I like to think of myself as a problem solver with a good sense of design. There are a handful of illustrators I’ve had the good fortune to work with (Melissa Sweeney is one of them!) that could put a pencil to paper and magic would come out. That’s a talent I don’t have. Never will. But I know what something should look like, so my own drawings may eventually get close. Being an old-school, hands-on person, I’ve always preferred making real, tangible things as opposed to creating on the computer. In previous posts, I reflected on a run of wooden sculptures I made, and perhaps mentioned a few of the telescopes I designed and built. Me in the wood shop is pure heaven.

Part of being a well-rounded person is expanding your interests, so around two years ago, I set out to take upright bass lessons. It was something I always wanted to do, even though my musical training was limited to the Magnus Organ Songbook back in the 70s, knocking out the themes to Ice Castles and Hill Street Blues. With an instrument that gave me plenty of growing room, I committed myself to weekly lessons.

When other commitments started keeping me away from home every other weekend, it also kept me away from practicing. It is possible to transport an upright bass in a small car, but it’s not easy, and not the best way for me to keep my instrument intact. There are smaller, electric upright basses (EUBs), but you need to plug those into amplifiers, and I really didn’t want to lug an amplifier with me. The smallest of them didn’t even reach the floor on their own, but needed to be fit to a drum-kit base (a heavy-duty tripod), which didn’t afford the luxury of moving/swaying to the music. Also, many of these EUBs don’t have a traditional upright bass neck or fingerboard, so they wouldn’t be analogous to my own bass. What I really needed was a very small, portable upright bass, that had a neck and fingerboard like my own, and an acoustic chamber that would let me play in a quiet area without electric amplification.

Bet I could build one…

Even more-so than with telescopes, I was getting in over my head by even considering it. There are so many aspects of creating a successful string instrument that if not nailed, leave you with an unplayable chunk of wood. Fortunately, I had my own bass to study and measure. Over and over. Sketch after sketch. After a couple of months, I eventually settled on a direction that I thought would cover all my requirements (and hopefully work). When I don’t know what I’m doing (which is often), I do lots of pre-planning, making test-runs with cheap wood, and building jigs to make up for lacking proper tools. Planning and practicing take lots of time, and I dove into this project which took me through the summer, fall, and into winter. There were conceptual failures that almost had me starting over. Twice. And many modifications/adjustments to get rid of quirks, rattles and roughness. But in the end, I had a very playable instrument in my hands. Eventually, I even added a pick-up so that I could play it through an amp. The bass hangs on my wall and folds in half to put in a travel-bag. It’s around as small as possible for a bass with a full-sized, 41.5″ string length (between nut and bridge). I’m happy with it, but…

Ah, the irony… In order to be able to practice my bass more, so that I could get better at an unfamiliar skill that I was sorely lacking, I spent 5 straight months without so much as a lesson. And instead of practicing with the bass I did have when I was home, I was down in my wood shop, immersed in a comfortable skill-set. Like a dog called home…

I do like my project bass. Looks great. Sounds pretty good. Does everything I wanted it to do plus more. I even christened it my Bombasstick (as it’s very stick-shaped). But after all that work, I can’t help but feel like half of the impetus behind the project was to get away from something else that I wasn’t very good at. Something that didn’t come naturally. Something that was creating a new skill-set instead of building on an old one. In the wood shop, it was play time. Now it’s time to play.   - j

The tale of print’s demise has been a common one in the past decade. Online work can give you live links, interactivity, and even motion! Animated gifs. Flash. Video!

I’ll grant all those things, but I also put them in the same category as my own work since computers became so prevalent: Non-precious, and even throw-away…

It’s not that the design work isn’t as decent as it’s ever been (hopefully even more-so!), but electronic media is endlessly reproducible, even when you can’t control how it’s reproduced because of inherent differences between displays, resolution, and aspect ratio.

What I want to glorify are the qualities of print that online can’t touch, ironically because print is the only one that can be touched. With print, you’re actually holding the work in your hand. It exists! Where is it when it’s online? Is there really a design if it’s not printed out, or is it just an abstraction of an abstraction? Bits and charges flying from a keyboard to a microprocessor, which stores it as a bunch of on and off switches, just to be translated to hues and values on a screen. What are you really looking at?

