This Blog Life
This Blog Life
This Blog Life
This Blog Life
This Blog Life
    QR code - blobby, big

    QR codes: enter the matrix!

    Quick Response (QR) barcodes are more interesting than you might think, so it’s worth considering them. Just make sure they work as expected before going live… You’ve probably seen a QR code, even if you don’t know what they are or do. QR codes are basically a two-dimensional form of barcode, with data encoded in [...]

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    Ampelmann-shapes

    Walk, Don’t Walk

    The curious life and times of Ampelmännchen I’m in Berlin as I write this, and I’ve noticed something curious about the pedestrian crossing signals here; there are two distinctly different kinds in this city. Both are the expected red and green silhouette variety, but the ones in what was the GDR-controlled East Berlin are curiously [...]

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    Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed

    Creative Design Briefs

    In which Keith explores the answers to a question and finds confirmation in a particular typeface design… I was asked an interesting question the other day. “Do you believe that creative briefs hinder the artistic mind?” This had the feel of a set question, and it turned out that this was the case; it was [...]

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    Bass featured image

    Static graphics vs animated media

    There’s more to creating good animations than most designers think, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. In my experience, many designers — perhaps most of us — harbour a secret desire. No matter how into our particular form of creative mark-making we are, there’s a part of us that wants to work with moving [...]

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    Preflight-column-Preflight-panel-and-layout-590x400

    Preflighting: boring but important

    Know more about preflighting than your software or you’ll get caught out. Grammar purists, look away now; this is all about a word that’s made its way from composite adverb to standalone verb. Preflighting is the act of going through a series of important checks before committing yourself. It originated in the flight industry (hence [...]

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    20 Sketch books with MessagePad

    Digital sketch books – can they work?

    Can the iPad really replace the designer’s traditional paper sketch book? If you’re a designer, the odds are high that you use a sketch book. If you don’t, you should. Sure, you can use your Mac to throw together all sorts of ideas, but there are two important reasons why Illustrator, Photoshop and whichever DTP [...]

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    19 euro examples

    Design a new character for a typeface

    Designing the character behind the face. Of all the design discipline specialities, typeface design is probably the most monastic. Creating a new font takes skill, serious attention to detail, and a perseverance that a medieval monk would respect. Not only do you have to consider the aesthetics of stroke weight, overall form, and the effect [...]

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    18 CD covers 06 - kaibara87

    Art Therapy for design block: The CD Cover game

    What do you do if you find yourself staring at an empty page, unable to get your creative juices flowing? Design block is no fun, and it happens to all of us on occasion. Fortunately, one of the best ways to shake people out of a creative slump involves a no-pressure, pure-creative bit of fun. [...]

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    17 hard work 4172394956_653cbf4ef5_b

    Freelancing and internships

    Negotiating the minefield of how much to charge and judging the morals of working for nothing. This is the time of year when new graduates are waking up to the fact that they’ve finished their courses and are starting to get worried about that big question: what do I do now? You have your portfolio [...]

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    16-hand-made-paper

    Paper facts and recipes for discerning designers

    Graphic design processes are almost always about putting marks on surfaces, and those surfaces are almost always paper. We take this medium for granted, but do we really know much about it? We talk about ‘dead tree publishing’, reject the paperless office concept by consuming tons of the stuff, recycle it (probably not as much [...]

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    15 Output res - QuarkXPress

    With resolution, size does matter

    When I teach I constantly have to remind myself that things that seem simple because I learned them years ago weren’t always easy to grasp the first time around. Image resolution is a bit case in point; understanding the relationship between a bitmap image’s resolution, pixel dimensions and printed size is simple once you know [...]

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    14 Magazine cover, McClure's, July 1916

    Cover design challenges in the digital world

    Is it possible to design sophisticated magazine covers that communicate and sell in the virtual newsstand when all we can show are low-resolution thumbnails? “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” We all know the saying, but do we pay any attention? Of course not. And that’s why we also say that first impressions matter. [...]

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    13-dither-example

    One-trick specialist or flexible expert?

    Don’t be afraid to play around with established production methods. If you know enough about them you’ll find creative ways to subvert them. When you look at designers today you see people who are faced with massive multi-skill requirements. Photographer? Check. (Everyone has a digital camera these days, even if they’re not actually good at [...]

