I think partly its to do with education, many clients don’t want good designs. They want something they perceive as being good and from a graphic design point of view they aren’t always the best solutions to the project.

Occasionally clients can be swayed from bad design decisions by providing them with alternatives but that isn’t always the case. I would agree with those individuals critical of graphic design as a profession. Many people have recently been lashing out at the design community saying that bad design arises out of the DIY capabilities of individuals.

Most people have a computer and they mostly come with graphical software, usually MS Paint. I think to be a designer you need to have some sort of graphical skill regardless of being degree educated or not. I believe you can see the difference between designs produced by non professionals and amateurs.

Just because your a design professional though doesn’t automatically entitle you into making good designs. I recently read the article ‘don’t be a tooler’, which highlighted the need for designers to engage properly with their tasks.

Design is one of those fields that is constantly moving forwards and the biggest revolution has been the computer but maybe its time to return to the drawing board.

Another reason for bad design is cheapness, sometimes clients only have so much budget and designers so much time. Also there is some value to be had out of cheapness.

If your brand looks cheap it exudes qualities of being good value and being affordable. Some people intentionally want poor design.

However ultimately whats ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is down to personal taste, in the end there are no guidelines to taste.

Bad design is a post from: The Typhon

If you’ve never heard of Noam Chomsky hes widely known as an American linguist, philosopher and political activist. Born in 1928 as a Jewish person growing up in Philadelphia he experienced first hand social and political upheaval of the 30’s.

From a young age he identified with anarchist politics writing an essay on the spread of fascism while being only 10 years old. Eventually he became one of the most vocal opponents of the Vietnam war.

The 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media was written by Chomsky and Edward S Herman. This book was later adapted into a film in 1992 by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick.

The film largely explores the ‘propaganda model’ there are five points to the propaganda model and they mainly revolve around control. Control by public bodies, private corporations and other news sources.

Manufacturing Consent points towards a very subtile type of propaganda. One where we are persuaded to think in a particular manner influenced by the media. Its a very delicate kind of persuasion, in a way its more whats has been selectively chosen for print and whats been left out.

Its interesting to think of news as being less than correct and furthering the interests of sponsors and advertisers in developing an appropriate platform.

It also brings into news orientated websites and blogs into the spotlight too and it’d be interesting to look at how blogs fit into the propaganda model.

From a design point of view in a way your always looking to communicate a feeling or sense of value. Your manipulating your visitors opinion in just the same way. Its not considered propaganda but more a sales pitch.

Anyway maybe next time you watch the news its some food for thought!

Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media is a post from: The Typhon

Letterpress is a form of relief printing using a printing press and moveable type, the kind of printer invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century. Modern industrial letterpress techniques are different from the traditional version which uses a photopolymer plate to reproduce digital art.

Typically a print would consist of raised blocks carved into letters or pictures, ink is then rolled onto the surface of these blocks. Paper is placed on top and pressure from above marks the ink with paper and also leaves a textured indentation of the block.

In the UK printing presses were largely abandoned in the 1950’s. Today letterpress printing is largely used for specialist ornate books, personal stationary and invitations.

In the UK and US letterpress has been undergoing a revival partly fuelled by Marther Stewart in the 1990’s and the craftivism movement. Stewart featured invitations in her weddings magazine and it took off from there.

Part of the appeal of letterpress is the tactile nature of the print itself. You can’t do a print run on cheap paper due to the embossing process so the heavyweight paper gives a feeling of quality.

Another graphically distinctive feature of letterpress is its inability to reproduce photographic images, that might sound like a disadvantage but it restricts the designer to strong typography, line and pattern.

When designing for letterpress your restricted to spot colours, it requires a bleed on both the actual document and the areas where coloured ink is to be printed and fonts must be no smaller than 5 point.

Theres a lot of debate between traditionalist letterpress printers and the modern technique. The modern letterpress uses digital art and plastic film negatives. The plastic film is mounted onto aluminium for the printing process and ink is applied by hand.

There are of course some advantages to using the digital method since theoretically you’re not limited by the artwork which can be created and the printer doesn’t have to invest in letter blocks. Of course there are the detractors who say it isn’t real letterpressing and the quality of print isn’t the same, but I think either way there are some truly stunning designs out there.