Simplistically, the print in your hand may be a reproduction of what you see on-screen, but there are certain elements of the physical world that you can’t reproduce electronically. Think of the qualities of paper–thin and thick, rough and smooth. Satiny. Translucent. Metallic. Pearlescent. How about the inks used? Not just your processed inks, but fluorescents, metallics, matte and gloss spot-varnishes. Then there’s heat-transferred foils, embossing, die and laser cuts!

What you’re left with (or certainly can be) is a piece that is real! There’s a tactile element. An emotional response. Hopefully something that says “I want to keep this”, and maybe you will. Pinning it to a wall, tucking it in your wallet, making it yours.

Though it doesn’t scream its name out at every click, print isn’t dead. It’s there, standing over your shoulder, elegant and patient, waiting for when you have something special to convey. Words of wisdom. Declarations of love. Expressions of uniqueness.

Long live print!

The other week, I’d watched the movie “Helvetica” and I know what you’re thinking. 1) Seriously, there’s a movie about a typeface?, and 2) Seriously, you watched a movie about a typeface?

Well, “yes” to both counts, but from my perspective it was an interesting film!

Everyone knows Helvetica. Maybe not by name, but it IS everywhere. In the PC world, Helvetica and its disfigured twin Arial are the default sans-serif fonts of many web pages and Word documents. That may seem to imply that it’s a throwaway typeface, like the soy-sauce packets in Chinese takeout, but that’s only because of our overexposure. Dismissing Helvetica is like taking air for granted.

It’s a beautifully balanced font, particularly the bold and thin styles; so well balanced and elegant that it tends to disappear, leaving other elements to define the message. Unlike many of todays often horribly designed typefaces, oozing with so much personality that their name often defines their only use, Helvetica simply implores you to read the message. Because of its readability, you can play with it. It invites you to.

Perhaps it’s my Modern design sensibility, but I find that Helvetica neatly slips into that “less is more” category, as an ultimate distillation of a concept. When Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann finished designing it. It was DONE. They put down their #2 pencils and walked away. Not everyone appreciates Helvetica, but it’s just my type.

- j

Over the years, Alstin’s become a very tight ship, and every member of our team is at the top of their game. It’s a great crew to work with because you know everyone is taking care of their end of business, leaving you to do yours in a nicely focused fashion.

Recently, we’ve had to add to the graphics crew with a Production Artist to free up the more senior members to put their time into more high-end creative projects. Since Production is more about attention to detail and not about reinventing the wheel, graphic designers tend to regard it as non-creative drudgery. Kids’ stuff. Easy peasy…

Turns out, we only MAKE it look that way because of the years of experience we have. Our new artist is not only getting a pay-check, but an education as well, learning our tips and tricks that make even the tiniest one-column ad a balanced and nuanced success.

I think this relates to Tony’s column last week about the “skills gap”. Taking a class doesn’t give you a skill, it gives you a resume bullet. A good eye for hiring means having a sense of how easily a candidate will get the gist and run down Experience Road, and that doesn’t come across in a Word doc.

The heart of what makes a company great is its “Best Practices” – the methods and techniques that have consistently shown results superior to those achieved by other means. A company’s reputation and reliability are based on these. How we dot our “i”s and cross our “t”s set us apart from the rest of our competitors. They reflect our attention to detail, pursuit of efficiency and excellence, and the room we allow our creative spirit to soar. Without those, we may as well be a temp agency.

Sometimes, business dictates that we suppress these principles. Requests to step outside established levels of integrity and let things slide for the sake of expediency, or simply to placate the flighty may be made. We do what needs to be done, but there’s the knot in our guts that tells us that something larger than the job at hand is being lost.

Common wisdom dictates that it’s better to lose the battle if it means winning the war, but there’s little doubt that those battles add up, and if they come too frequently, they end up redefining what kind of platoon you’re fielding. You certainly don’t want to end up with nothing but a handful of dog-tags left when the big calls come, but you also know that practicality has a place, even in businesses that define themselves by their principles.

Like anyone with a favorite pair of sneakers or some worn-in flannel pajamas, I enjoy being comfortable, but comfort has a way of letting the mind and body get sleepy. One doesn’t want to get complacent…

As an ever-changing hobbiest, I step into new adventures every couple of years, not just because I’m restless, but because there’s something wonderful about turning ignorance into a talent. My past is littered with adventures in beer making, rock climbing, animation, sushi rolling, etc. These were all things that I dove into because of some underlying desire or love. They seemed like they were within reach of my skill sets. Sure, they were new, but they all seemed learnable and they generally came pretty easily to me.

