But first I have to run to the bar to place my drink order. Shoot, look at the line!

Seem’s like Amanda is hiding something. An ulterior motive?

We could deduce that Dr. Fangser Brown gives each client an application of his own unique style of cosmetic upgrading.

Ok, this example here is simply…a disconnect. There is no connection whatever between the personality and expected usage of the font with the business name or the industry of the business. Honestly now – how many times have you seen that before? How many times on the way to work today? How many examples in today’s mail?

Hmm…I don’t feel so comfortable. This font sends the exact opposite feeling of a fluffy pillow. Angular, harsh, and generally uncomfy.

I’ll let you ponder this one…

No.

This is an entirely offensive and inappropriate font choice.

What a shocking suggestion! Is it safe? Can I take my hair-dryer in to warm up the water?

Thank goodness we found a Computer Shack that was still open tonight! I need a new wall wart power supply for my Texas Instruments TRS-80, as well as a 50 pack of C-size batteries for my remote control toy tank!

“Mommy, I don’t like this park. Why does there have to be old, yucky, band-aids all over the slide?”

This is gonna hurt. I know it.

I think maybe we misapplied a little something here…

Hadst thou not heardest of thither new-fangled tecknologies? A wee fowl didst tell me just now. But pray tell, what exactly is “Web 2.o”? And wither dirst it goe?

This is wrong on all the right levels to indicate that an article titled like this is not worth a click.

A lawyer who thinks he’s a comic – what a joke!

More Resources:

• Choosing a typeface timelapse – Brian Hoff (note: very cool video! check it out!)

One thing seems clear: most of these clothing store logos, many of which are from world-renowned companies, are very simple. There is not a reliance on a logomark, in general. Rather, the emphasis is on the logotype. Classic typefaces, or variations on them, are by far the most popular choice. The bigger the price tag, the simpler the logo?

It seems that in fashion, the brand is the storefront window, or the webpage, or the catalog, but in any case is not the logo. The logo in these cases, as evidenced by the most famous examples below, has a job to get out of the way. The logo’s job is to tell you the name of the store – to get you to say the name to yourself perhaps, to hear yourself saying that name and get you to picture yourself wearing the brand. These kinds of minimal logotypes allow a certain kind of customer-projection on to them, and allow for changes in style (which is cyclical and unending) without losing label recognition. Therefore, fashion logotypes must by fashion-style agnostic, within their fashion niche.

Logos are also used on clothing labels, and in many cases need to be stitched or embroidered at small sizes with few colors. No doubt, this is a significant factor in their design.

Many logotypes below, in a sense, are not visual perhaps as much as they are auditory. The clothing itself can’t be distracted from, and so, these logos provide excellent functionality to that effect. The real branding is displayed on the racks and shelves and tables, where presentation is everything.

Click through to see each retailer’s website.

My favorites below, in order, are:

• Prada
• J. Crew
• Alexander McQueen

How about yours?

Clothing Store Logos

(3/16/2010 – The list has been updated with more resources)
(5/26/2010 – Updated list again)
(7/23/2010 – Updated)
(8/29/2010 – Font Combinations book released)

Remember, a typeface is a whole set of fonts with all its variations. For example, Helvetica Bold 12pt is a font from the Helvetica typeface. Therefore, we combine fonts, not typefaces since you have to pick a particular font from each typeface you want to combine.

1. 19 top fonts in 19 top combinations
   Complete with graphics and a PDF chart to get you going!
2. Choosing Type Combinations
   Nice article with a lot of graphics. “Listen to your eyes” is great advice.
3. Matching fonts
   A longer, patient read. “It is worth noting that professional designers rarely use something besides the simple, traditional typefaces.”
4. Best Ways to Mix and Match Fonts
   Very short with 3 good tips, one of which is: “Use Classics and Keep a List”.
5. Typefaces: that work together
   Huge mult-page list of typeface names sorted alphabetically. No graphics, but if you know what font you want to start with, you will likely find a great match or at least a great point of departure. This post shows its age, but it’s really timeless information.
6. Selecting and Combining Typefaces (PDF)
   5 page article with some nice graphics. One good tip: “try mixing serif and sans serif faces that relate to each other”.
7. 8 Bits On Combining Typefaces
   Easy-reader with eight simple points. A great reminder is “you will almost never go wrong with combining practically any sans serif type with an opposite in style serif typeface”.
8. Combine typefaces
   This article is focused on combining fonts in the context of logo design. You have to click to see the graphics (why?) but it’s worth it because the examples are very clear and demonstrate what the author is talking about.
9. 4 Rules for Combining Typefaces
   Excellent article with equally excellent graphics. Killer tip: “If you are combining different typefaces, especially in text copy, they should have similar proportions.”
10. Typeface Combinations (PDF)
    Scan of a print article with some nice principles and examples – a quick one-pager worth checking out.
11. Typeface Combinations
    Nice article with table and graphics, focused on how typeface classifications can play an important role in making good font combination choices.
12. Mixing Typefaces (PDF)
    Ah, the PDF that started it all, from 1992! An Italian designer posted this table that sorts font choices by a kind of “risk factor”. Very well done and based on solid principles. Remember though: rules are made to be broken!
13. How To Mix Fonts: Typeface Cheat Sheet
    This article is one of the better articles you can find that reference (with graphics) the PDF from #11, but provides a few additional insights and context. Read the PDF at #11 and then read this article.
14. What is the Best Way to Choose or Mix and Match Fonts?
    A simple, easy read combining and condensing many of the principles you’ve read already, if you read the 12 articles in the list up to this point. A nice tip is: “With too many different fonts you run into problems with not having enough contrast”. Contrast is key.
15. Type palettes
    Short, older article but with a few high-quality graphic examples.

And don’t forget to check out our very own “19 top fonts in 19 top combinations” article, complete with graphics and a PDF chart to get you going!

Even more font pairing resources

These have been added since the original article was posted. I’ll keep adding more here

• 4 Techniques for Combining Fonts (3/16/2010)
  Simply fantastic article on the art and science of combining fonts from my favorite foundry (because of Gotham). From the article: “Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ‘s Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.”
• Combining Type with Helvetica (5/26/2010)
  A long article full of top-shelf visuals. Highly recommended.
• 10 Typeface Pairs for Cash-Poor Designers (7/23/2010)
  Morgan Gilpatrick took the time to work with the obvious for her students: she created some very functional examples of font pairs from the typefaces her students, as purchasers of Adobe CS products are going to work with whether they like it or not. Yes, designers should purchase new typefaces, but when it comes to eating and completing an assignment on time vs. spending money on a handful fonts, it’s easy to figure out what the student will do. Very nicely done graphics focusing on x-heights.

Happy font combining!

P.S.: If you know of any other blog articles or offline resources (books chapters or magazine articles) that we could reference in this list, please comment below!

In looking at the search terms used to find my site in Google Analytics, I would occasionally notice a typo or odd phrase, along with the occasional very-random search string that somehow landed a visitor on the site. Taken on the whole, condensed from about 4000 different search strings from the last few months, the typos and odd searches make an entertaining read.

Some of the typos and strange phrases are made with some frequency due to perhaps the layout of the QWERTY keyboard. Some are just funny! Either way, I have presented them below by order of frequency and then alphabetically.

The key to getting traffic to my graphic design blog has been writing new material with a relentless focus on what people are searching for. But as you can see, I do get some visitors who end up here by mistake!

I hope this humorous list provides some insight for your own blogging adventures, if any, or at least some insight into human nature and how people use search.

I have provided some commentary on most of these because it was too fun not to!

