Step 1: Go to MyFonts.com

You’ll see the logo on the left. You are in the right place!

Step 2: Start searching for your favorite font

Look on the far right for the search box and start typing.

Step 3: Get some search help

MyFonts.com will assist you in finding what you are looking for.

Step 4: Review your search criteria in the results

Notice how you could have searched for a string, like “neue” or “bold” or “old style” or even “script” and MyFonts.com would have given results based on those partials searches. Try it out to narrow your results if need be.

Step 5: Review the results for the right typeface or font

In this case, since we searched for Helvetica Neue, we got a link to the entire typeface, not just a font within it.

Step 6: Review the different fonts in the typeface

Step 7: Change the default text

Type in something different and change the font size. If you blow up the text to the max size, there is a brief lag while the display redraws the font at the new size. Fonts done really big in this tool look fantastic.

Step 8: Reset the values

If you play around and get the text all screwy and font size all out of whack, just click here to reset everything. The baseline texts are pangrams, which give you a nice random selection of letters other than “a quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”.

Step 9: Play with ligatures, fractions, and more

Step 10: View a font up close

You can get a very, very detailed full page sample sheet of each font in a typeface family. It goes from 144pt all the way down to 10pt.

Step 11: Buy a font or typeface!

If you see what you like, you are ready to make a purchase! MyFonts.com makes sure it doesn’t get much easier than that.

So, visit MyFonts.com and poke around and have fun.

I had the idea to take some classic typefaces and combine them with some illustrative elements for no other reason than it sounded interesting, even a little mischievous—just the kind of off–beat thing like I do for entertainment. It feels a bit like graffiti—scribbling all over an otherwise–perfect uppercase Helvetica Bold. But it was so fun! I may or may not do more in a series like this, but if you think you can get some mileage out of either the idea or the source files themselves, have at it! I have provided the sample below long with flattened PDF of the vectors, ready for you to further play with if you so choose. Have fun!

(FYI UPDATE: this post was inspired by Sketchetica by Hiekka Graphics. Visit MyFonts.com if this post makes no sense to you!)

And now, I present to you, Smilevetica for viewing or for downloading as a PDF:

The graphics are ugly, but they are straight from the main Google search page, reduced a tad to fit the page.

My personal favorites are:

• graphic designers…can’t draw
• why designers can’t think
• how do graphic designers dress (one pant leg at at time?)
• why do designers use helvetica

Under the “why does adobe…” section, notice how there are no “…make such cool stuff” suggestions. You might want to pay a visit to Dear Adobe after reading this.

• How to create an iPhone/iPod Application: Lesson 1, the basics
  A great article with an easy app that is filled with great comments in the code. Very verbose, non-techie language. If you want to see what’s under the hood of simple app, here you go.
• iPhone Developer Center at Apple
  You’ll be spending a lot of time here getting great content to help you develop an app. You’ll find Getting Started documents, the Application Programming Guide, Objective-C primers, help working on your first app, and lots of sample code to mess around with. Don’t forget the forums you get access to after you pay the registration fee.
• How to write an iPhone app
  This article is a gem if you are really a clueless newbie. It’s a short, non-technical overview of the entire process which covers how to get started with an idea, right through to the approval process to get your app in the App Store. If you have no understanding of how iPhone app development works from soup to nuts, this is the one article you should read today.
• Writing code for the iPhone. How?
  Writing software is a very human process. This poor sod seems to understand that quite well. With humility like this, he’s bound to succeed, for he begins his request for information in this manner: “How does a moron like me learn how to write code for the iPhone?”. If you identify with this meek attitude, read the short dialogue. It’s not going to teach you much code, but I think this banter reveals a lot of the paradigm you’ll encounter as you struggle forward in your development efforts.
• Stanford University iTunes U “iPhone Application Development”
  Open iTunes and go to the last tab on the top of the iTunes Store front page called “iTunes U”. Look for or search for Stanford University free lectures in video or audio format. A real gem.
• How to Write Your First iPhone Program (PDF)
  A short, pithy, smart article on how to write the simplest iPhone app that has one button, and nothing more. All the basics to meditate on are here. Basic, indeed, but necessary. Nice big visuals including screen shots of XCode, the Apple iPhone and Mac development platform, are included so you can see the development process in action.
• My first iPhone application
  This is a GREAT read! It is like a diary of what happened along the way from the idea of an app to the approval of the app in the App Store. It’s as much a human interest story as there can be in the world of programming. From an emotional perspective, reading success stories (as in developing an app and getting it on the Store) like this is the fuel you need to make it over the hump of learning how to do iPhone application development.
• iPhone Programming Tutorial – Connecting Code to An Interface Builder View
  This is fantastic hands-on tutorial of what is involved to get Interface Builder to wire up some buttons for you in your app. It’s long, has lot’s of screen shots, and there are excellent comments at the bottom of the article. The comments are great because they really help you understand the mindset needed to program.

During one exceptionally busy time some years ago, when I used to manage the design and pre-press department of a local printing company, we got a hold of a then-new but very troublesome direct-to-plate laser printer. The boss was very excited about the addition to the department, and was convinced that for spot color budget jobs not requiring more anything than 133 lpi, it would be great. Well, it was great in concept but no so great on execution, the product being so new and quite hard to configure correctly.

Without going into great detail about the technical difficulties I encountered getting this machine to play nicely with the rest of our Apple ecosystem, I’ll jump right to the dream sequence. Anyone who has struggled with printer drivers for expensive niche printing products may well know what kind of painful experience getting something new to work right, all the time, can be.

So, the dream: I was trying to get a job to print on this new machine. I could see the lights blinking, hear the sound of printer motors and gears working up and winding down, and smell that familiar hot-electric smell of static charges and hot plastic. But no print. But then, in the strange ways that dreams let you do things, I could suddenly see inside the printer. Then I could see out of the printer from inside the printer. That little sliver of daylight was my goal – to get out through that horizontal opening just ahead, just beyond the paper rollers and dust skirt. I finally made it out of the printer, as it were in dreamland, into my waiting hands now that I was me again, outside the printer. But then, I looked in dismay at the output. After all that waiting, struggling, stressing, and finagling, I was in fact not the image I thought I was going to be. Yes, I was the designer but I was also the finished output on paper, however those things happen. I in fact was not a hi-res TIFF. I really thought I was press-ready! Instead, after all that work, I was simply a lo-res TIFF, a proxy-image, an FPO — just an EPS preview image. There was no more time — I had to go to press as-is. I was lo-res. I fooled myself and everyone around me. Boy, would my boss be mad, and so would the anxious client with the deadline. I was a fraud.

And then I awoke.

I was immediately depressed! I had to get up and go to work and confront that stupid machine who had invaded my dreams and assaulted my self-worth!

Well, there is a happy ending. I mastered that stupid machine. We got excellent quality, low-cost direct-to-plate vinyl output that saved our department and company a good deal in labor and expenses.

What is the moral of the story? I don’t want to get too philosophical, but there is a lessons for designers in all this: don’t give up. When a project, client, computer, printer, vendor, or whatever gives you a hard time, just keep on going. You’ll eventually figure it out if you don’t quit. Most people don’t know how hard being a designer is, nor what goes into the daily grind of a typical designer. We are a multi-faceted, multi-talented, multi-tasking, and multi-tempered lot, us designers. From technical issues to personality conflicts to creative blocks, we deal with a wider variety of challenges on a daily basis than many other professions.

Remember, as a designer, it’s easy to get beat down at times, and be tempted to think you are nothing but a lo-res TIFF, a scanner preview image, an inkjet draft, a watermarked FPO stock photo image, an overly compressed JPG from the web, or even (gulp) a clipart of an outdated computer monitor from the Corel Draw “freebies” CD. But don’t you believe it. Each one of us is a masterpiece, no matter what the printer says.

Did you use a template provided by your printing service?

If you are using an online quick printer, you have to be sure follow the templates they provide perfectly, or you will get poor results. If your printer provides, say, a PSD template for a business card, either use their template or at the least compare your dimensions and bleed lines to make sure they are the same. The most common mistake with templates is missing your bleeds, so triple check this. The results of bad bleed trims are wasted time, wasted money, and damaged client relationships.

Did you include fonts?

While many print shops can work directly with PDFs with embedded fonts, many print jobs still require source files from InDesign, Quark, etc., along with all the attached images and fonts. Now that designers in fact do get to submit more self-contained PDFs than ever to print shops, it’s that much easier to create an “old fashioned” zip file of a print job and forget include the basics. Like fonts! And never assume that your printers “Garamond” is going to be your “Garamond”. For instance compare “Adobe Garamond Pro” to “ITC Garamond”. One of those typefaces is a dream and the other is a nightmare. I’ll let you google that one. Don’t trust anyone’s font substitution judgment calls but your own!

Are you submitting the right PDF format to your print shop?

Many print shops have requirements, based on their software, for a certain format of PDF. It very much depends on the type of job you are running and what machine or software package your printer will process the job on. Don’t assume! Give the pre-press department a call and find out exactly what they need from you before you lose time after the fact, or they just print what you sent and you get unexpected results. Overly-compressed JPG files are easy to miss in the wrong format PDF. What your screen might hide, the press reveals, in terms of poor quality images.

Did you set up your bleeds correctly?

If you are printing edge to edge color, you will have had to set up bleeds correctly. The size of the bleed is completely dependent on the type of job and the size and type of paper it will print on. Don’t assume your arbitrary bleed amount is enough or too much. Talk to the pre-press department or your print shop sales rep. While many print shops can fix incorrect settings, sometimes they don’t know if they can until they try, and you might end up with extra pre-press charges or delays because your bleeds were not to spec for that job. Save money and time by setting bleeds to accurate specs.

Do you have stray layers in your documents?

It’s best to remove any unused layers in your Illustrator or InDesign files before making PDFs or packaging source files for your print shop. It’s very easy to miss having turned on a layer by mistake and not notice it until you get your proof back from the shop. Extra guides, random “clip board” elements you were saving, text layers you were messing around with, etc., all can get turned on by mistake by you or the pre-press department. The sneaky little mistakes on stray layers aren’t caught sometimes until the presses have stopped rolling. Ouch!

Did you rip your PDF to PhotoShop before sending it to your printer?

This is one final fool-proof way to make sure the printer will see what you intend them to see. Ripping a lo-res PDF into PhotoShop is like having an unbiased third party evaluate your files. Flip through each page, if possible, and look at the raster version up close. You’d be surprised what you might find using this method of proofing. It’s different enough so that your eyes might catch something here that they wouldn’t normally catch from inside InDesign or Illustrator, or whatever other program you might be using.

Did you double check your die cuts?

This is one you want to be very sure of. Either use a die template provided by your printer or from a reputable source online, and make sure the printer has double-checked them, especially if you have modified them. What could be more expensive than incorrectly cutting a freshly-printed pile of, for instance, presentation folders, with the incorrect die?

Did you use rich black or regular black?

There are lots of articles on the net about rich blacks and regular blacks. Make sure you know what you’ve used in your design. Clicking a black color chip in a color palette does not mean you have selected a rich black, or that you have selected the correct rich black. Is your rich black warm, cool, or neutral? Please find out before you print!

Did you use CMYK-colored text with small font sizes?

Depending on the font, you want to make sure you have not applied complex CMYK colors to small type. A 9pt Garamond italic is simply not going to print nicely in a color comprised of all four process colors due to print registration limitations. Small type should be made of one or two colors at most. Very small or very delicate type should be made of one color at most. The same applies to knocked out type. Very small or very delicate type should not be knocked out (colored as “white” or “paper”) in richly colored CMYK backgrounds because it will be blurry in any case on a good number, if not all, of the print pieces. Printing is simply not accurate enough to prevent registration and dot gain from blurring those tiny strokes and shapes under a certain point size.

Did you check your varnish layer?

It’s worth triple-checking. You may have moved the type layer over which the varnish type layer originally sat. Or maybe you changed the font size or altered kerning just a touch and now the varnish copy you made earlier does not line up. You want your varnish or aqueous coat layers to be spot on, not spot off.

Did you check if any imported graphics have extra spot colors?

When using third-party art like native AI files or EPS files, it’s easy to overlook any spot colors that those files may have been created with. Though you may not have any spot colors in your layout, the imported spot colors will trigger the pre-press department to generate a plate for that color when you are not expecting it. While a press is not going to start printing a 5 color job (CMYK plus Spot) without your approval of course, it’s a needless waste of time, and may cost you pre-press charges. Proof your files carefully and convert any problematic vector files to a CMYK PSD or JPG at 100% of the size you need them to be, at 300 dpi, and re-import them. It’s not an optimal solution, but is the fastest way to fix the problem especially if you can’t edit the source file.

Did you double check to make sure all of your placed graphics are up-to-date?

If you work on a team, you want to make sure anyone working on imported graphics got their latest update accounted for. If they changed the size of something and you didn’t update the display, you could end up with a design gaffe that you catch in the proof you get back from the printer. It’s better to make sure everything is updated before it leaves your studio.

?

Well I hope you enjoyed this reminder. There are a dozen more things you could check over, but these are the ones I often double check personally because I have indeed been the victim of my own forgetfulness. What are some things you check before going to press? What are some things you have forgotten? Comment below!

This doesn’t need to happen to you again. All you need to know is a few of the methods of a dyed-in-the-wool time-wasting information leach. You can identify and avoid them and get back to real work.

So who are they and what do they do? Watch out for the following behaviors — they are great indicators they are not going to award you any business no matter how much due diligence you put into their Request for Proposal:

They ask too many detailed or technical questions

This type of potential client is asking you too many questions about technical minutia from either “What font will you use?” to “What plugin in WordPress will allow us to do XYZ?” This kind of client is looking for, and getting, free consulting out of you if you answer their questions beyond a low-level, reasonable set of questions.

They ask for too many changes in scope in the RFP

You are being snookered if the potential client comes back to you somehow “smarter” than they were in your last call. They suddenly want to add something you knew they couldn’t have known about in your last email or call. Essentially, the potential client has gotten free consulting from another designer or firm, and is playing your knowledge against theirs. They play firm against firm for free information they would otherwise have to pay for.

They are impersonal

This is a sure sign they aren’t really interested in what you do, and the value you bring, to their web or graphic design project. You are a number, the project is already awarded, and the potential client simply has to have a certain number of responses to fill some interal quota for RFP’s.

They ask for spec work

If they ask for “some samples of your design work”, you have to wonder if they have been to your website at all. If they have not reviewed your online portfolio, just stop now and don’t waste another minute.

They don’t know the basic details about your company

I got this one recently after a “we’d love to work with you” call: they didn’t know where in the country we were located. Time to hang up.

They ask for too many phone meetings

Again, these types of potential clients know that they can educate themselves at your expense. They have no conscience about wasting your time. It’s amazing people like this have the nerve to call. They are armed with just enough information to be dangerous, and try to get you to fill the blanks for them. Once you sense this is the case, it’s time to say goodbye!

They want you to talk to their IT person “for a minute”

While this isn’t necessarily related to just the RFP problem, it’s one to look out for in the bidding process. This kind of “IT” person simply wants to pick your brain and ask you if you have ever heard of some obscure open source CMS or if you have ever been to so and so’s website. They will offer you some advice you didn’t ask for. Lovely. What this means is, that even if you do get the project, this person will be “helping” by “bringing things up” to the project leader (like how the background color has a non web safe color in the gradient, and that you should be using XHTML and not HTML 4.0 Transitional, or that your PNG is not compatible with MSPaint) and essentially drag all profit potential for the project right down the drain. This person has made a career out of not knowing how to actually do anything (since learning FrontPage in 1995), and sticking themselves in the middle of every new project that comes along. As long as the project managers know less than they do, they have job security. Stop now and hang up!

Further Reading:

• RFPs are not for underdogs
• Top 8 Sins For RFPs
• Suppliers Ignore “Rigged” RFP’s

While Providence, RI did not make the cut, I take comfort that we are sandwiched right in the middle of these great cities. In fact you can’t get to one from the other without passing through Providence on I95. I’ve been to all these cities, and while they all have vibrant arts communities, the main factor in determining the list was average wages compared to the cost of living on a per-city basis, along with overall employment opportunities for creative professionals.

Finding good graphic design talent is very easy in all these cities (including Providence). A great place to start is to simply google “graphic designer” and then add the city name, like this: “graphic designer providence“. Google will give you a local map based on your location (if Google can tell where you are based on your IP address from your internet service provider) and show you the closest matches to your location.

Right below the local results, you will see links to graphic designer and artist portfolios, mixed in with some garbage results from out-of-town companies that try and trick local searchers into considering their businesses by using bait-and-switch page titles on their sites, like “Rhode Island Graphic Designers”, which is really just a computer-generated boilerplate page usually filled with ads for a thousand other things. If you carefully read the links before clicking, you can learn to tell a real graphic design firm portfolio web page or graphic design blog from a spammy, link-baiter type of website.

