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Every good graphic design starts with a good drawing

September 3, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

As soon as I could hold pencil, I was drawing. I drew through grade school where I spent time out of boring classes and instead got to decorate the hall bulletin boards. I drew through high school and three years of art studio time every day. I drew before I painted, then painted over what I drew. I drew before I sculpted, then sculpted what I drew. Then I went to art school where I drew some more. I studied graphic design where the first thing we did was…draw. Then we painted in black and white on top of our…drawings. Then I did printmaking where I…drew…such classic printing methods as stone lithography and entaglio. I even did linoleum print making where I took wood carving tools and cut out what I had just finished…drawing. I had a sketch book I carried (and still carry) with me everywhere. At lunch I drew.

Then one day…

I got Pagemaker on PC back in 1992. I made a box on the screen and was smitten. Look at that straight line! Wow! I stopped drawing completely. I was so smart! Why mess with stupid lead and erasers? I got into web design. Why mess with paint and pen and ink to pay the bills? Drawing was for fine art, which I continued to do. Then print and web design got hard. And harder. It was not so fun even though I had, by the late nineties, multiple undo’s and dozens of versions of projects saved with names like “brochure_v74_alternative_FINAL-03b.ai”. What was I missing? I have a pen tool, even a pencil tool. I have an eraser tool. I have delete and a hi-res mouse. What was wrong?

And then one day…

I got my sketchbooks back out. Thumbnails all around for all print layouts and web layouts. Sketches for all my freelance design clients. Sketches for everything FIRST and foremost. Good ol’ NO.2 and a Pink Pearl or kneaded wonder. My graphic design skills got better the more I drew and hesitated to get on the computer.

And so today…

After 20 years, I draw more than ever. I draw every day at lunch. I draw in my sketchbook. I draw in my business meeting notebook. I draw on whiteboards in meetings with programmers who give me quizzical looks. The marketing team likes when I draw, as they are visual thinkers too.

And so…

Don’t fool yourself! Thousands of years of cultural development of art, graphic design, typography and media have not changed one simple fact – drawing is the foundation of all graphic design and art. The Flemish master painters from the Renaissance handed us the seven layer method of painting, of which the first three steps are essentially drawing with lead and ink, and that several layers of colorless paint before color is introduced. They solved all the problems of design, composition and layout well before a single pigment was a figment in their imagination. Is graphic design any different? I don’t think so!

Therefore…

If you want to be a more impressive freelance graphic designer, if you want to turn work around faster and with greater grace and speed, if you want to converse fluently with your artistic muse and drink deeply from that fountain of inspiration, pick up a pencil and sketchbook, and draw it out before you think of hitting Command-N in Illustrator or Fireworks or InDesign or Photoshop. Get your layout worked out. Get your grid lined up. Get your whitespace flow spaced out. Rough out some typography. Erase, start over, work it on paper. Flip the page. Work fast and then slow down when something coagulates. When you have the elements all worked out, you may proceed to the application of your choice, with your trusty pencil and notebook telling you what to do next…

Don’t start your next freelance graphic design job until you’ve discussed it with your NO.2 pencil and notebook. They offer the counsel you need for a successful project.

Filed Under: Drawing

Top 10 fonts for graphic designers

September 3, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

There are approximately 73 billion typefaces out there in the wild the last time I counted. 99.5% of them are either copies of classic fonts, totally useless in regards to real typography, or copies of classic fonts rendered totally useless for real typography because of poor construction of the font files like missing characters and incorrect kerning tables.

Where does that leave the budding young graphic designer looking for the right starting set of best fonts on which to base a career? Well, lets look at painting for a moment and find an analogy.

When you go to the art supply store, you can find a bewildering array of oil or acrylic paints to choose from. What exactly is Cadmium Red Light (Hue) and Phthalocyanine green? If you are an experienced painter, you know what those are. But if you are a new painter and have a good book or instructor, you were instructed to avoid those tubes and go for a classic “starter set”. You have a wise instructor. Put down the Dioxazine Purple, and pick up the 6 tube starter set like you were instructed.