1. freelace graphic design portfolio
   Might want to check near your shoelace for that…
2. how to get graphic design work over 50
   Pretend you are 30 and see what happens.
3. what happens when you print a image that is 72 dpi
   It comes out of the printer looking really bad. Take an look close up…
4. can i print a 72 dpi image
   I think you mean “may I print…”
5. david airey font
   He doesn’t have a font, but he does have a designer hat and socks.
6. graphic design fail
   And why does my site come up for this search?
7. +”freelance” +”graphic design” +”what to charge”
   Could you be more specific?
8. 21th graphic design
   That’s easy. Just look for the 22th and back up one.
9. abstract sketches of furniture
   If it’s abstract, how will you know you found it?
10. bai logo
    Bai! You can has logo!
11. beer typeface
    To find a beer typeface, you need beer goggles. A pint of Guiness should get you started.
12. best grapich designer
    Talk to the best lgoo desginre and I’m sure he or she kowns someneo.
13. best typohraphy fonts loho
    I hreatly suhhest hetting a new keyboard to avoid this ehrehious error.
14. best-fonts-combination
    Try the use-less-hyphen approach for much-more-accurate results.
15. can i draw graphics like google analytics
    I don’t know, can you?
16. can you get a fifth color in cymk printing
    Let’s see. CMYK = 4 color process. The answer is no (unless you mean spot color ).
17. can you print a 72 dpi image
    Test: hit print and see what happens.
18. can you print online images at 300dpi?
    This question will never, ever go away.
19. chirdlike
    You have been pwned by chirdlike reasoning.
20. converting from 72 dpi to 300 dpi to print
    No, you can’t. Please stop.
21. corate identity timeline
22. corporate advertising print calendar design portfolio
    Please be more specific…
23. corporate identi ai
    Consult your dicti aie first.
24. cymk and you get a fifth color printing
    CMYK and you get four colors, hence the CMY and K.
25. desiner logo portafolio
    Yes, right next to the portobello mushrooms and Chianti.
26. do most graphic designers fail?
    Why are you asking me this? What are you implying.
27. does it take longer to scan 300 dpi or 72 dpi
    I’ll give you one guess.
28. download fonte futura
    No, you can’t download free “real” fonts.
29. download top 100 fonts
    No, you can’t download free “real” fonts, still.
30. dr sketching arthouse
    Sorry, Dr. Sketching is not availabe. He’s at the Arthouse.
31. effect on project when changing project hourly rate
    You lose the client, that’s all.
32. film resolution dpi
    Film does not have resolution…it’s film.
33. font combinaties
    Try again at google.fr
34. font combonations
    “I’ll have the Helvetica burger with a side of Futura fries.”
35. font comninations
36. font most used in school
    New Century Schoolbook, silly!
37. four thing u have to do in graphic design
    R u asking me 2 du this 4 u?
38. freelance designer fail
    OK, this whole fail thing is getting my goat…
39. freelance graphic design opinions david airey
    Do you really want to know what I think of David Airey? C’mon, look at his mad logo design skillz?
40. freelance graphic designer how to invoice australia
    I would start with a $1million AU bill to the “King of Australia” and see what happens.
41. freelance graphic designer rephrase
    “Rephrase freelance designer of graphics” – how’s that?
42. frelance sma
    k, sre.
43. graphic design+pdf+do comment boxes print?
    You have 3 questions here. Try 3 different searches in a row.
44. graphic designer: it’s cool being one
    It’s definitely cool being me, and such.
45. how to draw simple easy amazing things on a blank sheet of white
    Just get a pencil and paper and draw like Leonardo – how else would you do this? Silly question…
46. how to fix a fifth color in cmyk
    Your problem is due in large part to a lack of a fifth color being present to be able to fix.
47. how to go from 72 to 300 dpi for printing
    Listen: you can’t.
48. how to print a web page in 300 dpi on paper
    You are still not listening. You can’t. For many reasons beyond the scope of…you.
49. how to print on 300 dpi
    How to print on 300 dpi what? Hmmm. Go to Staples and ask for 300 dpi paper, maybe.
50. i am going to tell you one more time
    I’m all ears!
51. i just got my degree in graphic design and i dont have a portfolio
    You may have gotten ripped off at your college.
52. i’m a graphic designer where do i get printed?
    It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing now, isn’t it!
53. i’m graphic designer and i need to get clients
    I’m client – let’s get 2 gether!
54. i’m i to old to be a graphic designer
    Yes, the heavy lifting does exclude certain age groups from this physically demanding line of work.
55. if the web is 72 dpi why are higher res images better quality
    Because higher res images are better quality, which has nothing to do with the web.
56. ikea caint
    But, ikea cain after all! I’ve see it!
57. im gonna be graphic designer
    Go get’em tiger!
58. information design workbook graphic approaches solutions and inspiration plus 30 case studies
    I have 25 case studies – will that do?
59. jpg is 300 dpi but opens at 72 dpi
    Then your jpg is not 300 dpi.
60. like father like son spelled in all fonts
    Most things are spelled in all fonts, unless you are using sign language.
61. logos of a house sketches
    Lost me on that one…
62. many graphic designers are leave why?
    leave cuz can’t communicating client bill to financial pays.
63. moleskin top hat
    Ewwwww!
64. new poster for wasting things (based on graphics design)
65. organisation’s right to inspect computers ofgraphic communications
66. over the top font
67. pdf art tps ii
68. pdf font like verdana
    What is a PDF font? And why do you want one like Verdana? Don’t we already have enough Verdana in the world?
69. photoshop resolution 72 dpi to 300 dpi
    NO!
70. photoshop resulution 72-dpi to 300-dpi
    N-O-!
71. ping pong design in alphabetical order
72. prefered font for email
    Use Helvetica, which is faster than Times Roman because it has no serifs. Also, studies have shown 6pt Helvetica to be faster than 12pt Helvetica because it’s smaller.
73. printing higher than 72 dpi on web pages
    No. Stop it.
74. printing web resolution higher than 72 dpi
    You really need to stop it.
75. production possibility is a graphical combination which a society can use for resources
    Please consult the Flux Capacitor manual for more instruction. One may be located on the TARDIS.
76. pros and cons of a graphic designer
    Pro: I’m good. Con: I’m expensive.
77. questions i need to ask my im designing a website
78. responsibilities of the warehousing head
79. screen resolution 72 lines
80. site web top 10 de freelance en art graphique
    Oui!
81. some things graphic designer would design for a client
    Like maybe a logo, a website, a mug, a book, a poster. Let me think of a few more when I get some time.
82. this is going to be the final design
    Agreed.
83. tips til pdf print
    When waiting for the PDF to print, you can 1) surf the web, 2) get coffee, 3) check out twitter or 4) look at your Google Analytics stats for strange things.
84. top fints
    I think a blog dedicated to typigraphy might have an answer for you.
85. unpaid freelance graphic design work in photoshop
    Who told you I did that?
86. we always look out for freelancer
    Yes, and when you find one, you put a big hat on him that says “sucker”. See # 85.
87. website grader – do it work?
    It do work!
88. what are the four things that we can draw
    We can draw 1) a potato, 2) a cow, 3) a car and 4) a vase. Other than those, we don’t know if we can draw anything else.
89. what is a graphic designers job in the printing process
    To make the pre-press technician very, very upset that he can’t say out loud how dumb most graphic designers are .
90. what is anice font for wall writing
    Most graffiti artists just kind of make up their own fonts.
91. what is most popular font for drawings?
    That might be “chicken scratch” but I’d have to confirm.
92. what percentage of graphic designers are excellent at design?
    About 3%.
93. where should a graphic designer live
    Near a cafe with free wi-fi.
94. why all graphic designers must use
    I think it’s simply customary that in fact all graphic designers must use.
95. why do designers like akzidenz grotesk
    Why does Elvis like Rock and Roll?
96. why dont graphic designer likes verdana
    I like Verdana, just not when Ikea uses it…
97. why should i be a graphic designer
    Nobody says you have to be a graphic designer…
98. will the role of the graphic designer and design have
    changed in any way?
    I can’t tell if this question is going to happen or if it will have happenend.
99. top 10 fints
    I know the top 3 are Hilvitici, Girimind, and Fitiri.
100. what is a one color print job
     It’s a print job with…one color. But it could also be a four color job, as long as all four colors are the same.

The premise of the The Logo Psychologist

Can you tell what a restaurant is like simply by studying the logo design? What aromas are adrift? What sounds waft through the air? What is the decor? What kind of food goes with that font? The following logos with their accompanying psychological analyses are our best shot at discerning what a restaurant might be like, simply based on a study of their logo. Can it be done? Well, the premise is this: if the logo designer has done the job right, the logo should in fact say something concrete about what lays beyond the front doors. Logo psychology plays a roll, consciously or unconsciously, in every logo design. Can you guess the prices on the menu from the color pallete of a logo (hint: more black = more $$)? Can you guess the clientele’s demographic from the amount of kerning (hint: more kerning = more $$)? I think you can venture a good guess!

Each logo is linked to the actual restaurant. So read our psychologizing, engage in your own armchair-therapy too, and click to see how close we are to the truth. If you really want to know for sure, you’ll have to visit each restaurant because we don’t have time! Please post a comment if you do .

NOTE: We did not spend any time whatsoever at each of these restaurant websites before, during, or after our “sessions” with the respective logos. That is the fun of it, since it may be the case that we are totally off-the-mark or spot-on with our profiles. Either way, this post is about logos, not restaurants.

So join us now as I talk to, talk with, and talk at these 25 restaurant logos…

25 Mouth-Watering Restaurant Logos and Profiles

Logo Psychologist responds: “Hmmm…I’ll have an Americano after dinner at Americano! Maybe even a latte…I love the understated, elegant, and authoritative simplicity. When I come in the front door, I expect a casual, confident greeting. I know the typography of your menu is going to be great. There must be tiramisu for dessert. Fox News or CNN? Fox News for sure. I expect to see some cool black and white enlargements of NCY skyline, and maybe LA too. I get a great, confident vibe. You know exactly what you are doing, so I’ll just let you have at it!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I can taste the cardamom already. This classy logo type has me sold. But wait, my reservations were for 3 people, not 2. No, we need a bigger table. I hope you don’t forget any more details!…(20 minutes later)…Well, it’s obviously quite popular, but the ice in my drink was melted before I got it…(20 minutes later)…Wow – that was worth the wait. But man, I wish I had ice in that drink! I think we’ll be back – on a slower night!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This is the ‘Futura’ of cuisine in Australia. I’m all intimidated though. I just know there are going to be big words, maybe something in Finnish, on the menu. I feel dumb already, but I want to be smart so I’ll just suck it up and go in. Ah…roasted red pepper sauce with sauteed shrimp pizza! I can do that! And the presentation was minimal if not beautiful. Those IKEA chairs need cushions though. If I was more comfortable, I’d do some Sambuca after dinner, but the backside says ‘let’s go…’”