The legitimate listings at the top of any search results you may find (not the obviously bogus results) are usually the result of the hard work of the firm to optimize their site to win your attention, favor, and business. You will notice for instance that yours truly ranks highly in the results from the link above for Providence. Have fun browsing the results – lot’s of wonderful designers have great websites in all the New England metro areas, and there are many to chose from. Find the right designer for you – and don’t give up looking until you find that right match!

Without further ado, here are the 4 cities that made the cut:

• #24. Hartford, CT
• #21. Portland, ME
• #20. Boston, MA
• #3. Bridgeport, CT

Please click through to see information about each city, including a brief overview of each city, average salary (for all industries), and cost of living rank.

Ok, now that you are here I’m going to tell you upfront I’m not actually going to publish a list of annoying graphic designers. Instead, you are going to publish the list! In your head!

Hey, you already started but you haven’t gotten the instructions yet! Wait up!

I want you to read the following bullets and see for yourself what names appear magically in your minds eye and project it onto each line below:

Top 10 annoying graphic design bloggers (from the depths of your subconscious):

1. ________
2. ________
3. ________
4. ________
5. ________
6. ________
7. ________
8. ________
9. ________
10. ________

There, you admitted it to yourself. You let yourself in on the truth. Now it seems so obvious! What happened to these bloggers? Try to put them in order from the most annoying to the least most annoying now. Who is number one on the list. Ouch!

(Psssst! Hey you, Number One on this list, you might know who you are as you read this! Uh-oh!)

(Pssst again! Did you really think your name might have been on an actual list like this? Yikes, you need to keep reading, mon frere…)

Now dear reader, why do you think you feel this way? Why do you have any of those bloggers in your RSS feed, and why do you feverishly check them over and over for “new” content? Perhaps we’ve been hoodwinked! Is it possible?

Yes, it’s possible. And it’s a trend! But let’s dig deeper.

Now for a tougher question: What do all these ageing-design-rock-star bloggers on the list you just created have in common? Why did you subconsciously list out a few of them so easily? Let me suggest a few reasons:

1. You discern a pattern of shallow content at one point you thought was exciting.
2. You were hoping their mojo would rub off on you, but now you realize maybe you don’t want that mojo.
3. They borrow a little too freely from other sources. You know that feeling – “…didn’t I read that before somewhere?”
4. You can tell they kind of cut corners. You can’t tell exactly how, but you get the sense a lot of work didn’t go into this or that post, but that post somehow – in the title or the stock images or the scant text – tries to come off more original or content-laden than it really is. How’d they do that?
5. You sense the blogger revealed, crack by crack, that the blog is really all about them and that the “giving” either has stopped or waned. Honestly, it looks like their best content is behind them.
6. You feel slightly duped.
7. They have posted several 3 sentence posts in the last few months that simply state something obvious and then ask for your opinion.
8. They make list after list of freely available content. You are hooked, and now it turns out that about 1 in 10 lists they post are the result of actual work, not surfing and collecting the most obvious and easy content. They don’t add any value or insight to these kinds of posts. You think to yourself, “hey, I could have done that…”.
9. It’s not clear to you what the point of their content is anymore.
10. You know, their posts just aren’t showing craftsmanship or desire or creativity.
11. You read their latest post and immediately thought “They made a post about what? Are you kidding?”
12. At one point, they had a really unique voice and a made distinguished contribution to the graphic design community on the web. Now, for some reason, their voice is gone and all we have left is the vague memory that this blog was cool at one point.
13. And on and on…

From scrappy upstart blog to doltish sales-pitch drivel-holder

This tranformation from exciting blogger to something less design-worthy will be a phenomenon for several major design blogs this year. Blogs that move in this direction are becoming like…magazines. Or worse, they become little more than ad platforms that serve up lackluster content and along with an ad for an e-book or some affiliate link to a WordPress theme disguised as commentary.

How often in the past, for those who have been around a few years, did you rush out to get the new issue of this-or-that design magazine only to realize it was 95% fluff, mostly ads, and the one article that was most promising from the hype actually turned out to be kind of shallow? And you felt kind of robbed of your $7.95, though you did willingly fork it over.

Well, I stopped buying those magazines. When blogging came along with the rising tide of the net, many of those magazines evaporated because economics simply revealed the truth of what they were – a rip-off – and people stopped buying them.

It’s expensive and time-consuming to come up with quality content. That is why magazines will base an entire issue on one or two good articles and fill the rest with drivel. It makes economic sense to hoodwink readers at the newsstand. And this reality is slowly dawning on some better-known graphic design blogs. You know it’s true. Sad, really. But what to do?

How to rescue your favorite graphic design blogger from utter blog-destruction

I hope some big graphic design bloggers (you KNOW who you are!) out there find there way to better, more honest and verdant content pastures this coming year. Have you lost your first love, love? Pastures where real work and real creativity and originality come back and take the place of quick-burn flashy titles and cheap rehashed content and pointless lists. Lists can be great, don’t get me wrong. But enough shallow, goofy list posts and content cleverly scrubbed and disguised from other blogs and sources already! Go back to square one and learn to give again!

The next time your blogger-hero posts a lame article, just lovingly suggest you know they can do better. Be kind, be courteous, be constructive. Be positive, but be real and don’t let them get away with it. Remind them of why you subscribed way back when in the first place!

P.S. My two favorite foods are in fact Marshmallow Fluff and Marshmallow Peeps, I must mention. Next favorite would be Circus Peanuts and Licorice, but I digress.

Additional Resources

• The Top 50 graphic design blogs – David Airey

But first a quick intro: my first taste of anything CMS-like was Dreamweaver 1.0 from back in mid 1997. The “templates” feature (those pesky .dwt files) were amazing in their day for those of us not sure what an .ASP page was. Then followed ColdFusion and databases. Then ActionScript and Flash. Then followed PHP and more databases. Then Mambo. Then Joomla. Then several other CMS experiments including some homebrewed ones. Then sadness. Then Expression Engine and some joy. Then WordPress 2.8. Then Hybrid and a rebirth of web development joy. OK – done with that. You get the picture now.

So what is so great about the Hybrid theme framework? Here are 10 reasons you should check it out. No, I’m not on commission (like some, ahem, other framework situations out there). I’m an unpaid third-party end-user who pays his own way. But let’s get started.

10 Reasons to use the Hybrid Framework for WordPress

1. Support
   Justin Tadlock has provided nothing short of exceptional support. Other forum members know this, and fully well understand the time and effort he puts into running the support forums and keeping up on Hybrid development. So forum members also do a great job helping out with support issues. The community is fantastic. All my support questions are at least responded to in a matter of hours, and not one has trailed off without being resolved. When you log in to the support area and your profile, the first thing you see is a list of your support questions in a super-clean list, with the time of the last update anyone has made to your request, along with their name. I love this feature because I can see my progress from the first question (how naive!) up to the present (a little less naive…). I find that on this or that tough topic, manh times I want to go back to the very-thorough answers that are provided for me and re-read. More often than not, Justin or someone else will provide a link to an external resource, usually one that needs to be read carefully. All of this astuteness makes one want to work hard not to post superfluous support questions and prove to the community that I can actually read. If it were only so on all forums .
2. Skeleton
   This is my favorite thing about Hybrid. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are a CSS Hero, it most certainly is. Skeleton is a Hybrid child theme with ZERO CSS defined. However, everything that can be defined (all the classes) are in the main CSS file ready and waiting for you to fill in the blank. A unique approach Justin takes is using careful indentation to organize the classes hierarchically, which makes scanning them even easier. So, as a developer, all you need to do is pop open Firefox with Firebug installed, hover over an element you want to style and it get the line number in the CSS. You pop over to your favorite editor, make a change in 2 seconds and refresh. Basically, you can take a simple PSD web design through this process in an hour or two and have a working template ready to go. Wow! This blog (bonfx.com) is a Hybrid child theme developed from Skeleton, by the way.
3. CSS
   In addition to how the CSS is laid out (see “Skeleton” above), Hybrid also supplies ready-made access, commented out by default, to Eric Meyer’s Reset, The Holy Grail layout, several pixel-based line-height typography solutions, along with the option to include the most basic set of typography and formatting of the basic Hybrid theme. There is simply no way to lose if you know your way around CSS. It’s just a time saver. Never waste time on these repetitive web development chores again!
4. Hybrid Themes
   Hybrid is a framework, but comes with a default theme called Hybrid. So, there is the Hybrid Framework with a base theme called Hybrid. But, there are also another half-dozen incredibly high-quality child themes ready and available for free. Hybrid News is very popular and is a much sought after layout. All of the templates are better quality than most templates you will come across. The code is lean and mean. They all share a sophisticated approach to typography and feature a tasteful and welcome use of white space in the layouts. Ahh…no gratuitous transparencies and glittery stuff cluttering up a too-busy layout!
5. Child Themes
   Creating child themes are incredibly easy thanks to WordPress 2.9 combined with Hybrid’s unique development approach. You can take any of the themes (see “Skeleton” above) and quickly and easily create a variation of it without having to modify any of the source code. For instance, if you like Hybrid News child theme, but want to change several things around, following some simple instructions will set you up with your own “My Theme” ready to install in a development environment, and ready for you to customize away.
6. Hybrid Hooks & Filters
   WordPress is known for it’s easy-to-use hooks and filters, once you know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, I can’t go into that here. Google it. But if you do know what they are, know that Hybrid offers many more unique hooks and filters to speed up the process of customizing your site to your hearts content. Hybrid is about reducing the amount of time spent coding to get to great customizations quickly. Take a look at this list here and you’ll see what I mean: Hybrid Hooks and Hybrid Filters.
7. Hybrid Widgets
   One of the great features of WordPress is it’s widgets. It makes adding standard types of content to primary and secondary  and other areas very easy. Hybrid takes and one-ups many of the stock WordPress widgets and adds a slew of features based on standard WordPress functions. Widget Logic is also available for all of the widgets, which allows you to control when and where and how each widget shows up using simple WordPress conditional statements, right in the widget flyout. So simple! Saves a lot of time!
8. Search Engine Optimization
   There is no need for all kinds of plugins to optimize each post for search engines. While there are some great plugins out there for sure, Hybrid makes the need for them pretty much moot, as all the SEO functionality you are going to need (after your excellently-written and original content on a topic other than “ipods”, “how to make money blogging”, etc.) to get good site rankings is built right into the post form. It’s all right there. Install Hybrid and take a look! You don’t need anything else except good content and some goals.
9. Free & Inexpensive at the same time
   Hybrid and it’s child themes are free for the taking. The code is GPL, and Justin Tadlock is vocally and thoroughly for the open source community. But what differentiates Hybrid from some of the other commercial CMS frameworks is that while the code is free, it’s support you have to pay for. But, a full year membership is only $25 bucks. The fee seems like it should be a lot more considering how much goes into Hybrid and what you get out of the support forums. I’m more than willing to pay that annually without thinking about it. It was clear from my time spent noodling around the site and the nonmember support area that the paid support was serious and high quality. It was also clear that Hybrid was a very serious product. I spent the bucks early in 2009 and honestly have to say it’s the best $25 bucks on anything web related I have ever spent in my 15 years of doing web development. I’ve paid ten-time as much for other licenses, and paid even more for other software packages and proprietary solutions. I’ve paid a lot more to consultants over the years too. Nothing beats, for me, so far, my investment in Hybrid. I encourage you to drop the bucks and jump in the deep end today. You won’t be disappointed. But if you are, feel free to complain to me here on the blog .
10. I’m going to pull an old trick here and suggest you re-read reason #1 again. It’s so important, I wanted to mention it twice.

If you have any thoughts about any other WordPress theme frameworks to balance out these objective views, please post them below. I’d love to hear more about the other framework available, and how they compare to Hybrid.

Additional Resources

• Hybrid theme for Wordpress

Rhode Island is a very diverse place, and each design firm below has it’s own unique niche, style, and design process. Take a look! Rhode Island has enough design savvy to meet the design needs any business might have.

Rhode Island Graphic Design Agencies:

1. Malcolm Grear Designers
2. Black Door
3. Mad Creative
4. Ninedot
5. The Fenton Group
6. Michael Boardman
7. Glad Works
8. Imaj Communications
9. Speery Communications
10. MDG
11. Logica
12. eDesign
13. B. Boyle Design
14. BER Inc.

And of course your’s truly here at BonFX…

Enjoy!

1. My first assumption is that most logos were going to be cheap copies of the Toys R Us logo. That was not true for the most part. A few logos exhibit perhaps some influence, but it’s muted, if present at all.
2. A second assumption was that I was going to come across many unseemly uses of Comic Sans or other derivative fonts. We did find, as expected, a few child-handwriting type logos but they evoke none of the ill-will that Comic Sans does. However, we did find some Tekton (a second-cousin of Comic Sans) and Mistral (The snazzy brush script equivalent of Comic Sans) related entries. See if you can spot them below.
3. The most surprising finding was the use of elegant and understated logotypes with sophisticated typography. There are quite a few minimal and beautifully-crafted treatments below.

The wide array of design treatments reveals that the children’s toy and clothing market is very diverse and segmented. Since children are in every socio-economic level, it follows that that stores catering to different demographics will have different branding strategies and retail experiences to accommodate them. Of course this is obvious in hindsight.

If anything, my assumptions reveal the masterful job that Toys R Us (and offshoot stores) has done in dominating the market (in my mind at least)!

The research and findings were very interesting to us, and we hope for you as well.

What do you think? Please comment below…

Typefaces have personalities. If their personalities don’t match the essence of your business or message or text, you can create a conflict which distracts your audience.

We had fun below creating some absurd and extreme examples of bad font choices to make a point, but they are based – at least in spirit – on examples we’ve come across over the years. Hyperbole? Indeed. Fun? Of course!

So browse through these lovingly-typeset typographic wonders and consider font choices a little more closely on your next design project.

NOTE: Please put your coffee down before reading the commentary. You’ve been warned.

“Softer please…I said softer. SOFTER! SOFT…AHH-GATHA!!!”

Like, maybe we could, like go for a ride later? Or like, right now? M’kay?

Typographer you are not.

I can see it now. Ashley is going to fill out my tax forms with multi-colored pen. Maybe even one of the metallic kind that bleed through the page, but look all shiny on the front.

I find your request…difficult. Just give me a minute, k?

Yoga mats, bamboo incense sticks, and mirror walls…could be dangerous.

Well, they say the cobbler’s kids don’t get any shoes.

I must hurry up and get my space pegged and claim an adirondack chair in the shade. But first I have to run to the bar to place my drink order. Shoot, look at the line!

Seem’s like Amanda is hiding something. An ulterior motive?

We could deduce that Dr. Fangser Brown gives each client an application of his own unique style of cosmetic upgrading.

Ok, this example here is simply…a disconnect. There is no connection whatever between the personality and expected usage of the font with the business name or the industry of the business. Honestly now – how many times have you seen that before? How many times on the way to work today? How many examples in today’s mail?

Hmm…I don’t feel so comfortable. This font sends the exact opposite feeling of a fluffy pillow. Angular, harsh, and generally uncomfy.

I’ll let you ponder this one…

No.

This is an entirely offensive and inappropriate font choice.

What a shocking suggestion! Is it safe? Can I take my hair-dryer in to warm up the water?

Thank goodness we found a Computer Shack that was still open tonight! I need a new wall wart power supply for my Texas Instruments TRS-80, as well as a 50 pack of C-size batteries for my remote control toy tank!

“Mommy, I don’t like this park. Why does there have to be old, yucky, band-aids all over the slide?”

This is gonna hurt. I know it.

I think maybe we misapplied a little something here…

Hadst thou not heardest of thither new-fangled tecknologies? A wee fowl didst tell me just now. But pray tell, what exactly is “Web 2.o”? And wither dirst it goe?

This is wrong on all the right levels to indicate that an article titled like this is not worth a click.

A lawyer who thinks he’s a comic – what a joke!

More Resources:

• Choosing a typeface timelapse – Brian Hoff (note: very cool video! check it out!)

One thing seems clear: most of these clothing store logos, many of which are from world-renowned companies, are very simple. There is not a reliance on a logomark, in general. Rather, the emphasis is on the logotype. Classic typefaces, or variations on them, are by far the most popular choice. The bigger the price tag, the simpler the logo?

It seems that in fashion, the brand is the storefront window, or the webpage, or the catalog, but in any case is not the logo. The logo in these cases, as evidenced by the most famous examples below, has a job to get out of the way. The logo’s job is to tell you the name of the store – to get you to say the name to yourself perhaps, to hear yourself saying that name and get you to picture yourself wearing the brand. These kinds of minimal logotypes allow a certain kind of customer-projection on to them, and allow for changes in style (which is cyclical and unending) without losing label recognition. Therefore, fashion logotypes must by fashion-style agnostic, within their fashion niche.

