Thursday, November 12, 2009

Friends of Type


A COOL SITE! Lots of interesting type designs....The site is here.

Monday, October 26, 2009



bassnectar..

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

jeff bujak

Sunday, October 18, 2009

So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?



Test your type anatomy skills here.
Tip: watch for these distinctive letters: C G J Q R S a c e f g r s t.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Remedi Project


THE coolest use of type in Flash EVER.
ever. forever.
GO here to see it.
Eric Natzke RULES. His piece is called macronature...and it's in Issue 10.
Love love, type love.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

How to fail a test with dignity








Hello? Adobe.com!


www.adobe.com
Let's not leave out THE most important resource for InDesign, the Adobe website itself. There's faqs, tutorials, lessons, forums...just about anything you need to figure ID out. However, this site is DEEP>>>Adobe rules the graphic software crowd. There is info there for all the programs they make, and it can get crazy searching for specific things.
The InDesign section is here.
But even better, the COMPLETE list of InDesign CS4 Videos is here...
Sit down, put your feet up, and learn something.

Lynda.com


Lynda.com is well known by design professionals. I love the logo...
There is a nice pile o' tutorials for you on this site. They are VIDEO, so if you want to sit back and be spoon fed, this is for you.
Placing and Flowing Text
A good tutorial. Makes sense, and it's easy to follow with little fluff. Just the way I like it.
All of these tutorials are not free. They have a sampling of videos available on the site. You pay by subscription on this site, $25 month...$250 year. You have to be serious for this investment!

LAYERS magazine - Adobe goldmine


LAYERS magazine has a terrific website and a gob of pages that apply to InDesign (which from now on will be abbreviated..ID!) and the rest of the Adobe suite, including Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash. These are videos tutorials and they go into a whole bunch of topics, such as...
Tips on Using Guides in InDesign--
Guides are your pal. They help you get things lined up and show you where you are placing things in relationship to each other. Teaches you about setting up a grid.
Headline Style Using Effects in InDesign
You are flashy and need to stand out. You want to get tricky right away. This tute will show you how.
There's a lot of info and cool stuff to try on this site. Learn something new, and surprise yourself.

Adobe Press -


Type in Real World Adobe InDesign CS4
This is a tutorial in the reader-style. There's no video!
Articles supply info on some of the features of InDesign.
Interesting quote I picked up from this article:
"Note that InDesign does not have “type styles” in the same way that other programs do—it makes no assumption that the selected font family has a “bold” or “italic” member, and will never generate a fake bold or italic version. If you don’t have a font for a particular type style, you won’t see it on the Type Styles menu"
This is sweet. In Quark--the "other" page layout program that you may find out in the field, you have the ability to bold or italic any font, whether you have the bold and italic members of the font family or not! This has caused problems when outputting to film. I do like this feature!

What's your learning style?

Some people learn by reading. I am one of them. I skim the text and find the part I need, and then move on. My brain doesn't have the time to sift through anything extra. That's why I personally find the video tutorials annoying. I have to listen to the entire thing to get that one piece of info I am looking for. Drives me nuts. I am a visual person. I need to see it.
However, I understand we all don't learn the same way. You may be the type who see it done just once, and you never need to see it again. A video may be the perfect way for you to get the gist of a new software program. There's a ton of videos out there available for InDesign. It's staggering, actually. So if video is your bag, you are in luck.
Whatever your method, DO NOT rely on just class to help you understand the workings of layout on a computer. Explore what is out there for YOU. Figure out what fits YOUR learning style best. And then go do it.
Since we are working in InDesign on the computer now, I figured I would post a bunch of InDesign resources here. I hope to list both videos and text, so you can find the tutes that work for you.
No matter how we tackle the learning of InDesign, we have to remember that we are Designers First. It is our goal to think about our problems creatively, and then solve them creatively.

The illustration below from The Central Office of Design adds a graphic explaination of design thinking.
Design Thinking
figure 1: The Design Process from a great height

They explain on their web site that they "start each project assuming nothing, especially about what the solution to the problem might be, and embark on the process with empathy for the final consumer of the solution. Whether it be an employee, child, or mother of three." ...or a Coby college student attempting to solve a design problem.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

love the upper case M...


idsgn blog has a great series called "Know Your Type". The latest is on Gill Sans.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

this type is called Goombah. i got it from this site: http://www.cool-fonts.com. u should check it out.

seblester.co.uk


This site has some excellent shots of "found" type. There's also these beautiful type sketches...
I adore type in the raw.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Friday, September 25, 2009

The Best T's of 2009


NY Times posts the best T's of the year. See them here.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Cobleskill Rocks

Seriously. It does.
Watch it here.

What was Ikea thinking???

Typography Fans Say Ikea Should Stick to Furniture

..."when Ikea casually abandoned its version of the famed 20th-century font Futura that had served it for 50 years and replaced it for 2010 with the computer-screen font Verdana, professional outrage was immense." (Verdana....is THIS font!)

See the comparison here on idsgn.org.



My opinion?
I think Verdana seems week compared to the strength/weight of Futura. Verdana seems smoother, and therefore less bold, than Futura, with it's lack of sharp angles on the baseline. Verdana also reminds me of simple writing, like something you would see in a catalog. ho hum boring. I just detest Microsoft. This is a no-brainer. Futura wins.
What do you think...Futura? or Verdana??

Google Earth based alphabet!


Do you know about Google Earth?
How about an alphabet based on google earth?

Fonstruct—Make your own font!


WHAT total font coolness! Complete font nirvana.
It's called Fontstruct.

I found a site today that lets you create your own font! There's tools to make your own font AND DOWNLOAD IT to your machine! AND clone another persons' font, adapt it, and change it and make it yours. Holy crap this is cool. There is a gallery of previous created fonts made by folks like you and me that you can view and also download. Not only that. Fonts that other people have created are there for download in the sites' gallery. Whoa, this is a font goldmine.



Look out GART Class 151C. You will be looking at this in class!

The Undiscovered 27th Letter

"Cause you can’t see tits on the radio. Fasten those pants for the lap dance. a story about my letter. proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, circle, square, triangle, sound, shape, typeface, lip and mouth movement, sign language, script, print, roman, italic, uppercase, lowercase, vowel, consonant, foreign language, how to draw, how to pronounce, letter frequency, how would it change existing words, sound length, tone group, syntax, semiotics. did someone say salami?"


The undiscovered letter is a way of communicating when regular words just won't do. Sometimes called "Jibber Jabber" or "I make more money than you"—this technique is most commonly employed in hip hop music.




The Art Directors Club held a competition last year for designers to come up with a 27th letter. It was called The Undiscovered Letter. There's some crazy stuff on this site! There were 27 finalists and their work is posted online here.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Cool Free Fonts


Free Font for anyone who's interested.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Diacritical, stress and accent marks


In order: circumflex, acute accent, dot, caron, ring/angstrom, tilde, crossbar, overlay slash, macron, tilde, acute accent, circumflex, german Eszett, comma below, cedilla, umlaut, caron, grave accent, cedilla, period.


Set in Gill Sans.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

A Gift from Veer


Veer sells stock images and also fonts. They have some crazy promotions...and today I got an email about this insane little Activity book .pdf that they are offering free online. I downloaded it and there's some good graphics and silly font and illustration related stuff in it.
Check it out!