Logo Psychologist responds: “One look at the logotype and mark and I’m excited to go in. I have no clue what to expect, but whatever it is, it’s an original take on time-honored European classic dishes, Western of course. Well, North Western. Lot’s of meat dishes on the menu tonight, and always. German potato salad no doubt. Wow, and huge selection of local microbrews! Interesting – this use of a customized Helvetica paired with that ever-so-slightly Parisian fluer-de-lise inspired mark gives me a very distinct impression that a great marriage of old culinary traditions with new is going on here. Maybe you are a bit distant, lacking in warm fuzzies, but you certainly make up for it in competence and execution!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This is going to be a personal experience! Cool – I like the mismatched interior. It kind of all matches because nothing matches. The handwritten style menu is very cool. You cultivate a personal and friendly ethos very well. I love the open kitchen idea – shows that you are confident and open. You are into what you do with a passion, and don’t give a hoot if I give you 4 golden spoons or a rubber chicken. However, I have utterly no clue what to expect. Not pizza. Maybe interesting soups, salads, and crazy customized deli sandwiches? With homemade kettle chips? Probably. I think the logomark could use a lot more color. It’s really a kind of washed out gray. I could see a stronger khaki, a brown, or an Army green.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “No doubt, there will be no ice cream after. Because their will be no room for ice cream after. I bet they don’t sell dessert at all. Hmmm. Looks like the weight of the “g” should have been increased to offset the reduction in size from the “b”. Either way, this is a great, bold, strong, clear mark. No questions about what they do and in what manner they do it. Excellent branding!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I can taste the cinnamon, but I can see the bing. Not sure which one came first…But this logo makes me want to order a Chocolate Martini, or maybe a shot of Peppermint Schnapps. I’m a fan of bold and understated, and I think they achieved that quite nicely. I hope the music isn’t too loud, and the giant plasma screen isn’t too loud or playing a sports channel. The menu is big. The tables are big and spacious. However, there isn’t an overwhelming amount of items on the menu. You do a few things really, really well. And the leather booths and lighting are great. I want to stay and spend some $ at the bar after dinner.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This logo just has a chocolaty, drippy goodness to it. I’m sure there is a gourmet cheesecake in the house, but with some kind of cool twist to it. Hmm…the descender on the “g” in “graham” is not happy. Too tight. He needs a bigger location to fulfill his culinary vision. What a friendly place! What a great, innovative take on chicken soup – you made it gourmet! Fresh bread, fresh baked good. I think I might want to skip right to dessert with a black cup of French Roast. I think though, a bit more time could be spent connecting the ‘g’ to the top of the ‘e’ where the transition skips just a tad. My eye goes right there, and I don’t want it to.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I can hear it now: ‘How much is the special?’, and in reply, ‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford it…’. This is a forceful and classy mark. Paired with Trajan, it’s unstoppable. But, if everyone keeps loving Trajan (or a Trajan like cousin typeface) this way, soon no one will. Actually, I don’t even bother pulling up. I think you are supposed to wear a suit to go in there. I don’t eat dinner in a suit. Can’t do it. But for those that do, and live that kind of life, this is your place. Your Lear Jet will get you there on time, so don’t worry. Us riff-raff type won’t be visible. We’ll be at Taco Bell, or maybe just washing dishes somewhere, way out of the way. Even if my Lear Jet was out of the shop (it’s in for its 5000 hours of flight checkup), there would still be things on the menu with names that intimidate me. Your mark is beautiful, but out of my league forever. Did you see the diamonds on that woman that just walked in the door? Wow!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Someone loves what they do, and they make me love what they do too. What a spritely, clear, and joyful mark. I bet the chef comes out and make small talk after the rush peaks. MMMM…those were the most original, big, bready noodles I’ve ever had. Everything is just right, balanced just so. You take the ordinary and make it exciting – just a little bit on the edge! The modified Futura with it’s clean lines works just great. If the colors moved a bit warmer towards brown or red, away from mud gray, I think it would be that much better. Just a dash though.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This just has  a cool edge too it. I expect a tin drop ceiling and Art Nouveau accoutrements. I do expect crazy pasta dishes for some reason. Something with sun-dried tomatoes. This little mark has a lot of class and personality. What is Art Deco cuisine like?”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I bet killer fresh-mint stuffed grape leaves are on the menu. And maybe a lemon-chicken soup with capers. This logo says so much with so little. Let me in! Ouch though…those wrought iron chairs are great for outside, but not for an extended dinner. But hey, you are so classy and tasty, I’ll be back for sure. With friends.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I have to say that the designer of this logotype took the I-know-let’s-scan-in-a-coffee-stain and put-it-in-our-website-background to make-us-look-earthy-and-cool-cuz-no-one-thought-of-that-yet and has done something that makes me think they are cool because no one thought to put a coffee stain in a logomark, that I know if. I think it works great! If there is free wi-fi, I’m there. All. The. Time. Oh no, too cool – open mic every thursday, but you have to sign up in advance. That keeps the riff-raff down. Perfect! The descender playfulness is great. ‘Coffee and more’ could be a bit more pronounced though.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This logo just has a certain old-school previous-generation feel to it. I can see the “Gus & Paul’s Bakery” logo, the establishment on the corner for decades, sitting right next to this. A guy named Vinny patronizes both places. This logo feels like old World class come state-side. However, when I look at the ladies hand and the strange shape beneath her, everything starts getting skewed. There is a strange, ambiguous, incomplete feel to the drawing which the more I look at it, there more I feel unsettled. A bit creepy, actually. Am I missing something?”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Original, pithy, punchy, but it’s impossible to find a parking spot on campus to actually get in this place. It’s a little bloated, a little ponderous for a tea shop. Maybe it’s because they sell those poppyseed muffins that are like 9 parts oil, 1 part flour, and 5 parts sugar. I like those – once a year. This is the place everyone wants to hang out but no one can because it’s small and everyone is always in there.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This image is oozing fragrance. I can taste a crazy mixture of spices, with a little kick, that I never would think of putting together. The typeface needs to be roughened up though. Hmmm…what an odd layout of tables. We are kind of cramped. I don’t like when I pay good money for food but don’t have privacy. Maybe it’s cultural? Once the food got to the table though, we didn’t care how cramped we were, it was that good. But you know, there is a lack of synergy in this logo. The typeface and the illustration aren’t connecting. Smooth and rough just kind of sitting next to each other. They don’t speak to each other.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “You are going to put something on my plate I don’t recognize, and I might try it. If it’s slightly gelatinous and gray with faint stripes, I will not try it. But I can tell there is something bold, raw, fresh, and exciting lurking somewhere. But you know what, my eye darts around this logo a bit. I just now figured out that the 2 slashes are a capital ‘L’, I think. Or it’s a lowercase ‘l’ with a slash beneath it. Ok. What is the gray puff of smoke? Is it a candle? The more I look at this the less I understand it. It makes me think too hard. But maybe it’s just me. Why the tiny gray text? It’s kind of small set next to the large purple type. Is it an afterthought, or an incomplete aspect of the dining experience? Wait, I’m the Logo Psychologist and I’m supposed to be doing the thinking. I think you have a bit of cognizant dissonance going on. Think about and check back next week. Cut 50% of your menu out and bring a revised copy. We’ll discuss.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Here, we will experience vegetarian dining with a rare, refined sensibility. I hope it’s not BYOB. I’ll have a Leinenkugel Amber with that! I just bet that you have both daily gaspacho made fresh, and a BBQ tempeh sandwich that is a staple on lunch menu. Yes. Nicely done. And whole grain mini-loafs baked fresh and brought to each table to appease them after having waited 20 minutes to get a seat at lunch! Nice move. I will be back, but I’ll be here by 11:40 to beat the lunch rush. Is it legal for servers to wear that much jewelry and serve food? Eh, it’s kind of cool. You know exactly what experience you are trying to create, and you do it. And your customers gladly pay up. You know that too. The wheat / fork idea is just perfect. Clever and well done by all counts. You don’t need my help. Adieu!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I would expect a niche menu, simple and straight-forward. Each dish is a refined masterpiece of elegance and function. The gray-green is just a touch muddy. Like, it really looks like mud a bit. I would have leaned a bit more towards a warm color to saturate the logo with. Remember, cool blues and food don’t mix. You want warm colors here. I like the spacing between the elements. Very confident and balanced.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “For some reason, I expect Julia Child to have eaten here. Or perhaps some other cable TV gourmet gormandizer. Maybe we tried a little too hard on this logo. All the line-business. Not sure it works. Not sure I needed to try pureed spiced goose liver pate either – it’s just too much, at least for me. Is everything greasy? What’s that film all over the type and the illustrations? Kind of like you didn’t clean it off, several times in a row. I think we could clean this up and simplify it. Ah, you know what, I think I’ll pass on this, unless I meet someone who has personally been here and gives it a big thumbs up. I’m holding out for surprise good review.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I wonder if they have a wait staff. I’ll take good notes. The aroma is sharp but the sparkling water is flat. The order came out in triple time. The bar connects the interior space, but I take note of a few dotted character who are grouped together, slurring. The logomark looks like Jazz notation to me. But it says ‘music’. Is it Jazz or Classical or a mix? Hmm. Now wait. Just how do you pronounce this? However you say it, I like it.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Ok, this mark get’s a poor mark. For such an old place in a great European city, why did they have to create their logo in Power Point with the typeface ‘Mistral’. I hope the dining experience isn’t as cliched, unthought-out, and perfunctory as their logotype is. Really. Hire a logo designer for 5 minutes and we’ll get this to a better place.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I like the interplay  and implied, custom, sophistication of mixing upper and lowercase in the logotype. It’s easy to get that wrong by not balancing out the weight of the lines. However, it seems they have thought of everything. There is a decidedly European attention to detail that impresses me. Am I smart enough to eat here though? Maybe I’ll go with a friend.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Hmmm. I have no idea what to expect. This is the only logo on the list that doesn’t seem to hit me in the tastebuds. It looks more like a product logo than a restaurant. It looks like it belongs on something mass produced. You aren’t going to try and pull one of those $12.95 chicken sandwiches on me that is really a $5.95 chicken sandwich except for the fact that you have cool menus, are you? Also, snowflakes and warm colors seem like a contradiction. I’m conflicted. 5 Stars for logo design, indeed, but it this logo looks more like a cool Mac wallpaper than a restaurant. Now that I think about it, this reminds me of those rip-off holiday gifts that Starbucks makes you wade through before you can get to the barrista. But I think it made people annoyed and they curbed it back a bit.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This logo is odd. It looks like Animal the Muppet is hanging out next to the logotype. Or is that a fountain? Wait, It’s a Weeping Cherry. No, wait (slaps head), it’s a Willow. Hmm. Poorly executed logomark. Slightly poorly executed logotype. I can’t tell if it’s really hand scripted or if it’s a tweaked font. Looks more like a tweaked font. Based on the logo, I’d guess I was going to get either 1) a Cheeseburger on fancy china, or 2) something exotic and perfectly executed on a plastic tray. Also, why so much space after ‘The’?”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Whatever it is tonight, it’s gonna be classy, tasty, and expensive. I will not soon forget this dining experience! Classic Bodoni-inspired typeface in the tagline, set with a classy Art Deco ‘Anna’ or something close up top. Definitely big band pre-bop Jazz going on inside. Maybe even live! A Bodoni-like font in a restaurant logo is a class act all the way. What a great typeface pair, now that I look at it.”

Bon Appetite!

My son nabbed Edward Lear’s Complete Book of Nonsense from the library some time ago. It was one of my favorite books growing up. I wondered if it was possible to write limericks about Graphic Design. I penned some (dare I call it) Graphic Design Poetry and now post the results for your amusement and bemoanment:

Topics include:

• Clients
• Typography
• Designers
• User Interfaces
• Adobe

Illustration by Edward Lear, courtesy of "T"eresa

SPACE

There once was a graphic designer
Who could not draw a straight liner
Fresh out of school
She thought she was cool
And soon was a cook in a diner!

There once was a trendy typesetter
Who thought “less is more is more better”
“I’ll sit here and scratch
at my tiny soul patch,
Until my design is one letter.”

There once was a UI Designer
Who thought a right-nav was more finer.
But users bemoaned
When they could not find “Home”,
And simply restarted their browser.

There once was a client so wiley
He asked for every source filey.
He’d edit them twice
And say “Now they’re nice!”
And we’d stare at him with a blank smiley

There once was a designer so immature
She had not yet heard of a ligature.
She’d kern “f” and “i”
And then make a sigh
While wishing for one nice clean character.