Many painters use a limited palette. A limited palette is a set of colors from which many new colors can be mixed. For instance, my favorite watercolor artist Ray Campbell Smith only uses about 6 colors on many works. The core set of colors that make up the 6 color set is even smaller – only 3. Those three colors, a type of red, a type of blue, and a type of yellow, are combined to give a huge variety of hues. Adding the minimal use of a darker color (like a Payne’s Gray) further extends the hues created with the 3 primary colors, and same goes for the other one or two colors that might be used in limited circumstances. Where am I going with this?

To draw from this analogy, you only really need a very small sub-set of the most popular fonts to create a huge variety of work. Some people collect fonts and use them all over the place. Some designers have worked with a half-dozen fonts their entire careers and are quite well-off. They put the time they could have used looking for “that special font” into a solid grid-based layout, thought about content and white space, and became better designers for it.

So what are the top 10 fonts a graphic designer should have? This list by no means is definitive. However, if you find 20 other articles on the web suggesting an approach similar to this, you will find by and large the same typefaces showing up over and over. In fact, if you search for the top fonts of all time, or top favorite fonts, you will probably see about 20 fonts, out of the 73 billion available, showing up over and over. Not that you can’t grab something off the wall once in a while, but by and large the problem of good typography has been solved over and over, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel or look too hard in strange places for great fonts for regular daily work.

Here is my list of top 10 fonts for graphic designers, in no alphabetical order:

Top 10 Fonts for Graphic Designers

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

This list reflects what I actually use on routine basis. I actually use a few more, but I wanted to keep this list to 10. I would gather that other limited-font-user designers like me have 5 or 6 overlapping choices here, or use similar substitutes. For instance, Trade Gothic (which I love) is different but comes close to functioning the same way Avenir does. I own more faces (weights) of Trade Gothic, so I usually end up going with that when the need arises and the other sans serif fonts aren’t quite right. However, if I did own more faces of Avenir, I’d probably use it over Trade Gothic in most cases.

As a freelance graphic designer you might not have lot’s of cash to buy all the great fonts and faces you see and like, but the reality is you only need a thorough set of basics to get you quite far indeed. Remember, some of the greats only ever used a half-dozen fonts with any frequency!

If you focus on using a core set of fonts, like a core set of primary colors, you will be able to create an endless variety of styles, moods, layouts, etc., and not feel in the least bit slighted or hindered in your effort. Focus your work on getting a great layout, white space, grid, visual rhythm, and content, and you’ll be creating graphic design masterpieces in no time at all.

More Top Fonts resources:

  • Top 100 Best, Cool, Most Popular Professional Fonts (In English)
  • Top 7 Fonts Used By Professionals In Graphic Design
  • 13 excellent typefaces for graphic designers | David Airey …

Filed Under: Typography

Process color and small type on print jobs

September 3, 2009 by Douglas Bonneville

Ever had a print job come back only to see blurry small type but nice and crisp images?

When you are designing for 4-color process (CMYK), you have to obey a few rules or you’ll end up with poor results off the press. One mistake that very common to new designers is the flippant applying of CMYK colors on small type. Let’s review the fundamentals of printing in process color and see how they conspire to make small type with process color a no-no in general. As a freelance graphic designer, you can’t afford costly print re-runs and missed deadlines for the clients you worked so hard to get. Don’t blow it at the 95% completion mark of your wonderful new print piece!

When the prepress department at your favorite print shop outputs the plates of your process color print job, the plates come out as a series of dots. One plate for each color of the CMYK spectrum is created. If you are creating a dark blue box in your design, you will see dots that makes your box on both the Cyan and Black plates. Perhaps there is a touch of Magenta in your Cyan to give you a more royal blue. In that case, you’d see very faint dots on the Magenta plate. The pressman lines up the paper and the plates so that in each pass of the paper under each plate and it’s color, the dots from all CMYK plates line up. The pressman uses the CYMK calibration marks you see on the paper to adjust everything. If all goes well, the colors come out great.