Logos are also used on clothing labels, and in many cases need to be stitched or embroidered at small sizes with few colors. No doubt, this is a significant factor in their design.

Many logotypes below, in a sense, are not visual perhaps as much as they are auditory. The clothing itself can’t be distracted from, and so, these logos provide excellent functionality to that effect. The real branding is displayed on the racks and shelves and tables, where presentation is everything.

Click through to see each retailer’s website.

My favorites below, in order, are:

• Prada
• J. Crew
• Alexander McQueen

How about yours?

Clothing Store Logos

Remember, a typeface is a whole set of fonts with all its variations. For example, Helvetica Bold 12pt is a font from the Helvetica typeface. Therefore, we combine fonts, not typefaces since you have to pick a particular font from each typeface you want to combine.

1. Choosing Type Combinations
   Nice article with a lot of graphics. “Listen to your eyes” is great advice.
2. Matching fonts
   A longer, patient read. “It is worth noting that professional designers rarely use something besides the simple, traditional typefaces.”
3. Best Ways to Mix and Match Fonts
   Very short with 3 good tips, one of which is: “Use Classics and Keep a List”.
4. Typefaces: that work together
   Huge mult-page list of typeface names sorted alphabetically. No graphics, but if you know what font you want to start with, you will likely find a great match or at least a great point of departure. This post shows its age, but it’s really timeless information.
5. Selecting and Combining Typefaces (PDF)
   5 page article with some nice graphics. One good tip: “try mixing serif and sans serif faces that relate to each other”.
6. 8 Bits On Combining Typefaces
   Easy-reader with eight simple points. A great reminder is “you will almost never go wrong with combining practically any sans serif type with an opposite in style serif typeface”.
7. Combine typefaces
   This article is focused on combining fonts in the context of logo design. You have to click to see the graphics (why?) but it’s worth it because the examples are very clear and demonstrate what the author is talking about.
8. 4 Rules for Combining Typefaces
   Excellent article with equally excellent graphics. Killer tip: “If you are combining different typefaces, especially in text copy, they should have similar proportions.”
9. Typeface Combinations (PDF)
   Scan of a print article with some nice principles and examples – a quick one-pager worth checking out.
10. Typeface Combinations
    Nice article with table and graphics, focused on how typeface classifications can play an important role in making good font combination choices.
11. Mixing Typefaces (PDF)
    Ah, the PDF that started it all, from 1992! An Italian designer posted this table that sorts font choices by a kind of “risk factor”. Very well done and based on solid principles. Remember though: rules are made to be broken!
12. How To Mix Fonts: Typeface Cheat Sheet
    This article is one of the better articles you can find that reference (with graphics) the PDF from #11, but provides a few additional insights and context. Read the PDF at #11 and then read this article.
13. What is the Best Way to Choose or Mix and Match Fonts?
    A simple, easy read combining and condensing many of the principles you’ve read already, if you read the 12 articles in the list up to this point. A nice tip is: “With too many different fonts you run into problems with not having enough contrast”. Contrast is key.
14. Type palettes
    Short, older article but with a few high-quality graphic examples.

And don’t forget to check out “19 top fonts in 19 top combinations” article, complete with graphics and a PDF chart to get you going!

Happy font combining!

P.S.: If you know of any other blog articles or offline resources (books chapters or magazine articles) that we could reference in this list, please comment below!

In looking at the search terms used to find my site in Google Analytics, I would occasionally notice a typo or odd phrase, along with the occasional very-random search string that somehow landed a visitor on the site. Taken on the whole, condensed from about 4000 different search strings from the last few months, the typos and odd searches make an entertaining read.

Some of the typos and strange phrases are made with some frequency due to perhaps the layout of the QWERTY keyboard. Some are just funny! Either way, I have presented them below by order of frequency and then alphabetically.

The key to getting traffic to my graphic design blog has been writing new material with a relentless focus on what people are searching for. But as you can see, I do get some visitors who end up here by mistake!

I hope this humorous list provides some insight for your own blogging adventures, if any, or at least some insight into human nature and how people use search.

I have provided some commentary on most of these because it was too fun not to!

1. freelace graphic design portfolio
   Might want to check near your shoelace for that…
2. how to get graphic design work over 50
   Pretend you are 30 and see what happens.
3. what happens when you print a image that is 72 dpi
   It comes out of the printer looking really bad. Take an look close up…
4. can i print a 72 dpi image
   I think you mean “may I print…”
5. david airey font
   He doesn’t have a font, but he does have a designer hat and socks.
6. graphic design fail
   And why does my site come up for this search?
7. +”freelance” +”graphic design” +”what to charge”
   Could you be more specific?
8. 21th graphic design
   That’s easy. Just look for the 22th and back up one.
9. abstract sketches of furniture
   If it’s abstract, how will you know you found it?
10. bai logo
    Bai! You can has logo!
11. beer typeface
    To find a beer typeface, you need beer goggles. A pint of Guiness should get you started.
12. best grapich designer
    Talk to the best lgoo desginre and I’m sure he or she kowns someneo.
13. best typohraphy fonts loho
    I hreatly suhhest hetting a new keyboard to avoid this ehrehious error.
14. best-fonts-combination
    Try the use-less-hyphen approach for much-more-accurate results.
15. can i draw graphics like google analytics
    I don’t know, can you?
16. can you get a fifth color in cymk printing
    Let’s see. CMYK = 4 color process. The answer is no (unless you mean spot color ).
17. can you print a 72 dpi image
    Test: hit print and see what happens.
18. can you print online images at 300dpi?
    This question will never, ever go away.
19. chirdlike
    You have been pwned by chirdlike reasoning.
20. converting from 72 dpi to 300 dpi to print
    No, you can’t. Please stop.
21. corate identity timeline
22. corporate advertising print calendar design portfolio
    Please be more specific…
23. corporate identi ai
    Consult your dicti aie first.
24. cymk and you get a fifth color printing
    CMYK and you get four colors, hence the CMY and K.
25. desiner logo portafolio
    Yes, right next to the portobello mushrooms and Chianti.
26. do most graphic designers fail?
    Why are you asking me this? What are you implying.
27. does it take longer to scan 300 dpi or 72 dpi
    I’ll give you one guess.
28. download fonte futura
    No, you can’t download free “real” fonts.
29. download top 100 fonts
    No, you can’t download free “real” fonts, still.
30. dr sketching arthouse
    Sorry, Dr. Sketching is not availabe. He’s at the Arthouse.
31. effect on project when changing project hourly rate
    You lose the client, that’s all.
32. film resolution dpi
    Film does not have resolution…it’s film.
33. font combinaties
    Try again at google.fr
34. font combonations
    “I’ll have the Helvetica burger with a side of Futura fries.”
35. font comninations
36. font most used in school
    New Century Schoolbook, silly!
37. four thing u have to do in graphic design
    R u asking me 2 du this 4 u?
38. freelance designer fail
    OK, this whole fail thing is getting my goat…
39. freelance graphic design opinions david airey
    Do you really want to know what I think of David Airey? C’mon, look at his mad logo design skillz?
40. freelance graphic designer how to invoice australia
    I would start with a $1million AU bill to the “King of Australia” and see what happens.
41. freelance graphic designer rephrase
    “Rephrase freelance designer of graphics” – how’s that?
42. frelance sma
    k, sre.
43. graphic design+pdf+do comment boxes print?
    You have 3 questions here. Try 3 different searches in a row.
44. graphic designer: it’s cool being one
    It’s definitely cool being me, and such.
45. how to draw simple easy amazing things on a blank sheet of white
    Just get a pencil and paper and draw like Leonardo – how else would you do this? Silly question…
46. how to fix a fifth color in cmyk
    Your problem is due in large part to a lack of a fifth color being present to be able to fix.
47. how to go from 72 to 300 dpi for printing
    Listen: you can’t.
48. how to print a web page in 300 dpi on paper
    You are still not listening. You can’t. For many reasons beyond the scope of…you.
49. how to print on 300 dpi
    How to print on 300 dpi what? Hmmm. Go to Staples and ask for 300 dpi paper, maybe.
50. i am going to tell you one more time
    I’m all ears!
51. i just got my degree in graphic design and i dont have a portfolio
    You may have gotten ripped off at your college.
52. i’m a graphic designer where do i get printed?
    It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing now, isn’t it!
53. i’m graphic designer and i need to get clients
    I’m client – let’s get 2 gether!
54. i’m i to old to be a graphic designer
    Yes, the heavy lifting does exclude certain age groups from this physically demanding line of work.
55. if the web is 72 dpi why are higher res images better quality
    Because higher res images are better quality, which has nothing to do with the web.
56. ikea caint
    But, ikea cain after all! I’ve see it!
57. im gonna be graphic designer
    Go get’em tiger!
58. information design workbook graphic approaches solutions and inspiration plus 30 case studies
    I have 25 case studies – will that do?
59. jpg is 300 dpi but opens at 72 dpi
    Then your jpg is not 300 dpi.
60. like father like son spelled in all fonts
    Most things are spelled in all fonts, unless you are using sign language.
61. logos of a house sketches
    Lost me on that one…
62. many graphic designers are leave why?
    leave cuz can’t communicating client bill to financial pays.
63. moleskin top hat
    Ewwwww!
64. new poster for wasting things (based on graphics design)
65. organisation’s right to inspect computers ofgraphic communications
66. over the top font
67. pdf art tps ii
68. pdf font like verdana
    What is a PDF font? And why do you want one like Verdana? Don’t we already have enough Verdana in the world?
69. photoshop resolution 72 dpi to 300 dpi
    NO!
70. photoshop resulution 72-dpi to 300-dpi
    N-O-!
71. ping pong design in alphabetical order
72. prefered font for email
    Use Helvetica, which is faster than Times Roman because it has no serifs. Also, studies have shown 6pt Helvetica to be faster than 12pt Helvetica because it’s smaller.
73. printing higher than 72 dpi on web pages
    No. Stop it.
74. printing web resolution higher than 72 dpi
    You really need to stop it.
75. production possibility is a graphical combination which a society can use for resources
    Please consult the Flux Capacitor manual for more instruction. One may be located on the TARDIS.
76. pros and cons of a graphic designer
    Pro: I’m good. Con: I’m expensive.
77. questions i need to ask my im designing a website
78. responsibilities of the warehousing head
79. screen resolution 72 lines
80. site web top 10 de freelance en art graphique
    Oui!
81. some things graphic designer would design for a client
    Like maybe a logo, a website, a mug, a book, a poster. Let me think of a few more when I get some time.
82. this is going to be the final design
    Agreed.
83. tips til pdf print
    When waiting for the PDF to print, you can 1) surf the web, 2) get coffee, 3) check out twitter or 4) look at your Google Analytics stats for strange things.
84. top fints
    I think a blog dedicated to typigraphy might have an answer for you.
85. unpaid freelance graphic design work in photoshop
    Who told you I did that?
86. we always look out for freelancer
    Yes, and when you find one, you put a big hat on him that says “sucker”. See # 85.
87. website grader – do it work?
    It do work!
88. what are the four things that we can draw
    We can draw 1) a potato, 2) a cow, 3) a car and 4) a vase. Other than those, we don’t know if we can draw anything else.
89. what is a graphic designers job in the printing process
    To make the pre-press technician very, very upset that he can’t say out loud how dumb most graphic designers are .
90. what is anice font for wall writing
    Most graffiti artists just kind of make up their own fonts.
91. what is most popular font for drawings?
    That might be “chicken scratch” but I’d have to confirm.
92. what percentage of graphic designers are excellent at design?
    About 3%.
93. where should a graphic designer live
    Near a cafe with free wi-fi.
94. why all graphic designers must use
    I think it’s simply customary that in fact all graphic designers must use.
95. why do designers like akzidenz grotesk
    Why does Elvis like Rock and Roll?
96. why dont graphic designer likes verdana
    I like Verdana, just not when Ikea uses it…
97. why should i be a graphic designer
    Nobody says you have to be a graphic designer…
98. will the role of the graphic designer and design have
    changed in any way?
    I can’t tell if this question is going to happen or if it will have happenend.
99. top 10 fints
    I know the top 3 are Hilvitici, Girimind, and Fitiri.
100. what is a one color print job
     It’s a print job with…one color. But it could also be a four color job, as long as all four colors are the same.

The premise of the The Logo Psychologist

Can you tell what a restaurant is like simply by studying the logo design? What aromas are adrift? What sounds waft through the air? What is the decor? What kind of food goes with that font? The following logos with their accompanying psychological analyses are our best shot at discerning what a restaurant might be like, simply based on a study of their logo. Can it be done? Well, the premise is this: if the logo designer has done the job right, the logo should in fact say something concrete about what lays beyond the front doors. Logo psychology plays a roll, consciously or unconsciously, in every logo design. Can you guess the prices on the menu from the color pallete of a logo (hint: more black = more $$)? Can you guess the clientele’s demographic from the amount of kerning (hint: more kerning = more $$)? I think you can venture a good guess!

Each logo is linked to the actual restaurant. So read our psychologizing, engage in your own armchair-therapy too, and click to see how close we are to the truth. If you really want to know for sure, you’ll have to visit each restaurant because we don’t have time! Please post a comment if you do .

NOTE: We did not spend any time whatsoever at each of these restaurant websites before, during, or after our “sessions” with the respective logos. That is the fun of it, since it may be the case that we are totally off-the-mark or spot-on with our profiles. Either way, this post is about logos, not restaurants.

So join us now as I talk to, talk with, and talk at these 25 restaurant logos…

25 Mouth-Watering Restaurant Logos and Profiles

Logo Psychologist responds: “Hmmm…I’ll have an Americano after dinner at Americano! Maybe even a latte…I love the understated, elegant, and authoritative simplicity. When I come in the front door, I expect a casual, confident greeting. I know the typography of your menu is going to be great. There must be tiramisu for dessert. Fox News or CNN? Fox News for sure. I expect to see some cool black and white enlargements of NCY skyline, and maybe LA too. I get a great, confident vibe. You know exactly what you are doing, so I’ll just let you have at it!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I can taste the cardamom already. This classy logo type has me sold. But wait, my reservations were for 3 people, not 2. No, we need a bigger table. I hope you don’t forget any more details!…(20 minutes later)…Well, it’s obviously quite popular, but the ice in my drink was melted before I got it…(20 minutes later)…Wow – that was worth the wait. But man, I wish I had ice in that drink! I think we’ll be back – on a slower night!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This is the ‘Futura’ of cuisine in Australia. I’m all intimidated though. I just know there are going to be big words, maybe something in Finnish, on the menu. I feel dumb already, but I want to be smart so I’ll just suck it up and go in. Ah…roasted red pepper sauce with sauteed shrimp pizza! I can do that! And the presentation was minimal if not beautiful. Those IKEA chairs need cushions though. If I was more comfortable, I’d do some Sambuca after dinner, but the backside says ‘let’s go…’”