There was an “Adobe Updater”
Who’s button said “Update me later”.
Whenever we’d work,
It popped up like a jerk.
And so we are “Updater” haters!

A prominent button called “Home”
Caused UI elitists to foam.
“It should not be there!”
And they tore out their hair,
Then banged their heads on a big stone.

In Dreamweaver there was a bug,
But Adobe was silently smug.
“Pretend it’s not there!”
Said support with no care,
And swept the bug under the rug!

There once was a client so bozo
He thought he’d design his own logo.
He did it in raster,
And thought it was faster
Because bezier curves he did not know.

There once was client so lame
He flipped when he saw a wireframe
“The graphics are sparse,
And your firm is a farse!”
But we knew that this man did have no brain.

There once was a program called Freehand
It was the best tool in the whole land
But the software was sold
To Adobe the bold
And Freehand was soon no more at hand.

A designer with senses so fickle
He felt every unaligned pixel
“It’s off by a bit!
What are you a twit?”
And for lunch he ate ought but sour pickles.

There once was a blogging designer
Who said “I will sooner retire!
I’ll write blogs all day,
And sip my latte.”
But soon found his finances goner.

A program called Photo the Shopper
Was loaded with menus and slopper
“Just raise the price
to make naughty nice”
But users soon proved this a flopper.

Adobe the Great was a giant
To whom all it’s slaves was defiant:
“While charging more price,
I’ll make things less nice!”
And to this day all are compliant.

But I have a question for you: would a new font combinations book be useful to you? Low on theory, high on example?

Some ideas:

• Would bad examples in a font combinations book be as useful as good ones?
• How much written theory would be useful?
• Do you care about x-heights and units and what-not, or just pictures and point sizes?
• How many examples should a book like this include?
• What typefaces or fonts should a type combination book focus on?
• What would not be useful or necessary in a book like this?
• If you ordered a typeface combination book and to your dismay it was missing ______, what would ______ be that would make you think it was the greatest recent book on the subject?
• Are there any other posts or web pages you found helpful while researching this?
• Any other opinions on the topic?

Please leave a comment as it would be very much appreciated. I’d love to get a dialogue going on this…

Get your graphic design brain moving

When I brainstormed the list, it was initially very group-oriented and linear, as the brainstorm process naturally is. However, I chose to mix the list results up deliberately for several reasons:

• When a list is in random order, you actually have to read it
• Random lists will stimulate the brainstorming process in you
• Ordered lists will trigger your left brain to say “I already know that” and tell your right brain to shut up: we don’t want left brain in on this at the moment
• Random lists forces your right brain to make associations your left brain simply can’t make: right brain is your buddy on a wobbly new client call
• Asking “random” questions will make you look super smart and leave a good impression on your new client, whether you are really smart or not

If you post a comment below with a great question to ask, I will update the text list and PDF by removing my least-useful or most-lame question and make room for your awesome question.

Print this list of 72 Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients out and hang it near your phone

Why should you print a random list? You should print this out and keep it handy during new client calls so that instead of doodling, you can oodle this list and free-associate questions in a purely right-brain manner. If I put the list in grouped order, or alphabetical, or topical, etc., your left brain would simply shut down the right brain and say “I know all this”. The problem is that your left brain will not lie – you do know this stuff. However, your left brain knows little about timing and listening to and engaging with your new client in robust way.

Therefore, I’d suggest printing this out and keeping it handy, and let your eyes dart around the list. Maybe keep a few handy and scribble on it while you talk. Your right brain will dart around this list subconsciously and hopefully make connections between the random questions listed and what your client is actually saying on the phone. Good luck!

If you are excessively left-brained, you are probably not a designer, and probably don’t have many ordered lists hanging around, so this should work for you just fine. Is your desk a little messy? Sock drawer, at least? But you always find your socks, right? If you get anxiety when your socks are not in alphabetical order, you won’t get much value from a list like this.

One last important note about the list: Some questions are very, very straightforward. Other questions, as you read them, are totally ambiguous. That is the whole point. I want to help you figure out what questions to ask, and not simply tell you questions I would ask. Some questions overlap in subtle ways for some people, but might not for others. Therefore, improvise and tell me what to add to the list in the comment section below!

Uber-final Note: Please also forward me a 10% finders fee when you collect the deposit from your newly thrilled and delighted client who is impressed with your off-the-cuff competence! How impressive you truly are!

The list of 72 Top Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients

1. How does your company handle email?
2. Do you need any password protected areas?
3. Do you have the Pantone numbers for your current company colors?
4. Did you take a look at our portfolio?
5. What is your time frame?
6. Is this a brochure site, or a blog?
7. Who is your audience?
8. Do you have any specifications?
9. What are the website addresses of your competitors?
10. How many other companies have you talked to?
11. Do you need a business card and letterhead?
12. What is your main message?
13. Did you or someone else register the domain?
14. How familiar are you with search engine optimization and best practices?
15. What are several websites you like?
16. Do you currently have a website?
17. Do you or anyone on your staff have Photoshop or other image editing software?
18. Do you need search engine help?
19. Does the site launch need to coincide with a product launch or any other important milestone?
20. Do you need a content management system?
21. How long have you had a website?
22. Do you have photos you need to use?
23. Will several people be editing the site?
24. How many pages do you need?
25. Do you have a catalog or brochure?
26. How do people find your current website?
27. Do you have a newsletter?
28. Are you in touch with the orginal designer?
29. Do you have access to the web server?
30. What are several websites that you like the look of?
31. Do you have control over the domain?
32. Do you need any other promotional material?
33. How familiar are you with usability studies?
34. How important is search engine ranking to you?
35. Is there any specific functionality you need?
36. Will you be providing creative direction?
37. Do you have your content done?
38. Will your IT person be involved?
39. Do you have a logo? What format is it in?
40. How familiar are you with graphic design best practices for web designs?
41. What is your current hosting company?
42. Have you been through the complete web design and development process before?
43. Who are your competitors?
44. How often do you need to update the site?
45. Describe the style of website you are looking for?
46. Is the original developer still available?
47. What is your budget?
48. What is compelling about working with us?
49. Do you need an image gallery?
50. Are you or anyone on your staff familiar with HTML and CSS?
51. Is your logo in Illustrator format?
52. Do you need this to integrate with your existing identity pieces?
53. How are you going to maintain the site?
54. What software do you have?
55. How did you find us?
56. Did you read any of our blog?
57. What bugs you the most about websites?
58. Do you need any other graphic design help?
59. Do you need social media tools built in, like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, etc.
60. How familiar are you with web standards and web design best practices?
61. Do you need the website to tie into any particular 3rd party applications?
62. Do you need a contact form?
63. Do you have a domain?
64. Do you have any proposals from other design firms?
65. How important is customization to you?
66. Will you want or need help in making changes? If so, would you need help routinely?
67. What do you need your website to do?
68. Do you need ecommerce?
69. Have you considered redesigning your logo?
70. Do you have hosting?
71. Have you considered taking a fresh look at your corporate identity? This a good time to consider refresh or an entirely new identity.
72. When is the last time you updated the site?

Print the PDF Chart and put it next to your phone

Click on the chart graphic below* to download the PDF or download it here:

* Don’t forget to leave comments so I can tweak this list if need be!

I recently came across a blog, new to me called lines and colors run by Charley Parker. Charley says he created the blog because he delights in the “feeling of wide-eyed discovery” and by being “dazzled by the discovery of new artists or genres” that have sparked his imagination. He covers everything from Medieval to Dada.

I was shuffling through his recent archives and found a post about Lorenz Stöer that really caught me off guard. If you are an Escher fan, no doubt you will see why in a split second. Thumb through this gallery below and be sure to click through to see the high-res Flickr set of these great woodcuts and prints. Visit lines and colors for more info about Lorenz Stöer that Charley researched for our enlightenment.

Now I’m inspired! Random-geometric, psuedo-architecture, drawn-in-pencil-and-inked-with-a-Micron-in-my Moleskine, here I come! Right here, right now, I commit to doodling and then posting something along these lines .

Ever so slighty, a few recent posts of mine reminds me of the heavy-lined geometric oddities of the work of Lorenz:

• Art House Co-Op’s “The Sketchbook Project” Moleskine sketches, pages 12-13
• Art House Co-Op’s “The Sketchbook Project: Library” and daily Moleskine sketches

The above 2 sketch posts were not intended to be architectural per se, but I do have a fascination with hand-drawn 3d lettering and fake 3d spaces filled with random geometric forms.

A typewriter.

But not just any typewriter. It has to be a vintage Underwood Portable, or equivalent, and you need to pay about $5 for one at a yard sale. Then you simply get a freelance photographer to type in your company name on some cotton-fiber resume stock paper and take some incredibly beautiful shots with a nice camera (Olympus E-500 EVOLT) and lens (Konica Minolta MF 50mm f/1.2) combo using a shallow depth of field for some stunning results.

Then you put the photos on your blog and alert all manner of social media outlets and see what happens! Hopefully, something!

Brian Watkins took some great shots for a challenge assignment at dpchallenge.com, a digital photography enthusiast site with 82,000+ members. Below is his entry in the challenge and then some great outtakes that he didn’t use for the challenge but instead lent them for viewing here at BonFX. Enjoy!

Brian Watkins’ entry for Triptych III at DPChallenge.com

Brian Watkins’ outtakes for Triptych III at DPChallenge.com

But wait, there’s more!

We linked each tip back to the source we got it from. Not all the tips we came across are represented in the list. Rather, we did some editing for the sake of readability . We also want you to explore the great sites we found in researching our list here. We appreciate scannable lists that also make it easier to dig deeper.

So imbibe this list and add your own essential tips to it! Visit the the sites to see what else they had to say. Enjoy!

(Our favorite tips are highlighted!)