I can still hear the collective sighs of many a prepress tech when getting jobs from freelance and other graphic designers. They open the job and go “uggh…” when they see CMYK hairline borders and tiny fonts with complex CMYK colors.

Things don’t always go well on a press. Technically, no print job is ever perfect, especially CMYK. What happens is the plates are lined up to the eye as good as can be, but the closer you get, say with a magnifying glass, you’d see things really aren’t perfectly lined up. But most jobs are lined up perfect enough. This means that your eye can’t see the discrepancies. For all intents and purposes, close enough rules the day in printing. It takes time and money to be “extra perfect”. Sorry to burst the illusion of perfection in printing, if you had one! The best pressman is the one who can best hide the inherent imperfections of a print job on the press he or she knows all too well.

So what does this have to do with small type and the CMYK printing process?

Well, since printing is as much art as it is science, the calibration of said press and said paper drifts a little here and there. The pressmen keeps things in a certain tolerance based on the capabilities of the press combined with the type of paper, density of ink, and all kinds of factors. But it’s impossible to keep these things entirely under perfect control. If you see a high-speed 4-color press in full speed action, you will wonder in amazement how it stays under any control at all. Ok, so what happens when there is a drift or if the press is just acting up a bit? What happens is that color plates don’t line up perfect any more while the paper is whizzing by and the layer of ink are being laid down by the drum. Now, let’s say you have a flower made of Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Since the flower is all random and fuzzy-edged, you probably couldn’t notice a mild drift if there was one. It’s hidden by the image itself. But let’s say you have a thin line, the same color as the flower, right next to the flower. You’d all of a sudden see the line look a little fuzzy. What happened? The Yellow went one way, the Magenta went another. Instead of your colored line, you see kind of a blurry thing with a yellow haze on one side and a magenta haze on the other, a little grey thing in the middle, but you don’t see your reddish line anymore. Same goes for your small type done with process color.

How small is 8pt type? How small are the lines that make up the serifs on 8pt Garamond? If you said “very very small” you are correct. Think of having letters made from a complex blue color you made up that had some percentage of C, M, Y and K. Now imagine the press drifting just a tad, just for a few seconds while the pressman wipes sweat from his hardworking forehead. All of a sudden, your masterfully positioned footnote in the wonderful blue you created now looks like mush. And now instead of a subtle footnote you weren’t meant to focus on, your blurry footnote is now drawing undue attention to itself. How awful! And now with no time left to reprint the job, you have to hand the results to your client. That was the last freelance graphic design job you’ll do for them, I assure you.

Another topic for another post is the LPI or lines per inch that the plates for your print job are generated at. This drift problem is compounded even further when you print at 133 LPI on soft stock, and is less pronounced at say 150 or 175 LPI. LPI is the press equivalent of dots per inch, DPI, in your source Photoshop files.

Back to our fuzzy type problem though. How do we fix it? There are several solutions I offer in bullet point form, for you to ponder and ask questions about:

  • Don’t use complex colors for small type. Use Black or White or at most 2 colors. Create simple colors as the type gets smaller. Nobody will notice.
  • Use a 5th spot color for small type. Yes, very expensive, but if the print job already includes a 5th color, why not use it if you can on small type and lines?
  • Don’t use delicate fonts for small type. Use a heavier-bodied sans serif if you can. This will get rid of a lot of potential problems.
  • If you simply have to have small type all over your print job and you have full creative control, add a spot color, or do the whole job in 1, 2, or 3 spot colors and avoid creating colors by the CYMK process
  • Print at the highest LPI your budget can afford. The higher LPI jobs go on better presses. You get a lot more quality than just increased LPI when you go from 133 to 150 or 175 LPI. You get a better press and usually the more experienced pressman.

When in doubt, talk about your files with the prepress department before you send the files over. Ask them about the press they are using for the job. Some presses and paper combinations have little difficulty with some aspects of a some jobs, but other combinations might not be good news. There is no way you can know for, so your best bet is communication. Your freelance graphic design business depends on two things: successful communication and successful results in the end product.

Filed Under: Print Design

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