Logo Psychologist responds: “One look at the logotype and mark and I’m excited to go in. I have no clue what to expect, but whatever it is, it’s an original take on time-honored European classic dishes, Western of course. Well, North Western. Lot’s of meat dishes on the menu tonight, and always. German potato salad no doubt. Wow, and huge selection of local microbrews! Interesting – this use of a customized Helvetica paired with that ever-so-slightly Parisian fluer-de-lise inspired mark gives me a very distinct impression that a great marriage of old culinary traditions with new is going on here. Maybe you are a bit distant, lacking in warm fuzzies, but you certainly make up for it in competence and execution!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This is going to be a personal experience! Cool – I like the mismatched interior. It kind of all matches because nothing matches. The handwritten style menu is very cool. You cultivate a personal and friendly ethos very well. I love the open kitchen idea – shows that you are confident and open. You are into what you do with a passion, and don’t give a hoot if I give you 4 golden spoons or a rubber chicken. However, I have utterly no clue what to expect. Not pizza. Maybe interesting soups, salads, and crazy customized deli sandwiches? With homemade kettle chips? Probably. I think the logomark could use a lot more color. It’s really a kind of washed out gray. I could see a stronger khaki, a brown, or an Army green.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “No doubt, there will be no ice cream after. Because their will be no room for ice cream after. I bet they don’t sell dessert at all. Hmmm. Looks like the weight of the “g” should have been increased to offset the reduction in size from the “b”. Either way, this is a great, bold, strong, clear mark. No questions about what they do and in what manner they do it. Excellent branding!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I can taste the cinnamon, but I can see the bing. Not sure which one came first…But this logo makes me want to order a Chocolate Martini, or maybe a shot of Peppermint Schnapps. I’m a fan of bold and understated, and I think they achieved that quite nicely. I hope the music isn’t too loud, and the giant plasma screen isn’t too loud or playing a sports channel. The menu is big. The tables are big and spacious. However, there isn’t an overwhelming amount of items on the menu. You do a few things really, really well. And the leather booths and lighting are great. I want to stay and spend some $ at the bar after dinner.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This logo just has a chocolaty, drippy goodness to it. I’m sure there is a gourmet cheesecake in the house, but with some kind of cool twist to it. Hmm…the descender on the “g” in “graham” is not happy. Too tight. He needs a bigger location to fulfill his culinary vision. What a friendly place! What a great, innovative take on chicken soup – you made it gourmet! Fresh bread, fresh baked good. I think I might want to skip right to dessert with a black cup of French Roast. I think though, a bit more time could be spent connecting the ‘g’ to the top of the ‘e’ where the transition skips just a tad. My eye goes right there, and I don’t want it to.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I can hear it now: ‘How much is the special?’, and in reply, ‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford it…’. This is a forceful and classy mark. Paired with Trajan, it’s unstoppable. But, if everyone keeps loving Trajan (or a Trajan like cousin typeface) this way, soon no one will. Actually, I don’t even bother pulling up. I think you are supposed to wear a suit to go in there. I don’t eat dinner in a suit. Can’t do it. But for those that do, and live that kind of life, this is your place. Your Lear Jet will get you there on time, so don’t worry. Us riff-raff type won’t be visible. We’ll be at Taco Bell, or maybe just washing dishes somewhere, way out of the way. Even if my Lear Jet was out of the shop (it’s in for its 5000 hours of flight checkup), there would still be things on the menu with names that intimidate me. Your mark is beautiful, but out of my league forever. Did you see the diamonds on that woman that just walked in the door? Wow!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Someone loves what they do, and they make me love what they do too. What a spritely, clear, and joyful mark. I bet the chef comes out and make small talk after the rush peaks. MMMM…those were the most original, big, bready noodles I’ve ever had. Everything is just right, balanced just so. You take the ordinary and make it exciting – just a little bit on the edge! The modified Futura with it’s clean lines works just great. If the colors moved a bit warmer towards brown or red, away from mud gray, I think it would be that much better. Just a dash though.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This just has  a cool edge too it. I expect a tin drop ceiling and Art Nouveau accoutrements. I do expect crazy pasta dishes for some reason. Something with sun-dried tomatoes. This little mark has a lot of class and personality. What is Art Deco cuisine like?”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I bet killer fresh-mint stuffed grape leaves are on the menu. And maybe a lemon-chicken soup with capers. This logo says so much with so little. Let me in! Ouch though…those wrought iron chairs are great for outside, but not for an extended dinner. But hey, you are so classy and tasty, I’ll be back for sure. With friends.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I have to say that the designer of this logotype took the I-know-let’s-scan-in-a-coffee-stain and put-it-in-our-website-background to make-us-look-earthy-and-cool-cuz-no-one-thought-of-that-yet and has done something that makes me think they are cool because no one thought to put a coffee stain in a logomark, that I know if. I think it works great! If there is free wi-fi, I’m there. All. The. Time. Oh no, too cool – open mic every thursday, but you have to sign up in advance. That keeps the riff-raff down. Perfect! The descender playfulness is great. ‘Coffee and more’ could be a bit more pronounced though.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This logo just has a certain old-school previous-generation feel to it. I can see the “Gus & Paul’s Bakery” logo, the establishment on the corner for decades, sitting right next to this. A guy named Vinny patronizes both places. This logo feels like old World class come state-side. However, when I look at the ladies hand and the strange shape beneath her, everything starts getting skewed. There is a strange, ambiguous, incomplete feel to the drawing which the more I look at it, there more I feel unsettled. A bit creepy, actually. Am I missing something?”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Original, pithy, punchy, but it’s impossible to find a parking spot on campus to actually get in this place. It’s a little bloated, a little ponderous for a tea shop. Maybe it’s because they sell those poppyseed muffins that are like 9 parts oil, 1 part flour, and 5 parts sugar. I like those – once a year. This is the place everyone wants to hang out but no one can because it’s small and everyone is always in there.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This image is oozing fragrance. I can taste a crazy mixture of spices, with a little kick, that I never would think of putting together. The typeface needs to be roughened up though. Hmmm…what an odd layout of tables. We are kind of cramped. I don’t like when I pay good money for food but don’t have privacy. Maybe it’s cultural? Once the food got to the table though, we didn’t care how cramped we were, it was that good. But you know, there is a lack of synergy in this logo. The typeface and the illustration aren’t connecting. Smooth and rough just kind of sitting next to each other. They don’t speak to each other.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “You are going to put something on my plate I don’t recognize, and I might try it. If it’s slightly gelatinous and gray with faint stripes, I will not try it. But I can tell there is something bold, raw, fresh, and exciting lurking somewhere. But you know what, my eye darts around this logo a bit. I just now figured out that the 2 slashes are a capital ‘L’, I think. Or it’s a lowercase ‘l’ with a slash beneath it. Ok. What is the gray puff of smoke? Is it a candle? The more I look at this the less I understand it. It makes me think too hard. But maybe it’s just me. Why the tiny gray text? It’s kind of small set next to the large purple type. Is it an afterthought, or an incomplete aspect of the dining experience? Wait, I’m the Logo Psychologist and I’m supposed to be doing the thinking. I think you have a bit of cognizant dissonance going on. Think about and check back next week. Cut 50% of your menu out and bring a revised copy. We’ll discuss.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Here, we will experience vegetarian dining with a rare, refined sensibility. I hope it’s not BYOB. I’ll have a Leinenkugel Amber with that! I just bet that you have both daily gaspacho made fresh, and a BBQ tempeh sandwich that is a staple on lunch menu. Yes. Nicely done. And whole grain mini-loafs baked fresh and brought to each table to appease them after having waited 20 minutes to get a seat at lunch! Nice move. I will be back, but I’ll be here by 11:40 to beat the lunch rush. Is it legal for servers to wear that much jewelry and serve food? Eh, it’s kind of cool. You know exactly what experience you are trying to create, and you do it. And your customers gladly pay up. You know that too. The wheat / fork idea is just perfect. Clever and well done by all counts. You don’t need my help. Adieu!”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I would expect a niche menu, simple and straight-forward. Each dish is a refined masterpiece of elegance and function. The gray-green is just a touch muddy. Like, it really looks like mud a bit. I would have leaned a bit more towards a warm color to saturate the logo with. Remember, cool blues and food don’t mix. You want warm colors here. I like the spacing between the elements. Very confident and balanced.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “For some reason, I expect Julia Child to have eaten here. Or perhaps some other cable TV gourmet gormandizer. Maybe we tried a little too hard on this logo. All the line-business. Not sure it works. Not sure I needed to try pureed spiced goose liver pate either – it’s just too much, at least for me. Is everything greasy? What’s that film all over the type and the illustrations? Kind of like you didn’t clean it off, several times in a row. I think we could clean this up and simplify it. Ah, you know what, I think I’ll pass on this, unless I meet someone who has personally been here and gives it a big thumbs up. I’m holding out for surprise good review.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I wonder if they have a wait staff. I’ll take good notes. The aroma is sharp but the sparkling water is flat. The order came out in triple time. The bar connects the interior space, but I take note of a few dotted character who are grouped together, slurring. The logomark looks like Jazz notation to me. But it says ‘music’. Is it Jazz or Classical or a mix? Hmm. Now wait. Just how do you pronounce this? However you say it, I like it.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Ok, this mark get’s a poor mark. For such an old place in a great European city, why did they have to create their logo in Power Point with the typeface ‘Mistral’. I hope the dining experience isn’t as cliched, unthought-out, and perfunctory as their logotype is. Really. Hire a logo designer for 5 minutes and we’ll get this to a better place.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “I like the interplay  and implied, custom, sophistication of mixing upper and lowercase in the logotype. It’s easy to get that wrong by not balancing out the weight of the lines. However, it seems they have thought of everything. There is a decidedly European attention to detail that impresses me. Am I smart enough to eat here though? Maybe I’ll go with a friend.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Hmmm. I have no idea what to expect. This is the only logo on the list that doesn’t seem to hit me in the tastebuds. It looks more like a product logo than a restaurant. It looks like it belongs on something mass produced. You aren’t going to try and pull one of those $12.95 chicken sandwiches on me that is really a $5.95 chicken sandwich except for the fact that you have cool menus, are you? Also, snowflakes and warm colors seem like a contradiction. I’m conflicted. 5 Stars for logo design, indeed, but it this logo looks more like a cool Mac wallpaper than a restaurant. Now that I think about it, this reminds me of those rip-off holiday gifts that Starbucks makes you wade through before you can get to the barrista. But I think it made people annoyed and they curbed it back a bit.”

Logo Psychologist responds: “This logo is odd. It looks like Animal the Muppet is hanging out next to the logotype. Or is that a fountain? Wait, It’s a Weeping Cherry. No, wait (slaps head), it’s a Willow. Hmm. Poorly executed logomark. Slightly poorly executed logotype. I can’t tell if it’s really hand scripted or if it’s a tweaked font. Looks more like a tweaked font. Based on the logo, I’d guess I was going to get either 1) a Cheeseburger on fancy china, or 2) something exotic and perfectly executed on a plastic tray. Also, why so much space after ‘The’?”

Logo Psychologist responds: “Whatever it is tonight, it’s gonna be classy, tasty, and expensive. I will not soon forget this dining experience! Classic Bodoni-inspired typeface in the tagline, set with a classy Art Deco ‘Anna’ or something close up top. Definitely big band pre-bop Jazz going on inside. Maybe even live! A Bodoni-like font in a restaurant logo is a class act all the way. What a great typeface pair, now that I look at it.”

Bon Appetite!

My son nabbed Edward Lear’s Complete Book of Nonsense from the library some time ago. It was one of my favorite books growing up. I wondered if it was possible to write limericks about Graphic Design. I penned some (dare I call it) Graphic Design Poetry and now post the results for your amusement and bemoanment:

Topics include:

• Clients
• Typography
• Designers
• User Interfaces
• Adobe

Illustration by Edward Lear, courtesy of "T"eresa

SPACE

There once was a graphic designer
Who could not draw a straight liner
Fresh out of school
She thought she was cool
And soon was a cook in a diner!

There once was a trendy typesetter
Who thought “less is more is more better”
“I’ll sit here and scratch
at my tiny soul patch,
Until my design is one letter.”

There once was a UI Designer
Who thought a right-nav was more finer.
But users bemoaned
When they could not find “Home”,
And simply restarted their browser.

There once was a client so wiley
He asked for every source filey.
He’d edit them twice
And say “Now they’re nice!”
And we’d stare at him with a blank smiley

There once was a designer so immature
She had not yet heard of a ligature.
She’d kern “f” and “i”
And then make a sigh
While wishing for one nice clean character.

There was an “Adobe Updater”
Who’s button said “Update me later”.
Whenever we’d work,
It popped up like a jerk.
And so we are “Updater” haters!

A prominent button called “Home”
Caused UI elitists to foam.
“It should not be there!”
And they tore out their hair,
Then banged their heads on a big stone.

In Dreamweaver there was a bug,
But Adobe was silently smug.
“Pretend it’s not there!”
Said support with no care,
And swept the bug under the rug!

There once was a client so bozo
He thought he’d design his own logo.
He did it in raster,
And thought it was faster
Because bezier curves he did not know.

There once was client so lame
He flipped when he saw a wireframe
“The graphics are sparse,
And your firm is a farse!”
But we knew that this man did have no brain.

There once was a program called Freehand
It was the best tool in the whole land
But the software was sold
To Adobe the bold
And Freehand was soon no more at hand.

A designer with senses so fickle
He felt every unaligned pixel
“It’s off by a bit!
What are you a twit?”
And for lunch he ate ought but sour pickles.

There once was a blogging designer
Who said “I will sooner retire!
I’ll write blogs all day,
And sip my latte.”
But soon found his finances goner.

A program called Photo the Shopper
Was loaded with menus and slopper
“Just raise the price
to make naughty nice”
But users soon proved this a flopper.

Adobe the Great was a giant
To whom all it’s slaves was defiant:
“While charging more price,
I’ll make things less nice!”
And to this day all are compliant.

But I have a question for you: would a new font combinations book be useful to you? Low on theory, high on example?

Some ideas:

• Would bad examples in a font combinations book be as useful as good ones?
• How much written theory would be useful?
• Do you care about x-heights and units and what-not, or just pictures and point sizes?
• How many examples should a book like this include?
• What typefaces or fonts should a type combination book focus on?
• What would not be useful or necessary in a book like this?
• If you ordered a typeface combination book and to your dismay it was missing ______, what would ______ be that would make you think it was the greatest recent book on the subject?
• Are there any other posts or web pages you found helpful while researching this?
• Any other opinions on the topic?

Please leave a comment as it would be very much appreciated. I’d love to get a dialogue going on this…

Get your graphic design brain moving

When I brainstormed the list, it was initially very group-oriented and linear, as the brainstorm process naturally is. However, I chose to mix the list results up deliberately for several reasons:

• When a list is in random order, you actually have to read it
• Random lists will stimulate the brainstorming process in you
• Ordered lists will trigger your left brain to say “I already know that” and tell your right brain to shut up: we don’t want left brain in on this at the moment
• Random lists forces your right brain to make associations your left brain simply can’t make: right brain is your buddy on a wobbly new client call
• Asking “random” questions will make you look super smart and leave a good impression on your new client, whether you are really smart or not

If you post a comment below with a great question to ask, I will update the text list and PDF by removing my least-useful or most-lame question and make room for your awesome question.

Print this list of 72 Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients out and hang it near your phone

Why should you print a random list? You should print this out and keep it handy during new client calls so that instead of doodling, you can oodle this list and free-associate questions in a purely right-brain manner. If I put the list in grouped order, or alphabetical, or topical, etc., your left brain would simply shut down the right brain and say “I know all this”. The problem is that your left brain will not lie – you do know this stuff. However, your left brain knows little about timing and listening to and engaging with your new client in robust way.

Therefore, I’d suggest printing this out and keeping it handy, and let your eyes dart around the list. Maybe keep a few handy and scribble on it while you talk. Your right brain will dart around this list subconsciously and hopefully make connections between the random questions listed and what your client is actually saying on the phone. Good luck!

If you are excessively left-brained, you are probably not a designer, and probably don’t have many ordered lists hanging around, so this should work for you just fine. Is your desk a little messy? Sock drawer, at least? But you always find your socks, right? If you get anxiety when your socks are not in alphabetical order, you won’t get much value from a list like this.

One last important note about the list: Some questions are very, very straightforward. Other questions, as you read them, are totally ambiguous. That is the whole point. I want to help you figure out what questions to ask, and not simply tell you questions I would ask. Some questions overlap in subtle ways for some people, but might not for others. Therefore, improvise and tell me what to add to the list in the comment section below!

Uber-final Note: Please also forward me a 10% finders fee when you collect the deposit from your newly thrilled and delighted client who is impressed with your off-the-cuff competence! How impressive you truly are!

The list of 72 Top Questions to Ask New Web Design Clients

1. How does your company handle email?
2. Do you need any password protected areas?
3. Do you have the Pantone numbers for your current company colors?
4. Did you take a look at our portfolio?
5. What is your time frame?
6. Is this a brochure site, or a blog?
7. Who is your audience?
8. Do you have any specifications?
9. What are the website addresses of your competitors?
10. How many other companies have you talked to?
11. Do you need a business card and letterhead?
12. What is your main message?
13. Did you or someone else register the domain?
14. How familiar are you with search engine optimization and best practices?
15. What are several websites you like?
16. Do you currently have a website?
17. Do you or anyone on your staff have Photoshop or other image editing software?
18. Do you need search engine help?
19. Does the site launch need to coincide with a product launch or any other important milestone?
20. Do you need a content management system?
21. How long have you had a website?
22. Do you have photos you need to use?
23. Will several people be editing the site?
24. How many pages do you need?
25. Do you have a catalog or brochure?
26. How do people find your current website?
27. Do you have a newsletter?
28. Are you in touch with the orginal designer?
29. Do you have access to the web server?
30. What are several websites that you like the look of?
31. Do you have control over the domain?
32. Do you need any other promotional material?
33. How familiar are you with usability studies?
34. How important is search engine ranking to you?
35. Is there any specific functionality you need?
36. Will you be providing creative direction?
37. Do you have your content done?
38. Will your IT person be involved?
39. Do you have a logo? What format is it in?
40. How familiar are you with graphic design best practices for web designs?
41. What is your current hosting company?
42. Have you been through the complete web design and development process before?
43. Who are your competitors?
44. How often do you need to update the site?
45. Describe the style of website you are looking for?
46. Is the original developer still available?
47. What is your budget?
48. What is compelling about working with us?
49. Do you need an image gallery?
50. Are you or anyone on your staff familiar with HTML and CSS?
51. Is your logo in Illustrator format?
52. Do you need this to integrate with your existing identity pieces?
53. How are you going to maintain the site?
54. What software do you have?
55. How did you find us?
56. Did you read any of our blog?
57. What bugs you the most about websites?
58. Do you need any other graphic design help?
59. Do you need social media tools built in, like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, etc.
60. How familiar are you with web standards and web design best practices?
61. Do you need the website to tie into any particular 3rd party applications?
62. Do you need a contact form?
63. Do you have a domain?
64. Do you have any proposals from other design firms?
65. How important is customization to you?
66. Will you want or need help in making changes? If so, would you need help routinely?
67. What do you need your website to do?
68. Do you need ecommerce?
69. Have you considered redesigning your logo?
70. Do you have hosting?
71. Have you considered taking a fresh look at your corporate identity? This a good time to consider refresh or an entirely new identity.
72. When is the last time you updated the site?