1. A logo doesn’t need to say what a company does
2. A logo doesn’t have to convey what your company does
3. A tagline is nice, but not as part of your logo
4. Adapt the logo design for dark backgrounds
5. Always choose function over innovation
6. Avoid intricate details
7. Avoid monotony
8. Brainstorm logo concepts in pencil with reckless creativity
9. Choose colors wisely
10. Color is a secondary factor in your logo
11. Colors are important but not as crucial as you might think
12. Completely ignore what your parents and/or spouse think about the design
13. Confirm that the logo looks appealing to more than just three (3) individuals
14. Create a distinctive tagline
15. Create a unique shape or layout for the logo
16. Create variations. The more variations, the more likely you are to get it right
17. Disconnect icons from text
18. Do not combine elements from popular logos and claim it as original work
19. Do not copy
20. Do not rely on color for effect
21. Do not rely on gradients
22. Do not use any “swoosh” or “globe”symbols
23. Do not use clipart under any circumstances
24. Do not use more than three colors
25. Do not use stock art images
26. Don’t include photos in your logo
27. Don’t use more than 2 fonts
28. Don’t design in bitmap
29. Don’t follow trends
30. Don’t use filters. Don’t use filters. Don’t use filters.
31. Establish your own logo design process
32. Familiarize yourself with the commercial printing process
33. Fit the logo into a square layout if possible, avoid obscure layouts
34. Get lots of specific feedback
35. Get rid of everything that is not absolutely necessary
36. Good logos have “one thing to remember”
37. If the brand name is memorable, the brand name should be the logo
38. If the logo contains an icon or symbol, as well as text, place each so that they complement one another
39. Invoke feelings of being bold and confident, never dull and weak
40. Keep contrasts as high as you can
41. Keep imagery appropriate for your client’s business
42. Keep the logo font easy to read
43. Keep the logo versatile
44. Keep your logo ‘metaphor light’
45. Know the rules and principles of logo design
46. Learn off other’s successes and mistakes
47. Learn the software and complete the logo
48. Learn what a logo is and what it represents
49. Leave trends to the fashion industry
50. Make sure all elements have cohesive unity
51. Make sure that the logo is recognizable when inverted
52. Make suuuure that you know what you are doing before you take on this kind of project.
53. Make the logo functional
54. Make the logo strong and balanced
55. Master working with vectors
56. Memorize all steps of the single best logo design ever (you simply must visit this post)
57. Not every logo needs a mark
58. Present only your best logo designs to your client
59. Realize that you will not create a perfect logo
60. Refrain from designing a logo around the tag line or vice versa
61. Simple is sometimes better
62. Sketch logo concepts
63. Strive to be ‘different’ logo
64. Take breaks
65. Test at various sizes
66. The logo must be easy to describe
67. The logo must look consistent across multiple platforms
68. The logo should be balanced visually
69. Think ahead
70. Under-promise and over-deliver
71. Use simple fonts
72. Work in black first
73. Your logo has to have ‘instant impact’

Further Reading

• 45 Rules for Creating a Great Logo Design

As the feedback came in, the answer became clear: graphics. Not just any graphics, but specifically the PDF chart attached to the post.

The PDF of the font combinations allows for the best presentation of fonts on the web. It didn’t occur to me when I made the graphics, that people would do more than print it. They could zoom in on it!

Zooming in on a graphic (vector of course) to a comfortable size in a PDF reader allows for a much more immersive learning moment. It was that simple.

I caught wind of a lot of the tweets than bandied about and noticed the tweaked title variations that I got, which included things with “…with chart” and “with PDF”, etc. I had not highlighted the fact at all in the title, and just tossed in the post matter-of-factly. I also noticed that many people that blogged about the article were able to simply lift the large preview graphic for the PDF, which looks pretty sharp. I think big graphics on blog posts say things like “take me and blog me and link back to my original” or something like that. I think that’s wonderful!

That brings me to this post. One of my first posts on the BonFX blog is Top 10 fonts for graphic designers where I simply listed out the fonts with little fanfare. Take a read and come back for the rationale for this particular list. I decided to revisit that post and submit an updated list of my best fonts (the ones I use routinely) with much-improved graphics and also a freshly-designed PDF chart with a preview.

Top 10 Fonts for Graphic Designers

• Akzidenz Grotesk
• Bodoni
• Frutiger
• Futura
• Garamond
• Gill Sans
• Helvetica / Helvetica Neue
• Minion
• Trade Gothic
• Univers

Graphic samples of the Top 10 Fonts

Some production notes of interest:

• The samples are all produced using one Bold and one Regular font from each typeface.
• The size ratio for Heading, Sub-heading, and Body are roughly equivalent to 18pt, 14pt,  and 10pt respectively.
• The “Lorem Ipsum” greeking is the same for each example
• Line breaks are 99% the same to make comparisons as easy as possible
• The red text for the page header and font descriptions is New Century Schoolbook which incidentally is not one of the top 10 choices, but is still one of my favorite typefaces.

PDF Chart

Click the preview below to download a PDF version of the Top 10 Fonts, or download it directly.

Further Reading:

• 27 Classic & Elegant and Professional Serif Fonts

• The Moleskine paper is prone to bleeding anything and everything. If I open the Moleskine in room lighting, it looks exactly like the scan. I normally use a variety of acid-free, heavy weight white paper with the thick wire binding you see in various sizes at any art store. I have never bled through any of the pages. It must be this particular model.
• While the flatness and paper texture are wonderful, the Moleskine paper weight is not heavy enough to support really any media without bleeding. Oh well.
• As my project is entitled, “It’s not easy being green”, we can now add “It’s not easy drawing in a semi-transparent Moleskine notebook”, and hence, I have to draw concepts, if any, very lightly on the even page and focus on only using one side of the odd page.

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Moleskine sketchbook pages 12-13

Blackletter type of the word "Green" with lots of angles surrounding.

Close up and cross hatching of a few letters and angles.

The new iMac monitor is crazy good for graphic designers for several reasons:

• LED backlighting – For the time being, nothing is a bright and crisp as LED backlighting. It’s 100% transition free, and consistent all the way around. The old-style backlighting involved shooting in light from the frame of the monitor, creating bright areas and dead areas, especially when viewed from different angles.
• Corner to corner glass – When you are designing all day, getting rid of any extraneous visual garbage is good. The iMac is glass, corner to corner, and also has a black “matte” around the screen, further bordering it from the surrounding visual messiness (especially if the messiness is my office).
• Monitor Resolution – This thing has 2560-by-1440 resolution. What on earth else is there to say? Now I can open everything all at once and leave it open all day. InDesign layout artists are going to love this.
• IPS Technology – What is that? Well, whatever “in plane technology is” it simply means that you can be looking at the screen from any angle whatsoever and see all the details. No more wonky-wobbles of black that turn all manner of inexplicable colors when viewing the screen from various angles. This is fantastic.

As a freelance graphic designer, I need to maximize everything I do in my graphic design process to eek out the most productivity. Processor speed and RAM amount aside, the new 27-inch iMac will find a welcome home in our studio as soon as possible. And you can be we’ll be at the Providence, RI Apple store to take a peek at this and other goodies just release today by Apple.

• 27-inch iMac released
• See the video of the new 27-inch iMac – wow!
• Apple’s new 27 inch iMac designed to also work as a display

Update (tongue firmly planted in cheek)!

I just found a new settings panel on the new iMac 27-inch that will boost it’s overall image quality. You can increase Awesomeness to 11 and also turn on the Reality Distortion Field. I’m sure this will come in handy …

Awesomeness goes to 11 on the new iMac, along with the ability to toggle the Reality Distortion Field

I’m not sure about the efficacy of using third-party portfolio websites in regards to supporting and directing traffic back to a blog. I participated in the Behance network site for two reasons:

1. Lot’s of other freelance graphic designers have work here, and I’m following the crowd 100% on this one.
2. I have come across a lot of other logo designers with their portfolio on Behance, and it seems the quality is very high in general.

As with any new website tinker-tool, we have to just wait and see what happens. It didn’t take long to get signed up and get a pretty nicely-formatted portfolio up and going, so I’m pleased at that much!

• BonFX logo design portfolio at Behance.net

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Moleskine sketchbook pages 10-11

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine Sketchbook pages 10-11

Detail of "No Green"

I’d like to encourage every graphic designer to draw every day. It doesn’t matter what you draw. Random is great! To encourage this, I decided to post some pages from my current journal. I use a blank page, heavy spiral bound, #100, acid-free notebook at 7 x 10 inches.

Mixed in with my design work and meeting notes are totally random sketches for fine art projects, studies, still lifes, mind maps and all manner and what not of all kinds. I personally enjoy not only individual drawings from people’s sketchbooks, but all the progress from page to page. In that spirit, I have posted about 30 different scans representing about 50 different drawings and sketches. Some are refined, some are patently not refined. Some are personal, some are strictly business. I personally like that mixed up matrix when I come across it on other blogs, and so I’m contributing my drawings to the crowd.

50 Sketches from a Graphic Designer

Please click any sketch for a larger version.

This is my left hand. Rule: make darks darker and lights lighter and avoid mid-tones when sketching.

Notes from a client meeting about a website and logo over coffee at Starbucks.

Can I draw Daffy Duck from memory? No, I cannot draw Daffy Duck from memory.

"Happy Times" sketch. I doodled this really fast so I could have something to try and color, later, in Photoshop.

Unused sketch for the banner illustration of a technology and graphic design article.

"Bad little kids breaks vase but is truly sorry, so mom is not too mad", or something like that.

Abstract art concept

Several abstract composition sketches. The top left one focuses on patterns of dark and light, while the second focuses on organic blending of dark and light.

Abstract sketch compositons. The lower one is a concept for a larger painting.

Mindmap for the new BonFX.com focus. This was several months before I started any work on the site at all.

Sketched composition for larger painting, "I am the Bread of Life", along with a little chalice.

A few devotional fine art sketches and compositions. One is of the Virgin Mary, and the larger one is a concept for a painting about division among ecclesial communities.

Another set of concept sketches for some devontial art about Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows and other ideas.

Lunchtime sketches: My teabag and a one-eyed, dangerous, spinning, octopus.

Realistic concept sketch of Jesus above an abstract Madonna and Child concept. I don't think abstract approaches to traditional topics work that well, maybe in the same way "Baroque" and "Hip Hop" probably don't mix that well.

Lunchtime sketch: My lunch trash consisting of a paper boat and balled up napkins, giving new meaning to "trashy art".

Lunch time sketch: The furniture near me and my coffee cup. With the cup, I tried to use only black, white, and one gray and in a sense doing a manual "posterize filter" like Photoshop does. Meh...

Lunch time sketch: more trash. I twisted a napkin into a "rose" of sorts, and then tried to draw a detail of the crumpled inside of a foil-lined chip bag. Note: drawing foil is hard.

A series of abstract sketch concepts, some focused on grids and patterns.

