The Appeal of the Unexpected
I love witty advertising. This ad just makes me laugh. And I just might buy me some of those Duluth Trading Fire Hose® Work Pants.
recent posts
- The Appeal of the Unexpected
- Redesigning the Aging Newspaper
- New Business Cards
- Helvetica. It works.
- A New Year, A New Beginning
- B.D. Andrews Photography
- Starbucks + (Red)
- Never Satisfied
- Why Typography Matters
- Grandaddy
- Relaunching of the Website
- Permanent Press
- One Awesome Camera
categories
Redesigning the Aging Newspaper
Is design more than just aesthetics?
I’ve become a bit of a Ted.com addict recently. I’m fascinated by some of the talks on there. If you have never checked it out, you owe it to your intellect to do so.
One of the most recent talks was with Jacek Utko. He is a former architect who has headed up the redesign of several European newspapers and the results have been phenomenal. His point is that if the newspaper industry is to survive, it must be redesigned on every level. It’s the visual appeal, efficiency of communication, quality of content, and layout, all working together. And all of these things working together are what design is really about.
New Business Cards
I have just gotten my own personal business cards printed. I had a bit of an ordeal finding a good printer that would print them at a reasonable price, but I found one – Printing Plus in Roswell. They did a great job.
The cards I designed are very simple, but I just wanted something eye catching that had some contact information. They only have my phone number, email address and website address on them. I left the living address off because I don’t want them to be made useless if I move, and I didn’t find having it on there to be necessary. I have posted some pictures below. Let me know what you think.
Helvetica. It works.
This
This is
This is my
This is my block
This is my block of
This is my block of Helvetica.
I just got through watching ‘Helvetica’, a documentary about the history and culture behind the font Helvetica. I actually learned quite a bit from the film. Some of the people interviewed I’ve heard of for so many years, such as Eric Spiekermann. And to see them talk about typography and graphic design was especially intimidating since many of them are German and Swiss and can speak better English than I can. But regardless, I will never look at the font the same again.
Even if you are not a graphic designer and you are reading this wondering what Helvetica is, or why you should care, it has had a major impact on Western culture. It is literally everywhere, for both good reasons and not so good reasons. It is a modern font and encompasses the modern age in its aesthetic and context. I have honestly not experimented with it that much. I’m not sure if that’s a sign of my immaturity as a designer or that I leaped ahead and am therefore more mature as a designer. I don’t know. But seeing the film and learning about this significant creation in my industry is making me think about revisiting it. And what may be more important than that would be for me to revisit typography in general. Maybe for my next website design, I will simplyl start with text only, and build around it. Such a simple idea, yet so mind altering. Maybe it’s just the refreshing change my approach needs.
A recommendation was given by one of the designers in the film for all of the inexperienced and/or bad designers out there. When in doubt, use Helvetica. At the worst, you will be using an aesthetically pleasing type face. I thought this was kind of funny, but then when I thought about all of the strip malls I had seen with signs loaded with logos using Papyrus and Comic Sans, I decided he was right. So yes – when in doubt, use Helvetica. But once you get the hang of it, expand and explore the use of other high quality fonts. That is, after you delete Papyrus and Comic Sans from your harddrive forever.
So if you want to see what I mean by Helvetica being completely ingrained in Western culture, go an entire day taking note of every time you see the Helvetica font used somewhere. Develop an opinion as to where you think it fits or doesn’t fit.
A New Year, A New Beginning
Yes it’s cliché, but in this case, there is no other way to say it.
We all have something new that we vow to do for the new year. For some it’s to exercise more. Others may decide to start flossing. I decided it was time to leave my job of four years at an ad agency to freelance full time.
It may seem like a crazy decision. The economy isn’t doing so great and people are being laid off. But I felt that I needed to spread my wings a little bit. Freelancing is a challenge, but I feel up to it. I’ve got some new tools under my belt and some exciting projects coming up. And there’s nothing like working from home. This has been a dream of mine for a while, and I’m confident that I can make it work.
If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed that I’ve revamped the site, hopefully for the better. It started off as an experiment, inspired by Jason Santa Maria, who is promoting the idea of treating dynamic web content more like printed media. This is tough to do. Designing for the web has its own set of challenges that make this a lot harder than it sounds. I had a lot of other ideas that I’ve had to scrap for technical reasons and time constraints, and I may gradually add some of them. But I had to say enough was enough, and go ahead with the launch.
You might be wondering why this is necessary. The truth is that print, especially magazines and newspapers, are in the middle of a mass migration to the web. This is being accelerated by the current economy. So the challenge for us designers is to learn how to make this transition, and make it a good one.
Like I said, this site is a bit of an experiment. I’ve used some techniques that I’ve never used before, and it may not display correctly in Internet Explorer. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. But the techniques and framework that I’ve implemented should allow me to create posts and pages that aren’t stuck in the traditional ‘post in left column, static links in right column’ layout. I can be a little more creative with the layout of my posts. So we’ll see where this goes.