One of the most important assets you can have as a designer doing print work, whether you are new or old is an understanding of how to correctly set your files up for printing. There are multiple ways to do this and I am not saying that my is the only way but, mine works and this will teach you fundamentals of how to correctly set up your file so your printer does not send them back to you and waste time in the printing process. There is however, some technical jargon in this article. I have included a glossary at the end that tells you what “the jargon” means. So veterans, students and anyone in-between will be able to read and take something away from this article.

Correct Colorspace

via

The most important thing is understand the difference between CMYK & RGB. Now, first off CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. RGB is Red, Green, Blue. Setting up the correct color mode is crucial for have the correct colors print and it being able to be used on a 4 color run. I usually send proofs to clients in RGB files. The reasoning is that it saves file space so its emailable or small enough file size I don’t bring their computer to its knees when I send it.

What does it matter?

Let’s say your color is Cyan: C: 100 M: 0 Y: 0 K: 0 that means that the selected area is going to receive all the cyan ink on one pass and the next three passes will not lay down any ink on the spot. Making sure that you understand how your file will be printed and therefore how you need to save it is a step that needs to be taken so you can achieve accurate color in your prints.

Process Black vs. Build Black

When printing you want to make sure that you specify that all your blacks are 100%. What I mean by this is in the CMYK colors it should read: C: 0 M: 0 Y: 0 K: 100% Doing this means that your blacks will print correctly as black and not a build of black and running the risk of printing as a dark grey that looks great on screen but no on paper..

Spot Colors

Most company logos have an assigned PANTONE color to them. This can add more colors to your print job. 4 color process is very common for print color specs. If you are adding a spot color that would be 5 colors. Most of the printers in my area can only support a total of 7. 4 color process + 3 spots. Logo’s are usually assigned a spot color and if the company has its own PANTONE color created just for them you will have to use their spot color. However other clients might not want the added cost of printing their logo in a spot color so you will need to print the logo in process color instead of a PANTONE. A PANTONE color has a CMYK value.

Example: PANTONE 032 (which is Red) has a CMYK conversion of: C: 0 M: 90 Y: 86 K: 0

The reason you would print the logo in a CMYK color instead of a Spot is to save money or you are already printing a spot color and the printer cannot accommodate another spot color.

The Color White

White does not print. When i first started designing I thought there was a white ink and I could make a white box on a page and get it to show-up on the design. A simple example of this is a newspaper. If you are designing something for a newspaper that is white that section will be the newspaper itself. The color will print around that white area.

File Format

Another way to get your files sent back to you faster than you can say Farfegnugen is to not save them in the correct format. Now, this does not mean save them “How you think is correct”, this means how the printer wants them. If they want a flattened Tiff, then you give them a flattened tiff. If they want a PDF X1A , then you give them a PDFX1A. Make sure that you know what you are sending them. If you have any questions send them an email or call them.
Remember: Not all printers want the same files.
This is especially true with newspapers a good portion of them, especially local use older technologies that we as an industry use. The 5 minute phone call will be easier than having to redo something later or having to reprint because you saved a file incorrectly. The last thing you want is to go back and work on a project you already thought was done.

Note: If you are in a crunch and don’t have the luxury of contacting the printer (time, phones are out etc.) Send all the formats you can think of to cover your basis. Usually a PDF (optimized for print not a low-res space saver) a Tiff an EPS, Packaged In-Design file or Quark file will usually do the trick.

Follow Directions

This ties in closely with the last point. Following directions will save you time and overall money, especially if something has to be re-printed because you carelessly rushed through the directions on how you were supposed to provide the file. The most important thing is that you take your time and double check that everything is saved & packaged correctly.

Image Resolution

Making sure your files or images are in the correct Image Resolution (referred to sometimes as DPI or PPI) is crucial for non-pixelated images, great looking ads and just general quality. A rule for print is an image resolution of 300. Now, that being said I have designed things at 600 and 1200. Am I crazy or am I just trying to get high quality images? The point of designing with that high of an image resolution is because I was designing something half size that will be scaled up.

For example: I am designing a poster that is 40×80 @ 300. Now, the layered file for that sucker would be massive and would be cumbersome to make changes (just because it takes so long to save and open regardless of your machine’s performance capabilities) and much less what it would take you to upload this to someones FTP site. So, you would design it at 20×40 @600 which is half size. This would be scaled up at the printer to the original size and therefore save file space and time.

Bleed, Trim & Live Area

If you haven’t designed for print before these may seem a bit foreign. The bleed area is what bleeds off the page. You have a bleed so your artwork gets cutout without an ugly white border around the outside. The reason you could get the ugly white border is because the images

Deadline

Another great way to save money and an angry client is making sure you get the files on time. It would be horrible to already have a spot in a newspaper or a magazine and miss the deadline. Now, if its a one off job there might not be a deadline set by the printer because its printed when you package your files and send them over.

Package Your File

Packaging your files correctly is one of the easiest ways to make sure your printer gets exactly what they need and not have any missing links. Packaging a file correctly in In-Design is a breeze you just click package. What In-Design does is find your images, your fonts and put them into their respective folders. This way the printer has everything they need. **DO NOT** send just your In-Design file. The printer will not have any of your images or your fonts so the file would give them errors when they open it. If you don’t have In-Design and are using another layout program make sure that you send the fonts the text is using and the images they are linking to. Also like above make sure that you know what file format your printer is working in. If you have CS4 and your printer is on CS3 you need to save them a .INX file so they can open it. Printers are not always up to date like some of the designers/agencies in the industry so just make sure you have everything packaged and saved correctly. If you made your poster in Photoshop save it as a 300 DPI Tiff and then Place it in In-Design. Most printers set documents up to print from In-Design or Quark. This gives them the ability to set printers marks,a Bleed or Trim and Live areas. I wanted to call special attention to fonts and colors because they are some problematic areas.

Fonts

Spending hours on beautifully kerned typography and having an awesome layout because of it can be crushed in a matter of seconds if you don’t send the fonts that are using. Now, if you have converted your type to outlines in Illustrator or turned them into vector objects its not necessary. Usually this has to deal with body copy or headlines. If you are working in Photoshop your are safe. You can just save as a flattened tiff and be on your way.

Proof

I always include a PDF or a jpg in my packaged file of what I am sending to print. The reason I do this is so the printer knows what its supposed to look like so when they open the file if it doesn’t look like that something is wrong. Its an extra step that has saved me some issues and headaches in the past. The printer may have a different version of your font, they may not have it installed at all or you may have packaged something incorrectly.

Explanation

Make sure that you give your printer detailed instructions if your print job is something outside of the ordinary. A rule of thumb is if you are using varnishes, spot colors or anything that is not a typical 4 color process you should call or if they are local give them a visit to talk through it. A small consultation can work wonders on working through something. Try not to do a barrage of emails as things can be lost in translation, taken out of context or read incorrectly.

Glossary

Bleed- a term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming. The bleed is the part on the side of your document that gives the printer that small amount of space to move around paper and design inconsistencies.

Trim- the final size of a product after its unnecessary parts have been cut off or removed.

Live Area – is the area where your art and type should be safely tucked into so they are not trimmed or cut-off.

PDF X1A –  Common file type for printing. The purpose of PDF/X is to facilitate graphics exchange, and it therefore has a series of printing related requirements, which do not apply to standard PDF files. For example, in PDF/X-1a all fonts need to be embedded and all images need to be CMYK or spot colors.

PDF- (Portable Document Format) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system

TIFF- (Tagged Image File Format) is a high resolution loss-less file format that is ideal for saving images for print.

DPI- Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of spatial printing or video dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed within the span of one linear inch (2.54 cm). The DPI value tends to correlate with image resolution, but is related only indirectly.

PPI- Pixels per inch or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts; typically computer displays, image scanners or digital camera image sensors.

Image Resolution-describes the detail an image holds. The term applies equally to digital images, film images, and other types of images. Higher resolution means more image detail.

EPS- Encapsulated PostScript is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions intended to make EPS files usable as a graphics file format. In other words, EPS files are more-or-less self-contained, reasonably predictable PostScript documents that describe an image or drawing, that can be placed within another PostScript document.

Process Color- referred to as process color or four color, is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in most color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black.

PANTONE Color -The PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM is the definitive international reference for selecting, specifying, matching and controlling ink colors.

Selected Resources

Prepress Tips for Graphic Designers

David Airey explains some invaluable pre-press tips for designers.

Ultimate Round Up of Print Design Tutorials

Smashing Magazine puts together a great list for designers to use when looking for How-To articles on print design.

8 Print Finishes to Spice up your designs

Brian Hoff talks about Print Finishes that you can add to your designs and goes more in-depth with varnishes and colors.

10 PrePress tips for Perfect Print Publishing

Smashing Magazine has a l post about working in RGB colorspace vs CMYK. Its an interesting read and explains some good facts about working in RGB instead of CMYK.

Reflecting on Strike Through Varnish

Nick DeTomaso from Jakprints talks about Varnishes and how to use them and set them up.

Designing for Print – Setting up Crops and Bleeds

Chris Spooner goes in depth about setting up cropmarks and bleeds.

Designers Guide to the Apparel Printing Industry

GoMedia gives some awesome resources, links and how-to’s about printing in the apparel industry.

What are your thoughts? Did I miss something? If you are a veteran chime in and leave some valuable feedback so the youngsters (me included) can grow and learn. After all if you teach someone to fish they can feed themselves for a lifetime.

Chad Engle is the Editor of Fuel Your Creativity. He is a fulltime designer, who lives, breathes, listens , eats, tweets , connects & consumes all that is creative & app related. He is a caffeine addict and likes long walks on the beach. Follow him on twitter at @chadengle and @fuelcreativity

Computer – check. Photoshop – check. Lots of free time – check. It seems that this is all that is necessary to call yourself a ‘designer’ these days. I believe that there is far more to a designer than software, computers and free time. Designers should have critical thinking skills, understanding of design principals, knowledge of grid systems, typography and much more.

Read the rest of my guest post over at Design Reviver and join the discussion in progress!

In this quick tip I’ll show you how to change the case of existing text in photoshop. This can be super handy if you are working with lots of text in photoshop as I was today. If you are too lazy to watch the video the magic keyboard shortcut is shift+cmd+k with the text selected and BAM! ALL CAPS TEXT WOOO!!!

Big thanks to my twitter friends for showing me this tip! (You should follow me on twitter if you aren’t already!)

So it looks like Photoshop just rang in another birthday! Photoshop just turned 20?!?!?!? Holy crap that’s a long time for software. I don’t know about you but Photoshop was my first ‘design’ program starting with version 6. I admit that I cheated a bit and also tinkered with Gimp for a bit. But I mainly have font memories of an online course with my less than legal version on my PC back in the day. I remember being so fascinated and intrigued by Photoshop and what it could do and I was SO EXCITED to learn. This tinkering that I did in high school is what pushed me to become a designer.

How did you get started in design?

Now I’m curious how you, dearest readers of this blog, got your start in design. Was it tinkering with Photoshop? Paint shop pro? Corel Draw? MS Paint? Gimp? Something else? I’d like to share your story in a blog post. If you are interested please fill out the form below. Thanks!

Image from LifeHacker

In the wake of the popularity of the Clients From Hell site I thought it would be appropriate to talk about good experiences with clients. I had a chance to have a chat with Liz Andrade from CmdShiftDesign and discuss the topic.

What do you think?

Have you had good (or bad) experiences with clients? What was it like? What did you do to foster the client/designer relationship? Leave a comment and join the discussion.

Remember when you had that *first* genius moment in design when we discovered effects in Photoshop or the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator? (I remember these moments quite fondly…) Its always great to look back and where we came from and laugh at ourselves I asked some of my fellow designers to dig though their archives and share their lovely first attempts at design. Enjoy!

James White – SignalNoise.com

Here is a design for Signalnoise.com I created way back in 1999. At the time I was into my first year working in the design field and I wanted a website that encompassed my creative passion, and for whatever reason I thought the right path was with mad textures and blurry typefaces. I think I JUST discovered the Overlay blending mode so it was all systems go.

I have a jpeg version of almost all the hilarious versions of Signalnoise.com, but this image perfectly captures the raw animosity of a young design idiot trying to forge his way without any real goal or direction. Good times

Brian Hoff – TheDesignCubicle.com

This was one of my first logo designs when I started college in 2001. The brief provided by the instructor was still attached to the file:

“Design a logo for a website dedicated to housing web discussion forums focusing on both current world and political issues.”

You have to love my letter “i” character with the horrid stretched and distorted typeface, and to top things off, this is a PSD file, created entirely in Photoshop — gasp!

Jeff Golenski – Midnight-Shift.net

First website. circa 2001. “must use IE6, baaaaaddd netscape” font tags and tables inside of tables inside of tables. It’s an angelfire site and it’s actually STILL online. http://www.angelfire.com/music3/stuffwedo/index2.htm go browse that badboy!

Dan Denney – DanDenney.com

I can’t believe that I’m about to share this.

Anyways, this was an awful concept that I had back in the day (2004) and started building for my personal site. Aside from the obvious problems, there is more to this story.

I had just learned about layering using a flash emulator called Swish. So, each “section” came in on its own and was animated. What could be radder than that, huh?

Eek.

Liz Andrade CmdShiftDesign.com

I wish I had something older, but I think this is pretty horrific. This poster was designed in art school for a class project, I feel like I had absolutely no concept for designing for my audience at all and they type setting is atrocious.

Chanell Shorter – Cshorter.com

This was a poster I had to do in one of my adverting design class. I took the photo myself! I even got this one in the student art show. My photography and graphics have some a long way lol.

Danny Outlaw – @DannyOutlaw

It amazes me how sites I designed even a month ago look like crap compared to what I am currently designing.

Take this site for example, when I designed it, I thought it was amazing. Looking back on it now, it is obviously extremely bad. Craziest part about this design, people actually paid for it as a premium theme! Despite the sales, I have stopped selling this because of the poor quality.

Chad Mueller – @ChadMuller

1 I had to add this, good old lens flare effect…. what a staple in design.

2 This was my first take on using illustrator… I would trace friends faces, celebrity photos and such.. I have to admit this is something that really has helped me with my design skills.

3 This piece was created in high – school.. this was my first pass at photoshop filters… have to love radial blurs eh…

4 This was done in my first year of college. I was just recently introduced to photoshop brushes… that might explain the piece.

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Andrew Houle – MyInkBlog.com

This is one of my first iterations of Houle Designs, which was my old personal portfolio site. I went through many more horrific designs before I finally ditched the site. I’m now reworking my portfolio under a different domain name, but it’s still a little ways away. Man, this design is terrible, but we all have to start somewhere, right

Mark Batup – Blur-Designs.com

I fell into graphic design, I got my first job scanning in photos for a small design agency who’s focus was estate agencies. After a while, after mastering re-touching photos, they asked me to produce an image to show 2 companies becoming one. This is what I came up with, I hope it speaks for itself. 10 years later I still like looking at it, but I would certainly do it differently!

@mbatup

Andy Sowards – @AndySowards

Wow, I really dugg deep this time. I found an old and very simple flash slideshow that I built for practice several years ago, when I was taking some classes and had a strange fascination with flash lol. This was probably my first attempt to build anything useful in flash, and its a really basic flash slideshow, which I created the left and right nav buttons in photoshop, and also photoshopped some pics of my wife and me, and our boys (which were actually really little babies at the time!) It was a good learning experience, and I have built a ton of random flash things since then, but its funny to look back and think how happy I was when I got that slideshow working right lol. Now If I was ever to do a slideshow it would most definitely be done in jQuery!

Kitty Florido – DesignBackslash.com

This is the Press ad we ran for the first venture (a dot com) I was in as a designer and an entrepeneur: Guatebodas (Guate-weddings, for a rough translation) and it was the first wedding portal in Guatemala. I was 21 and an advertising student that had little experience with FreeHand7 or Photoshop.
The design is not great, but it sure does show where I came from! Cheers!

Jeff Fisher – JeffFisherLogomotives.com

As a kid, I wanted to be an artist and while in junior high I had my first exhibit of ink line drawings of historic Oregon buildings. In 1970, at the age of 14, I produced a set of notecards for sale in local galleries and gift shops. For that project I produced my first logo. The image was a graphic representation of the old Salem, Or city hall building, with its clock tower. The illustrative portion was drawn with a rapidograph pen. I created the lettering using black border tape cut with an X-Acto knife. To a teenager, it was a pretty cool design. Looking at it now it reads “Scenes Salem,” instead of the intended “Salem Scenes” and it’s pretty rough. However, it is a hint of my future identity designs combining text and graphic elements.

AJ Troxell – PhireDesign.net/

ack when I was huge in to politics and anti-war designs like this were a common thing for me to create in my spare time. It’s so terrible, it’s not even funny.

Social design communities can be found all over the web and can play a vital role in growing and learning as a designer. I will be reviewing four of my favorites: Flickr, DeviantART, Coroflot and Behance and discussing the positives and negatives of each community.

Flickr is mainly geared towards showing off photography, but you can often find wallpaper designs and other pieces of artwork. Flickr was one of the first sites I actively engaged in using, and was first recommended to use the site after a lecturer at university directed me towards using its vast library of images for work as opposed to using Google image search. It’s advantages include its simplicity of in use once you have setup a user account (the negative is that you have to setup the account using a yahoo address, which owns Flickr.) There are also desktop applications you can use to upload large amounts of photos and designs at once.

The site also offers pro accounts (which cut out on advertising) for the professional user which allows you to display unlimited amounts of photos and storage space as well as giving access to  page views and stats. The current free account offers 100mb of monthly photo uploads as well as restricted video uploading. As a user who will only upload a handful of images and designs each year the free account is more than plenty.  If you exceed this limit the pro account is only $24.95 a year.

DeviantART is a community that has been running for ten years and has over 50 million pieces of user-generated content.  You are virtually unlimited in what you can show to its community of users. If you have a design that needs some critique or simply want to browse great photography, designs, interfaces, wallpapers, etc then DeviantART will have everything you need. Users interact freely and the site as a whole has a great interactive element in all its features, whether it’s the groups, critiques or selling your artwork.

The site has often been described as part portfolio and part social networking. As a free user you can access the forums, make friends, put up artwork and even have your own blog. You also sell your artwork in various forms such as prints, t-shirts, bags etc. The premium account is again available for a price of £18.40 a year, with this it brings more benefits than a Flickr account and offers a premium portfolio, stats, premium widgets, and ad free browsing. The premium coverage is definitely worth the money if you are going to work with the site on a regular basis.  The amount of premium benefits are massive and significantly improve your deviant service and are much better in comparison to Flickr.

Coroflot is a portfolio hosting site aimed mostly at product designers, industrial designers and graphic designers.  The site makes it brilliantly easy to showcase your design work, get feedback and attract potential employers. I use Coroflot to showcase both my graphic design and product design work. I started using Coroflot as a place to direct clients, friends, and fellow designers while I worked on creating my own domain to host my portfolio.

Coroflot makes it easy to  browse through other users work and offer feedback as well as liking or bookmarking images. This allows you to create a bank of bookmarked images much like Flickr and DeviantART offer. When browsing work on Coroflot I find a great variety of inspiring work from students projects and concept designs, to professional work done at fancy design studios. (Not jealous at all.) Coroflot also offers detailed traffic statistics for various sections of your portfolio, as well detailing the popularity of individual images.

The Behance Network is very similar to Coroflot in terms of interaction and feedback. The thumbs up system is much less emphasized in comparison to  other sites. Behance is focused on the feedback system and commenting on other users work. Friends are easily organized into circles, which makes it easy to organize by discipline or subject matter. As a website I don’t think it fully functions as well as the other three websites do, lacking in functionality in some areas.

My Favorite Social Design Community

I would rate deviantART above the rest due to its overall variety of content and interactive community. The community is so widespread and it features everything that you need as a designer,photographer or artist. Whether your an expert or a rank amateur you are able to showcase all levels of work and the pro account allows for full utilization of the complete features found on the website.

Other Places To Find Community

Freelance Switch Forums
An active community of designers, programmers and freelancers.

Design Community Twitter Hours
Design Community Twitter Hours
Thursday 6-8pm (eastern time, east coast)
I am usually more than happy to answer tweets, give feedback, help, anything I can do so just shout at me @chadengle

How Design Forums
Companion forums for the poplar How Design magazine. Lots of active designers discussing and critiquing each others work.

Design Democracy
The social network for graphic designers, web designers and the creative arts.
It’s a community of real people doing real design. We’re here for the everyday designers — the ones just breaking into the industry, the ones with 20-some years under their belt, the ones working long hours at an agency, the ones who’ve been singing the freelancer’s tune for quite a while…they’re the ones who love learning, who love to inspire and be inspired and enjoy the camaraderie and friendship of other designers.

Designers Couch
A group established to embrace creativity through inspiration,

encouraging designers to network with fellow creatives and share

their knowledge of design.

Society 6
Society6 is a platform for the world’s artists and creatives to promote their work and connect with unique opportunities.

Design Chat
#designchat is a weekly real-time twitter-based conversation between creatives. Video chats start at 8pm CST on Wednesdays and last about an hour on mashable.com/chat. You can continue before and after on twitterfall.com/#designchat.

Which site would you recommend?

Do you have any other sites you use? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Jared Thompson is a keen product and graphic designer.  He has a passion for the works and designers of the Bauhaus movement and strongly believes that ‘less is more.’ Jared is currently studying Product Design at the Northern School of Design. Visit Jared’s website Design Juices or follow Jared on Twitter

It’s super easy to make diagonal or custom guides in Illustrator! Just grab the line tool or pen tool, draw the line and then go to view guides make guides. If you are into keyboard shortcuts its apple+5 on mac or control+5 on PC. Walla!

Have a suggestion for a quick tip? Wondering how to do something in Photoshop, illustrator, indesign, dreamweaver, any program? Ask away!

Yesterday afternoon I tuned in with the thousands of fanbois and girls to listen to God, (I mean Steve Jobs) introduce Apples newest creation: The iPad.

After my initial non-amusement with the name and product features I couldn’t stop thinking that this product was not made for me – a power user. The iPad is geared towards media consumers – which is who we design for – which is why designers should pay attention.

Not For Me…

I have a MacBook Pro, Netbook, and an iPhone already – so why would I want to carry around another device. I purchased a laptop to get rid of my desktop, and an iPhone to replace my smart phone and ipod touch. I’m not a kindle user so this device really does nothing for me… For the mac user that is already ultra connected the iPad has no real use but I still think that this is an important device to pay attention to.

Drawing and Sketching

Photo via Gizmodo
Ok – so I lied. Maybe designers will have some uses for this device. I’m curious about the iPads sketching capabilities. I’ve noticed that the iPhone and iPod touch screens are much more responsive and quick to touch than any other touch screen device ive ever used *cough droid cough*. This makes me think that the iPad would be good for sketching and drawing.

I’m also curious if the iPad could handle Photoshop or Illustrator – or if Apple would even allow Adobe apps on their hallowed device.  Could the processor handle that? I can see designers sketching out quick ideas for layouts, logos, product designs etc. I would also think that some sort of stylus would be helpful for these types of apps. What do you think? Would you use the iPad to sketch?

Digital Magazines

Most importantly I think the iPad will cause designers to continue focusing on designing for mobile and digital content. If the iPad is adopted by enough people it could cause a considerable boost for the newspaper/magazine/print industry and create a new demand for digital magazines.  This will bring in new challanges of designing visually interesting layouts that also include interactivity that lie beyond typical web design. This format might also bring new and more targeted advertising opportunities that are specific to this delivery channel.

Apps for the iPad – Whats to come

I have no doubt that in the hands of all those able and crazy creative developers out there the apps for the iPad will make the device even more useful and powerful. Just think how often you use 3rd party apps on your iPhone or iPod touch. My iPhone would  basically be worthless to me if it weren’t for all those cool apps. I’m excited to see what is to come in this area.

And Now…The Letdown: Features The iPad Is Lacking

No camera?

No flash?

No Multitasking?

No multi carier data plans?

Really Apple?!?!?!?!?

This is where the device REALLY dissapointed me. Steve Jobs mentioned in the keynote that netbooks were basically crappy laptops – implying that the iPad was much better, but hey Mr. Jobs,   my netbook runs photoshop and illustrator pretty decently, runs flash and has a camera. Hrmmmm. Yeah yeah I know this product isn’t for me, but they could have improved on the features that already existed in the iPhone.

At the very least the iPad should have had a camera! Every mac product besides the Mac Mini and iPod Touch have cameras! The iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr. People love snapping picures and video chatting.  I think this is where Apple REALLY missed the mark. Oh and lets not forget about multitasking… not sure why they didn’t include that either. Sigh…

Jailbreaking the iPad

To contradict everything I just said I think the iPad will be pretty sweet once the jailbreak community gets their hands on it. Perhaps they will adapt iPhone apps like Backgrounder to enable multitasking and apps that let you run flash so we don’t miss out on all those awesome non-youtube videos on the interwebs. I think Apple needs to embrace the jailbreak community and the ideas and improvements it brings forward instead of ignoring them.

What do you think of the iPad?

Will you buy one? Or will this product flop? Will it create new opportunities for designers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Photo by Thomas Hawk

In this fast paced world of design how do we keep our focus on quality and not quantity? For the past month I’ve taken some time to evaluate, rethink and regroup. I’m going to try to do a few things differently in order to bring this quality back into my design world.

Freelance projects

I’m going to be much more selective with the freelance projects I take on. No more last minute, oh no I needed it yesterday jobs! Not worth my time! I freelance in the spare time (currently employed full time) so this is valuable time that I could be spending doing something else (like washing my cat). I want to work with clients that respect and trust me as a designer and can trust that my design decisions are well founded. Good design takes time – and I’m willing to put that time in. I’m lucky to have a few of these clients right now. Interested in working with me? Fill out my quote request form.

Writing, thinking, and sharing knowledge

I want to spend more time writing and thinking about design. When I first started this blog it was really just a collection of cool designy things I found on the internets and has since then morphed into something else – what this is I’m not quite sure, but I’m ok with that. I enjoy writing and thinking about design and sharing my thoughts and getting feedback from you guys! As this blog continues to morph and change this will be more of a focus – with a dash of my patented smart ass humor^TM of course

Attention to detail

My recent re-entry into the print world (new posts on work to come!) has made me realize the importance of focusing on details – no matter how big or small. Will this tiny little detail work when the logo is 1 inch wide? Will it work when the logo is huge (*cue make the logo bigger song*) I’d like to transfer this focus on details into my writing, my personal projects and the web design projects that I take on. Hopefully this will mean more focus on typography, coding, usability and readability.

Reading and discussion

I’m also going to focus on reading things that are more in depth. Right now this means reading more design books and magazines. I plan on writing my thoughts and responses to my reading material and generating discussion. As designers I think we tend to shy away from reading… or skim and only look at the pictures *im soooo guilty on this one*

I also want to generating more thoughtful discussions around design, process and learning on this blog. Interacting with readers, learning and sharing knowledge are the best parts of blogging.

Summing it all up

To sum up this entire article in just a few words: I’m going to be doing less, but its going to be better.

How about you?

Have you made any design resolutions? What do you plan to do differently this year? Leave a comment and let me know!