More pattern fun. I like effect of patterns with subtle organic inconsistencies. I think when you can tell something is mechanical, your eye knows not to scan them all. But with minor undulations in line and tone, an otherwise boring pattern has a bit more life to it. I'd like to explore this idea in a series of full sized paintings.

Logo design concepts and sketches for the Office of Religious Education in the Diocese of Providence.

Small, detailed study on improvised composition of light and dark slowly built up. This is about 2 inches square.

Improvised street scene sketch. I wondered how repeating certain improvised elements would work in a more realisitc application.

Sketch of a ripped napkin, a simple study in tonal values.

Very loose sketch, a study of tonal values of a crumpled napkin (my favorite lunch time prop) done with quick cross-hatching.

Abstract pencil sketch study of improvised composition, built in layers. I like the idea of transparency of abstract shapes and would like to explore this in a larger work, possibly charcoal.

Well folks, that’s it for now! More to come as I take the time to collect more sketches as the sketchbook fills up! I hope this was, at the least, interesting!

My own contribution is as follows:

“Drawing affords the path of least resistance from the conceptual visual idea to objective visual media. It has the least possible amount of psychological and physical overhead weighing down on and in on one’s inner muse.”

Jump over to the thread and leave your own thoughts…

Let’s start with the first 3 you might already be able to guess:

1. Produce New Designs: This includes but is not limited to client work. Of course this is the bedrock of getting paid, but should you be paid for everything you do? I would suggest no. You need to design every day regardless of workload. Shoot for every day, but only replace the production of new design with #4 from below. But don’t look there yet! When you don’t have client work due, create something else. Never let a day without producing something go by. Here are some ideas:
   • Create a logo concept for fictitious or random company
   • Create a poster on a topic you really like
   • Recreate a famous design in a new way, or simply try to replicate a famous work down to the pixel. You’d be shocked what you could learn by copying. Hey, it worked for all the artists of the last couple thousand years or so. Renaissance artists often had to copy other master works for 2-3 years before the studio Master Painter would allow them to do anything with a brush besides clean it. As graphic artists, we should head back to the “classroom” and copy the recognized “master” works of the great designers of the last 50 years or so.
2. Market Your Freelance Design Business: If you don’t market now while you are busy, suddenly you will have no work and no marketing “seeds” anywhere ready to “harvest”. Marketing must happen at least a little every single day, because you don’t know what efforts on what day will produce what results on what day in the future. It also seems that most traditional ways of marketing are near death. I would not suggest wasting money or time on cold-calls (warm calls are different) and certainly not on printed marketing material outside of a business card. The internet is the way to go. Start a blog and find a niche. Become an expert in that niche and write excellent content. Do a good job with SEO but don’t worry about it beyond the basics.
3. Bill Your Clients: Seems obvious, but make sure you are getting invoices out on time and following up on invoices that have been “forgotten”. For serious right-brainers, this is extra-hard. If it’s that hard, get someone else to do it. Use the simplest billing system you can find. There are great invoices resources online for pretty cheap, and they use big shiny buttons and lots of white space. Get one, use it, keep it, rely on it. Keep it up-to-date on a daily basis, or at least keep your hours system up-to-date. How many hours, really, have you gotten foggy on and ended up not billing for because you weren’t sure how many hours it really was, 3 days after the fact?

So what is the fourth thing you must do every day as a graphic artist to keep growing and developing a unique style and voice?

4. DRAW!

Drawing is the fundamental skill needed by every designer. If you don’t use a pencil or pen from time to time, but only design on the screen, you are stunting your growth and greatly limiting the solutions you are able to come up with for any given project. In a sense, moving blocks of color around an Illustrator file is a kind of drawing, but at best a substitute for process that has no parallel. The ability to draw straight line, to draw from life, to handle a pencil, etc, are the mechanical abilities that enable us to use a mouse or stylus. You are also limited to the tool palette in your application. Really now, are you able to whip up great ideas on the fly using the bezier path tool and a few squares? Well, having at least a good grid can make some decisions for you, but I’m not talking grid at the moment. That’s another topic entirely.

Take for instance the practice of drawing from life. The ability to “flatten” a three-dimensional image into a two-dimensional approximation enables and trains the brain to see composition – a series of related shapes. Still life drawings in a certain sense are really “designs” of interconnected shapes approximated from the tree-dimensional objects. For instance, when the petal of a flower recedes into space, your pencil does not recede into the paper to draw it. Instead, it flattens it out into a random shape that really doesn’t look like a flower petal (until you add some shading). The connectedness of a series of shapes recreates what looks like a flower to our eye. In graphic design, we have to have this skill, the skill to balance out created shapes – those we draw and those created indirectly by what we draw – in order to create a compositional harmony.

Experiment: Stop what you are doing right now and grab a pen or pencil. Pick one thing, however small, from your immediate surroundings and draw it from life. How faithfully can you recreate it? If you find this exceptionally hard, to recreate something using just your eye, go ahead and work at it for a few minutes here and there for a week. After this “workout routine”, I’m willing to bet that you see your computer screen diffrently.

A few tips for drawing to become a better graphic designer

1. Carry a PAA – personal analog assistant known also as a sketchbook. Moleskines are not overrated so try one of those. Carry it with you all the time.
2. Keep a retractable pencil on hand. There will be no excuse if you have both paper and pencil.
3. Draw anything. Don’t let “it’s boring” stop you. Draw anything. Draw crumbs. Draw the edge of your notebook. Draw your other hand. Draw what you see out the window. Draw the corner of a book. Draw your lunch. No excuses. Draw for 10 minutes a day.
4. Draw daily. Practice makes perfect.
5. Stop reading so many blogs and draw more instead. Well, stop reading some but not this one. And go draw!

There you have it! Make sure you stretch and educate yourself, market yourself, pay yourself, and most importantly, dig deeper into the artist you are by drawing, the most fundamental skill of all the graphic arts.

I’m aggressively working out what charcoal can and can’t do easily, balanced by the simple parameter of a time limit. Apparently like oils, charcoal will take as much time from you as you want to throw at it. I concentrated on simple shapes, a few bold lines, and enough shading and blending to give the dog character some heft.

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Sketch pp08-09

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine p08

Detail "Mystery Dog King with Green Crayon"

First, I will not be using the even numbered pages for content. I want to capture any brainstorming process on the even pages and do the art on the right pages. I want to remember not just the artwork but also the process if any that went with it. I’m finding the whole aura of Moleskines very creative. Marketing savvy or not, I’m hooked!

The theme is “It’s not easy being green”, so I’m taking a strong figurate liberty and just sticking to ideas related to green, so it’s a little easier that way. Also, my scanner causes some serious ghosting of the pages of the Moleskine sketchbook. Very light weight paper indeed!

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Sketch p04-05

Ok, so I took a simple #2 pencil and went to town as usual, remaining firmly in sketch mode. When I do finished fine art in graphite, I use a variety of lead weights, like 3B, HB, and H. But for this I wanted the purity of the experiment. I’d use cross hatching and that’s it.

I composed some Helvetica letters and got a little dramatic perspective going for fun. I got to about 90% done on this and decided to get to the charcoal experiment.

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine p04-05

Detail of "Roy G Biv"

Sketch p06-07

I composed a scattering of letters in Garamond and proceeded to layer charcoal into the background area. I grabbed my paper stomp and was not really sure what to do with it. In graphite, the stomp serves to blend away stroke marks, but with Charcoal, it acts like a brush with “dry” paint on it. Then the light-bulb went off. Charcoal is medium is in stick-form. Well, I suppose graphite is too, but a graphite pencil, in my mind and in my hand, is much closer in functionality to pen and ink where you lay down the strokes you want. With charcoal, you lay down some medium and paint a bit with it, add more, remove some, smooth it, push it around. To me, it acts nearly identical to transparent oil paints. I got stuck 20 years ago in art class with some vine charcoal and didn’t get past using it in a quick, non-detailed kind of manner. I have just discovered the joy of a new medium. Hello rich blacks!

I improvised the rest of the elements, styling, and coloring after realizing what I could do. I had a blast! The ability to play with light and texture far surpasses the natural ability of graphite. Everything I wanted graphite to be all these years and wasn’t, is truly in charcoal.

For instance, you can only get so dark, even with the softest pencils, because graphite ends up burnishing the paper and flattening the fibers. This causes that annoying shine. Graphite gets to about 60% black and gives out. With charcoal, since it is much more abrasive, will get as dark as the stick of charcoal you are using. Put some on, blend it in, ad more, blend it in, and in a few layers, you have the deepest, richest black you can imagine. I find it thrilling, I don’t know about you. I’m looking forward to the next charcoal “green” drawing!

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine p06-07

Detail of "Green Green"

From an email I just got:

As the signup deadline started to approach and people started to receive their sketchbooks in the mail, we started getting two big requests: to let more people sign up and to give everyone more time to complete their sketchbooks. We’ve figured out a way to do some shuffling and have moved the first exhibition on The Sketchbook Project tour from December to January 29th. This will give everyone an entire month longer to complete their sketchbooks, moving the postmark date that they need to be sent in to us to January 4th.

Revised list of dates:

• November 1st – Date to sign up for the project (you did this already!)
• January 4th – Postmark date you need to send your sketchbook out by (keep in mind that the show is a couple weeks after that, so if shipping internationally, make sure they definitely get to us by then!)
• January 29th – The first show of the tour at Art House Gallery in Atlanta, GA

If you have an extra pencil and some spare time over the next 2 months, give it a spin! It cost a few bucks to join but it will be great fun working on artwork everyday. It’s a great discipline opportunity to blow some dust off of your creative window sills, and let some fresh ideas in.

Read more about the sketchbook project.

The entire project has to be completed and back to Art House Co-Op by December 1, 2009. From there, it will be on tour across the country with all the other completed sketchbooks.

I will be posting all the pages from my sketchbook here on the blog, regardless of how each piece comes out. This will be a fun month or two! My intention is to focus on graphite and pen & ink (Micron .05′s and .01′s). However, I have no idea where this will lead. I hope to see unexpected developments and evolution of method, subject matter, and execution. Here we go!

Click for an enlargement.

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine page 01

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine page 02-03

Since his new logo is on the internet, I have a license to use it on my new limited edition product line in recognition of his achievementness with design. I now present to you 2 products, both designed with the same loving care with which David created his stunning tour-duh-force new logo.

