A small milestone for our humble little blog. I just noticed crossed a million page views a couple weeks ago. since launching at the end of 2009. Our most popular posts remain those focused on typography. The Big Book of Font Combinations and the Font Combinations app continue to grow in popularity as more people discover us.

While a million page views is nothing compared to other graphic design blogs, it’s a lot for us considering how we’ve successfully carved out such a small niche. Remember, broad numbers don’t count nearly as much as a narrow, targeted audience. Big, focused numbers in your narrow target audience mean everything! And that’s what we’ve done and will continue to do: reach graphic designers and other casual typeface enthusiasts with particular typographic needs!

What’s next? Let’s get to 2 million twice as fast :). With some cool things coming up in 2012 we can do it! Thanks for stopping by!

The Mac OS App Store has more and more to offer graphic designers looking for productivity software for their Mac. However, that means there is more and more to wade through to find the good stuff, just like when looking for iPhone apps. But hold on! We did the hard work and research and found a combination of the highest-rated but also most useful apps for graphic designers!

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Head over to Smashing Magazine to see my latest article, “How to Choose a Typeface“, and leave a comment or two!

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Many of you know of what secret skill I’m referring to. I’m talking about graphic designers who write great copy, but keep their writing chops hidden in plain sight. Why do they do this?

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What is the main reason a graphic design fails miserably? It’s quite simple: you played with graphic content before you worked out your message.

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Let’s face it: clients usually don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to design for both web and print. How do you navigate around a client that insists on A or B, when you know C is what they need? Here are 20 “templates” that you can “use” to convince any client of anything!

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When it comes to making font combinations, there are principles and methods, but no absolutes. You can’t apply all the principles or ideas listed here at the same time. Just peruse this list of ideas and see what strikes you as interesting, and then pursue creating your own interesting typeface pairs!

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So you wondered the same question about your graphic design blog too? Join the crowd! But I do have some interesting and hopeful numbers for you…. [Read More]

“Font Combos” for the iPhone is on sale at the iTunes store now!

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!

Just a little horn-tooting: we crossed 100,000 visits last week. It’s not much, but our first 6-digit tally of visitor totals feels significant for some reason. Unique page views crossed 160,000 too. We started in September 2009, and in general get 300-1000 unique visitors a day, but have the odd day of 3000-7000 hits if we post something that gets re-tweeted like mad. That’s happened a dozen times or so.

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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:

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When using vector tools for drawing realistic objects, many subtle tweaks are required here and there to give that realistic “fit and finish”. The process is not linear, like many tutorials are for certain things. There is no step 1, then 2, then 3. Rather, there is a cycle that is more like “rinse, wash, repeat if necessary”. So let’s tear apart a finished, realistic-looking vector object to see what makes it tick after all is said and done.

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Short thoughtful post here folks.

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?

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We are excited to have our first app be published in the iTunes Store. It’s a simple app called Font Combinations that lets you see how different header and body fonts relate to each other with a simple swipe. So many fonts, so little time!

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I’ve seen a lot of humorous posts lately about the very random things Google Suggest will come up with when trying to read your mind. So what does Google “suggest” about graphic design related topics? I plugged in some terms for some entertaining, informative, and unintentionally funny results. Enjoy!

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The dreams of graphic designers can be very interesting as well unintentionally revealing. I speak from personal experience. Let me tell you about an episode and then you can make of what you will, and perhaps apply the lesson to your own life as a designer and human being.

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The “request for proposal” or RFP process for many small graphic design and web design firms is fraught with huge time-wasting and dead-end traps. Have you been caught up in the excitement of getting what seems to be great project opportunity from an established company only to find out “while your offer was compelling, for strategic reasons” they chose some other firm?

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What has happened to these 10 great graphic design blogs and their bloggers?

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