Print the PDF Chart and put it next to your phone

Click on the chart graphic below* to download the PDF or download it here:

* Don’t forget to leave comments so I can tweak this list if need be!

I recently came across a blog, new to me called lines and colors run by Charley Parker. Charley says he created the blog because he delights in the “feeling of wide-eyed discovery” and by being “dazzled by the discovery of new artists or genres” that have sparked his imagination. He covers everything from Medieval to Dada.

I was shuffling through his recent archives and found a post about Lorenz Stöer that really caught me off guard. If you are an Escher fan, no doubt you will see why in a split second. Thumb through this gallery below and be sure to click through to see the high-res Flickr set of these great woodcuts and prints. Visit lines and colors for more info about Lorenz Stöer that Charley researched for our enlightenment.

Now I’m inspired! Random-geometric, psuedo-architecture, drawn-in-pencil-and-inked-with-a-Micron-in-my Moleskine, here I come! Right here, right now, I commit to doodling and then posting something along these lines .

Ever so slighty, a few recent posts of mine reminds me of the heavy-lined geometric oddities of the work of Lorenz:

• Art House Co-Op’s “The Sketchbook Project” Moleskine sketches, pages 12-13
• Art House Co-Op’s “The Sketchbook Project: Library” and daily Moleskine sketches

The above 2 sketch posts were not intended to be architectural per se, but I do have a fascination with hand-drawn 3d lettering and fake 3d spaces filled with random geometric forms.

A typewriter.

But not just any typewriter. It has to be a vintage Underwood Portable, or equivalent, and you need to pay about $5 for one at a yard sale. Then you simply get a freelance photographer to type in your company name on some cotton-fiber resume stock paper and take some incredibly beautiful shots with a nice camera (Olympus E-500 EVOLT) and lens (Konica Minolta MF 50mm f/1.2) combo using a shallow depth of field for some stunning results.

Then you put the photos on your blog and alert all manner of social media outlets and see what happens! Hopefully, something!

Brian Watkins took some great shots for a challenge assignment at dpchallenge.com, a digital photography enthusiast site with 82,000+ members. Below is his entry in the challenge and then some great outtakes that he didn’t use for the challenge but instead lent them for viewing here at BonFX. Enjoy!

Brian Watkins’ entry for Triptych III at DPChallenge.com

Brian Watkins’ outtakes for Triptych III at DPChallenge.com

But wait, there’s more!

We linked each tip back to the source we got it from. Not all the tips we came across are represented in the list. Rather, we did some editing for the sake of readability . We also want you to explore the great sites we found in researching our list here. We appreciate scannable lists that also make it easier to dig deeper.

So imbibe this list and add your own essential tips to it! Visit the the sites to see what else they had to say. Enjoy!

(Our favorite tips are highlighted!)

1. A logo doesn’t need to say what a company does
2. A logo doesn’t have to convey what your company does
3. A tagline is nice, but not as part of your logo
4. Adapt the logo design for dark backgrounds
5. Always choose function over innovation
6. Avoid intricate details
7. Avoid monotony
8. Brainstorm logo concepts in pencil with reckless creativity
9. Choose colors wisely
10. Color is a secondary factor in your logo
11. Colors are important but not as crucial as you might think
12. Completely ignore what your parents and/or spouse think about the design
13. Confirm that the logo looks appealing to more than just three (3) individuals
14. Create a distinctive tagline
15. Create a unique shape or layout for the logo
16. Create variations. The more variations, the more likely you are to get it right
17. Disconnect icons from text
18. Do not combine elements from popular logos and claim it as original work
19. Do not copy
20. Do not rely on color for effect
21. Do not rely on gradients
22. Do not use any “swoosh” or “globe”symbols
23. Do not use clipart under any circumstances
24. Do not use more than three colors
25. Do not use stock art images
26. Don’t include photos in your logo
27. Don’t use more than 2 fonts
28. Don’t design in bitmap
29. Don’t follow trends
30. Don’t use filters. Don’t use filters. Don’t use filters.
31. Establish your own logo design process
32. Familiarize yourself with the commercial printing process
33. Fit the logo into a square layout if possible, avoid obscure layouts
34. Get lots of specific feedback
35. Get rid of everything that is not absolutely necessary
36. Good logos have “one thing to remember”
37. If the brand name is memorable, the brand name should be the logo
38. If the logo contains an icon or symbol, as well as text, place each so that they complement one another
39. Invoke feelings of being bold and confident, never dull and weak
40. Keep contrasts as high as you can
41. Keep imagery appropriate for your client’s business
42. Keep the logo font easy to read
43. Keep the logo versatile
44. Keep your logo ‘metaphor light’
45. Know the rules and principles of logo design
46. Learn off other’s successes and mistakes
47. Learn the software and complete the logo
48. Learn what a logo is and what it represents
49. Leave trends to the fashion industry
50. Make sure all elements have cohesive unity
51. Make sure that the logo is recognizable when inverted
52. Make suuuure that you know what you are doing before you take on this kind of project.
53. Make the logo functional
54. Make the logo strong and balanced
55. Master working with vectors
56. Memorize all steps of the single best logo design ever (you simply must visit this post)
57. Not every logo needs a mark
58. Present only your best logo designs to your client
59. Realize that you will not create a perfect logo
60. Refrain from designing a logo around the tag line or vice versa
61. Simple is sometimes better
62. Sketch logo concepts
63. Strive to be ‘different’ logo
64. Take breaks
65. Test at various sizes
66. The logo must be easy to describe
67. The logo must look consistent across multiple platforms
68. The logo should be balanced visually
69. Think ahead
70. Under-promise and over-deliver
71. Use simple fonts
72. Work in black first
73. Your logo has to have ‘instant impact’

Further Reading

• 45 Rules for Creating a Great Logo Design

As the feedback came in, the answer became clear: graphics. Not just any graphics, but specifically the PDF chart attached to the post.

The PDF of the font combinations allows for the best presentation of fonts on the web. It didn’t occur to me when I made the graphics, that people would do more than print it. They could zoom in on it!

Zooming in on a graphic (vector of course) to a comfortable size in a PDF reader allows for a much more immersive learning moment. It was that simple.

I caught wind of a lot of the tweets than bandied about and noticed the tweaked title variations that I got, which included things with “…with chart” and “with PDF”, etc. I had not highlighted the fact at all in the title, and just tossed in the post matter-of-factly. I also noticed that many people that blogged about the article were able to simply lift the large preview graphic for the PDF, which looks pretty sharp. I think big graphics on blog posts say things like “take me and blog me and link back to my original” or something like that. I think that’s wonderful!

That brings me to this post. One of my first posts on the BonFX blog is Top 10 fonts for graphic designers where I simply listed out the fonts with little fanfare. Take a read and come back for the rationale for this particular list. I decided to revisit that post and submit an updated list of my best fonts (the ones I use routinely) with much-improved graphics and also a freshly-designed PDF chart with a preview.

Top 10 Fonts for Graphic Designers

• Akzidenz Grotesk
• Bodoni
• Frutiger
• Futura
• Garamond
• Gill Sans
• Helvetica / Helvetica Neue
• Minion
• Trade Gothic
• Univers

Graphic samples of the Top 10 Fonts

Some production notes of interest:

• The samples are all produced using one Bold and one Regular font from each typeface.
• The size ratio for Heading, Sub-heading, and Body are roughly equivalent to 18pt, 14pt,  and 10pt respectively.
• The “Lorem Ipsum” greeking is the same for each example
• Line breaks are 99% the same to make comparisons as easy as possible
• The red text for the page header and font descriptions is New Century Schoolbook which incidentally is not one of the top 10 choices, but is still one of my favorite typefaces.

PDF Chart

Click the preview below to download a PDF version of the Top 10 Fonts, or download it directly.

Further Reading:

• 27 Classic & Elegant and Professional Serif Fonts

• The Moleskine paper is prone to bleeding anything and everything. If I open the Moleskine in room lighting, it looks exactly like the scan. I normally use a variety of acid-free, heavy weight white paper with the thick wire binding you see in various sizes at any art store. I have never bled through any of the pages. It must be this particular model.
• While the flatness and paper texture are wonderful, the Moleskine paper weight is not heavy enough to support really any media without bleeding. Oh well.
• As my project is entitled, “It’s not easy being green”, we can now add “It’s not easy drawing in a semi-transparent Moleskine notebook”, and hence, I have to draw concepts, if any, very lightly on the even page and focus on only using one side of the odd page.

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Moleskine sketchbook pages 12-13

Blackletter type of the word "Green" with lots of angles surrounding.

Close up and cross hatching of a few letters and angles.

The new iMac monitor is crazy good for graphic designers for several reasons:

• LED backlighting – For the time being, nothing is a bright and crisp as LED backlighting. It’s 100% transition free, and consistent all the way around. The old-style backlighting involved shooting in light from the frame of the monitor, creating bright areas and dead areas, especially when viewed from different angles.
• Corner to corner glass – When you are designing all day, getting rid of any extraneous visual garbage is good. The iMac is glass, corner to corner, and also has a black “matte” around the screen, further bordering it from the surrounding visual messiness (especially if the messiness is my office).
• Monitor Resolution – This thing has 2560-by-1440 resolution. What on earth else is there to say? Now I can open everything all at once and leave it open all day. InDesign layout artists are going to love this.
• IPS Technology – What is that? Well, whatever “in plane technology is” it simply means that you can be looking at the screen from any angle whatsoever and see all the details. No more wonky-wobbles of black that turn all manner of inexplicable colors when viewing the screen from various angles. This is fantastic.

As a freelance graphic designer, I need to maximize everything I do in my graphic design process to eek out the most productivity. Processor speed and RAM amount aside, the new 27-inch iMac will find a welcome home in our studio as soon as possible. And you can be we’ll be at the Providence, RI Apple store to take a peek at this and other goodies just release today by Apple.

• 27-inch iMac released
• See the video of the new 27-inch iMac – wow!
• Apple’s new 27 inch iMac designed to also work as a display

Update (tongue firmly planted in cheek)!

I just found a new settings panel on the new iMac 27-inch that will boost it’s overall image quality. You can increase Awesomeness to 11 and also turn on the Reality Distortion Field. I’m sure this will come in handy …

Awesomeness goes to 11 on the new iMac, along with the ability to toggle the Reality Distortion Field

I’m not sure about the efficacy of using third-party portfolio websites in regards to supporting and directing traffic back to a blog. I participated in the Behance network site for two reasons:

1. Lot’s of other freelance graphic designers have work here, and I’m following the crowd 100% on this one.
2. I have come across a lot of other logo designers with their portfolio on Behance, and it seems the quality is very high in general.

As with any new website tinker-tool, we have to just wait and see what happens. It didn’t take long to get signed up and get a pretty nicely-formatted portfolio up and going, so I’m pleased at that much!

• BonFX logo design portfolio at Behance.net

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Moleskine sketchbook pages 10-11

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine Sketchbook pages 10-11

Detail of "No Green"

I’d like to encourage every graphic designer to draw every day. It doesn’t matter what you draw. Random is great! To encourage this, I decided to post some pages from my current journal. I use a blank page, heavy spiral bound, #100, acid-free notebook at 7 x 10 inches.

Mixed in with my design work and meeting notes are totally random sketches for fine art projects, studies, still lifes, mind maps and all manner and what not of all kinds. I personally enjoy not only individual drawings from people’s sketchbooks, but all the progress from page to page. In that spirit, I have posted about 30 different scans representing about 50 different drawings and sketches. Some are refined, some are patently not refined. Some are personal, some are strictly business. I personally like that mixed up matrix when I come across it on other blogs, and so I’m contributing my drawings to the crowd.

50 Sketches from a Graphic Designer

Please click any sketch for a larger version.

This is my left hand. Rule: make darks darker and lights lighter and avoid mid-tones when sketching.

Notes from a client meeting about a website and logo over coffee at Starbucks.

Can I draw Daffy Duck from memory? No, I cannot draw Daffy Duck from memory.

"Happy Times" sketch. I doodled this really fast so I could have something to try and color, later, in Photoshop.

Unused sketch for the banner illustration of a technology and graphic design article.

"Bad little kids breaks vase but is truly sorry, so mom is not too mad", or something like that.

Abstract art concept

Several abstract composition sketches. The top left one focuses on patterns of dark and light, while the second focuses on organic blending of dark and light.

Abstract sketch compositons. The lower one is a concept for a larger painting.

Mindmap for the new BonFX.com focus. This was several months before I started any work on the site at all.

Sketched composition for larger painting, "I am the Bread of Life", along with a little chalice.

A few devotional fine art sketches and compositions. One is of the Virgin Mary, and the larger one is a concept for a painting about division among ecclesial communities.

Another set of concept sketches for some devontial art about Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows and other ideas.

Lunchtime sketches: My teabag and a one-eyed, dangerous, spinning, octopus.

Realistic concept sketch of Jesus above an abstract Madonna and Child concept. I don't think abstract approaches to traditional topics work that well, maybe in the same way "Baroque" and "Hip Hop" probably don't mix that well.

Lunchtime sketch: My lunch trash consisting of a paper boat and balled up napkins, giving new meaning to "trashy art".

Lunch time sketch: The furniture near me and my coffee cup. With the cup, I tried to use only black, white, and one gray and in a sense doing a manual "posterize filter" like Photoshop does. Meh...

Lunch time sketch: more trash. I twisted a napkin into a "rose" of sorts, and then tried to draw a detail of the crumpled inside of a foil-lined chip bag. Note: drawing foil is hard.

A series of abstract sketch concepts, some focused on grids and patterns.

More pattern fun. I like effect of patterns with subtle organic inconsistencies. I think when you can tell something is mechanical, your eye knows not to scan them all. But with minor undulations in line and tone, an otherwise boring pattern has a bit more life to it. I'd like to explore this idea in a series of full sized paintings.

Logo design concepts and sketches for the Office of Religious Education in the Diocese of Providence.

Small, detailed study on improvised composition of light and dark slowly built up. This is about 2 inches square.

Improvised street scene sketch. I wondered how repeating certain improvised elements would work in a more realisitc application.

Sketch of a ripped napkin, a simple study in tonal values.

Very loose sketch, a study of tonal values of a crumpled napkin (my favorite lunch time prop) done with quick cross-hatching.

Abstract pencil sketch study of improvised composition, built in layers. I like the idea of transparency of abstract shapes and would like to explore this in a larger work, possibly charcoal.

Well folks, that’s it for now! More to come as I take the time to collect more sketches as the sketchbook fills up! I hope this was, at the least, interesting!

My own contribution is as follows:

“Drawing affords the path of least resistance from the conceptual visual idea to objective visual media. It has the least possible amount of psychological and physical overhead weighing down on and in on one’s inner muse.”

Jump over to the thread and leave your own thoughts…

Let’s start with the first 3 you might already be able to guess:

1. Produce New Designs: This includes but is not limited to client work. Of course this is the bedrock of getting paid, but should you be paid for everything you do? I would suggest no. You need to design every day regardless of workload. Shoot for every day, but only replace the production of new design with #4 from below. But don’t look there yet! When you don’t have client work due, create something else. Never let a day without producing something go by. Here are some ideas:
   • Create a logo concept for fictitious or random company
   • Create a poster on a topic you really like
   • Recreate a famous design in a new way, or simply try to replicate a famous work down to the pixel. You’d be shocked what you could learn by copying. Hey, it worked for all the artists of the last couple thousand years or so. Renaissance artists often had to copy other master works for 2-3 years before the studio Master Painter would allow them to do anything with a brush besides clean it. As graphic artists, we should head back to the “classroom” and copy the recognized “master” works of the great designers of the last 50 years or so.
2. Market Your Freelance Design Business: If you don’t market now while you are busy, suddenly you will have no work and no marketing “seeds” anywhere ready to “harvest”. Marketing must happen at least a little every single day, because you don’t know what efforts on what day will produce what results on what day in the future. It also seems that most traditional ways of marketing are near death. I would not suggest wasting money or time on cold-calls (warm calls are different) and certainly not on printed marketing material outside of a business card. The internet is the way to go. Start a blog and find a niche. Become an expert in that niche and write excellent content. Do a good job with SEO but don’t worry about it beyond the basics.
3. Bill Your Clients: Seems obvious, but make sure you are getting invoices out on time and following up on invoices that have been “forgotten”. For serious right-brainers, this is extra-hard. If it’s that hard, get someone else to do it. Use the simplest billing system you can find. There are great invoices resources online for pretty cheap, and they use big shiny buttons and lots of white space. Get one, use it, keep it, rely on it. Keep it up-to-date on a daily basis, or at least keep your hours system up-to-date. How many hours, really, have you gotten foggy on and ended up not billing for because you weren’t sure how many hours it really was, 3 days after the fact?

