Jan 9
Illustration
How do you make a better map? Ask cartographer David Imus. Mapmaking is not only about measurements and data, a great map is a feat of graphic design.
David Imus recently won the Cartography and Geographic Information Society's (CaGIS) annual Map Design Competition, Best of Show designation for his acclaimed new map: The Essential Geography of the United States of America.
Seth Stevenson takes a look the making of the map and explains what makes it significant in a piece he wrote for Slate.com.
Many thanks to Wendy Hersh for pointing us to it.
The Essential Geography of the United States of America...
An insightful piece about the map by Seth Stevenson for Slate.com...
The Imus Geographics website...
The Cartography and Geographic Information Society's (CaGIS) website...
About David Imus...
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May 25
Graphics Tech
I'm just back from the aforementioned conference and I thought I'd sit down and share some impressions. My hope is that, if you don't normally attend these events (I don't either), that you might be interested in the goings-on...
First impression: It's a global thing.
Roughly 400 folks attended the conference from 33 states and 11 countries — I believe it was a sell-out. I heard mention of Australia, Hong Kong, Serbia, Belgium, United Kingdom, Guatemala, and others. I know that kind of diverse participation is no great revelation to people who move in design and software circles frequently, but to someone who doesn't, I am particularly aware of the privilege it is to be a part of this type of international event.
It's a community.
Equally as interesting is the sense of community I felt. Designers, geeks, authors, and designer-geek-authors have much in common. Many of us are most comfortable in designing our world and staying within its bounds — so it's particularly exciting to be with other folks who spend so much of their lives on the same layer. I love my wife, but she couldn't care less about which device and software I use to calibrate my HP ZR30w monitor (thank goodness). Occasionally, it's a good idea to sit with people whose brains are trying to solve similar problems and attain similar outcomes.
There is no single voice.
For some reason I had the expectation that I would hear one side of things. Yes, that sounds silly in hindsight, but that's what I was thinking. The reality of it reminds me that there are as many workflows, approaches, and opinions about design and production as there are people doing it. For example, I sat in a session with the InDesign development team who all seemed to think that it should be the printer's responsibility to produce final production PDFs from native InDesign files. That was followed by the "Long Live Ink" roundtable with Design Tools Monthly editor Jay Nelson and prepress troubleshooter and Adobe Certified Instructor James Wamser both of whom seemed to think the opposite — that most jobs are best prepared for printing by the user (using the printer's guidelines).
E-publishing is in its big-bang stage.
There are MANY ways to create and view e-publications and MANY devices and platforms on which to view them. That's about all anyone agrees on. Which software and software settings to use (including InDesign's EPUB export) will be dictated by the device you're preparing your publication for, the complexity of the document, the intended distribution channel, and so on. As conference organizer David Blatner pointed out, you can't, for example, produce PDFs to sell through Apple — not because you can't produce them, not because the iPad can't read them, but because Apple doesn't yet allow you to distribute them through iBooks.
There are also significant design considerations to be tackled. When you convert page layouts for different devices and orientations, you'll need to design different layouts for each setting or create simplified, "elastic" layouts that adapt to multiple uses. I heard someone refer to that conversion as changing your layout into a Microsoft Word document.
Software developers and designers alike are in the very early stages of figuring out how to recast information in ways that are compatible with the new devices yet as aesthetically pleasing as print and conventional web page design. I think even the folks at Adobe would agree that (for now), that InDesign's EPUB export is not for creating e-versions of complex layouts.
Chris Kitchener, Senior Product Manager for Adobe InDesign, "Meet my extended family," 2011 InDesignSecretsLive Print and ePublishing Conference (doctored image)
The best early tools are expensive.
It's not surprising that the tools that allow the most control over page layout and effects are being developed for the upper echelon of the publishing trade. James Fritz, another respected author and trainer, discussed some of the many platforms used to create digital versions of magazines — Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, WoodWing's Digital Magazine Tools, Mag+, and others — and the fact that the new pricing models require both upfront fees (most in the thousands of dollars) for the initial content management systems and ongoing monthly or per-piece publication fees. (The good news is that by the time you read this [a couple of hours after I write it] everything will have changed.)
Much of what I learned was from the audience.
I went because of the featured speakers but I learned lots from the audience too. Questions, suggestions, and comments from audience members were every bit a useful as those from the assembled experts. For example, in one session, Eddy Hagen, the managing director of VIGC in Belgium offered some excellent insights on the production of PDFs and pointed us to his own Flemish Innovation Centre for Graphical Communication and the Ghent PDF Workgroup. There we're lots of high-powered users and experts in the audience.