The David Airey Hat

Inspired by his limited color pallete taken directly from nature, we have created this hat product. This is the pre-production mockup, though you might think it was real. I used some clever Photoshop techniques to simulate the logo being affixed to the hat. Notice the SUBTLE tweak of the angle of the logo, the slight drop shadows that gives the logo a sense of depth, and of course the bevel which also adds to the effect of overall REALISM:

A few other production notes about this hat:

• I added the name “David Airey Hat” for clarity and drew attention to it by using yellow, which we know from nature attracts things like bees, who can’t even see.
• I added a watermark to prevent theft. Please don’t bother trying to right-click, download, save and then create a product or blog post using this image. You will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of International Law. Ha, I made it that much harder by putting the watermark where you can’t get at it. No, don’t ask me for the original MS Paint file, or Paint Shop Pro file either.
• I added a drop shadow to the title at the bottom to blur the lines between reality and what’s real, so as to keep you guessing: Is it a floating carving or is that clever typography that simulates a fuzzy yellow carving? It’s touches likes this that sets BonFX apart from competing.

Without going into great detail, I also want to introduce the second product…

David Airey Socks

They speak for themselves. You may not have noticed just how fast this image loaded, considering the high-quality, data-dense image we’ve reproduced here. You may also not have even noticed that the logo on the socks toes is FAKED totally. We totally simulated the look and feel of real fabric using a “fabric simulator” in our editing software. Notice the clever use of our watermark, which only fools thieves into sending traffic back to our site, not their Yahoo Store. The simulated bevel is unbelievably just another one of our creations. The slight sheen on the upper corners suggests a different mix of textiles than that of the socks, proper. While the sock is about 40% cotton 60% rayon, the logos include a 20% mix of polyester, for that leisurely feel and increased shine. It’s all in the fit and finish, folks.

UPDATED!!!!

You can now place the order. BUT if you order, you get a free David Airey Logo book.

The reason we are giving the book away is because since this new process has been revealed, it made David’s old work obsolete, which allows us to sell his “old style” book at a discount. Click HERE below on the BUTTON here:

In case that doesn’t work, you can also click HERE below, though it’s just boring text with no filters:

• Logo Design Love book pre-order

• Frank Chimero
• BrandLogic

So pop over to the Dache Board and take a look! What do you think?

NOTE: If you are interested in the logo design process behind the BonFX logo, scroll down to the Related Posts section and click on the “23 Steps” post. It includes all the brainstorming and sketching steps, as well as final vector art preparation.

“A question just came up at the happy hour, and none of us know the answer. Standard resolutions in the web and print world are 72, 300 and 600. None of these are natural squares, which assuming a regular dot layout grid seems… well, confusing?”

I’m going to paste my reply as-is below. Several people found it quite useful but now it largely walled-up inside a Yahoo group archive. Since it’s a largely unedited stream-of-consciousness kind of post, I’d be glad to take questions about any and every aspect of what I’m now posting.

Original reply (March 2008):

[--- start reply ---]

72 dpi is a rough conversion from 72 picas, which is how many picas there are in an inch. There are 12 points in a pica, where we get ours standard font sizes from. A pica the traditional form of  measurement in typography the old school way. The 72 dpi for screen resolution was an early attempt on Macs to get a one to one correspondence between screen resolution and “old fashioned” print measuresments. 12 pixels on a mac screen should be the same as a 12pt font printed out. 72 pixels printed from a mac should be one inch. PCs have always been 96 dpi, hence the reason early desktop publishing and Mac, not PC, was a natural fit.

Now, moving on to 300 dpi. This has nothing to do with the screen or monitor or anything. A standard offset press medium quality screen is 133 lpi, as in lines per inch. The next level of quality is 150 lpi. Above that is 175 lpi. It takes more time and accuracy to print higher lpi. Lines per inch refers to the number of dots in a CMYK film output, or today, direct to plate output. Offset printing uses 4 screens typically, of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, printed in that order, to build up an image of dots. The dots from the plate are laid down at differing angles – you’ve seen this blown up in lots of pop art. Photoshop even has a filter to simulate what this looks like. Grab a low power magnifying glass and look at anything printed in your house that is color, like a photograph on a cereal box or junk mail.

Ok, junk mail is usually 133 lpi because the paper is cheap, and it’s cheap to print 133 lpi. Cheap paper absorbs ink and the dots spread, so you really can’t print better quality than 133 lpi. Try writing on a paper towel with a sharpie to get the idea.

Almost there, hang with me!

A raster file (photoshop psd or jpg or tiff) has resolution. For the web it’s 72 dpi. But for print, you need higher resolution than that. But, you only need so much. The process of translating the digital file to the “lines per inch” plate of dots (for the CMYK process) throws a lot of information away. How much does it throw away? Well, it throws away anything above about double what the lpi is. If you are printing 133 lpi, then you need 266 dpi. If you go lower than 266, you will start to actually see pixels, the square elements of the digital file, in the final output. So, more resolution = better quality to a point. Anything after 266 or so just gets tossed out. Think of a gravel factory with the big screens that sift rubble into piles. The screen lets small stuff fall through will big stuff makes it to the end. That’s the idea with print. So if you toss sand and gravel along with your hand size rocks, the sand and gravel fall through. If you just put marbles and hand size rocks, the marbles still fall through, and the hand size rocks make it to the end just the same. So why add more sand if it’s just going to be tossed out at the screening process? More resolution just means bigger files, wasted disk space, slower previews in InDesign, and longer film or plate generation times as all that data has to be processed.

So, why 300 dpi? Well, 9 times of 10, your final art might just be a tad too small. Maybe you need, after you exported the PSD, 10% more size. Happens all the time. Say there is just too much empty space in a group shot around a group of friends that you just realized 5 mins before you have to send the files to the printer. Should you boot up Photoshop for the edit? Well, if you made your picture at exactly 266 dpi at 100% of the size the image needs to be in the final layout, you really can’t blow it up without degrading quality. But if your image is 300 dpi, you have about 15% headroom where you have “extra” resolution to sop up in the final screen. Therefore, you can safely bump up images 10-15% if it’s 300 dpi at 100%.

Now, if you send a 300 dpi image at 5 inches across, but it’s going to be printed at say 2.5 inches in the final layout, you now have TONS of headroom, because it’s effectively 600 dpi because you are reducing the image by 50%. Get how that works? If you had a catalog of images that were all 200% bigger than they needed to be, you’d just be wasting DVDs or FTP time or whatever, plus making the process just slower. The goal is to print 300 dpi at roughly 100% of the final print size.

Finally, what is 600 dpi? Simple. The 300 dpi relates primarily to images that are printed in CMYK. The screens and colors make up the final image of tiny dots. But what about line art? Like a pen and ink drawing or a black and white version of a logo? The human eye needs about 600 dpi to be fooled into seeing pixel based art as non-pixelated and nice and smooth with no jaggies. If you print a logo from the web, you can see the dots on the printer. But if you print a logo at 600 dpi, from about a foot away, you really can’t see any dots or edges. But if you zoom in in photoshop, you can see how “bad” it looks. This is why 600 dpi is the baseline for laser printer resolution. Since the final print of line art has no screens involved to help the illusion along, you have to have sheer numbers of pixels to fool the eye. Beyond 600 you really can’t tell too much, but below 600 you can. It’s just that way.

Well that was one big brain dump. I hope it helps!

Doug

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In conclusion

Yes, indeed, that was one big brain dump. Not an easy article to scan, but is worth the time to read carefully if the resolutions of web and print as of yet still befuddle you.

Funny & Odd Emails Received

The typo is “chirdlike” which seems to be, but I’m not 100% sure, a typo for “childlike”. I don’t understand why this happens so much since “r” is not near “l” on the keyboard. Either way, I didn’t know what it meant the first time I came across it, thinking it was an eighth-grade vocab word I missed, or it was another one of those fancy internet memes like “pwn” or its past-tence version, “pwnd”.

I googled “chirdlike” only to find that the number one result for the word in Google was…the post I was commenting on!

I still have no definition, since I end up in a recursive loop, since when I ask the question, I end up reading my own comment on the site from which the comment originated. How interesting.

Therefore…

I now suggest that we define “chirdlike” as follwing:

chirdlike: a debate tactic which uses circular logic as a diversionary tactic: a recursive red herring.

What do you think it should mean? Before you suggest anything though, you must Google the word “recursion” and include a reference to it in your post. You must also Google “chirdlike” too.

• “freelance graphic design”
• “freelance graphic designer”
• “freelance graphic designers”
• “freelance graphic design portfolio”

…and a few more, as well as a dozen or so font and typeface related searches.

We did this in 3 weeks.

If you want to know, in detail, how this came about, I would encourage you to subscribe to our RSS. I’m not holding anything back, but the details will come over months, not weeks. Some of our path over the last 3 weeks is documented already. Dig, you must, and read, you must. And then after that, apply you must and work you must. Did I mention work?

Of course, I don’t expect this to last. The top 10 rating could be done in a matter of days or hours, but the fact that we did it at all is due to following good instructions, writing a lot, working hard, using WordPress, and following the advice and example of other bloggers. Our site has been in top 20, 30, and 40 for the above searches and related terms for a long time (years) with a site that was essentially one page at times (as high as #17). Now it’s time to focus on finishing my basic content like About Us, getting a usable contact and prospect screening form in place, and doing something about the Portfolio!

Hat’s off to Jacob Cass, David Airey, and Rob Cubbon! Their dedication to blogging and designing, as well as being open about their processes, and of course their kindly comments here on BonFX and on their own respective sites, are much appreciated.

Now, I just hope that the top 10 ranking we got lasts long enough for you to get here and read about it while it’s still news .

EXPERIMENT: If you are so inclined and interested to take a look, where does BonFX come up in Google if you search any of the above terms? For what it’s worth, we don’t show up at all in Bing. What’s up with that?

In lieu of pro-bono work, which is actually surprisingly tricky to give way while also getting a decent portfolio-worthy piece at the same time, responding to these calls to graphic designers for new work is a fantastic way to offload those unused logo design concepts or rejected brochure comps with a little touch up and make-ready. Like the land of misfit toys, you can make your old design work happy and proud to be yours once again by giving them a useful existence – and maybe some glory!