So what is the fourth thing you must do every day as a graphic artist to keep growing and developing a unique style and voice?

4. DRAW!

Drawing is the fundamental skill needed by every designer. If you don’t use a pencil or pen from time to time, but only design on the screen, you are stunting your growth and greatly limiting the solutions you are able to come up with for any given project. In a sense, moving blocks of color around an Illustrator file is a kind of drawing, but at best a substitute for process that has no parallel. The ability to draw straight line, to draw from life, to handle a pencil, etc, are the mechanical abilities that enable us to use a mouse or stylus. You are also limited to the tool palette in your application. Really now, are you able to whip up great ideas on the fly using the bezier path tool and a few squares? Well, having at least a good grid can make some decisions for you, but I’m not talking grid at the moment. That’s another topic entirely.

Take for instance the practice of drawing from life. The ability to “flatten” a three-dimensional image into a two-dimensional approximation enables and trains the brain to see composition – a series of related shapes. Still life drawings in a certain sense are really “designs” of interconnected shapes approximated from the tree-dimensional objects. For instance, when the petal of a flower recedes into space, your pencil does not recede into the paper to draw it. Instead, it flattens it out into a random shape that really doesn’t look like a flower petal (until you add some shading). The connectedness of a series of shapes recreates what looks like a flower to our eye. In graphic design, we have to have this skill, the skill to balance out created shapes – those we draw and those created indirectly by what we draw – in order to create a compositional harmony.

Experiment: Stop what you are doing right now and grab a pen or pencil. Pick one thing, however small, from your immediate surroundings and draw it from life. How faithfully can you recreate it? If you find this exceptionally hard, to recreate something using just your eye, go ahead and work at it for a few minutes here and there for a week. After this “workout routine”, I’m willing to bet that you see your computer screen diffrently.

A few tips for drawing to become a better graphic designer

1. Carry a PAA – personal analog assistant known also as a sketchbook. Moleskines are not overrated so try one of those. Carry it with you all the time.
2. Keep a retractable pencil on hand. There will be no excuse if you have both paper and pencil.
3. Draw anything. Don’t let “it’s boring” stop you. Draw anything. Draw crumbs. Draw the edge of your notebook. Draw your other hand. Draw what you see out the window. Draw the corner of a book. Draw your lunch. No excuses. Draw for 10 minutes a day.
4. Draw daily. Practice makes perfect.
5. Stop reading so many blogs and draw more instead. Well, stop reading some but not this one. And go draw!

There you have it! Make sure you stretch and educate yourself, market yourself, pay yourself, and most importantly, dig deeper into the artist you are by drawing, the most fundamental skill of all the graphic arts.

I’m aggressively working out what charcoal can and can’t do easily, balanced by the simple parameter of a time limit. Apparently like oils, charcoal will take as much time from you as you want to throw at it. I concentrated on simple shapes, a few bold lines, and enough shading and blending to give the dog character some heft.

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Sketch pp08-09

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine p08

Detail "Mystery Dog King with Green Crayon"

First, I will not be using the even numbered pages for content. I want to capture any brainstorming process on the even pages and do the art on the right pages. I want to remember not just the artwork but also the process if any that went with it. I’m finding the whole aura of Moleskines very creative. Marketing savvy or not, I’m hooked!

The theme is “It’s not easy being green”, so I’m taking a strong figurate liberty and just sticking to ideas related to green, so it’s a little easier that way. Also, my scanner causes some serious ghosting of the pages of the Moleskine sketchbook. Very light weight paper indeed!

NOTE: Click for enlargements

Sketch p04-05

Ok, so I took a simple #2 pencil and went to town as usual, remaining firmly in sketch mode. When I do finished fine art in graphite, I use a variety of lead weights, like 3B, HB, and H. But for this I wanted the purity of the experiment. I’d use cross hatching and that’s it.

I composed some Helvetica letters and got a little dramatic perspective going for fun. I got to about 90% done on this and decided to get to the charcoal experiment.

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine p04-05

Detail of "Roy G Biv"

Sketch p06-07

I composed a scattering of letters in Garamond and proceeded to layer charcoal into the background area. I grabbed my paper stomp and was not really sure what to do with it. In graphite, the stomp serves to blend away stroke marks, but with Charcoal, it acts like a brush with “dry” paint on it. Then the light-bulb went off. Charcoal is medium is in stick-form. Well, I suppose graphite is too, but a graphite pencil, in my mind and in my hand, is much closer in functionality to pen and ink where you lay down the strokes you want. With charcoal, you lay down some medium and paint a bit with it, add more, remove some, smooth it, push it around. To me, it acts nearly identical to transparent oil paints. I got stuck 20 years ago in art class with some vine charcoal and didn’t get past using it in a quick, non-detailed kind of manner. I have just discovered the joy of a new medium. Hello rich blacks!

I improvised the rest of the elements, styling, and coloring after realizing what I could do. I had a blast! The ability to play with light and texture far surpasses the natural ability of graphite. Everything I wanted graphite to be all these years and wasn’t, is truly in charcoal.

For instance, you can only get so dark, even with the softest pencils, because graphite ends up burnishing the paper and flattening the fibers. This causes that annoying shine. Graphite gets to about 60% black and gives out. With charcoal, since it is much more abrasive, will get as dark as the stick of charcoal you are using. Put some on, blend it in, ad more, blend it in, and in a few layers, you have the deepest, richest black you can imagine. I find it thrilling, I don’t know about you. I’m looking forward to the next charcoal “green” drawing!

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine p06-07

Detail of "Green Green"

From an email I just got:

As the signup deadline started to approach and people started to receive their sketchbooks in the mail, we started getting two big requests: to let more people sign up and to give everyone more time to complete their sketchbooks. We’ve figured out a way to do some shuffling and have moved the first exhibition on The Sketchbook Project tour from December to January 29th. This will give everyone an entire month longer to complete their sketchbooks, moving the postmark date that they need to be sent in to us to January 4th.

Revised list of dates:

• November 1st – Date to sign up for the project (you did this already!)
• January 4th – Postmark date you need to send your sketchbook out by (keep in mind that the show is a couple weeks after that, so if shipping internationally, make sure they definitely get to us by then!)
• January 29th – The first show of the tour at Art House Gallery in Atlanta, GA

If you have an extra pencil and some spare time over the next 2 months, give it a spin! It cost a few bucks to join but it will be great fun working on artwork everyday. It’s a great discipline opportunity to blow some dust off of your creative window sills, and let some fresh ideas in.

Read more about the sketchbook project.

The entire project has to be completed and back to Art House Co-Op by December 1, 2009. From there, it will be on tour across the country with all the other completed sketchbooks.

I will be posting all the pages from my sketchbook here on the blog, regardless of how each piece comes out. This will be a fun month or two! My intention is to focus on graphite and pen & ink (Micron .05’s and .01’s). However, I have no idea where this will lead. I hope to see unexpected developments and evolution of method, subject matter, and execution. Here we go!

Click for an enlargement.

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine page 01

Art House Co-Op Sketchbook Project - Moleskine page 02-03

Since his new logo is on the internet, I have a license to use it on my new limited edition product line in recognition of his achievementness with design. I now present to you 2 products, both designed with the same loving care with which David created his stunning tour-duh-force new logo.

The David Airey Hat

Inspired by his limited color pallete taken directly from nature, we have created this hat product. This is the pre-production mockup, though you might think it was real. I used some clever Photoshop techniques to simulate the logo being affixed to the hat. Notice the SUBTLE tweak of the angle of the logo, the slight drop shadows that gives the logo a sense of depth, and of course the bevel which also adds to the effect of overall REALISM:

A few other production notes about this hat:

• I added the name “David Airey Hat” for clarity and drew attention to it by using yellow, which we know from nature attracts things like bees, who can’t even see.
• I added a watermark to prevent theft. Please don’t bother trying to right-click, download, save and then create a product or blog post using this image. You will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of International Law. Ha, I made it that much harder by putting the watermark where you can’t get at it. No, don’t ask me for the original MS Paint file, or Paint Shop Pro file either.
• I added a drop shadow to the title at the bottom to blur the lines between reality and what’s real, so as to keep you guessing: Is it a floating carving or is that clever typography that simulates a fuzzy yellow carving? It’s touches likes this that sets BonFX apart from competing.

Without going into great detail, I also want to introduce the second product…

David Airey Socks

They speak for themselves. You may not have noticed just how fast this image loaded, considering the high-quality, data-dense image we’ve reproduced here. You may also not have even noticed that the logo on the socks toes is FAKED totally. We totally simulated the look and feel of real fabric using a “fabric simulator” in our editing software. Notice the clever use of our watermark, which only fools thieves into sending traffic back to our site, not their Yahoo Store. The simulated bevel is unbelievably just another one of our creations. The slight sheen on the upper corners suggests a different mix of textiles than that of the socks, proper. While the sock is about 40% cotton 60% rayon, the logos include a 20% mix of polyester, for that leisurely feel and increased shine. It’s all in the fit and finish, folks.

UPDATED!!!!

You can now place the order. BUT if you order, you get a free David Airey Logo book.

The reason we are giving the book away is because since this new process has been revealed, it made David’s old work obsolete, which allows us to sell his “old style” book at a discount. Click HERE below on the BUTTON here:

In case that doesn’t work, you can also click HERE below, though it’s just boring text with no filters:

• Logo Design Love book pre-order

• Frank Chimero
• BrandLogic

So pop over to the Dache Board and take a look! What do you think?

NOTE: If you are interested in the logo design process behind the BonFX logo, scroll down to the Related Posts section and click on the “23 Steps” post. It includes all the brainstorming and sketching steps, as well as final vector art preparation.

“A question just came up at the happy hour, and none of us know the answer. Standard resolutions in the web and print world are 72, 300 and 600. None of these are natural squares, which assuming a regular dot layout grid seems… well, confusing?”

I’m going to paste my reply as-is below. Several people found it quite useful but now it largely walled-up inside a Yahoo group archive. Since it’s a largely unedited stream-of-consciousness kind of post, I’d be glad to take questions about any and every aspect of what I’m now posting.

Original reply (March 2008):

[--- start reply ---]

72 dpi is a rough conversion from 72 picas, which is how many picas there are in an inch. There are 12 points in a pica, where we get ours standard font sizes from. A pica the traditional form of  measurement in typography the old school way. The 72 dpi for screen resolution was an early attempt on Macs to get a one to one correspondence between screen resolution and “old fashioned” print measuresments. 12 pixels on a mac screen should be the same as a 12pt font printed out. 72 pixels printed from a mac should be one inch. PCs have always been 96 dpi, hence the reason early desktop publishing and Mac, not PC, was a natural fit.

Now, moving on to 300 dpi. This has nothing to do with the screen or monitor or anything. A standard offset press medium quality screen is 133 lpi, as in lines per inch. The next level of quality is 150 lpi. Above that is 175 lpi. It takes more time and accuracy to print higher lpi. Lines per inch refers to the number of dots in a CMYK film output, or today, direct to plate output. Offset printing uses 4 screens typically, of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, printed in that order, to build up an image of dots. The dots from the plate are laid down at differing angles – you’ve seen this blown up in lots of pop art. Photoshop even has a filter to simulate what this looks like. Grab a low power magnifying glass and look at anything printed in your house that is color, like a photograph on a cereal box or junk mail.

Ok, junk mail is usually 133 lpi because the paper is cheap, and it’s cheap to print 133 lpi. Cheap paper absorbs ink and the dots spread, so you really can’t print better quality than 133 lpi. Try writing on a paper towel with a sharpie to get the idea.

Almost there, hang with me!

A raster file (photoshop psd or jpg or tiff) has resolution. For the web it’s 72 dpi. But for print, you need higher resolution than that. But, you only need so much. The process of translating the digital file to the “lines per inch” plate of dots (for the CMYK process) throws a lot of information away. How much does it throw away? Well, it throws away anything above about double what the lpi is. If you are printing 133 lpi, then you need 266 dpi. If you go lower than 266, you will start to actually see pixels, the square elements of the digital file, in the final output. So, more resolution = better quality to a point. Anything after 266 or so just gets tossed out. Think of a gravel factory with the big screens that sift rubble into piles. The screen lets small stuff fall through will big stuff makes it to the end. That’s the idea with print. So if you toss sand and gravel along with your hand size rocks, the sand and gravel fall through. If you just put marbles and hand size rocks, the marbles still fall through, and the hand size rocks make it to the end just the same. So why add more sand if it’s just going to be tossed out at the screening process? More resolution just means bigger files, wasted disk space, slower previews in InDesign, and longer film or plate generation times as all that data has to be processed.

So, why 300 dpi? Well, 9 times of 10, your final art might just be a tad too small. Maybe you need, after you exported the PSD, 10% more size. Happens all the time. Say there is just too much empty space in a group shot around a group of friends that you just realized 5 mins before you have to send the files to the printer. Should you boot up Photoshop for the edit? Well, if you made your picture at exactly 266 dpi at 100% of the size the image needs to be in the final layout, you really can’t blow it up without degrading quality. But if your image is 300 dpi, you have about 15% headroom where you have “extra” resolution to sop up in the final screen. Therefore, you can safely bump up images 10-15% if it’s 300 dpi at 100%.

Now, if you send a 300 dpi image at 5 inches across, but it’s going to be printed at say 2.5 inches in the final layout, you now have TONS of headroom, because it’s effectively 600 dpi because you are reducing the image by 50%. Get how that works? If you had a catalog of images that were all 200% bigger than they needed to be, you’d just be wasting DVDs or FTP time or whatever, plus making the process just slower. The goal is to print 300 dpi at roughly 100% of the final print size.

Finally, what is 600 dpi? Simple. The 300 dpi relates primarily to images that are printed in CMYK. The screens and colors make up the final image of tiny dots. But what about line art? Like a pen and ink drawing or a black and white version of a logo? The human eye needs about 600 dpi to be fooled into seeing pixel based art as non-pixelated and nice and smooth with no jaggies. If you print a logo from the web, you can see the dots on the printer. But if you print a logo at 600 dpi, from about a foot away, you really can’t see any dots or edges. But if you zoom in in photoshop, you can see how “bad” it looks. This is why 600 dpi is the baseline for laser printer resolution. Since the final print of line art has no screens involved to help the illusion along, you have to have sheer numbers of pixels to fool the eye. Beyond 600 you really can’t tell too much, but below 600 you can. It’s just that way.

Well that was one big brain dump. I hope it helps!

Doug

[--- end reply ---]

In conclusion

Yes, indeed, that was one big brain dump. Not an easy article to scan, but is worth the time to read carefully if the resolutions of web and print as of yet still befuddle you.

Funny & Odd Emails Received

The typo is “chirdlike” which seems to be, but I’m not 100% sure, a typo for “childlike”. I don’t understand why this happens so much since “r” is not near “l” on the keyboard. Either way, I didn’t know what it meant the first time I came across it, thinking it was an eighth-grade vocab word I missed, or it was another one of those fancy internet memes like “pwn” or its past-tence version, “pwnd”.

I googled “chirdlike” only to find that the number one result for the word in Google was…the post I was commenting on!

I still have no definition, since I end up in a recursive loop, since when I ask the question, I end up reading my own comment on the site from which the comment originated. How interesting.

Therefore…

I now suggest that we define “chirdlike” as follwing:

chirdlike: a debate tactic which uses circular logic as a diversionary tactic: a recursive red herring.

What do you think it should mean? Before you suggest anything though, you must Google the word “recursion” and include a reference to it in your post. You must also Google “chirdlike” too.

• “freelance graphic design”
• “freelance graphic designer”
• “freelance graphic designers”
• “freelance graphic design portfolio”

…and a few more, as well as a dozen or so font and typeface related searches.

We did this in 3 weeks.

If you want to know, in detail, how this came about, I would encourage you to subscribe to our RSS. I’m not holding anything back, but the details will come over months, not weeks. Some of our path over the last 3 weeks is documented already. Dig, you must, and read, you must. And then after that, apply you must and work you must. Did I mention work?

Of course, I don’t expect this to last. The top 10 rating could be done in a matter of days or hours, but the fact that we did it at all is due to following good instructions, writing a lot, working hard, using WordPress, and following the advice and example of other bloggers. Our site has been in top 20, 30, and 40 for the above searches and related terms for a long time (years) with a site that was essentially one page at times (as high as #17). Now it’s time to focus on finishing my basic content like About Us, getting a usable contact and prospect screening form in place, and doing something about the Portfolio!