Enter ballroom dancing.

Mind you, this is not a typical choice for me, but a wonderful woman I had just started dating had mentioned being into dancing, so I offered up that we take lessons together. Aside from netting myself 1,000+ “great guy” points, I suddenly found myself spending evenings moving awkwardly across a dance floor with instructions that made my last experience (Virginia Reel, 1974) seem completely irrelevant. Hello Rhumba, Waltz, Eastern Swing, Cha-cha and Foxtrot! For those of you who’ve seen “Dancing with the Stars” (I have not), following a routine like they do is completely different than making it up on the fly and being able to convey the next move to your partner (that’s called “leading” I now know).

And you know what? I’m having a fun time, but I’ve finally found something I’m completely awful at! Now, my girlfriend and dance instructor both assure me that I’m in fact progressing quite well, but as someone who has always considered himself a quick study, I’m just not seeing it! Perhaps I can blame it on age, infrequency of lessons, or two left feet (there’s got to be a reason in there somewhere!), but it doesn’t matter. I’ve always been of the mindset that you learn more from failures than successes, so I’m learning more than I have in years. It’s a good thing!

Resolve in the upcoming year to step out of your comfort zone. Risk being awful. Looking like a fool.

You’ll thank me in 2013!   - j

As a long-term graphic designer and the resident Mac tech-guy at Alstin, I found Steve Job’s’ recent demise to be the closing of a window that I’d often peered into. Though I think some of the eulogizing was over the top and overly simplistic, I found much of the criticism directed towards Jobs’ and his apparent deification to be equally ignorant.

One of the most repeated comments I read was that all Apple did was make things shiny and market them well, with Steve being little more than a huckster pitchman preying on the easily distracted masses. Sure, you could attribute these POVs to Android fans who think their superior platform doesn’t get a fair shake, developers who froth over Apple’s “walled garden”, the “those who hate anything popular” crowd, and an abundance of rambunctious 13 yr. old boys, but in reality, you simply have a group that doesn’t understand or respect the concept of complete design.

Steve Jobs understood this, and he was a bit of a prick when it came to getting other people to grasp and embrace the concept. It mattered a lot to him, possibly more than anything other than his family. It was his life’s philosophy. “Make it great!” was all about elegance–the inseparability between form and function. Because his vision was so clear, he believed that the best way to keep people from making the wrong/inelegant choices was to remove them altogether. In the end, this led to products that had built-in limitations, but that’s because of Job’s philosophy that the device knew better than the user did. When you let the device make all the decisions, you no longer have a computer. You have an appliance. And who tinkers with their microwave oven?

When you plunk down your cash for an Apple product, you’re not buying a shiny product with a great marketing campaign (though these are givens at this point), what you’re buying is a vision, what design luddites call the “Kool-aid”, simply because the value of the concept is not apparent to them. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

For those of you that DO get it, here’s another product to look at – nest.com. And trust to just work… – j

Along with being a pixel-pusher, I’m a big fan of words and writing. Crafting a well-written letter or even properly expressing a thought can require a bit of tinkering, word-substitution, rephrasing… just all around editing. But no matter how much time you put into personalizing your thoughts, printing them out in stodgily familiar Times Roman or even the light-hearted Myriad puts a separation between the writer and the words, especially if the letter is going the snail-mail route. At that point, you may as well have it served like a subpoena for all the warmth a typewritten note imparts.

To impart a personal feel, nothing can beat a handwritten note. It takes time and craftsmanship. It takes an envelope and a stamp. It also takes perfection. If not, you start all over again (cross-outs and eraser-marks are bad form!). Perhaps if calligraphy was a hobby of mine, or even if my handwriting looked halfway decent, I’d look at writing a letter by hand as a pleasure. Instead, it’s an exercise in frustration.

For years, I’d thought about creating a font version of my handwriting, but it seemed very labor intensive. Nowadays, you can find automated services that do it for around $10 a pop, a price that I consider to be very reasonable. After hunting around a bit, I went with Yourfonts.com. You download a template, print it out, fill in the blanks according to their instructions, scan it back in, upload it, wait two minutes, and download your new font!

