If you’re a “notebook thinker,” you’ll like Baron Fig, a small line of carefully crafted, take-it-anywhere hardcover and pocket notebooks made of archival quality pages (blank, lined, or dotted) that lie almost perfectly flat. I have a first-run hardcover, and it’s sweet.

Launched in October 2013 as a Kickstarter project, Baron Fig blew past its modest $15,000 funding goal by whopping $153,289! Impressive as that is, what’s really impressive — and why I’m writing — is the fantastic, relentless simplicity of the entire idea.

How do you make such a (seemingly) ordinary product desirable enough to sell at a premium? With design in its purest form, which one trip to their web site will make obvious.

It’s a beautifully simple site with a single focus — to present Baron Fig notebooks in a personal and somewhat precious way, similar to the iPhone. They do it not with hyperbole or lengthy explanation, but briefly, clearly, point by careful point. No distractions, diversions, or sidebars — just a photo, an illustration, a few words, a click or two.

Its design is wide-screen, deep scrolling, mostly white space, with sensitive, quiet typography. You’ll see a half-dozen carefully filmed videos of notebooks in use.

What reminded me of all this is the email I got recently promoting a new Baron Fig model — a “limited edition” pocket notebook with a lightbulb on the cover, handsomely presented against a tweed jacket:

Kinda makes you want one, doesn’t it?

Think about this. It’s a fairly mundane product category. The lightbulb is an image that you or I would easily discard as overly simplistic. And adding it to an otherwise blank cover — how much fanfare does that merit? I would have thought none, but Baron Fig has turned it into an event — low-key for sure, but worth talking about and worth doing well.

I’m smiling. The whole enterprise reinforces for me the efficacy of narrowing an idea to a niche and even a hyper niche and staying with it, carefully refining, proudly presenting, not overlooking the value in even the smallest detail.

Time to rethink a few things.

With a story, however, comes a paradox: there is no preset way — no rule, no template, no roadmap — that tells us how to design it (“if it’s round, make it blue”). Every story, and every expression of it, is unique.

To learn graphic design, one must master the operating tools (a big job), the aesthetic arts of visual expression (bigger), and accurately blend these (complex) skills in ever-changing contexts, which always involve people in some way, so there’s a psychology part, too.

And here’s the big one. The foundational truth of graphic design is that the designer is not an objective observer. Rather, how we design a story colors it.

I’ll say that again. How we design a story colors it. The designer’s voice is always mixed in with the author’s voice.

If you understand that, you know the responsibility that’s involved.

How does it work? Usually when you say something is “good looking,” you mean it’s connecting with you. If designed with the appropriate weight and voice, what you appreciate is not so much the design but the thing itself, whatever it may be. This is ideal.

An idea, some knowledge, a point of view remain only in someone’s mind until a designer makes them visible. This is exciting.

A friend of mine whose startup was heading with its first product to its first trade show asked me on short notice to design a brochure. Midweek of the show, delighted with its success, he phoned and said simply, “Thank you for making us exist.”

He wasn’t kidding. Back home, their office looked like a college dorm — tangles of wires and speakers, used pizza boxes and coffee cups from endless all-nighters, workout clothes tossed on boxes or chairs or floors for lack of closets, all that. But to the world through their brochure, they were professional and polished, their presence confident and convincing. I could do that because I knew them, understood their product, felt their mojo. I created a mirror in which they could see themselves.

It can go the other way. When a stakeholder isn’t happy with a design, it may be because your design doesn’t match his vision. The voices aren’t the same, or at least harmonious. Sometimes the fault is communication, meaning that you don’t know each other. Remember that your job is not to deliver a product (x number of pages over x hours equals x dollars) — you’re not pouring concrete here — but rather to tell his story.

Sometimes the problem is lack of skill. Remember that you’re not in the decorating business; you’re in the communication business, and 10-pt Gotham Light speaks differently from 11-pt Mrs. Eaves — different tone, different inflection, different vibe. You need to know which does what. The choices aren’t arbitrary.

There’s a third way. Sometimes a design can overpower the product or person. I’ve had people say to me “wow, you’ve made me look incredible,” before they backed off and asked for something less to live up to, something more like they felt about themselves. My design was not truthful.

All of this is easy to forget. We like how something looks — how this typeface goes with that one, or how a layout has the special something that gives us goosebumps. And while we can pick up tips from this or that, we usually can’t duplicate a design and expect it to work. We can’t copy style, not really. It will look affected, inappropriate, fake. 

And entirely because of context. You and I can have the same kind of house or wear the same kind of  jeans or drive the same kind of car, and it works for both of us. Not so with design.

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Our Master Collection — every issue we’ve ever published — is on sale this week and makes a great gift.

. . . which made it unusually easy to connect the name on the board to the team on the field.

This was a design decision. What I like is the visual efficiency of it — a color gradient behind the name is all it takes to let you know which team is which.

