BonFX

Typography & Graphic Design Blog

Archives for September 2009

Dear Ikea: Verdana is not a top font and now I can’t go in your store

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Ikea, as many of you know, changed their typeface for all catalog, in-store, and online presence to Verdana. Yes, Verdana. The outrage by graphic designers and others with an intuitive design sense let out an immediate cry of digust. An online petition was started. I just got around to signing it. It’s up to about 6300 right now. Their corporate identity for decades has revolved around the usage of such classic fonts such as Futura and Century Schoolbook on which they based their own typefaces, Ikea Sans and Ikea Serif, respectively. If you like timeless typography and good design, you need to head over to the petition website and sign it right away! Please don’t wait… Sign the petition to get Ikea to change Verdana back to their classic fonts! I can’t imagine, as much as I like dill salmon, swedish meatballs, cool cheap lamps, hanging canvass storage units, maple plywood bookcases, and hot pretzels on the way out, I just can’t imagine 3 hours of being confronted with a never-ending stream of Verdana in my face. I can’t do it…

Further Reading:

21 Top Graphic Design Blogs According to Graphic Designers on the Web

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UPDATE: Check out our brand new list: Top Graphic Design blogs for 2018. There are some perennial winners from the list below! We scoured the web to find the names of top graphic designers and agencies who also ran blogs. We compared blog comments for mentions of other designers, blog rolls, etc., and came to a general-consensus list of what are considered the most visited blogs by the top graphic designers and graphic design agencies. This list is not our opinion of the best graphic design blogs, but rather (we stress) the current consensus of what search results and blog chatter reveal them to be. Zero opinion factor The length of the list was simply limited by time. If you are sure someone is missing, let me know and I’ll be glad to add it!

21 Top Graphic Design Blogs

  1. Aisle One
  2. Coudal Partners
  3. David Airey
  4. Design Observer
  5. Dexigner
  6. Fuel Your Creativity
  7. Grain Edit
  8. I Love Typography
  9. Inspiration Bit
  10. Just Creative Design
  11. Logo Design Love
  12. Mark Boulton
  13. Outlaw Design Blog
  14. Presidia Creative
  15. Six Revisions
  16. Smashing Magazine
  17. Subtraction
  18. Swiss Miss
  19. Vandelay Design
  20. Veer: Ideas: The Skinny
  21. You The Designer
Update 12-14-2009: It looks like Inspiration Bit has not published in many months.

15 elite graphic designers and agencies, and their corporate identity portfolios

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Who is who these days in corporate identity design? We searched out this over the course of a few days, here and there, all over the web, from scratch. We searched for things like “famous graphic designers”, “top graphic design agencies”, etc., etc., and tallied up what many other sites had mentioned as their top inspiring portfolios. The list could have been 50 long, but these 15 came up over and over. Yes, there are so many other amazing designers and agencies out there specializing in corporate identity design, but this snippet represents a nice cross-section across the whole internets, which as you know is a series of tubes. Those tubes make it 1) easy to find these elite graphic designers and 2) easy to present to you for your consideration. So, the common denominator all of these designers and firms is that they have famous clients, with which they focus on branding. Recognize any brands out there? And who did we miss? Please suggest and we’ll amend the post!

Yo, Font-Addict! Make sure to check out The Big Book of Font Combinations. Go grab a copy from Amazon or B&N, or grab the DISCOUNTED ebook PDF digital download version (40% OFF the hardcover retail price!) from the BonFX Store, and stare at all 350+ examples of informative font combinations for web and print. You know you want to!
Happy clicking!

3 Ways the logo design process is like making a comic

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Someone just sent me a link to Daryl Cagles comic section on MSNBC where he discusses and shows examples about how he creates his comic strips. He shows the artwork in various stages from rough sketch to final color. This is very similar to how logo designers work. Daryl doesn’t show aborted and half-baked ideas, but rather starts with the final concept he is going to render. This is similar to when a logo designer commits to a concept and finishes the brainstorming process. From this point, Daryl lists the following steps:
  • Messy rough sketching with no attempts to “look good”
  • Finished line art on velum
  • Scan into Photoshop and add color
The parallels to the logo design process are as follows:
  • Brainstorming concepts with no attempt to “get it right”, until one concept is selected and refined
  • Vector art construction, usually in black & white
  • Addition of color in Illustrator, after contrasts and tonal values are worked out
Every cartoonist has their own style and method of brainstorming and producing final art. The same also applies to a logo designer. However, with all the variation in methods, these basic steps apply in general to. They reflect the essence of the creative process and not necessarily the specific mechanics. Hey, we all dance to a different tune, right? So visit Daryl’s article today and enjoy the work of a master cartoonist!