Because it’s an automated process, the kerning (spacing) between the letters doesn’t have the intuitive flow that you would impart on your own. In my own font, the tongue on the lower-case “e” sticks out a bit and the next letter always seems a bit too far away. But for $10, it’s pretty good.

As with all fonts, the only way someone else can open and see a document written in your font is for them to have it installed as well. Same with email. The only exception to this is with PDFs, where the fonts are imbedded and everyone will be able to see your gnarled chicken scratch.

For me, the pleasure comes from being able to compose a long letter and print it out in my own handwriting (read it, fix mistakes, print again!) before sending it off to an old friend or family member. Sure, it’s a fake me, but it’s more me than Times Roman or (shudder) Comic Sans.   – j

We’ve already talked about how good design takes time-that it’s an evolutionary process and unless you’re willing to settle on a piece pulled from your designer’s bag of tricks, you need to let exploration happen. But there’s a flip-side to that as well…

The beauty of being busy (besides making more money!) is that having a variety of projects encourages a widespread range of approaches. You don’t want Client A’s and Client B’s pieces to look similar at all, and by having them both at hand, you’re far more conscious of this danger. Along with pushing yourself to find new looks on your own, you also turn to other design publications, and if you see something that looks like it would be fun to try, having a diverse pool of pieces to apply it to gives better odds that it will find an appropriate home.

Unfortunately, we all experience business lulls where the drop in project numbers gives us more down time than we would like. When work comes in, you put your best into it, but without the competition from surrounding jobs and without the adrenaline rush of multiple deadlines, the stuff that ends up getting produced can often seem a little uninspired, like you just went through the motions. Keep this up long enough and you not only get rusty, but a little lazy as well. Been there.

It’s said that “knowing is half the battle”, and that’s just as true here. The next time you find yourself spray-cleaning your work area to a fine polish or visiting an online time-waster for the umpteenth time, pick up a recent design book and attack it with a stack of stickies, or google “well designed sites” and see what comes up. Great design can flow back and forth between print and electronic mediums. Get inspired. Get better…   - j

My hunt for Double Bass information and opinion led me to a popular site (for enthusiasts, that is). Instead of starting a “newbie needs help” thread, I just read. And read and read and read. As expected (but not what I’d hoped for), the more I read, the murkier the picture became. Who knew there were so many variables?

At first, you simply think that there are different manufacturers. And there are. But then comes the new vocabulary as well. Next thing you know, you’re surfing through terms like hybrids, CCBs, gut, carved, end-pin, Spirocores, plywood, pizz, fingerboard, arco… It’s quite an education. Then you learn that 50 yr. old basses are not uncommon. Neither are 100 yr. old ones! And buying used can be preferable to new if you know what you’re looking for (which I don’t). Also, the kind of music you want to play can determine the best bass for you.

My head was ready to explode and I was almost thinking that needlepoint would be a better hobby…

When you enter into something completely new like this, where the quality of instruments has a professional level that only high levels of talent can take you, you’re going to realize there are places your wallet doesn’t need to go. When a concert bassist mentions he needs to upgrade from his $25,000 instrument, you realize that there are a lot of places it can’t go. But that doesn’t always matter when people are spending your money. You quickly find that once someone spends a couple thousand dollars of their own hard-earned cash, the thought processes behind their purchase becomes THE thought process that everyone else should get in line behind. And as I mentioned in the last entry, these are musicians. They’re passionate!

Now that’s not to discount their opinions, because I can only dream of playing a tenth of good as these players even if I devote years to study (I still like doing the woodworking and telescope things), but one does need to take them with a grain of salt and get to the underlying reality behind their unbendable stances. Fortunately, there are people who started off in your same position and remember what it was like to be new and not necessarily want to invest a couple of grand in something that doesn’t have an engine or a 62″ screen, especially when you’re not even sure you’ll be sticking with the hobby. You find out quickly that there’s a LOT of junk out there and that your most basic searches on Amazon and Ebay are going to take you directly to this junk. Yes, they may be cheapest (and the least expensive for that matter), but once you start reading the horror stories, you’ll find out that even with doubling your investment with upgrades and improvements, you still have junk underneath. It’s like putting 20″ rims on a Yugo (again, my first telescope experience!).