There are some great letterpress designs on etsy and if your feeling really DIY you could even make your own letterpress machine!

Letterpress, we’re bringing it back is a post from: The Typhon

A lot of people think that just by having a website people will visit your delicately crafted home on the internet, but thats just not true. To run a successful website it can take a lot of effort and time.

So with that in mind heres a few tips to get you started.

Statistic monitoring.

One of the most important things to when you first start your site is monitoring where your visitors are coming from. You can install invisible tracking to through either Google Analytics, or my favourite Statcounter.

This will allow you to see exactly how people are arriving at your site. If they’re clicking through links on other sites or if they’re searching on Google for particular search terms. These search terms are known as ‘Keywords’.

Keywords are really important and can identify visitor trends and help you to find new areas which you can expand into.

To install statistic counters you’ll have to go into the code of your site to install it or if your using a wordpress site download a plugin.

How to target keywords.

If your aiming to rank number one for any Christmas related keywords you need to start targeting your site towards this in August! I know it seems like a long time but you need a long lead in time when it comes to SEO.

Your SEO efforts build up over time rather than it being an instant result, also you need to accumulate enough content on your site to be considered an ‘authority’ on a particular topic.

A good place to start looking for potential keywords is in your statistics, have a look at what people are already searching for and note it down as a potential keyword to target.

You can expand upon these initial results by using Google keywords. Google keywords will help you to find potentially related keywords that you can rank for and show you how competitive the terms your trying to rank for are.

Another thing you might want to consider is ‘long tail keywords’, these are usually phrases rather than individual words. Long tail keywords are usually easier to rank highly for but typically have a lower search volume.

How to use keywords.

So once you’ve drafted your list of keywords or phrases you want to rank for, I’d recommend trying to keep this list to about 10-20 words. These are the keywords your going to try and rank for. Again you won’t see an immediate return for your efforts but over time it’ll accumulate.

Keywords are primarily used in the meta date for your site, meta information is located in the header of the site in the source code. You can either manually enter this information yourself or use a plugin like ‘All In One SEO’ for Wordpress.

Meta information for every page of your site should be different.

You need to decide what the keywords from your selected list best reflect the information on the page. You can of course pick up new keywords from the content contained within the article of your site. Your keywords need to be relevant to your articles!

Another good practice is to include a keyword as part of the title of your article and in the URL. Including keywords into your URLs will result in them being deemed more relevant and be picked up more highly in searches. Many content management systems have an option to convert your blog entry titles into URLs automatically.

The final tip I have is for writing articles for your site. Your natural instinct for writing an article will be to combine many topics into one post but don’t do it! If you want to successfully target you should stick to one topic per post and also mention whatever is your chosen keyword three times for it to become indexed.

Keywords and how to use them is a post from: The Typhon

In case you don’t know anything about it the piece is called Temenos and be located between the Transporter Bridge and Middlesbrough Football Club. It’ll have been 10 years in the making and cost £2.7m. Temenos is however set to become just one of many sculptures as part of the ‘rejuvenation’ of Middlesbrough, Stockton, Redcar, Hartlepool and Darlington set to cost £15m.

To get an idea of scale Temenos will be 110m long or the size of a football pitch and 50m high.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of public art, I’m one of those people who still doesn’t like Anthony Gormley’s Angel Of The North sculpture. If your a regular reader to this site you’ll realise that I don’t say these things because I hate art or I think it should always be in galleries. Quite the contrary, art should be for everyone.

But have you ever been to Middlesbrough?

Recently its been in the news for other reasons, massive job losses at the Corus steel working plant. The recession it seems is hitting the region hard and you can’t help but feel the money would have been better invested elsewhere.

“When I went to Middlesbrough for the New Statesman last year to find out how the recession was affecting the area, I found an atmosphere of grim transition — of council officials and local radio presenters grinning desperately through the decline of the last of Teesside’s manufacturing industries, hoping to patch up huge wounds with regeneration rhetoric.” Dan Hancox

I understand that this is a horribly grim opinion of public art and one that could be more positive.