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    12-Digital camouflage step 3

    Dazzle and digital camouflage

    Camouflage is the art and design of staying hidden. But there’s more to camouflage than blobs of muted green, yellow and brown – just look at the modern Marpat patterns and WW1 dazzle ship designs. Seeing patterns in things is one of the most basic instincts we have. It is a survival instinct, something that [...]

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    11-brown-samples

    Color perception: more than meets the eye

    Color plays a crucial part in how we perceive things, so understanding its emotive effects is fundamental to creating effective designs. How do you react to colour? The hue of things has a surprisingly strong affect on how we perceive things and even on how we feel, both physically and emotionally. It is thought that [...]

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    10-Wired mag with drop-down article navigation menu

    Graphic design as visual language

    When a new medium arrives it changes the way we communicate visually as well as technically. With the growth of digital magazines, it’s time we rethought our visual language. How many languages do you speak? Chances are, if you’re a born English speaker, you’re monolingual; when you travel to other parts of the world you [...]

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    09-960-grid

    The secret to designing with grids

    Page layout is chiefly about how objects on a page interact with each other, which is why grids play such a vital role in design. Here’s how they work… Page design is seen as a bit of a black art by so many people. It is true that it isn’t a doddle, but there are [...]

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    08-pangrams

    Placeholder text and pangrams

    When you need to see how a typeface works you use dummy copy. But there’s more to life than lorem ipsum, as pangrams can be fun, too. If you need to fill a text box with words but you don’t have final approved copy or you just want to see how different type settings look, [...]

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    07-national-graphic-identity

    Flying the flag for effective branding

    Graphic identity is one of the concepts that designers juggle as part of their daily work; using them, misusing them, and sometimes creating them from scratch – although that’s not as frequent as most would like. Just about every organisation in existence has some kind of visual identity, some graphic branding that helps to distinguish [...]

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    06-project-management

    Keep managing the projects

    Designers aren’t known for their project management skills, but they’re vital if you’re to finish a commission on time and on budget. Graphic design is about creative problem solving. This is a simple statement, but this is what sets graphic design apart from fine art, and it is what makes it actually more of a [...]

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    05-C5-envelope-cutter-guide

    Paper sizes: get to know your A, B, C

    ‘As easy as A, B, C’ can’t really be said of paper sizing conventions. Fortunately, this article explains the intricacies of the various standards. Paper size is something we don’t give that much thought to, most of the time at least. If you have a printer, chances are it is an A4 model. If not, [...]

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    04-Adobe-Bridge-color-settings

    Understanding profiles and color

    Tackling color settings, profiles and calibration can leave even experienced designers quaking with fear, so here’s what you need to know. I find that RGB vs CMYK, colour profiles and picking the right settings is a constant source of confusion for designers. This isn’t surprising; it is a murky subject, and there’s a load of [...]

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    03-InDesign-nested-styles-featured-image

    Work smarter with DTP style sheets

    Take the mind-numbing drudgery out of complex text styling jobs by preparing style sheets for your layouts. Today I’m going to talk about style sheets in print design. Excited? I doubt it. But hang in there, this just might make your work easier and get you home or to the pub more quickly. How plain [...]

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    02-variable-data-print-BIG

    Variable data printing for the rest of us?

    Dynamic publishing may be the next big thing, but if it’s to really take off, the likes of Quark and Adobe must provide designers with better tools. Traditional print design is normally all about nailing things down with millimeter precision, polishing layouts and adjusting things to watchmaker-levels of accuracy. In some respects web design is [...]

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    01-cmyk-chart-BIG

    Focoltone: Cut to the chase

    Sometimes, when you need to get something done, the simplest approach is to cut to the chase. Colour matching is a case in point. This stuff is important but it can also be annoyingly, sometimes mind-numbingly, complex. What I’m about to say may sound a trifle heretical, but hear me out. Forget science, forget abstract [...]

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    Islamic ornament

    Repeat patterns: history and techniques

    We’re pattern-seeking creatures. Whether you put this down to evolutionary defensive instinct or a higher-sourced aesthetic appreciation, the fact is we can’t help seeing structure and repetition. This happens even where it doesn’t exist, as shown by lottery-playing numerologists. More positively, patterns play an important part in art in practically every culture and age. In [...]

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