Once you set a firm price-point, you still find people trying to push you just a couple of hundred(!) dollars higher. They mean well, though enough options start to surface that fit your budget, options that have left people playing happily, that you finally start to believe in your process. Of course, that assumes you budgeted $200 or so for shipping the monster (unless you can drive to pick it up AND fit it in your vehicle), and another $90 for the flimsiest of protective bags, and the aforementioned strings ($200) that aren’t included in the price. Yowza!

When all was set and done, I’d committed to a small outfit in Connecticut called Upton Bass, that hand-makes their instruments to your specifications. They were helpful enough on the phone to help me figure out what those specifications were (I’m ignorant, remember?) and I sent them a picture of the color and finish that I hoped my bass would have. Sure, there were some cheaper, mass-produced basses out there, and ones that travelled across oceans to get here, but I’m kind of psyched about an instrument being made for me by craftsmen I can talk to (even if I did eclipse my budget significantly). We’ll be starting off in this relationship together as a couple of newbies, but it’s going to take 12-14 weeks of build time on their end before it gets into my hands. In the meantime, I’ve started taking lessons, which has proudly exposed me to even more that I don’t know!   – j

Around this time last year, I was embarking on a wood-carving phase and made several animals of varying sizes over the course of the first three seasons. It was a wonderful lark and I had a lot of fun, mostly because I knew at least a little about what I was doing and the results were rewarding right off the bat.

It’s not going to be that easy this year.

After around two years of canoodling with the electric bass, I’ve decided to embrace the upright, or “double” bass, which was really what I was drawn to in the first place as it is sexy and romantic. This is an imposing instrument that stands around six feet tall, two feet wide, and a foot deep. They’re hand-made and have strings that easily hit $200 for a pack of four. Prices range from under a grand to the deep five digits. You need to have these complicated instruments “set up” by a “luthier” and that will add another couple of hundred or more to your total.

In other words–a purchase one doesn’t go into lightly.

I was completely ignorant, but ignorance has the advantage of being correctable. The downside of ignorance is that you never know how deep your hole is until you start to climb out. This was quite a hole…

The first step is… the INTERNET! The wealth of knowledge at your fingertips is only eclipsed by the amount of misinformation, opinion, and sheer marketing manipulation. The trick is to be able to tell one from another.

Fortunately, several years ago I became interested in telescopes and bought one that seemed to have the specs that I thought were important. While waiting for its delivery, I stumbled upon a telescopes enthusiasts’ website (CloudyNights.com). Real people with real experiences (and real opinions). But the biggest benefit is that you have many thoughts and opinions, and the volume allows you to begin to assemble an overall picture. Some sites, like CN, have reviews of products by members, and you can review the members’ other posts to help understand the amount of experience behind their views or if there is reason for them to have a more personal bias.

It didn’t take me long to find a review for the scope that I just ordered, and it was by a long-time, respected member. A moderator even! What the review came down to was “Stay away from this scope at all costs!”. Needless to say, I sent the package back as soon as it arrived and began the process of asking questions and begging for advice in the forums.

Now, with over 4,500 posts to my own credit and five telescopes that I’ve made from scratch, I’m in a position to actually give advice. About telescopes. But an upright bass is a different creature. And musicians are much more passionate about their opinions than amateur astronomers are. Here goes…

Next up – Butterflies in the Hornets’ Nest

This blog entry was a favorite of mine as it captures some additional appeal to design that exists beyond visual aesthetics. Perhaps I’ll follow it up with why design is important to food… - j

Desktop publishing software can do amazing things. At an amazing price. If the abilities of these programs wasn’t so wondrous, “Photoshop” wouldn’t be considered a verb. The premier King of Pixels is Adobe Systems. Along with the ubiquitous Photoshop, their programs InDesign, Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver are instantly recognizable (at least by name) to any designer in the 21st century. Often playing catch-up to the royal family is Quark, whose reign at the top of the heap was left vulnerable by stagnation and lack of competition in the mid-90′s and early 2000′s.

