Type in Your Face

Al Ward, author of 'Photoshop for Right Brainers' walks you through an extensive tutorial using layers and layer masks for a rather striking image. More than 30 illustrations and Al's competent guidance will show you how to put type in your face!

Ward, Al. Design, Typography and Graphics (2004). Design>Graphic Design>Typography

Typofile

Almost everything we know in the world can be described in just 26 letters--isn't that amazing? Yet this most visible art--which we all see all around us each day--has long been invisible in most people's minds. Part of this was intentional-- because the content, not the type, is the message. With type, the media is not the message. But type also adds to everything we read in subliminal and powerful ways, and Typofile is about people who love type, and why.

Will-Harris, Daniel. Typofile. Design>Typography>Graphic Design>Blogs

typographic

An interactive experience informed by type and typography, which aims to illustrate the depth and import of type, and to raise relevant questions about how typography is treated in the digital media, specifically online.

typographic. Design>Typography>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric

Typographic Branding

The more components a brand identity contains, the more onerous it can be. Logo, pictogram, texture, color scheme, wordmark: each must be laboriously created, launched, and cared for, and each of these stages has its own substantial costs. For many companies today, these costs are becoming prohibitive. An increasingly popular alternative is a hard-working, purely typographic wordmark that speaks clearly for the brand, all by itself.

Fishel, Catherine. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2002). Design>Typography>Graphic Design

The Typographic Circle

The Typographic Circle was formed about thirty years ago by a group of advertising typographers as the Type Directors Club, to bring together anyone with an interest in type.

Typographic Circle, The. Organizations>Graphic Design>Typography>United Kingdom

Typographical Design, Modernist Aesthetics, and Professional Communication    

The technology of in-house publishing is radically shifting the responsibility for document design from the graphic specialist to the individual writer. To apply the new technology, professional communicators need to understand the principles underpinning typographical design and their origin in the functionalist aesthetics of modernism, particularly as articulated by the Bauhaus. While some of the key concepts of modernism--strict economy, universal objectivity, intuitive perception, and the unity of form and purpose--are well-suited to business and technical documents, these concepts are bound to an historical and intellectual milieu. By understanding the influence of modernism on typographical design, professional communicators equipped with the new technology can adapt design principles to the rhetorical context of specific documents.

Kostelnick, Charles. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1990). Design>Typography>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric

Typolog

Weblog van Gerard Voshaar over typografie.

Voshaar, Gerard. Typolog. (Dutch) Resources>Graphic Design>Typography>Blogs

U&lc

U&lc Online is ITC’s international journal of graphic design and digital media.

Upper and lowercase Magazine. Journals>Graphic Design>Typography

An Unbearable Lightness?    

This article considers various notions of 'beauty' and how these have informed the creative and critical processes of graphic design, specifically typography. The author considers how the Renaissance revival of Greek mathematics to support a 'universal beauty' was gradually unpicked by Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Kant and Hume, and how this process has subsequently shaped modernist and postmodernist attitudes towards 'beauty'. From our current vantage point it could be argued that 'beauty' should now be considered a redundant concept; however, design schools and studios continue to make value judgments dividing the 'beautiful' from the 'ugly'. On what basis are these judgements made and are they still valid in a pluralistic society? Is it possible that we now have a new sensibility, a different notion of beauty? Reflecting upon important questions raised by the American designer and writer Steven Heller in his controversial essay 'The Cult of the Ugly' in _Eye_ magazine in 1993, the author proposes that 14 years on from the article, we can indeed witness a new aesthetic sensibility, shared but not universal, rooted in loss yet also 'found'.

Rigley, Steve. Visual Communication (2007). Articles>Graphic Design>Typography>History

Understanding Data Flow Diagrams  

Data flow diagrams (DFDs) reveal relationships among and between the various components in a program or system.

Le Vie, Donald S., Jr. STC Proceedings (2000). Presentations>Graphic Design>Charts and Graphs

Understanding Graphic File Formats

Identifying and fixing problems with graphics often comes down to a brief reminder of what the various kinds of graphic formats are and how to use each of them when they're the most appropriate--not merely most convenient--for the situation.

Ray, Eric J. TECHWR-L (2000). Design>Graphic Design

Unexpected Text  

I know, I know, Illustrator is a drawing program - but its text-handling features can be handy, too. Here's a guide to using them.

Kvern, Olav Martin. Adobe Magazine (1996). Design>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Illustrator

Usability as Recognition

I'd like to point out something that you may not have noticed yet. And though I'm quite sure many of you have seen it by now, its subtlety is worth mentioning here again. Go take another look at the FedEx logo — specifically, take another look at the white space surrounding the logo. There may have been years when you didn't notice this arrow in its negative space. Now you can't stop noticing how the figure and its ground produce an entirely new object. The brand may have even taken on new meaning. Josef Albers describes the arrow's visual effect as 1+1=3 or more, or the creation of an incidental new element from two intentionally placed elements. What has happened here is that you're stopped recognizing the logo, and started to perceive it as having another quality.

Danzico, Liz. Bobulate (2001). Design>Typography>Graphic Design>Usability

Use Actions in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop's Actions utility is a great way to speed up repetitive image-editing jobs or quickly perform commonly used edits. This tool lets you assign a sequence of commands to a single key. Rather than going through a number of steps, the program records a set of actions and allows you to recall those same actions with a single keystroke the F12 function key, for example.

Regenold, Stephen. Presentations (2003). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop

Using AutoCAD Drawings in CorelDraw  

Sometimes there are problems importing AutoCAD files. The following gives a few tips on correcting such problems.

Broz, Donald. Broz and Dian (2006). Design>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration

Using Color to Bring Harmony to Photographs

What do you do if the photographer is on assignment -- hundreds of miles away -- shooting an event that happens only once, and all the elements in the setting seem to work against each other? After getting the images via email the next morning I couldn't hardly call the photographer to say 'shoot it again.'       In this scenario the photographer had but one chance to create the images for a web page with an important, compelling story. In situations like this the only thing you've got to work with are the camera and your senses.       The serious nature of the message dictated that the audience play an important role in the overall impact of the story. However, the lights were mixed incandescent and fluorescent, giving a greenish tint to the audience when the stage lights rendered flesh tones fairly well.

Photoshop Tips and Tricks (2002). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop

Using Design Elements as Page Organizers  

Creating a visual hierarchy has always been the primary concern of page design. Whether the purpose is to instruct, inform or sell -- communication is the primary goal. The designer's task is to organize the page so that the viewer can easily find pertinent information on the page and in the appropriate sequence. The layout or appearance of the page establishes relationships between items -- what is most important, what goes together, what is incidental. Structuring the page establishes clearly defined areas to assist the reader. Design elements can be used to add structure to the page by unifying or emphasizing particular page elements. Although conventions for print and online documents may vary slightly, these techniques can be applied to both.

Birchman, Judith A. STC Proceedings (2002). Design>Document Design>Graphic Design

Using Graphics to Help Users Build Mental Models  

Research shows that adults learn more efficiently when they have formed an accurate mental model of the product they are trying to use. We can help our users form accurate mental models more quickly by graphically depicting that model on the interface. One product using that approach allowed engineers to become productive with no reference to user documentation.

Elser, Arthur G. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Documentation>Graphic Design

Using Streamline with Adobe Illustrator

I've been doing pen and ink illustration for years. It's part of my comic book roots I guess. It's taken a while but I've figured out how to combine pen and ink skills along with Adobe Illustrator to create a completely digital illustration, with a little help from Adobe Streamline and a dash of Photoshop.

Sellers, Mike. Illustrator World (2005). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Illustrator

Using the Photoshop Zoom Tool

Photoshop's zoom facility is very versatile and allows you to zoom in and out of an image in many different ways. You can even have different views of the same document open at once, with different zoom levels! In this tutorial we will explore the zoom tool and its applications.

Elated (2003). Design>Graphic Design>Software>Adobe Photoshop

Using Visualization in Websites

In some websites the amount of information is so large that the context may be lost whenever it is displayed on a single computer screen. If we try to have the entire structure visible all at once (so we did not lose the context), the details may be too small to read. For example, the HypViewer product on the right below is showing over one million IP addresses. If you think that adding visualization methods to a website automatically will improve user performance in this situation, you may want to consider the results of a couple of recent studies.

Bailey, Robert. Web Usability (2003). Design>Web Design>Graphic Design

Value of Value-Based Pricing: Should a Creative Professional Charge on an Hourly Basis, or a Project Basis? Here's the Answer

We creative professionals tend to be a right-brained bunch, harnessing our creative talents to create practical solutions for our clients. Creating pricing structures, estimates and invoices are not high on our enjoyment list. But we can avoid some common pitfalls and potentially unhappy clients by pricing our work based on project value rather than an hourly rate.

Stuart, Valarie Martin. Creative Latitude (2004). Careers>Freelance>Graphic Design>Estimating

Vectorization of Raster Data

There are various solutions available which allow the vectorization of raster data, such as scanned design drawings or manually created technical illustrations. What kind of problems can occur with vectorization?

ITEDO Software (2004). Design>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration