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How to get Google Analytics stats for today only with one simple click

September 22, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

I check Google Analytics a lot to see how this or that article is tracking. I’m almost never interested in what happened yesterday, but rather what is happening today. In Google Analytics, you have to click through several screens and drop-down menus to get to todays data. Right now it takes 6 clicks and 4 screens to get at the data I want. That’s too much! 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! … [Read More]

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

September 17, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

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…

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

September 16, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

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

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

September 15, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

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!

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Happy clicking!

3 Ways the logo design process is like making a comic

September 14, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

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!

How to get Google Analytics stats for today only with one simple click

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

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Related Articles

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

21 Top Graphic Design Blogs

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

3 Ways the logo design process is like making a comic

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