It’s great that as a consumer, you can buy programs that do so much, so well. The double-edged sword that the software creators face is that when their software does it all, why would people buy it again? Sure, every year or two, they come out with the next version and tout the latest features. Now it can SLICE BREAD, BUTTER YOUR TOAST, and MAKE SURE IT LANDS BUTTER SIDE UP! Gotta have it… Gotta have it…

Not really. The truth is, you can take most of these software packages back two or three versions ago and still do 99% of your work the exact same way. The most important and common features have undoubtably been there from the beginning. Yes, there are new tricks that make some tasks easier and other ones that you’re dying to find a use for, but the productivity increase you get by upgrading to the latest version is negligible, and possibly even negated by the time you spend playing with the latest useless tricks.

Lots of designers know this game, but still end up playing it because none of us plays in a closed system. We need to share files with others, be they other designers or printers or clients. Adobe and Quark (and others I’m sure) make it very cumbersome (if it’s even possible) to share files between users with different versions of the software. Years ago, our whole department was using InDesign CS2. A client of ours gave us some InDesign files. When opening them up, we were told that we were missing “plug-ins”. A little research showed that this is the error message you get when opening a CS3 file. So in order to view this clients files, we had to upgrade my station to CS3. Now that I could open the files, I needed to save them back so that the CS2 users could work with them. But you can’t save back! I needed to export the files as this middle-man format called “InDesign Interchange” with the suffix “.inx”. When CS2 users open this file and resave it, it gets the suffix “.indd”, which is the typical InDesign tag. That leaves us with an extra file lying around on the server, confusing things. Theoretically, I could save these .inx files to my desktop, open them in CS2, and resave them as .indd files before moving them to the server (no, that’s not cumbersome!), but in buying the CS3 UPGRADE package, my CS2 was “upgraded” to CS3 and was no longer a standalone program in its own right. That means that in order to read a single client’s files, I now have to export every project I work on in the middle-man format alongside its native one! These extra steps not only cost time (= money, right?), but allow for confusion over multiple files. Cumbersome inefficiency is not something you want to deal with when it gets busy.

In rereading the last paragraph, I realize that it comes across as a confusing, insane rant, and the truth is, that’s often how I feel when going back and forth at crunch time. Hopefully our entire team will be on the same page, software-wise in the near future, but it’s a losing game. The next upgrade is always just around the corner. – j

It used to be that every website that represented “creative” groups had a website done in Adobe’s Flash. You’d find menus, pieces and targets bouncing all over the page like little movies that screamed “LOOK AT ME! AREN’T I CLEVER!” At Alstin, we did the same thing. It was fun and new, but once BobsHubcaps.com jumped on the Flash bandwagon, it was obvious that what was going on was a fad. As a creative agency, the last thing you want to do is what everyone else is doing.

Besides the theatrical mess that Flash allowed web-designers to implement, there were other problems as well. Some of our computers here have fans that only run when needed, and the only time you’d ever hear them kick in was when a Flash-based site was loading in the browser. You’d think a fairy was blowing leaves inside your computer while searching for the spinning beach-ball of death that she’d left on your display. I don’t think it’s an accident that “Flash” rhymes with “crash”. Sometimes, force-quit was the only way out.

To add to that, the little phenomenon known as the “iPhone” doesn’t support Flash (its siblings, the iPad and iPod touch don’t either). The reasoning behind that is supposedly the effect the previously mentioned reactions would have on battery life, but there are other reasons that have more to do with Apple’s bottom line. Regardless of the reason, if your website is done completely in Flash, millions of users can’t see it at all. In today’s economy, who can afford that?

Unfortunately, Flash has been the goto standard for embedding video on websites, so it appears that we’re stuck with it, no? No indeed! A little something called HTML5 has been brewing in the wings for sometime now, which not only does the simple tricks like embedding video, but it can do a bit of interactive motion work as well. Best of all? No fans and no beach-balls! That’s not to say there isn’t a place for Flash, but the days of watching “LOADING 25%” clips may be tapering off as we start to trade some of our overbearing style in for more underlying substance. At that point, I won’t hear the fan, I’ll be one.   - j

“Renaissance” may not be the best word to use, but typography, more specifically font faces, underwent an explosion in the past ten years. Thankfully, it’s slowed down a bit and the waters are beginning to clear.