20 Design Competitions and Calls to Artists for Exposure!

• AIGA - ”AIGA (Re)design Awards is a design competition honoring sustainable and socially responsible work done by professionals around the world.”
• Andy Awards
• Campaign Big Awards - ”The Big Awards have become the kite-mark for creative excellence across all media and all product categories, from TV to DM, radio to press, posters to digital. Again, we’ll ask some of our industry’s most illustrious talent to judge each of the categories. And unlike some other awards, our judges will all know what it’s like to create ads for the British market”
• Communication Arts - ”Enter the most prestigious design competition for interactive media, the Communication Arts Interactive Design Competition. Any interactive project created for digital distribution on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, interactive kiosk or handheld device is eligible…”
• Creativity - ”Creativity Annual Awards is one of the longest running international advertising and graphic design competitions. We are a print design competition, a web design competition, and an advertising design competition. You will find we have categories in Print, Publications, New Media, TV, Radio and more.”
• Cresta International Advertising Awards
• Effie Awards - ”The Effie Awards were founded in 1968 by the American Marketing Association, New York Chapter, as an awards program to recognize the most effective advertising efforts in the United States each year.”
• Graphic Competitions - A resource for many top design competitions for Graphic Designers, Illustrators, Animators, Cartoonists and more!
• Graphics.com - A great resource for Creative Designers with info on competitions, forums, tips, news, inspiration and learning tools for new and seasoned designers.
• How Magazine - ”Enter your work in HOW magazine’s Interactive Design Competition. All winning entries will be featured in HOW’s April 2010 Design Annual and will receive a $100 discount toward registration for the 2010 HOW Design Conference.”
• Icograda IDA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations, a Partner of the International Design Alliance) - ”Our international calendar of events includes congresses, meetings, and conferences that further the international exchange of information. Icograda events and Icograda endorsed events comply with international guidelines and best practices.”
• Licc – London International Creative Competition - ”London International Creative Competition (LICC) is a vehicle for facilitating contact between uniquely talented artists and an international audience”.
• New York Festivals
• Print Magazine - No explanation needed; an ideal site for graphic designers, students can enter a myriad of contests and gain exposure.
• The Drum – UK - Great blog with Design Competition listings as well as informed UK art news, jobs, events, training, and a lot more. Subscribe to this one!
• The Mobius Awards - Entry deadline Oct 1 every year; “Acknoledging Creative Excellence Worldwide…Print, Outdoor, Brochure/Book, Package Design..Mixed Media..”
• UCDA - ”The 2009 Design Competition is now underway. UCDA is looking for your biggest and best ideas for our annual design competition — whether it be print, electronic, green, and even student work!”
• Crescent Hill Books “Innovative Producer of Fine Design Books”
• Design and Design - ”An Independent and Non-Profit on/off-line venture developed by Marc Praquin to help talented designers to promote for free their work on an international basis.”
• Rockport Publishers - Publishers for ARchitecture, graphic design, Interior Design, and Fashion Design, looking for Artists to submit designs and illustrations for their covers, promising great exposure!

• Optimize the PDF file size: The PDF that is used to print high-quality copies of your brochure is not the one you want to post on the web. You want to make sure you are using a web optimized PDF. Optimized PDFs are much smaller, load faster, and display faster than print-ready PDFs. There is an art and a science to proper PDF optimization which is a balance between image quality, extra features (like thumbnails) and download speeds. This is very important especially for mobil devices. A PDF of your brochure can be optimized in the program that made it (InDesign, Illustrator, Word) to some degree, or it can be optimized using Adobe Acrobat Professional. Acrobat has many options to reduce the file size of a print-ready PDF down to a web-friendly version.
• Consider the design of your brochure and format of PDF: A large format brochure or multi-page brochure with spreads may not translate well in a PDF reader like Adobe Reader. For instance, do any of the pages “spread” across another page? If so, a direct default conversion to PDF from the source might not be what you want. You might have to have your designer output a special PDF with the pages set up as spreads in order to accommodate the layout. But just because a designer offers brochure design services doesn’t mean they know how to optimize it right for the web.
• Consider a specially-designed PDF brochure for your customers to download: It might be best to take your print-ready brochure design and adjust it for optimal reading on the screen, downloading and viewing time, and printability on basic office printers. If you want to communicate with your clients, give them what they need as simply and efficiently as possible!
• Replace your PDF as soon as it’s out-of-date with a an updated copy USING THE SAME FILENAME when you can: I recall many times where I’ve found a PDF brochure or catalog because Google indexed it and it contained information I wanted. And many of those times, it was an ancient PDF from years ago full of outdated information. One clever way to always make sure only one up-to-date version of PDF is indexed by Google is to use the same file name. Don’t post “My Company Product Catalog version-13.pdf” and then post “My Company Product Catalog version-14.pdf”. Either delete the old version, or use one common name all the time like “My Company Product Catalog.pdf” or use clearly delineated dated names like “My Company Product Catalog – Summer 2009.pdf” and then delete them when they are obsolete.
• Make sure your logo design translates well in the PDF on the screen and in print: Depending on the source files for your brochure, your logo might print “fuzzy” or nice and crisp. Your logo should be 1) from a vector source file, and 2) not a “raster” or “bitmap” version that prints fuzzy from a lo-res PDF. Have you printed it? The tagline typography might look great on the expensive paper you chose, but can you read it at the default size the PDF opens up at?
• Think PowerPoint: I know, we all love PowerPoint. But it’s a good paradigm to consider for your brochure when someone opens it up on the web. Is it actually legible or do you force the customer to zoom in and out and resize and whatnot just to be able to read it? You are going to lose the customer if important information is not designed correctly for consumption as a PDF on the web.

The best option, honestly, is to design something specifically for a web-based audience who is likely to print out what they see on the screen. For instance, your print brochure might be heavy on reversed-out type on a dark color. Will your clients appreciate your brochure sucking up their supply of color ink – for just your cover page? It’s small things like this that create an impression on your customers. Your corporate identity is at stake! Carelessly designed PDF brochures, among a zillion other things that contribute to the overall impression your company makes, do matter. Everything you do matters on the web, and make sure you optimize all your media, including PDFs of brochures and catalogs, for the manner in which they will be consumed.

Grab your beveled pica ruler, Letraset rub downs, and your favorite browser. We did some fresh research to discover what the best typography blogs are, according to the top graphic design blogs. We went through our own lists (see Related Posts below) of top graphic design blogs, some other lists, and tallied up all of their recommendations, comments, and anecdotal data to discover the 28 top typography blogs. We sorted the list from “most recommended” down to  “regular recommended”.

Don’t let those ranking only one star fool you. If it’s on this list, you should pay them a visit and subscribe to your favorites! Orphan or widow, this list is for everyone from freelance graphic designer to rock-star art director:

28 Top Typography Blogs Ranked by Top Graphic Design Blogs

• I Love Typography ******
• Typographica ******
• TypeNeu *****
• FontFeed *****
• Typographer ****
• Spiekerblog ***
• The Ministry of Type ***
• Type 101 ***
• Type For You ***
• Typography.com ***
• Typoretum ***
• 26 Symbols **
• Phinney on Fonts **
• Swiss Legacy **
• The Type Directors Club **
• Type Theory **
• Typesites **
• Archive Type *
• Beta Type *
• Font.Is *
• John D. Berry *
• Jon Tan *
• Letter Cult *
• Open Type *
• Thinking with Type *
• Typography Served *
• Upscale Typography *
• Use Typography *

I’ve written a small jQuery plugin that makes it easy to see only todays stats. It takes you right to your domain stats with info delimited to today. Nice!

How to install and use GA Today:

• Download (view then copy and paste) the code below and save as “ga-today.js” or some other name
• Go to Google Analytics and view the default stats for your domain and get the ID from the URI, towards the end but right before the dates (see the bold red number below):
  https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=2539825&pdr=20090822-20090921
• Set the variable “domain_id” in ga-today. js to the value you just got from previous step
• Upload ga-today.js on your server
• Include the script in your HTML as any other jQuery plugin
• Make sure you have a DIV with an ID of “ga-today” somewhere in your HTML

That’s it! You can get the script directly from my server here.

Then in your HTML, make sure you have this DIV (or SPAN or other element) ready to go:

<div id="ga-today"></div>

Edit any of these bits and pieces to get your desired link format or ID to insert the dynamic link into and you’ll be in business.

When it runs, you’ll see this:

However, this link won’t work for you, since it’s my site ID. Whether you are logged in to Google or not, your generated link will take you to the right place once your domain ID is inserted correctly.

I hope the code pasted here doesn’t translate back to something buggy. And one final note: the script is set to run in “no conflict” mode, so you may want to get rid of that construct in the first few lines of the script…

Good luck!

Take a moment to scan the story, or read it in full: The number on reason my startup failed.

If you don’t have time, I’ll share the money quote with you now:

“So the number one reason my startup failed was: I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn’t solve anyone’s problem. The shinier and more tempting features of any software program should be regarded with a high level of suspicion. There may be a reason some things are so shiny and alluring. Traps often have this quality. My advice to anyone creating a solution is to march straight towards your initial goal, as long as the goal really does address a true need then that’s what you should focus on.”

The number one reason a graphic design fails miserably:

The number one reason a design fails is that it fails to communicate it’s message to the audience.

How does this happen? It’s very easy to get lost with tempting eye-candy like photoshop filters and backgrounds, or belabor the choice of a photo illustration or typeface. It takes discipline, practice, and the pain of multiple failures as a graphic designer to learn to stay on task.

6 things to avoid while developing a graphic design:

• Not following a sound procedure that starts with an outline, then a sketch, and slowly and clearly builds a design.
• Not sketching a good number of ideas in pencil or pen first.
• Failing to establish a grid or layout system.
• Failing to establish tonal variations up before playing with colors.
• Playing with colors before a grid and information flow are established.
• Tinkering with fonts, kerning, wingdings and embelishments before the structure and information flow are established.

None of these things can be 100% avoided all the time. Sometimes there is the flash inspiration and you must follow it. But, you are more likely to get the flash of inspiration you want when following a mundane set of procedures, as that in and of itself creates expectation for inspiration. And if you don’t get inspired, you’ll at least have a solid design coming along that is adequate if not totally sufficient for the task.

3 Tips for developing a solid graphic design:

• Draw, draw, draw first. Don’t bother with the eraser, just keep drawing more comps. Dra