ESPN could have assumed you knew — you are a sports fan, right? — but they didn’t, and their choice makes the viewing experience better.

The lesson here is easy: If you want your viewer to connect this to that, give your elements something in common, and color is usually the strongest way to do that. Note below on the Nubi Yogurt card how effortlessly blue connects to blue and orange connects to orange.

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Notes:
ESPN’s scoreboard typeface is Klavika Bold, which is also the base typeface for the Facebook logo.
The Nubi Yogurt card and expanded lesson can be found in our Master Collection, articles 0686 (page 2) and 0702.

The panels are about 7′ x 3′, sparingly typeset on both sides in white atop very dark, nearly black, photos. The fabric is light and waves faintly when a door opens.

Each panel tells a Kaiser Permanente employee’s firsthand story of domestic violence. Created maybe a decade ago, the presentation is displayed throughout the Kaiser system each October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

I love the restraint. It’s a hot-button topic, ripe for sentiment and outrage, but note what’s not here. We see no screaming headlines, no sensational photos (battered faces, for example), or any other attempts to “grab” attention (bright colors, bold graphics, and so on).

Indeed, absent are all of the usual clichés. Instead are stately proportions, low-key typography, understated layout. “It was so serious,” said Kaiser designer Jason Pillon, who directed the work. “We were deeply affected by the candor and courage of those whose stories we were presenting, some of whom are not alive today.

“It was depressing,” he said, “but it couldn’t be bleak. We wanted to convey hope.”

To do this, the designers leaned heavily on memorial-style design, which conveys with heartbreaking dignity the strength that’s born of loss. In style and substance, the panels share elements with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,

and the National September 11 Memorial,

mighty touchstones that bear the weight of a nation’s collective grief.

Below are two of the visual techniques at work:

(Above) The design begins with a dark field, which by itself has weight, and most of it is left dark — there is considerably more unprinted than printed area. This “white,” or empty, space allows the eye to settle on the words without pressure or urgency. The result is the sense of certainty and calm — more impressive than shouting or thrashing for attention.

(Below) The panel is divided into three narrow columns. A clear, sans-serif typeface — in this case Gill Sans — is set on wide line spacing (about 175%) and placed into only two columns:

(Above) The thing to note is that the columns are not aligned in a block but staggered irregularly. Why? To create a flow that a block would not. The eye moves with the page, not against; without defined beginning or end, you flow into the story and flow out of it.

(Below) Conversely, a block stops the eye, defines a space:

(Above) A block is a visual object. When a block forms in positive space, you get equal and opposite blocks in the negative spaces, which are easy to see above. (A) White text columns blocked to the left yield heavy (black) blocks above and below and leave the right column obviously empty. We call this inactive, or dead, space, visually unproductive. (B) The three-column block divides the page into thirds, which could have significance but is meaningless here.

In another situation these could be turned into successful layouts — a poster grouping different kinds of information, for example — but here they have nothing to do with the story, which we simply want to flow off of the page and into the viewer’s mind.

(Below) The callout — which in this design is the focal point — is set in Bodoni italic, a classic Modern style, line spacing about 140%, and staggered too. Finally, the Silent Witness logo, set in Gill Sans, is added in the lower right against the margin. Both elements bridge the center and right columns, which activates the previously empty column and yields a design that releases its information gracefully (and silently), undisturbed by artificial visual devices:

From the beginning of the project, client, stakeholders, and designers had a bond of trust that yielded a presentation powerful enough to affect viewers years later. Domestic violence, I learned here, is often hidden or denied out of shame, confusion, fear, and can be difficult to discern from the outside. But someone you care about may already be living in silent agony. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I encourage you to learn more by reading the Kaiser Permanente Silent Witness stories here.

The typeface is Verdana, a web standard. It was designed specifically for the web, which means readability at small sizes and (in 1996!) very low resolution. Its clarity comes in part from its tall x-height (the height of the lowercase letters) and large, open counters (the spaces inside the characters). Technically a sans-serif, it nevertheless has serifs on the cap I and numeral 1, which keep the 1, I, and lowercase l from being confused.

Because long distance is functionally the same as small, Verdana can be read across the store, yet it works equally well up close, so you’re free to design with high contrast of scale (above).

The ceiling sign below is less successful because the letterspacing is too tight for its viewing distance; this spacing would be used for closeup reading on a screen or printed page. I do like the spotlight.

Verdana is one of the most ubiquitous typefaces on the web. The benefit, of course, to using it in print is that it’s super easy to get your entire program looking consistent. Its serif counterpart is Georgia, which looks equally good on the web and in print.

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A heads-up: After this Friday, October 17, physical copies of our two videos, Design Essentials and Graphic Design Techniques, will no longer be available for general purchase.

Both videos in streaming form are a permanent part of lynda.com’s online training library. Search for my name.

What they don’t provide is delight, inspiration, fulfillment. I go there but I don’t love it. I enjoy roaming the galleria as much for its visual and aural ambience as for the products on sale, and it draws me back. I love beauty and seek it out. Great design creates atmosphere, mood, desire, experience — it lifts my spirit, stirs my soul, makes the world a more pleasant place to be.

So yeah, we can follow the sign, sit, eat, move along.

Or we can live.

Design can make the difference.

Generally we crop to either fit a space or get rid of dead spots. We’re usually less aware of the way we use cropping to create. Changing the proportions of a canvas can draw attention, dramatize a point, convey a sense of realism, and so on, especially when the cropped image interacts with type or other elements.

With that in mind, here’s a look at the seven kinds of crop that we’ll be dealing with in the video:

The original image . . .

The hard crop. This is (by far) the most common. It changes the proportions of the image by cutting one or more sides . . .

. . . often to make room for words . . .

The soft crop. This also changes the proportions but does so by feathering an edge . . .

The soft crop mimics how we naturally see; a scene in real life doesn’t have edges but just fades off in our peripheral vision . . .

The split crop. This removes a section from the interior rather than from the sides . . .

The image can (in this case) then be spread apart . . .

. . . and copy inserted. The spread step isn’t always necessary. Not all photos lend themselves so well to this technique . . .

The stickout crop. Similar to the hard crop but leaves a bit of the image sticking out. Easier to do with hard-edged objects than with fur like this . . .

The stickout creates dimensional interaction with the page . . .

The knockout crop. Same as the stickout except the entire background is removed . . .

. . . which frees the image to interact with the page in many different ways. Here, the panel is behind the wolf and the words on top, which is dimensional and in this case unrealistic. It would be very effective in other scenarios . . .

Very easy to recolor the background . . .

The false crop covers rather than cuts the image . . .

. . . as you’d want, for example, on a cover . . .

Last, the shape crop. The wolf image works naturally in a circle. Other kinds of images can require some creative gymnastics.

Paired with a soft crop . . .

And a hard crop . . .

The video will detail each of these seven, with lots of other examples. I’ll let you know when it releases.

. . . an assertion that’s wrong in so many ways, but for our purposes it’s wrong because of design.

Apple’s Tuesday announcement looked like this . . .

Better than this, actually, because the real thing was bigger. Bright, fresh, crystal-clear, and beautiful, as always. Accompanied as it was by voice, video, and a live audience, Apple’s announcement was a show, bigger than life.

How could anyone equate one with the other? We all know what he meant: I’m showing you their secret phone before they do — snark! Perhaps it was wishful thinking that made the reporter overlook what was in front of his eyes — drab, surreptitious, flash-lit images, blue Post-it note included — and imagine that the public would appreciate his triumph.

This instance is over the top, but it’s a mistake that’s made every day. It’s what yields all those bad PowerPoint demos. Meandering videos. Confusing web sites.

I’d say that all are the natural result of a designer (or someone) short on time or talent; given a choice, people don’t naturally choose the ugly thing. And sometimes that’s the case. But it doesn’t explain the caption. Without it, it would have been a valid spy photo, its faults easily overlooked. But the caption — that this revelation would ruin Apple’s own — was added with eyes wide open.

We see what we want (or at least hope) to see.

I bring this up to say that this mistake is not limited to others. We designers make it all the time. Not this egregiously, but we talk ourselves into something short of the best. The layout that’s pretty much working. The logo that’s kind of right. The concept that’s almost there. Look at them long enough and they start looking right. Or even great.

The solution: Take a break, set it aside, look at it tomorrow. View it in a mirror. Show it to a friend. Listen to the feedback. Stay with it. Whatever it takes. We may be stuck, and we may be out of time, but before we pronounce our design finished, let’s make sure our feet are actually on the ground.

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Seems reasonable here to mention Before & After’s The Grid forum, which is filled with bright colleagues who help one another do just that. It’s free and for subscribers only.

Saw this recently in church. On the wall behind the choir is a projection screen . . .

. . . that looks ordinary enough, but why is it there? It breaks up an otherwise clean wall, casts a shadow, constrains the words to an artificially small space. It adds a black edge, corners, a second surface. It even motors up and down.

You don’t need this. Design-wise, you don’t need anything up there. All you need is a way for the congregation (or any audience) to follow the words.

They could be memorized. They could be in a handheld book or on a smartphone; they could stream through earbuds. Whatever. Easiest is just this . . .

Beam the words straight onto the wall. They appear out of thin air, release their information, then disappear without a trace. Nothing material. No distraction. Just communication.

At the state fair last month we came across this small display . . .

. . . which is the same idea. No reason to add a frame; just write on the wall. The words are the point.

(Formal Futura type isn’t the right choice to express the casual tone above, but that’s another story.)

This works everywhere — wall, poster, web page, print page, with graphics or without. If mechanical constraints don’t require a border but you’re tempted to add one, ask yourself why.

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We cover this topic in greater depth in the “Get Unblocked” segment of our Design Essentials video, and in our course Before & After: Things Every Designer Should Know, at lynda.com.