“There are all the arguments about public art – couldn’t we have spent money on a hospital, say – and all the arguments are correct. But what happens after a while is that these things have the possibility of infiltrating people’s consciousness. You can’t say it’s going to happen, but you can hope it does.” Anish Kapoor

Its a very lofty ambition for public art to achieve but even Kapoor himself says that he ‘hopes’ it will change the individuals view of Middlesbrough. Its not a guaranteed result of spending all that money. In my experience a place doesn’t change until its people do.

Why not invest money to local artists who otherwise struggle to make a name in the region? Part of the problem with public art is that the money gets invested into big name artists when regional ones can create beautiful pieces and have first hand experience of the region.

Why do all public sculptures have to be so huge? One of my favourite pieces of public art is Tracy Emin’s Sparrow – even though yes it is too expensive.

While we’re on good public art I also really like the Love sculpture designed by Robert Indiana. Its both an iconic piece of art and a great display of typography.

I also really like traditional sculptures otherwise known as ‘blokes on horses’. Theres something attractive about the authoritarian nature of these sculptures, and you can feel somehow connected to the past by viewing them in public spaces.

Regardless of if you think they’re good on not ultimately its that test of time that public art has to endure.

My beef with public art is a post from: The Typhon

Rosetti was a poet, illustrator and painter perhaps best known for his work with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood during 1848 as one of its founding members. Together with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Milais the brotherhood founded what could be considered as the modern art industry, selling prints of work and illustrating books. This made art more commercial and more public but retained the ideology of the Pre-Raphaelites.

His work is closely linked with female sensuality and medieval romanticism. Rosetti fostered an interest in medieval art from a young age during his time at Kings College School and The Royal Academy.

Often his work features medieval style compositions and deep colours from a very natural colour pallet; maroon, burgundy and deep forest greens. Mythological arthurian legends and italian folklore appear as common inspirational themes.

Rosetti’s private life and love of women often comes to the fore as a subject for his paintings, particularly featuring his eventual wife Elizabeth Siddal as a sitter for a number of paintings. He also won the eventual support of John Ruskin who became a patron for the brotherhood. However Ruskin’s criticism of Rosetti’s work made him more introverted and unwilling to create pieces for public showcasing.

The Victorian social landscape during the 18th Century was undergoing great change. You only have to know a little about Dickensian novels which heavily feature the plight of widowed women and the poorhouse. Along side social change was great scientific and manufacturing change, the industrial revolution meant that goods could be mass produced and people were progressing forwards towards a machine age.

Arguably the work of the Pre-Raphaelites was a direct backlash against the encroachment of mechanisation and everyday struggles of the working man harkening back to a mythical simpler time.

I enjoy his work mainly because of how it portrays the female form. The very striking looks of the women, which are portrayed in a liberating manner – both powerful and feminine. As a teenager I found these images particularly inspiring and compelling from both an artistic point of view and how empowering it is.

When you look at the way the women look its highly stylised, at times almost graphically styled yet retaining realism. This intentional stylising could have something to do with Rosetti’s later friendship with designer William Morris.

I’ve also always loved the natural imagery of Rosetti’s work. Its my own personal view that in many ways we’ve lost touch with nature due to the computer being the domineering force in modern times. Perhaps once it was the vast machinery in mills that kept us indoors but now computers have us in their digital grip. Its that wild abandon of freedom which I think is so beautiful.

Dante Gabriel Rosetti is a post from: The Typhon

A logo is broadly defined as a graphic mark or emblem used by organisations to promote and assist public recognition.

Before the modern contemporary logo people were using watermarks, coats of arms and cylinder wax seals all of them could be broadly defined as logos. They assist the viewer in instantly understanding an organisation or society.

“They are a hangover from old-school thinking about branding. There is no desire by the public for a new logo. They are simply an old-fashioned approach to differentiating products or services.” Simon Manchipp, SomeOne

Logos now face increasing pressure there are now a plethora of logos representing brands, bands, voluntary organizations, websites the list is potentially endless. There is only a brief time for the brand impact to be made before we move on to the next one.

“Each of us now encounters a staggering 30,000 commercial
messages every single day, and the vast majority of them are visual.” Julian Treasure

Viewers of logos and branding have also become increasingly critical and often the suggestion of the term ‘logo’ itself is a very negative one. After all as a designer your coercing the viewer into a particular state of mind, in essence you are intentionally trying to manipulate someone.

Theres no better example than the UK Olympic 2012 logo for creating mixed opinions. It was a design by committee and that approach is notorious for producing poor results. Almost everyone I’ve talked to hates the logo.

Logos traditionally represent huge faceless corporations who hide behind wholesome images attempting to brand our lives, our natural instinct is suspicion highlighted in the book ‘no logo’ by Naomi Klein.

“Your brand is more than your logo, website and advertising. It’s also what you say, what you do, how you act, and how you treat people.” Peter, SEO Blog

In addition to the volume of logos now on display they also have to compete on ever changing platforms from mobile phones, PDA’s, laptops, and even in traditional print. Its these pressures that the cover of the latest Metallica album ‘Death Magnetic’ attempted to avoid.

“And I think the vernacular for the band and heavy metal is a simple, iconic world, and that translates fantastically well to small icons that go on your phone or iPod. So it boils down to a simple iconic graphic.” Bruce Duckworth

The coffin iconography for Death Magnetic helped to cement its position on shop shelves, magazines and on ipods thanks to ifs flexible branding.

So maybe rather than considering logos ‘dead’ they just need to work smarter rather than harder.

The logo is dead, long live the logo is a post from: The Typhon

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This time its the turn of Lou Romano.

Lou Romano works at Pixar Animation Studio’s as a voice actor and production assistant. If you’ve never heard of Lou its not surprising, like a lot of industries its the final product which most people see rather than the work ‘behind the scenes’.

Having graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992 he’s worked mostly as an an art director for Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. Arguably two of the most influential modern children’s cartoons.

However what attracts me to Lou’s work isn’t the fact that it looks modern its that retro edge mixed with an almost childish innocence which gives it a unique charm. Its a notable homage to the works of many other artists who worked at Disney during the 1960’s, in particular Mary Blair who created the ‘Its A Small World’ ride.

I first discovered Lou in a compilation book of Pixar production artwork. Normally shy away from any artwork which has harsh geometric lines. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys cubism or Picasso but the charm of Lou’s work really captured my imagination.

Another distinctive technique in Lou’s work is the depth of vibrant colours and the rendering of shadows. Its that use of light which makes many of his more serious adult works appear sinister or even sombre.

Even without colour theres a dynamic graphic look to his work which is highlighted through the detail of black and white – the balance between the positive and negative space.

Lou’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and at The Metropolitan Opera in New York along with being published on the cover of The New Yorker.

You can see more of Lou’s work over at his blog.

I realise that the last two entries I’ve posted in this series are about living artists, next time I may take a look at one of my favorite artists from the past.

Lou Romano is a post from: The Typhon

If you don’t know Etsy its a website where people can buy and sell handmade goods. In some respects its a very american orientated site, however there are plenty of sellers from the UK and even from throughout Europe.

To me the beauty of it is you can get a great unique gift thats perfectly one of a kind and you’re paying the artist directly rather than having to give a large percentage to the gallery.

First up is celestefrittata from Bari in Italy. My mum is a massive Harry Potter fan and she often carries around notebooks in her bag. With this in mind I thought she’d love one of these screen printed notebooks.

I deliberated for a long time over which one to get her and whittled it down to Dark Arts and Spells and Charms. In the end I went with Spells and Charms.

I also ordered an Owl Post gift wrapping bag as an alternative to wrapping paper for an awkwardly shaped present. The design on it was incredibly cute and I also got a free Daily Prophet reporter badge!

Being a very crafty family I usually try and get at least one craft related gift and this year it was some hand dyed Falkland roving for spinning.

I spent ages looking at sellers on Etsy trying not only to get the best quality, price but also the right colours! The shop I kept coming back to was FeltStudioUK run by Daniela Kloppmann in Leeds.

Along with spinning tops she also has beautiful pre spun yarns in a variety of weights, colours and even has luxury yarns. Also its great to support crafting in the UK through a purchase.

As a designer I really value a good notebook and you can get some great hand made leather books on Etsy. I found EarthworksJournals which I think are probably the best notebook binders on Etsy in the UK at the moment.

When I made my order I was actually asked to wait for it since there was such a high demand and upon receiving it I can certainly see why! In fact I was slightly begrudged to give it away as a gift.

Samantha and Jason run the shop online from Northampton in the UK and their work makes its way through craft fairs, country shows and even on TV. Featuring a journal on BBC childrens programme ‘Sorcerers Apprentice’.

A while ago I bought myself a necklace from mrd74 a polished pewter ravens skull. Its one of my favourite pieces of jewellery, my dad decided that he wanted one too.

So I bought him the bronzed ravens skull because somehow in my mind I decided that bronze was more manly than shiney silver pewter.

Anyway I can’t recommend mrd74 highly enough because even though they’re in Canada shipping is surprisingly speedy. And I even added the who’s who in hooville necklace to my christmas list!

I’d also like to thank the buyers who’ve spend their hard earned money on the things I’ve created this year in a shameless plug for my own Etsy store – LittleWrenPottery. It recently got a feature on the Boho Birdie blog during the 12 days of Christmas.

So next time you’re looking for the perfect gift why don’t you give Etsy a try

Merry Christmas from Etsy is a post from: The Typhon

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Every few years theres an overhaul of web technologies or someone comes up with ‘the latest thing’ which will apparently exponentially improve our webby lives. So I often come at these things from an overly critical stance. Out there in the real world what’s it gonna do?

On a very basic level there are a variety of new tags which help to define and identify elements within a web page.

This is handy for a couple of reasons; you no longer have to go round defining divs and the way web elements integrate into the page will be much smoother.

So for example you’d no longer have to define a header as < div id = "header" > you’d just use the tag < header >. If you really want to know all the new tags they can be found on the design shack blog.

Another advantage of these new tags is that it helps Javascript, Flash, AJAX and other web technologies to integrate better into HTML pages. Back in 90’s most people’s internet connection couldn’t cope with streaming live video or audio however both these things are now commonplace. So the tags < video > and < audio > has been introduced.

You may have also been hearing about the < canvas > tag. Created by Apple it allows graphics to be drawn using Javascript, this giving more robust graphics since it doesn’t matter what screen size your running at. It’ll resize to compensate. In a way Canvas is related to SVG since they do similar things – drawing on the screen. You can find out more about Canvas on the Opera site.

Both Canvas and SVG rely on what goes on in the background in Illustrator, that is creating point based vector graphics by mathematics. I think this is one of the key changes in HTML for designers. It means that in the future there may be no JPG’s it’ll all be scalable vector graphics. I think it’ll be interesting to see how graphics software changes in order to cope with this new web ability.

As part of this new drawing ability CSS also now includes some new features. The functionality to create animations, its lining up to be some sort of face off between flash and CSS. Check out this CSS Animation tutorial on 24 ways.

The best new tool of CSS is probably rounded corners. Creating consistent looking round corners is generally a bit of a faff. Being able to automatically generate them is a dream come true with CSS.

Anyway the final thing you might have been hearing about is Font Replacement.

I’m not convinced that Font Replacement is such a great idea. It’s one of those things that has the potential to be incredibly annoying like GIF’s were back in the 90’s. I recently read a tutorial on how to do it and the article argued that font files are so huge that you have to ‘ease in’ the sudden change between the loading font and what your looking at on the screen.

To do this it suggested using a font stack, now font stacks are a common tool of CSS. But if your going to do a font replacement with a font that looks kinda similar – whats the point? Why not just use the web standard font anyway and not bother.

In my opinion Font Replacement isn’t worth it unless font files become smaller data packets or the internet continues to speed up (which it probably will!).

Of course all of this relies heavily on the support of browsers to be able to process HTML 5 and CSS 3 and what with IE dragging its heels who knows how long that’ll be. If your building a new site soon then it may be worth considering writing it in HTML 5 but otherwise theres no hurry just be prepared!

If your after some cool HTML 5 resources check out this list of great tutorials on speckyboy.

HTML 5, CSS 3 and Font Replacement is a post from: The Typhon