Technology is a moving target.
No revelation here, but it is impressive when a presenter changes her slides in the hours just preceding her presentation because of some new tidbit of information. From his view inside Adobe, the Lead Product Manager for Adobe InDesign, Chris Kitchener, explained the perplexing process of gathering suggestions for new features, fixing bugs, and working with engineers to update a program as complex as InDesign. It's easy to forget the divergent pressures applied by users, reviewers, stockholders, partners, marketers, and so on to influence the decisions about which features or fixes to produce when and why.
BTW, the Adobe team was particularly impressed by and thankful for this blog post which explains that InDesign is a database and why, for example, files are not backward compatible.
There is a modicum of tension between Adobe and its community.
One of the most intriguing revelations of the experience was the respectful tension there is between the product producers and their users. All of it was friendly and in good humor, but it's obviously, a real issue. Adobe wants everyone to like its products and users are great at pointing to flaws. None less than Michael Ninness, now the VP of Content for Lynda.com, formally the Senior Product Manager for InDesign, rose to ask the current Senior Product Manager when certain features (such as charting) would be added to InDesign. It was all good-natured (especially when Ninness pointed out that he, himself, hadn't added the feature when he could have), it is a complicated dance.
There are few better venues for meeting the people you want to meet.
I had the pleasure of meeting, face-to-face, some of the many people I communicate with online and introducing myself to others I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to meet.
First and foremost I got to meet and speak with one of the conference organizers, David Blatner. My only complaint about the entire conference is we didn't hear more from David. He is a smart, personable guy who knew as much or more about InDesign (from a user standpoint) as anyone in attendance.
If you don't know Blatner, he's the editorial director of InDesign Magazine, wrote Real World InDesign (and 14 other books), teaches courses on InDesign at Lynda.com, and co-hosts InDesignSecrets.com with Anne-Marie Concepción.
Their combined experience with InDesign, the InDesign community, and Adobe corporate made David and Anne-Marie uniquely qualified to pull together this wide and deep gathering of designers, technicians, and developers.
If you don't know Anne-Marie Concepción, she too teaches courses on InDesign at Lynda.com, does the InDesignSecrets.com thing, plus rules her own creative empire at Seneca Design & Training.
This was also an opportunity to sit with Jay Nelson and Lesa Snider. Jay is the affable publisher of Design Tools Monthly, the only industry publication I read cover to cover, every issue. It was a real treat to spend some time comparing notes with someone else who is as interested as I am in finding and sharing the the best of design and publishing ideas. Lesa is a writer for Macworld, author of numerous books, chief evangelist for iStockphoto.com, and host of graphicreporter.com
I also had the good fortune to have one-to-one discussions with conference speakers Gabriel Powell, InDesign and Photoshop author and Senior Solutions for Typifi Systems, Ron Bilodeau, the Production and Design Specialist at O'Rielly (who once worked for the beautifully designed Cooks Illustrated), Chris Kitchener, Lead Product Manager of Adobe InDesign, Nigel French, the author of InDesign Type (who spoke about designing with a grid), and Cari Jansen, a technical writer and print and publishing consultant who spoke about the challenges of this new medium.
And I gathered some great insights from Keith Gilbert, a brilliant tech- and design-savvy guy who spoke about XML and data publishing and who showed me an impressive project he had just finished. It's a beautifully designed iPad-based catalog/brochure his client's sales force will use at an upcoming trade show.
All that and, of course, all of the good stuff I learned (I just downloaded a 344-page PDF of conference slides that Anne-Marie Concepción made available to those who attended.)
Finally, most happily, I got to meet a few folks who subscribe to my newsletter at ideabook.com and who read my blog at PagePlane.com. Thank you all for introducing yourselves. (If I didn't get your business card please send me an email so we can stay in touch.)
So... where's the 2012 conference?
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May 5
Illustration
I happened on this logo/icon and had to show it to you. It has at least three things going for it:
1. Skillful rendering
2. An interesting metaphor
3. A unique color scheme
Difficult to do it better.
The icon in use...
A closeup without the ray burst...
More icons (and other design work) by MadeBySofa and designer Jasper Hauser...
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Jan 24
Ideas 101
Before I can design something — a website, a logo, a brochure, whatever — I've got to understand what needs to happen. What my client's purpose and motive is, and the action they want their audience to take.