Hat’s off to Jacob Cass, David Airey, and Rob Cubbon! Their dedication to blogging and designing, as well as being open about their processes, and of course their kindly comments here on BonFX and on their own respective sites, are much appreciated.

Now, I just hope that the top 10 ranking we got lasts long enough for you to get here and read about it while it’s still news .

EXPERIMENT: If you are so inclined and interested to take a look, where does BonFX come up in Google if you search any of the above terms? For what it’s worth, we don’t show up at all in Bing. What’s up with that?

In lieu of pro-bono work, which is actually surprisingly tricky to give way while also getting a decent portfolio-worthy piece at the same time, responding to these calls to graphic designers for new work is a fantastic way to offload those unused logo design concepts or rejected brochure comps with a little touch up and make-ready. Like the land of misfit toys, you can make your old design work happy and proud to be yours once again by giving them a useful existence – and maybe some glory!

20 Design Competitions and Calls to Artists for Exposure!

• AIGA - ”AIGA (Re)design Awards is a design competition honoring sustainable and socially responsible work done by professionals around the world.”
• Andy Awards
• Campaign Big Awards - ”The Big Awards have become the kite-mark for creative excellence across all media and all product categories, from TV to DM, radio to press, posters to digital. Again, we’ll ask some of our industry’s most illustrious talent to judge each of the categories. And unlike some other awards, our judges will all know what it’s like to create ads for the British market”
• Communication Arts - ”Enter the most prestigious design competition for interactive media, the Communication Arts Interactive Design Competition. Any interactive project created for digital distribution on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, interactive kiosk or handheld device is eligible…”
• Creativity - ”Creativity Annual Awards is one of the longest running international advertising and graphic design competitions. We are a print design competition, a web design competition, and an advertising design competition. You will find we have categories in Print, Publications, New Media, TV, Radio and more.”
• Cresta International Advertising Awards
• Effie Awards - ”The Effie Awards were founded in 1968 by the American Marketing Association, New York Chapter, as an awards program to recognize the most effective advertising efforts in the United States each year.”
• Graphic Competitions - A resource for many top design competitions for Graphic Designers, Illustrators, Animators, Cartoonists and more!
• Graphics.com - A great resource for Creative Designers with info on competitions, forums, tips, news, inspiration and learning tools for new and seasoned designers.
• How Magazine - ”Enter your work in HOW magazine’s Interactive Design Competition. All winning entries will be featured in HOW’s April 2010 Design Annual and will receive a $100 discount toward registration for the 2010 HOW Design Conference.”
• Icograda IDA (International Council of Graphic Design Associations, a Partner of the International Design Alliance) - ”Our international calendar of events includes congresses, meetings, and conferences that further the international exchange of information. Icograda events and Icograda endorsed events comply with international guidelines and best practices.”
• Licc – London International Creative Competition - ”London International Creative Competition (LICC) is a vehicle for facilitating contact between uniquely talented artists and an international audience”.
• New York Festivals
• Print Magazine - No explanation needed; an ideal site for graphic designers, students can enter a myriad of contests and gain exposure.
• The Drum – UK - Great blog with Design Competition listings as well as informed UK art news, jobs, events, training, and a lot more. Subscribe to this one!
• The Mobius Awards - Entry deadline Oct 1 every year; “Acknoledging Creative Excellence Worldwide…Print, Outdoor, Brochure/Book, Package Design..Mixed Media..”
• UCDA - ”The 2009 Design Competition is now underway. UCDA is looking for your biggest and best ideas for our annual design competition — whether it be print, electronic, green, and even student work!”
• Crescent Hill Books “Innovative Producer of Fine Design Books”
• Design and Design - ”An Independent and Non-Profit on/off-line venture developed by Marc Praquin to help talented designers to promote for free their work on an international basis.”
• Rockport Publishers - Publishers for ARchitecture, graphic design, Interior Design, and Fashion Design, looking for Artists to submit designs and illustrations for their covers, promising great exposure!

• Optimize the PDF file size: The PDF that is used to print high-quality copies of your brochure is not the one you want to post on the web. You want to make sure you are using a web optimized PDF. Optimized PDFs are much smaller, load faster, and display faster than print-ready PDFs. There is an art and a science to proper PDF optimization which is a balance between image quality, extra features (like thumbnails) and download speeds. This is very important especially for mobil devices. A PDF of your brochure can be optimized in the program that made it (InDesign, Illustrator, Word) to some degree, or it can be optimized using Adobe Acrobat Professional. Acrobat has many options to reduce the file size of a print-ready PDF down to a web-friendly version.
• Consider the design of your brochure and format of PDF: A large format brochure or multi-page brochure with spreads may not translate well in a PDF reader like Adobe Reader. For instance, do any of the pages “spread” across another page? If so, a direct default conversion to PDF from the source might not be what you want. You might have to have your designer output a special PDF with the pages set up as spreads in order to accommodate the layout. But just because a designer offers brochure design services doesn’t mean they know how to optimize it right for the web.
• Consider a specially-designed PDF brochure for your customers to download: It might be best to take your print-ready brochure design and adjust it for optimal reading on the screen, downloading and viewing time, and printability on basic office printers. If you want to communicate with your clients, give them what they need as simply and efficiently as possible!
• Replace your PDF as soon as it’s out-of-date with a an updated copy USING THE SAME FILENAME when you can: I recall many times where I’ve found a PDF brochure or catalog because Google indexed it and it contained information I wanted. And many of those times, it was an ancient PDF from years ago full of outdated information. One clever way to always make sure only one up-to-date version of PDF is indexed by Google is to use the same file name. Don’t post “My Company Product Catalog version-13.pdf” and then post “My Company Product Catalog version-14.pdf”. Either delete the old version, or use one common name all the time like “My Company Product Catalog.pdf” or use clearly delineated dated names like “My Company Product Catalog – Summer 2009.pdf” and then delete them when they are obsolete.
• Make sure your logo design translates well in the PDF on the screen and in print: Depending on the source files for your brochure, your logo might print “fuzzy” or nice and crisp. Your logo should be 1) from a vector source file, and 2) not a “raster” or “bitmap” version that prints fuzzy from a lo-res PDF. Have you printed it? The tagline typography might look great on the expensive paper you chose, but can you read it at the default size the PDF opens up at?
• Think PowerPoint: I know, we all love PowerPoint. But it’s a good paradigm to consider for your brochure when someone opens it up on the web. Is it actually legible or do you force the customer to zoom in and out and resize and whatnot just to be able to read it? You are going to lose the customer if important information is not designed correctly for consumption as a PDF on the web.

The best option, honestly, is to design something specifically for a web-based audience who is likely to print out what they see on the screen. For instance, your print brochure might be heavy on reversed-out type on a dark color. Will your clients appreciate your brochure sucking up their supply of color ink – for just your cover page? It’s small things like this that create an impression on your customers. Your corporate identity is at stake! Carelessly designed PDF brochures, among a zillion other things that contribute to the overall impression your company makes, do matter. Everything you do matters on the web, and make sure you optimize all your media, including PDFs of brochures and catalogs, for the manner in which they will be consumed.

Grab your beveled pica ruler, Letraset rub downs, and your favorite browser. We did some fresh research to discover what the best typography blogs are, according to the top graphic design blogs. We went through our own lists (see Related Posts below) of top graphic design blogs, some other lists, and tallied up all of their recommendations, comments, and anecdotal data to discover the 28 top typography blogs. We sorted the list from “most recommended” down to  “regular recommended”.

Don’t let those ranking only one star fool you. If it’s on this list, you should pay them a visit and subscribe to your favorites! Orphan or widow, this list is for everyone from freelance graphic designer to rock-star art director:

28 Top Typography Blogs Ranked by Top Graphic Design Blogs

• I Love Typography ******
• Typographica ******
• TypeNeu *****
• FontFeed *****
• Typographer ****
• Spiekerblog ***
• The Ministry of Type ***
• Type 101 ***
• Type For You ***
• Typography.com ***
• Typoretum ***
• 26 Symbols **
• Phinney on Fonts **
• Swiss Legacy **
• The Type Directors Club **
• Type Theory **
• Typesites **
• Archive Type *
• Beta Type *
• Font.Is *
• John D. Berry *
• Jon Tan *
• Letter Cult *
• Open Type *
• Thinking with Type *
• Typography Served *
• Upscale Typography *
• Use Typography *

I’ve written a small jQuery plugin that makes it easy to see only todays stats. It takes you right to your domain stats with info delimited to today. Nice!

How to install and use GA Today:

• Download (view then copy and paste) the code below and save as “ga-today.js” or some other name
• Go to Google Analytics and view the default stats for your domain and get the ID from the URI, towards the end but right before the dates (see the bold red number below):
  https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=2539825&pdr=20090822-20090921
• Set the variable “domain_id” in ga-today. js to the value you just got from previous step
• Upload ga-today.js on your server
• Include the script in your HTML as any other jQuery plugin
• Make sure you have a DIV with an ID of “ga-today” somewhere in your HTML

That’s it! You can get the script directly from my server here.

Then in your HTML, make sure you have this DIV (or SPAN or other element) ready to go:

<div id="ga-today"></div>

Edit any of these bits and pieces to get your desired link format or ID to insert the dynamic link into and you’ll be in business.

When it runs, you’ll see this:

However, this link won’t work for you, since it’s my site ID. Whether you are logged in to Google or not, your generated link will take you to the right place once your domain ID is inserted correctly.

I hope the code pasted here doesn’t translate back to something buggy. And one final note: the script is set to run in “no conflict” mode, so you may want to get rid of that construct in the first few lines of the script…

Good luck!

Take a moment to scan the story, or read it in full: The number on reason my startup failed.

If you don’t have time, I’ll share the money quote with you now:

“So the number one reason my startup failed was: I was distracted by a cool and shiny feature that didn’t solve anyone’s problem. The shinier and more tempting features of any software program should be regarded with a high level of suspicion. There may be a reason some things are so shiny and alluring. Traps often have this quality. My advice to anyone creating a solution is to march straight towards your initial goal, as long as the goal really does address a true need then that’s what you should focus on.”

The number one reason a graphic design fails miserably:

The number one reason a design fails is that it fails to communicate it’s message to the audience.

How does this happen? It’s very easy to get lost with tempting eye-candy like photoshop filters and backgrounds, or belabor the choice of a photo illustration or typeface. It takes discipline, practice, and the pain of multiple failures as a graphic designer to learn to stay on task.

6 things to avoid while developing a graphic design:

• Not following a sound procedure that starts with an outline, then a sketch, and slowly and clearly builds a design.
• Not sketching a good number of ideas in pencil or pen first.
• Failing to establish a grid or layout system.
• Failing to establish tonal variations up before playing with colors.
• Playing with colors before a grid and information flow are established.
• Tinkering with fonts, kerning, wingdings and embelishments before the structure and information flow are established.

None of these things can be 100% avoided all the time. Sometimes there is the flash inspiration and you must follow it. But, you are more likely to get the flash of inspiration you want when following a mundane set of procedures, as that in and of itself creates expectation for inspiration. And if you don’t get inspired, you’ll at least have a solid design coming along that is adequate if not totally sufficient for the task.

3 Tips for developing a solid graphic design:

• Draw, draw, draw first. Don’t bother with the eraser, just keep drawing more comps. Draw lightly and correct with darker strokes. Scribble suggestions where text goes, based on your outline or bullets you worked on first.
• Have your information ranked by importance and make sure less important information does not overwhelm or distract from the most pertinent information. Good design is hierarchical.
• Always have the message, not the look and feel, foremost in your mind. In the early stages of design, let the information structure slowly suggest a look and feel direction. You may have, and should have, the general mood or theme in mind, but resist implementing it until the information design is clear. When it’s time for color, and later on other visual embellishments, you’ll know.

The discovery process will no doubt lead to many ideas. Your first idea might be gold – you saw it in a flash because you understood all the issues instinctively. But it might be your tenth or twentieth idea, after much deliberation and iteration following a solid process which then leads to success.

In conclusion:

• Don’t be distracted by cool and shiny visual embellishments, from fonts to filters, that don’t contribute to solving the main communication problem of your design. They are traps!
• March straight towards your initial goal, and keep your focus on it.

What we have here is that list of 19 top fonts once again, but this  time combined into pairs to give us 19 excellent font combinations.

How does combining fonts work?

I simply followed the golden rule of font combinations, which is simply to combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. The farther apart the typeface styles are, as a guideline, the more luck you’ll have. Fonts that are too similar look bad. Set a line of Times Roman over Garamond and you’ll see what I mean.  I chose the simple model of a bold headline font and normal weight body font. All the font combinations got the same “lorem” text.

How did I choose the combinations?

I tried to mix it up, but had to make some arbitrary decisions. For instance, I could have picked Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, or Minion, etc. (all serif typefaces) to go with Futura (a sans serif typeface). I simply choose to spread them out amongst themselves, keeping the use of repeats down to a minimum.

The results

You may love some of these combinations and hate others, or be unphased by yet others (or you may think I dwell on this too much). However, this is not a fair fight. Pretty much any two fonts can be balanced out and made to work with each other in some type of context. Our context here was strictly delimited, and so any of these combinations might warrant further experimentation for even better results.

Finally, I tried to keep the look of each example as close as possible to each other. This involved using the occasional semibold or light to balance a font out at certain point size. I also tweaked font size and leading in the interest of creating uniformity amongst the examples.

So here we have the following items:

• A very long chart of the font combinations
• We must also technically call this a list of top typface combinations, which is what it really is (Google “fonts and typefaces” for some spirited discussions).
• A link to a PDF version (2 column) of the original I composed
• A text list version of these combinations

PDF Download:

Click the preview image below or download “19 top fonts in 19 top combinations chart“:

Text version of list:

• Helvetica / Garamond
• Caslon / Univers
• Frutiger / Minion
• Futura / Bodoni
• Garamond / Futura
• Gill Sans / Caslon
• Minion / Gill Sans
• Univers / Caslon
• Bodoni / Futura
• Myriad / Minion
• Avenir / Warnock
• Caslon / Franklin Gothic
• FF Din / Baskerville
• Trade Gothic / Clarendon
• Baskerville / Univers
• Akzidenz Grotesk / Garamond
• Clarendon / Trade Gothic
• Franklin Gothic / Baskerville
• Warnock / Univers

Enjoy! Thanks again for reading and looking and downloading and printing! And please tell me I didn’t make a typo…

Their corporate identity for decades has revolved around the usage of such classic fonts such as Futura and Century Schoolbook on which they based their own typefaces, Ikea Sans and Ikea Serif, respectively.

If you like timeless typography and good design, you need to head over to the petition website and sign it right away! Please don’t wait…

Sign the petition to get Ikea to change Verdana back to their classic fonts!

I can’t imagine, as much as I like dill salmon, swedish meatballs, cool cheap lamps, hanging canvass storage units, maple plywood bookcases, and hot pretzels on the way out, I just can’t imagine 3 hours of being confronted with a never-ending stream of Verdana in my face. I can’t do it…

Further Reading:

• Ikea Sans replaced by Verdana

• Visit Twitter and view / search for “#warehouse”
• Find an image, then go back Twitter at said link above.
• Twit something like: “If my head was a warehouse, it would look like this: [insert_your_link_here]“

Happy warehousing…

We scoured the web to find the names of top graphic designers and agencies who also ran blogs. We compared blog comments for mentions of other designers, blog rolls, etc., and came to a general-consensus list of what are considered the most visited blogs by the top graphic designers and graphic design agencies.

This list is not our opinion of the best graphic design blogs, but rather (we stress) the current consensus of what search results and blog chatter reveal them to be. Zero opinion factor

The length of the list was simply limited by time. If you are sure someone is missing, let me know and I’ll be glad to add it!

21 Top Graphic Design Blogs

1. Aisle One
2. Coudal Partners
3. David Airey
4. Design Observer
5. Dexigner
6. Fuel Your Creativity
7. Grain Edit
8. I Love Typography
9. Inspiration Bit
10. Just Creative Design
11. Logo Design Love
12. Mark Boulton
13. Outlaw Design Blog
14. Presidia Creative
15. Six Revisions
16. Smashing Magazine
17. Subtraction
18. Swiss Miss
19. Vandelay Design
20. Veer: Ideas: The Skinny
21. You The Designer

Update 12-14-2009: It looks like Inspiration Bit has not published in many months.

So, the common denominator all of these designers and firms is that they have famous clients, with which they focus on branding. Recognize any brands out there? And who did we miss? Please suggest and we’ll amend the post!

• Tolleson Design
• MetaDesign
• End Communications
• Firstborn
• Memo
• VasilisMagoulas
• AntiAnti
• Larsen
• Graphic Vertigo
• Chermayeff & Geismar
• Milton Glaser, Inc.
• Studio Dumbar
• Minale Tattersfield Design Strategy
• Pentagram
• Distant Station Ltd.

Happy clicking!

This is very similar to how logo designers work. Daryl doesn’t show aborted and half-baked ideas, but rather starts with the final concept he is going to render. This is similar to when a logo designer commits to a concept and finishes the brainstorming process. From this point, Daryl lists the following steps:

• Messy rough sketching with no attempts to “look good”
• Finished line art on velum
• Scan into Photoshop and add color

The parallels to the logo design process are as follows:

• Brainstorming concepts with no attempt to “get it right”, until one concept is selected and refined
• Vector art construction, usually in black & white
• Addition of color in Illustrator, after contrasts and tonal values are worked out

Every cartoonist has their own style and method of brainstorming and producing final art. The same also applies to a logo designer. However, with all the variation in methods, these basic steps apply in general to. They reflect the essence of the creative process and not necessarily the specific mechanics. Hey, we all dance to a different tune, right?

So visit Daryl’s article today and enjoy the work of a master cartoonist!

As of right now, I only have about 15 articles, all authored in the last week. I got a hat tip from Jacob Cass over at Just Creative Design to check out the Hubspot Website Grader. I ran a report and I think – someone correct me if I’m wrong – I have reason to be pleased with where I’m at after one week of changing to a blog format. Of course I have a lot of work to do now, but it could be worse. See the report:

http://www.grader.com/site.php?URL=bonfx.com

I have a score of 83, and a Page Rank of 4. All of my old content is still being indexed, like totally random stuff and like Flash demos installed in their own folder from my days as a hack Flash Developer, temporary junk like a folder of pictures from when I sold my Jeep (96 Jeep Cherokee 4×4 – what a vehicle!), old customer sub-domains, and temp folders for friends like “stuff” hanging off the root.

So what did I learn? First, I learned that the way to increase SEO and ranking is to be humble, true, and honest and write good content. There is so much bad information out there that tries to game the system, but it won’t work. I just read last night, I think it was Jacob Cass (not sure now) that there are hundreds of PhDs working at Google and the like. You are not smarter than them, and they know how to write algorithms that smoke out the impostors. Essentially, do what is good and right, and do it in a good and right way, and you will do well in ranking. Essentially, it seems to be a fact now (and certainly more so as search engines get even better) that search engines will bless hard honest work and not much else.

Part of my blogging will chronicle my work in regards to ranking. Click the link above to Website Grader for a detailed report (and then get your own) of the BonFX website, or read some interesting facts I need to act on immediately:

• My page title is way too long. It should be 70 characters or less and mine is 236
• My site description is also way too long. It should be no more than 150 characters, but I hit 160. I guess less is more for these first 2 points!
• 2 images are missing alt tags.
• My domain is going to expire in 4 months. I had no clue this could count against me, though the site is old! The farther the expire time is out in the future, the better search engines feel about the site.
• My Page Rank is 4. From what I gather, 4 is pretty good considering what has been going on on my site for the last 8 years (nothing!).
• I have a form! I guess having a form on the site counts towards looking alive to the search engines!
• I am looking to lock down some decent search engine rankings for 2 basic terms: freelance graphic design and logo design. It’s not clear if I have to pick one or the other and focus on it. For now, I’m not doing too badly (20-30 ranking) for having done nothing, essentially, in regards to “freelance graphic design” other than having had that in my title for eons. Notice I didn’t even rank for logo design, but I’m just starting that, like 5 days ago:
  

  freelance graphic designer	1,401	30
  freelance graphic design	1,775	30

• It looks like my site vocabulary is too high, being ranked as college undergraduate. It is suggested I lower it. It’s probably due to my predilection for run-on sentences. Why stop when you are having fun? Yes, I’ll work on that. If you want some long sentences, try reading German Biblical scholarly titles translated into English. There are some sentences that are close to a full page. Not good, not user-friendly.
• Overall, I got a score of 83.
• The last thing I learned is that there is an astonishing array of very powerful tools to help you analyze your site, and a wonderful cadre of friendly bloggers to help find the way.

As usual, thanks for reading! Please subscribe to my feed in the top right corner to keep tabs on my progress

My blog is brand new. I’m new to this kind of blogging as well. I’m fairly new to SEO though I have gotten some great results with my initial site in it’s pre-blog incarnation. For instance, I was in the top 20 for some key terms (“freelance graphic designer“), and number one for local variations on that.

Evaluation of graphic design articles

If you have a few minutes, I’d love to hear some drag-down, knock-out assessments of some of the graphic design content on the site. The first few articles are longer and not very optimized, but as I researched how to write over the last week, I think I’ve made some progress. There are a lot of great resources and my learning uptake is about as fast as it can be. I’m drinking from the WordPress SEO firehose!

WordPress plugins to manage site and increase SEO of site

Can you recommend anything specific? I’d love to chat about it…

Evaluation of anything else for SEO

As my site finishes coming together and I get more content going, I’d love to hear whatever you might have to say, if you have any experience in SEO at all. It will be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

1. Graphic Artists Guild Handbook (Graphic Artists Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines)
   This book contains priceless discussion about and examples of contracts for graphic designer to use. New or used, every designer should have this on their shelf.
2. Color Harmony: A Guide to Creative Color Combinations
   Sometimes you simply need to turn away from the computer and pick up a printed swatch book or some other tactile form of inspiration. This is a classic!
3. Quick Solutions for Great Type Combinations
   A great book for seeing on paper how to combine classic fonts. Sometimes you just need to see up close examples done by skilled typographer to see what classic fonts are capable of, and how they work in combinations you might not have thought of.
4. Inspirability: 40 Top Designers Speak Out About What Inspires
   It’s hard to find 40 designers in one place speaking about the timeless issue of how to get inspiration. For 1 cent, you just saved 5 hours of surfing the web looking for this info!
5. 2005 Artist’s & Graphic Designer’s Market
   Why include such an old book? Surely the information is dated. Not exactly, not at all! Most of the information in the book reveals how you should approach all kinds of people, timeless marketing tips, and a ready list of companies that year after year are in the book. So, for 1 cent, you can nab the book. If you really want an updated list, you can then turn around and buy the new version. But for 1 cent, you get to see what all the fuss about this great book is year after year.
6. Designer’s Guide to Color 3 (Bk. 3)
   I included this classic book which has been sold for years unchanged. It’s just another book you can turn to and hold and flip through when you need to take a coffee break and your eyes are tired of the glowing screen. It’s timeless and a book I pick up with some frequency nearly 10 years after I bought my new copy.

NOTE: When I checked these out there were limited numbers of copies from various booksellers for the 1 cent price. If the 1 cent copies are gone by the time you read this, there will be some under a dollar. And if you wait long enough (why you’d wait I’m not sure) you might see them again for 1 cent.

Happy reading!

Further reading:

• What’s your favourite graphic design book? – David Airey

100 of the most popular books on graphic design

1. Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)
2. The Non-Designer’s Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice
3. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design
4. Graphic Design Solutions, Third Edition
5. Graphic Design: The New Basics
6. The Elements of Color: A Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten Based on His Book the Art of Color (A Basic color library)
7. Envisioning Information
8. Universal Principles of Design
9. Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines (Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines)
10. Designing with Type: A Basic Course in Typography
11. Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual
12. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop
13. An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers
14. Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design
15. Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
16. Layout Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Building Pages in Graphic Design
17. Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands
18. Graphic Design: A New History
19. Interaction of Color
20. Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type (Design Briefs)
21. Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition
22. Picture This: How Pictures Work
23. Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works (2nd Edition)
24. The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
25. Design Basics Index (Index Series)
26. How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul
27. The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
28. Forms, Folds and Sizes, Second Edition: All the Details Graphic Designers Need to Know but Can Never Find
29. Designer’s Color Manual: The Complete Guide to Color Theory and Application
30. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide
31. Fingerprint: The Art of Using Hand-Made Elements in Graphic Design
32. Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color
33. Logo Design Workbook: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Logos
34. Design Language
35. Graphic Design Basics
36. Getting It Printed: How to Work With Printers and Graphic Imaging Services to Assure Quality, Stay on Schedule and Control Costs
37. Understanding Color: An Introduction for Designers (Design & Graphic Design)
38. Exploring the Elements of Design (Design Exploration Series)
39. Elements of Design: Rowena Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships
40. Exploring Typography (Design Exploration Series)
41. Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain
42. Graphic Design School, Third Edition
43. Graphic Communications Today, 4E
44. Basics of Design
45. Building Design Portfolios: Innovative Concepts for Presenting Your Work (Design Field Guide)
46. The Designer’s Guide To Marketing And Pricing: How To Win Clients And What To Charge Them
47. Color Index: Over 1100 Color Combinations, CMYK and RGB Formulas, for Print and Web Media
48. Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1
49. Becoming a Graphic Designer: A Guide to Careers in Design
50. Introduction to Design (2nd Edition)
51. Publication Design Workbook
52. 1,000 Type Treatments: From Script to Serif, Letterforms Used to Perfection
53. Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design
54. A Guide to Graphic Print Production
55. Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids
56. Layout Index: Brochure, Web Design, Poster, Flyer, Advertising, Page Layout, Newsletter, Stationery Index
57. Picturing Texts
58. Marks of Excellence
59. Principles of Form and Design
60. The Information Design Handbook
61. Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers (3rd Edition)
62. What is Graphic Design? (Essential Design Handbooks)
63. The Designers Complete Index (Boxed Set)
64. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (Design Handbooks)
65. A Designer’s Research Manual: Succeed in Design by Knowing Your Clients and What They Really Need (Design Field Guide)
66. Logo, Font & Lettering Bible
67. Typographic Systems of Design
68. The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places
69. Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Graphic Problem Solving
70. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Graphic Design
71. The Business Side of Creativity: The Complete Guide to Running a Small Graphics Design or Communications Business (Third UpdatedEdition)
72. How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer
73. The Designer’s Desktop Manual
74. Graphic Design: A Concise History, Second Edition (World of Art)
75. Package Design Workbook: The Art and Science of Successful Packaging
76. Starting Your Career as a Freelance Illustrator or Graphic Designer
77. Letterhead and Logo Design 9 (Letterhead & LOGO Design (Quality)) (v. 9)
78. Type Idea Index: The Designer’s Ultimate Tool for Choosing and Using Fonts Creatively
79. The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics
80. 1,000 Graphic Elements: Details for Distinctive Designs
81. Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication
82. Looking Good in Print
83. The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Portfolio Design
84. Idea Index: Graphic Effects and Typographic Treatments
85. Creativity for Graphic Designers
86. Designing Type
87. Type Rules!
88. The Creative Business Guide to Running a Graphic Design Business (Revised)
89. Make It Bigger
90. Design Matters: Logos 01: An Essential Primer for Today’s Competitive Market (v. 1)
91. New Vintage Type: Classic Fonts for the Digital Age
92. Design for Communication: Conceptual Graphic Design Basics
93. Green Graphic Design
94. Creative Sparks: An Index of 150+ Concepts, Images and Exercises to Ignite Your Design Ingenuity
95. Process Color Manual: 24,000 CMYK combinations for design, prepress, and printing
96. The Designer’s Guide to Color Combinations
97. AIGA Professional Practices in Graphic Design, Second Edition
98. Designing Brand Experience: Creating Powerful Integrated Brand Solutions
99. Information Design Workbook: Graphic approaches, solutions, and inspiration plus 30 case studies
100. Vector Graphics and Illustration: A Master Class in Digital Image-making

Further reading:

• What’s your favourite graphic design book? – David Airey

For BonFX, and any designer worth his or her salt, logo design is an iterative process. Many dead ends are encountered looking for the one right idea. But those dead ends are like pieces of marble that are chiseled away from a sculpture, as the artist “frees” the image trapped in the stone. In the case of a logo designer, the “stone” is blank white paper, and the chisel is a No. 2 pencil.

I’m going to walk you through my creative and technical process for creating the logo mark “BonFX”. I’ve run BonFX as such for over 10 years, and was Bon Communications before that. Now, BonFX has changed several times over the years, but with the advent of my new blog at www.bonfx.com, I decided a new look and feel was in store. The cobbler’s children are finally getting some shoes! My previous logo was a very simple, overly-austere type based mark relying on Akzidenz-Grotesk, one of my favorite typefaces (that I did quickly and ended up sticking with for some time). I wanted something warmer and friendlier, but I’m not a big fan of using handwriting fonts for logo marks. I decided to just brainstorm to see if I could get to “loose”, “friendly”, “fun”, buy yet convey a sense of restraint, balanced by a refined corporate sensibility. Let’s commence and see how it went!

Last step first:

First, let’s start with the end and then work through how I got there. Here is the final logo in production now on my website and collateral, in black and white:

Now we’ll run through 23 steps of this logo design process and see just how crazy it got. All good logo design processes follow a similar path.

Step 1: Brainstorm logo concepts

The first step in creative is brainstorming is to just improvise some visual ideas guided by the research done in a previous cycle of work. In this case, since I was the client and the designer, I already had worked out my goals for aesthetics, evaluated my competition, and decided where I wanted to end up. The important thing at this stage is to generate too many ideas and leave nothing unexplored, even if it seems at odds with the research and stated objectives:

Step 2: Bring a logo design concept into further focus

I had an initial visual I wanted to pursue, on a chunky box theme:

Step 3: Pursue even random logo design concepts beyond simple lines

But no…and then I was off down rabbit trails when I realized the initial “box idea” turned out to be a “bag idea”. Even though I wasn’t going to use the idea, I still make it a point to let my pencil enjoy itself and get creative and make wasted ideas look nice. Well, they aren’t really wasted really. What’s more fun than doodling? And what’s better than coffee?

Step 4: Free associating logo design concepts

I’m really getting out there, trying to get sillier so that I can get some perspective on where I need to be. A banner? Why not? I need to “say” something fun with the logo I’m looking for…I’m drawing quickly, very small, and generating lot’s of free association ideas:

Step 5: Remain unhindered in your creativity as you hunt for the right logo design concept

Hmmm…what is that happy lamp thing from Pixar movies? He’s fun. Can he help shine some light on my new logo?

Step 6: Never give up, but keep iterating, and always letting your creative juices have their way

Ok, no light from the lamp per se, but I’ve filled a sheet of paper at this point. No luck yet. It’s the end of the road for this creative burst…

Step 7: Give yourself plenty of white space as you pursue the logo design concept

So I grabbed a new sheet and went right back at it. Let’s look and see some places this next creative brainstorm took me. There is something about a blank sheet of paper that forgives the past, keeps only the good, and invites the artist to explore:

Step 8: Try all the different directions for a logo design that you can reasonably and quickly prototype

I really felt like I wanted that square idea from earlier to work. It was a feeling I was after, and I thought it was squarish, but not quite. I needed movement. Can I move some lines around inside a square? Stability and playfulness?

Step 9: Try a different angle on your logo design concept when your current perspective fails

Nope, not working. So let’s go with the “stable” thing, keep the straight lines so we avoid looking like a 60’s psychedelic poster. Oops, I went from the 60’s music poster to the 50’s movie poster. Fine, fine…I see “staring Charlton Heston” floating somewhere…

Step 10: Work diligently to trap the mood of the logo design, but don’t worry about specific designs

Maybe we can stack some blocks? Have some grown up fun? Maybe not. I’m not sure about the fun idea at this point, but I’m thinking we need friendly and I’m groping again to get there. This is too disorganized but I like the freedom concept that is lurking in this one. It’s about mood at this point, and not about execution or final design. You need to trap the mood and then explore that. I’m committed to hand drawn letters for sure:

Step 11: When the right path to take on your logo design presents itself, you will know it

Nope, too rigid. Let’s speed the pencil up and get the left brain to take a breather. The left brain often starts saying “I know best, give me the pencil” and you start listening to it. “You want lines and grids” it says. So you start drawing lines, but lose emotion. But I don’t want boxy lines and grids! I want to break out of this entirely. Right brain takes the pencil:

Step 12: Refine the vision for the logo design

That felt good! Let’s jam on this free-flowing theme and eschew all manner of lines and grids. Left brain at this point is observing, slack-jawed, and wondering where this is going, grumbling like a back-seat driver, waiting to say “I told you so!” However, I get the idea to use the structure of flowing lines to build up something more substantial and weighty:

Step 13: Try variations within a tightly narrowed focus for the logo design

After coloring this in, I get an ah-ha moment. I grab another sheet and rapidly sketch out some variations on the free flowing handwriting thing:

Step 14: Refine the logo design concept using the freedom of pencil to bring out what might be the details of the final art

I quickly flesh out and fill in another handwriting sample:

Step 15: Eliminate extra logo designs and narrow the options to only a few concepts

Ah…I can see where this is going. This is not it, but is like it. Let’s get even loser and write in a manner that will produce lines expected to be further improvised on. I narrow it down to four looks and now things are getting clearer and tighter: