It’s kind of common-sense/basic, but it’s easy to overlook: people are more likely to do something if they already know how. It turns out that most people aren’t as adventurous as they’d like to think.

If you show me how easy it is to use your product, I’m more likely to buy it. On the other hand, if you just tell me what great features it has, I’m less likely to do something about it.

Let’s say you have a new way of purchasing things, such as by bumping two smartphones together. If you tell me how it works, I might be nervous about it. What if something breaks? What if the phone somehow transfers all my texts to their phone? Will it be hard to keep track of it?

But if you show me how it works in a way that’s fun and not condescending, it becomes easier, because I’m already familiar.

Before any of us understood what it was all about, Common Craft made a video using paper cutouts to explain Twitter in plain English.

Remember, by default we aren’t very adventurous. Show the rest of us how easy it is to do/use your new thing, and we’ll jump on board.

Pixel Girl shows you how to create good colors for the web!

So far, I’ve discussed creating color palettes in general and for printed materials in specific. Now let’s dive into using color on the web.

In my opinion, color on screen should be used very carefully, perhaps more carefully than in print. I say this because, until color e-Ink is widely affordable, screens will be backlit for the foreseeable future. What this means is that since screens are backlit and since colors made from light instead of pigment are more intense by default, the colors are typically more intense and bright than they would appear on paper.

You might be able to replicate 100% green with a fluorescent ink, but metallics have to be faked somehow.

It also means ultra-bright colors can be a bit garish. (Remember the color-clashing phantasmagoria of Geocities sites? Yeah, you don’t want that.

BONUS: make your website look like it was built by a 13-year old in 1996.)

Since you don’t want to hurt people’s eyes when they arrive at your website, it’s a good idea to start with a neutral palette and add color in small doses. If the color is too intense, it’ll “burn” your eyes. If you need a refresher, go see the Geocities-izer again.

Also, reversed-out type is generally hard to read on screen (unless you’re in a darkened room, and even then, 16 pixels is probably the absolute minimum smallest size you can set reversed type and not cause eye strain.) If you have areas of intensity, you want to be sure to provide plenty of relief for the eye.

That’s why when I designed this site, I set out to use a fairly neutral design, added the orange and silver from the logo sparingly. The headlines in black would be too much contrast, so they are silver to ease the tension. Furthermore the limited use of color on the site helps the portfolio pieces stand out.

The Benday Dot girl will show you how to create a good color palette for print!

Previously, we’ve talked about building a color palette from a general perspective, but today I want to talk about creating a color palette for use in printed materials.

Of course, you should always make sure your color choices match up with your overall purpose, but once you have that established it’s time to consider how to apply that in the case of print.

You might be wondering what’s different about print. Color is color, right? Sometimes. You have to consider things like reversing out or knocking out type over colored areas, especially if the color is particularly “rich.” If the registration (how the color plates line up) is off, it will look blurry and be hard to read. If you must use reversed out type, avoid going any smaller than, say, 16 points or using typefaces with extreme thick-thin contrast such as Didot or Bodoni. And avoid the rich black. Just use 100% K instead.

Reversed type on rich black can look blurry and hard to read if the registration isn't spot-on, especially with a finely drawn typeface like Linotype Didot. Opt for a less brittle font and 100% K instead of a mixed black.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about building actual palettes.

A good place to start is with a dominant color, which might come from the logo or whatever color is associated with the brand.

For example, IBM is known as “Big Blue.” It would stand to reason that shades of the official blue from the logo might be a good place to start.

Target is famously red, as is Coca-Cola. (Pantone 186 is one of the most widely specified spot colors since it is similar to Coca-Cola red, which is actually just as proprietary and secret as the soda giant’s formula.) Likewise many of their marketing materials have liberal amounts of red, or use red as a strong accent.

Another trick is to use color as code for different types of information. When I designed the AHFD brochure, I used beige backgrounds on the pages featuring hospital construction highlights, and set the management profiles against pale green. Throughout the brochure, the headlines are all in dark red-orange.

Based on the corporate colors, this brochure skews the color palette a bit.

Typically what I do is I choose a dominant color, use one of the basic color schemes outlined here to arrive at 2-3 main colors, and add in lighter/muted versions of the same, plus some neutrals to balance things out.

Color blocks of the AHFD palette

So for the color palette of the AHFD brochure, I started with blue, with a slightly teal hint to it. The complement to blue is orange, and if you desaturate orange you get tan. Make it darker and you get brown. Dark red-orange and green complement each other and round out the palette. Note there isn’t any purple or yellow per se; rather, they are hinted at in the tan and red-orange, respectively.

You know it's true: Hell isn't just other people; it's their Photoshop documents.

If you’ve been in the design industry any length of time, you know that everyone has their own way of working. While this is OK to some degree, there should be some standardization out there when it comes to the actual practice of design in a digital environment.

Here are 11 things I have run into over the past tean years or so years as a print designer, working with other people’s files. Now that I’m a freelancer doing mostly logo and front-end web design, I don’t run into these problems so much, but I’ll share this with you anyway. You’d be surprised how many “veteran” designers don’t pay attention to these sort of things. Then again, maybe I’m just being persnickety.

1. Name Photoshop layers. “Layer 52 copy 3” doesn’t really help me much when I’m looking at a file that I didn’t create. Even “Starburst copy 3” is more descriptive.
2. Name files logically. “DisneyLogo1C.eps” is more descriptive than “logo.eps”
3. Group your layers. It makes editing easier. Group elements common to one thing. If you’ve drawn several people in Illustrator, group each person.
4. It’s OK to use vectors in Photoshop. In fact, I recommend it, especially if something keeps changing size. It keeps the edges clean and sharp. Use a Shape Layer or a Smart Object imported from Illustrator.
5. Use hard returns and soft returns appropriately. A hard return is used for starting a new paragraph. A soft return is for line breaks. It’s almost always created by pressing Shift-Return (or Enter).
6. Don’t lead single lines. Use the styles to add space to the bottom or top of the line instead of adding leading. Also, blank lines aren’t as “clean” as you think. If you have to put more than one “space” element in a row, you’re doing it wrong. (This applies to hard returns, spaces, or any other whitespace character.)
7. Use stylesheets. It makes it much easier to make global changes, and it forces you to think through some sort of systematic approach where certain repeated elements are consistent. It establishes a hierarchy. Try learning CSS while you’re at it. You’ll be surprised at the overlap between print and interactive.
8. Embrace the grid and the idea of a scale. Create a logical hierarchy and don’t place everything all willy-nilly. Once you get that in place, then you can break the grid.
9. Use proper bleeds. An eighth of an inch works for pretty much everything, unless you’re printing something large or on cardstock. Then .25″ bleed is safe. If you’re doing a banner, consult your printer to find out how much bleed you need. And do that in Illustrator so your file won’t take up half your hard drive.
10. QuarkXPress — don’t use it. Especially if the calendar says it’s after 2002 (when InDesign CS came out).
11. Layers are for PSDs, not TIFs. There’s some debate over this, but I stick with flat TIFs and layered PSDs for a number of reasons. Sure, TIF is a more open format than PSD, but not everything can read a layered TIF. Plus, it’s easy to accidentally flatten a TIF and lose your work. Plus, TIF was never meant to be layered.

And here’s one more tip: Organize your type creatively and logically. Go beyond the usual standard categories and think of their actual usage: fancy/elegant/casual/corporate/funky. Or group them by license: print/web.

Most of the time, the ads are for movies that are similar to the movie you’re there to see. If you’re there to see a comedy, most of the ads will be for other comedies coming out soon. If you’re there to see an adult drama, you’ll see ads for luxury cars and adult dramas. If you’re at a kids’ movie, you’ll see ads for minivans and other kids’ movies.

Of course, there are ads for the concessions stand, featuring delicious-looking popcorn, candy, and gigantic carbonated beverages.

This isn’t coincidental.

Amazon and Zappos have applied this technique to the online world. On a product page, they’ll say, “If you like this, you’ll also like this other thing.” Most of the time, they’re right.

This is along the lines of using the right tools: you have to be where your audience is, or they’ll never see you.

You’ll never see ads for Clearasil in the AARP magazine.

Are you using the right tool?

There are lots of tools available to marketers these days: social media, direct mail, print ads, billboards, TV spots, websites, landing pages, blogs, promotional products, giveaways, coupons, “99¢,” high design, low design, hard sell, soft sell, etc.

The list goes on.

A lot of times it’s easy to get caught up in using the same tool for everything. You get comfortable with a certain tool or format and forget that it’s not always the best one for this situation. These tools aren’t one-size fits all.

Billboards are great for stimulating the impulse to go eat at a restaurant down the street, and second-screen advertising is great for spurring people to buy the soundtrack to the show that’s on TV right now.

An ad campaign in national print magazines can generate some great creative work, but if you’re trying to sell something to Millennials you’re better off advertising on Facebook.

Likewise, if you’re marketing to Boomers, you might be better off airing TV commercials that tout your product’s time-saving benefits. You might also want to mention how it will create envy among their friends. The Boomers I know aren’t that into social media, but they like to watch dramas on TV.

Can you think of appropriate or inappropriate marketing and marketing tool usage?

With that in mind, here are 20 typefaces that I tend to come back to time and again. They’re good workhorse fonts that work well in many applications.

20 of my favorite fonts

1. Helvetica Neue
2. Clarendon
3. Trade Gothic
4. Garamond
5. Interstate
6. Baskerville
7. Akzidenz Grotesque
8. Caslon 540
9. Futura
10. Mrs. Eaves
11. News Gothic
12. Minion
13. Gotham
14. Bembo
15. Avenir
16. Janson
17. DIN Mittelshrift
18. Century
19. Univers
20. Bodoni

Of course, I don’t limit everything I do to these 20 fonts, and some of them don’t get used that often. I admit they run together somewhat, so I alternated sans and serif. And because there are certain similarities between faces, you could eliminate a few. Is it necessary to have Helvetica, Univers, and Akzidenz Grotesque on the same list? You could say the same of Venetian faces like Garamond, Bembo, and Jenson.

The point is not how many typefaces are in your canon, but that you “sift, sift, sift, sift” until you get what is perfect for what you are doing.

The classics are simply a great starting point, and they’re classics for a reason.

What are your favorites?

Badges for Bruises: art for the Minnesota RollerGirls roller derby promotional poster by Adam Hoganson.

There’s a style in logo design that I’ve watched grow in popularity over the past few years (especially with online outlets like Ffffound and Dribbble) that is sort of a homey, quasi-naive take on the classic Swiss/International style of the 1960s and 1970s.

Where Swiss typography usually favors Helvetica and Univers, this newer style typically consists of sturdy American favorites such as slab serifed Clarendon and condensed sans-serifs like Trade Gothic, with a dash of Hellenic Wide, sometimes ornamented by inline strokes.

So much of it seems to be coming out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and nearby Wisconsin, so I am calling it Midwest Modern.

You find this kind of style coming out of Minneapolis a lot.

Overall it is pretty clean, symmetrical design with retro circles and color palettes that make you think of two-color printing. Sometimes this retro look is “updated” with a little bit of grunge, which ironically makes it look older and more established.

Not all the work that looks like this is coming out of the Midwest, but Minneapolis does seem to be the epicenter due to a thriving poster design community as well as how much of it seems to be coming from retail giant Target for their various marketing materials. (Here in Nashville for a while there was a big influence from Hatch Show Print and the resulting stacked-typography approach influences a lot of designers, but I’ll get into that in another post.)

Target & Fossil: two major purveyors of the Midwest Modern design approach

Minneapolis-based Target seems to be one of the biggest corporate proponents of this kind of visual style, but Dallas-based Fossil has been employing a similar retro style for years, so I’ll focus primarily on those two locales.

Minneapolis

Badge-style logos by Allan Peters of Minneapolis

Allan Peters, currently Senior Art Director at Target and formerly at BBDO Minneapolis, may be responsible for a lot of this. He has professed a love for what he calls “badges,” which are essentially logos that have a more or less chevron or circular shape, along with the surface treatments mentioned above. Samuel Soulek, also from Minneapolis, employs a similar aesthetic.

Texas

Work by Dustin Wallace for Fossil. Note the "vintage" approaches that bring to mind logo work from the 60's and 70's as well as a little bit of the "badge" approach favored by Allan Peters.

Super Furry (Simon Walker) has a vintage/badge style that I like to call "beer label modern."

Fossil is based in Richardson, TX, a suburb of Dallas. They’re well known for the retro-style graphics printed on their watch tins. Dustin Wallace of Frisco, TX has done a lot of work for Fossil, so a variant of this retro style has emerged there as well. Simon Walker, aka Super Furry, appears to be based in Austin, and his work seems to have a similar aesthetic that I call “beer label modern.”

Other places

Brent Couchman for Fossil. Not quite the "Midwest" variant, but still retro with an American take on European ideals.

Portland is in the US Northwest, not the Midwest. Yet this kind of style comes from there as well. It could have something to do with Aaron Draplin, who, while based in Portland, grew up in Detroit. Frank Chimero — also a Portlandite — solves typographic problems in a similar manner. Fair Haven, Washington-based Kyle Marmesh does somewhat similar work, and Brent Couchman from the San Fransisco Bay area has done a bit of work for Fossil, so there’s some of the “midwesternization” of graphic design elsewhere, if you will.

A small sampling of the logo design work coming out of Draplin Design Co. in Portland, Oregon.

London-based Everyone Associates brings a British flair to this style of logo design for a hair salon.

Also, Everyone Associates in London seem to be taking a similar approach to their work with the Percy & Reed hair salon identity, albeit with a more “British” approach.

So again while this kind of design style may not have come from Minneapolis per se, I’ll stick with “Midwest Modern.” It has a nice ring to it.

Like buying shoes, if you commission a logo based purely on functionality, it may work for a while, performing the bare minimum of its duties. Shoes cover your feet and keep you from stepping on sharp things. A logo is an emblem for your company. That’s enough, right? Well, maybe for a little while. Once you fill that basic need of protecting your feet, your shoes need to be comfortable — they need to fit your feet. If they don’t fit, they could give you blisters, or worse, hurt your spine.

Not only should those shoes fit your feet well, ideally they are attractive and you enjoy wearing them. They flatter you and fit who you are and why you’re wearing them. Who wears dress shoes to the gym?

Also, you’ll want them to last a while. If you buy cheap shoes, there’s a chance they’ll fall apart pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you spend good money on shoes, they’re probably going to last a long time. They better, right?. You want to get your money’s worth.

The same goes for your logo. You can get something ultra-cheap that simply bears your name, but it’s not very usable. It doesn’t look good in one color, or it embroiders poorly on a polo shirt. Or it ultimately fails to represent your company’s desired brand image.

Maybe it was cranked out by someone who takes a one-size-fits-all approach, or it was designed by a novice who hasn’t learned all the nuances of typography and reproduction techniques.

Now, I’m going to ruffle some feathers with the design crowd: cheap logos have their place.

Then again, so do cheap shoes and cheap cologne.

But in the long run, you probably want something worthwhile that’s got quality. You have to consider more than just cost: take into account things such as taste, functionality, appearance, and longevity.

So, a good logo should be functional: it bears your name and tells people who you are and what you do. It should be attractive and ideally long lasting, useable in lots of places and lots of ways, from a black-and-white newspaper ad to an animated bumper for a video podcast.

Logo design is part art, part science. It’s a science in that there are certain things that catch peoples’ eyes every time, and art in that it can do things in a new way. It takes lots of time, research, and exploration to develop something that fulfills all those requirements we just mentioned. And it probably won’t be cheap.

Then again, you usually get what you pay for.

They’re all good, but not always appropriate depending on the situation. If you take your girlfriend on a fancy date at a French restaurant, you’ll probably put brie on crusty bread and nibble on grapes. If you’re eating a quick meal alone, mac-and-cheese will do. If you want a midnight snack, a piece of cheddar melted on a piece of toast is perfect.

Logos are the same way: it can take lots of forms, but they’re not the same. Each has it’s own personality and is appropriate for different brands. It’s not all “just cheese.”

Typography

Different typefaces have a different "voice," and thus a different personality and tone. One font may appear sophisticated and another may appear juvenile.

There are a couple of things that give you an idea of the kind of brand a logo represents. Typography is a great place to start. It could be classy and elegant, or playful, or utilitarian. Or trendy and fashionable, or descriptive of a certain place or era.

Shape

Some logo shapes appear more dynamic than others. It's all about what's appropriate to the brand the logo represents.

A logo’s shape plays an important role in how it is perceived. Generally, the more symmetrical a logo is, the more stable or established it appears.

Color

The colors used in logos makes a huge difference in how they are perceived.

Of course, a logo’s color says a lot about its brand. Gold and black are often associated with expensive luxury brands. Orange is youthful or sports-oriented. Lime green is usually funky and edgy, and lately it is used as a symbol of friendliness to the environment. Finally, blue and red are typical of corporations, and have been for years.

Surface Treatment

There are lots of ways to "dress up" a logo. Like a pair of shoes, the surface treatment can add a finishing statement to an overall package. The surface treatment can create an air of establishment, nostalgia, or any number of moods.

Finally, stylings to the “surface” of a logo convey quite a bit about a brand: a smooth, shiny surface treatment says that the company it stands for is slick and modern or high-tech.

This has become rather common in recent years since reproduction technology has changed so much. In the 1960s and 1970s, logos were flat and hard edged out of necessity. Gradients just weren’t feasible from a reproduction standpoint.

Now that a logo will appear on screen far more often than in print, and design software capabilities have changed so much, logos have become fuzzier and more three-dimensional and more gradient-y. Perhaps the biggest advantage of seeing your logo in print is that there you can use metallic or fluorescent ink.

Sometimes a trendy logo just says that the company has jumped on the bandwagon without really understanding what it means.

In the end, the success of a logo really boils down to is appropriateness: does it accurately reflect the brand and industry it represents?

It should stand out, but not to the point of being inappropriate. That is what makes it tricky — and why you should hire a professional.

Post-script: Hat-tip to my friend Lora for suggesting I write about the differences between logos.