Once I understand what I am being asked to accomplish, I can design with purpose. I'm not a decorator, I'm a designer — my job is to determine the combination of elements — the images, typefaces, and user interface — necessary to communicate messages in a way that makes them interesting and accessible.
Teaching that process is what John McWade is so expert at. Through the pages of Before & After Magazine, he has been teaching what others don't, in ways that others can't, since the days when the first version of Aldus PageMaker was in beta testing. He parses, deconstructs, and studies a design problem, then packages a solution in a form that is easy to understand, digest, and reproduce.
I've written for B&A and I can testify that there's nothing easy about making things simple. I have pointed you to John in the past, but there is some new news worth sharing: John McWade has begun a series of wonderful short stories about design — video snippets that once again have me thinking about what is possible.
One in the series, How to design without graphics...
The beginnings of the new collection...
Plus, for the first time, the entire Before & After collection goes digital...
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Mar 17
Illustration
Clay Hayes' GigPosters.com features posters used to advertise music shows and events. As you might imagine, the subject matter allows the designers and artists great creative freedom—so you're going to see some exciting and interesting uses of type, color, and illustration. (The examples I link to are tame, but I'll caution you that if you wander around, there's also material some might find offensive.)
Example 1 by Gwenola Carrere...
Example 2 by Nate Duval...
Example 3 by Matthew Fleming...
The front door...
The GigPosters Twitter page...
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Aug 3
Ideas 101
True passion is rare.
Much creative energy and expertise is expended moving value from one hand to the other. That's not a criticism--commerce makes lots of good things possible--I am a card carrying member of the commerce thing. But I can't help but take special notice when I encounter expressions of interest and involvement that appear at least, to have grown out of a pure devotion to its subject.
I see that in a new publication--UPPERCASE magazine (2009). A magazine? Are you kidding?! Who starts a magazine in the year of Twitter? People with passion do--their names are Janine Vangool and Deidre Martin and they've enlisted the help of an eclectic collection of talented contributors--designers, illustrators, photographers, typographers, writers, and others.
The purpose of UPPERCASE is to take a look at the creative process from all angles: profiling creatives, peeking into work environments, pointing to examples of styles and palettes, uncovering interesting ephemera--they even devote a section of the magazine to brief profiles of five or six of their subscribers--an approach that (to me) demonstrates something important about their thinking.
Enough with the accolades--at this point you probably think these are relatives of mine--they aren't, I have no connection with them whatsoever. But I can tell you the first thing I did after closing the last page was to go online and subscribe. I figure that when you find a passion you share, you should support it.
UPPERCASE Magazine: Issue 2 preview...
The magazine is just part of the mix, their web includes lots of interesting material...
Their blog...
You can buy the current issue or subscribe here...
Once you've seen it, I'd love to hear your comments below...
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Jun 5
Illustration
I'm sure you've read about Tokyo street style. And that the world fashion industry keeps an eye on how young people are dressing there--that it is one of those places from which designers draw inspiration.
Anna Rusakova reminds us that we need to keep our eyes open for inspiration everywhere. Though this might not be your style, I doubt you would disagree that she has a wonderful sense of her's. She creates fascinating illustrated Moleskine notebooks and presents them within an eclectic kind of color palette-interior design-fashion environment kind of thing that makes it all work.
I just found it very interesting that all these pieces, even the way she has organized and photographed a selection of candies, seems to establish a very clear sense of style.
What do you call this mix of design, illustration, fashion, place, and typography? Is there a better description than simply "style?"
Candies...
Anna Rusakova's Moleska...
An interior design vibe...
And a fashion component...
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Apr 29
Color
This elegant tool by Czech designer Petr Stanicek allows you to create color schemes using monochromatic, complementary (contrast), triad (soft contrast), tetrad (double-contrast), analogic, and accented analogic models. It also offers presets, adjustments, reporting, and even simulates various forms of color vision deficiency. (via a mention by Jim Dudley through LinkedIn)
The Color Scheme Designer...
Petr Stanicek's site...
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Dec 10
Color
In this recent article, David Pache at Dache presented the logos of 100 leading branding firms in black and white to, in essence, level the playing field. It made me wonder if it might be time to adopt the use of color as a foundational component of logo design. Isn't the reasoning for the need of a straight black and white version antiquated?
100 Brands of Interest...
In the Ideabook Design Store: Templates for InDesign, QuarkXpress, or PageMaker...
Oct 11
Color
That's the title of an article I wrote for the August/September issue of InDesign Magazine. It points to some of the simple ways you can tap the power of color within InDesign.
The bad news is you can't read it for free, you'll have to subscribe to the magazine. The good news is you'll have to subscribe to the magazine. Seriously, if you are a dedicated InDesign user, you'll find lots of thoughtful and detailed InDesign insight from simple to advanced. The masthead includes the names of top editors and authors you are sure to recognize including Terri Stone, David Blatner, and Sandee Cohen.
Here's a free trial issue...
In the Ideabook Design Store: Creative Business CD-ROM...
Sep 17
Color
Thanks to Suffolk Software for sponsoring an interesting new survey on color. They are inviting visitors to a match word (and its definition) to the colors that best matches it. I predict the exercise will reveal that there is no definitive consensus.
Why? Because there are too many variables. Our impressions of color are built on an incalculable set of influences--seemingly unrelated considerations such as our geographical location, upbringing, or education, or for explicit reasons such as the context in which the color is presented, the other colors it is mixed with, the background on which it sits, and so on.
I have long thought that "blue means cool" is an over simplification of a complex, highly personal impression. How do you identify the meaning of a specific color? I don't think you can but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.
The Cymbolism.com experiment...
In the Ideabook Design Store: Before & After: Graphics For Business...
Apr 7
Color
UNIQLO is a company based in Japan that is fairly new to the United States. It positions itself at a provider of “high quality, basic casual wear at the lowest prices in the market.” Their site was designed by Yugo Nakamura who employs the color palette Roger Black made famous (at least to me): red, white, and black. It relies heavily on a combination of stark contrast, powerful typography, and bold images. Love it.
The is the company's site...
This is the site used to tease the arrival of the store in NYC...
In case you missed it previously, Roger Black's page...
In the Ideabook Design Store: Getting It Printed...
Jan 28
Color
I happened upon truthdig.com recently and was impressed by their color palette (my interest is entirely apolitical). It uses a wide range of muted colors to visually organize the subject categorys—A/V BOOTH, ARTS & CULTURE, REPORTS, and so on. Click on a subject and you'll see the designer carries the color into the category section. Notice how the background colors of each article darken as you scroll down the page—giving you a sense of a difference between the top and bottom of the listings—another nice touch.
The truthdig.com color palette...
Dec 24
Color
Black and white is beautiful. The limited use of color combined with a series of powerful black and white images builds the story-quality of this site.
A great example of a “less is more” palette...
Oct 1
Color
There is some news in the world of color worth noting. Pantone, keeper of the keys to the industry standard color matching system, is introducing the first significant upgrade of its 45 year old system—the Pantone Goe System. It includes a new range of solid colors, software, new color guides, and so on.
The other side of the news is that Pantone is being acquired by x-rite, a color conglomerate traded on the NASDAQ. Among their products are all manner of color calibration software and hardware used by many different industries around the world. I thought it was particularly interesting that one of their holdings is the Munsell Frozen French Fry Color Standard for the USDA.
Seriously though, these are the types of transactions that effect us as designers in significant ways—not the least of which is the cost of upgrading to a new system.
The Pantone Goe System...
The xrite press release...
The Frozen French Fry Color Standard...
Sep 12
Color
Among other things, the Web provides space for nuance—the subtle shades of meaning and feeling. ColourLovers.com is that type of forum. It is tagged as “a resource that monitors and influences color trends.” It provides a place to invent and compare color palettes, submit color-oriented news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.
The front door...
Their blog...
Tracking color trends...
In the Ideabook Design Store: Design-It-Yourself: Graphic Workshop...
Aug 17
Color
Sit through a couple of cycles of the color changes here to see how they influence the mood and emphasis of the subjects.
The Asia Society...
In the Ideabook Design Store: Design-It-Yourself: Graphic Workshop...
Jul 11
Color
Here's proof that color contrast can produce real drama. The bright colors here juxtaposed with a deep, dark background struck me as having an almost neon-like quality (similar to the fluorescent ink colors that made Wired Magazine covers so distinctive).
Fluorescent colors at inkymole.com ...
In the Ideabook Design Store: The Color Harmony Guide...
Oct 18
Color
Here is an elegant little tool for brainstorming RGB color ideas.
http://www.steeldolphin.com/color_scheme.html