The computer, which set desktop publishing afire, allowed just about anyone to design a typeface or create a flyer. The results have not been pretty. A quick search will turn up thousands of typefaces based on people’s own handwriting. Where typeface designers used to spend months giving faces a matching look and feel, where weight mattered and the kerning between the letters would allow elegance to come through, we now have wild one-offs with absolutely no consideration for how the letters fit together is taken. Sometimes classic faces are simply tweaked and given a new name. Think of the ubiquitous “Arial” font, a Helvetica stand-in that has awkward tweaks (like the slant on the top of the lowercase “t”) that apparently were made to simply avoid paying royalties to Helvetica.

People love their fonts, and for some people, the uglier the better. “Comic Sans” is the reigning leader of a long line of fonts that are seldom appropriate for anything. Yes, you could add “Bradley Hand” and “Papyrus” to round out the podium, but using a single ugly font is not the most grievous assault to the senses. That comes from those who insist on mixing it up a bit. Perfectly reasonable people, who know better than to wear polka dots and stripes together, or plaid and paisley, will somehow feel comfortable creating a four font ensemble that would scare even the most stalwart “Dingbat” off of the page. Alternatively, though you’d think most would know better than to wear two different shades of red together, it’s not uncommon to see two fonts that are close enough to be siblings mashing it up on the same page. Just ground one of them and let the other hog the spotlight. The less fighting the better.

Fortunately, the internet has largely been free of this assault, due to the limitations of HTML 4. The upcoming HTML 5 allows “designers” to embed their fonts in the pages. The future is looking bright. And tacky.   - j

A common misperception about design is that you just sit down, move some things about, make something bland look pretty. Good designers can make things look prettier than poor designers.

Seasoned designers often have a big bag of tricks that we can rely on. Experience tells us what works and what doesn’t before we even start, so yes, we can pull something out pretty quickly that will look good, flow well, and even have some sort of individual hook. In an industry that revolves around needing it yesterday, this type of work is often good enough. The client’s happy–onto the next job!

Unfortunately for everyone involved (other than the client’s bean-counter), this is not how the best work, the satisfying work, the award-winning work gets created. Design is not a eureka moment, but an evolutionary process filled with false-starts, multiple variations, successful directions, and yes, plenty of dead-ends. The more you play with an idea, the more you understand what it’s about, the better feel you have for where it needs to go. But you don’t have a map. You just have a gut feeling.

With my biggest projects, I like keeping all of my sketches. Seeing the thought processes. Realizing that at one point you thought you were close before you tried something new and took off in a whole new direction. The history of a design is often more interesting than the final piece.

So if you want something that does better than merely work, give your designers time to play. Time to get lost, start over, and get lost again. When the old stand-bys and cliches are allowed to fade into the process is when a real winner is allowed to mature.   - j

By the looks of this blog, you might think we over here at Alstin eat, breathe and sleep all that is recruitment and retention. Every so often we’ll stray from the HR talk and bring you more on some of our favorite things, places and activities that also populate our daily lives.

I enjoy being able to make my living doing graphic design, which I tend to think of as aesthetic problem solving in two dimensions. Coming up with something that not only works, but does so with a twist brings a lot of satisfaction. Being able to do so under the absurd timeframe of contemporary deadlines adds to that feeling. And yet, as a creative endeavor, it’s missing something…

Call me old-fashioned, but knocking something out on the computer, either to end up online, viewable by millions, or as a brochure that might be seen by hundreds or even thousands, lacks a tactile individuality. One postcard looks like all the other printed ones, and if you wanted more, just call the printer. The masthead on this blog looks the same to everybody on their own screens. The designs may be effective, but they’re not precious.

One could say that my hobby is starting hobbies. I’m a poly-amateur (from the Latin “amare”-to love), and find that most of the pursuits I engage in revolve around having something to hold, hear, or taste. They’re one-offs, culminations of efforts that are intimate expressions of myself.

A recent loss of a Danish Modern figure in an ebay bidding war started me down the path to woodcarving this past winter (I thought I could do just as well). I started off with a stylized teak cat, followed it up with a number of 2″ tall teak woolly animals (mammoth, buffalo, rhinos, another mammoth), an oak manta ray, and finally an 8″ tall mammoth made from black cherry with poplar tusks. All that within the span of six weeks before losing interest (at least for now).

When I look at the pieces, I do like the way they look, but I LOVE the way they feel in my hands and in my heart. Their weight, their polish, and their smell are all intimate sensory experiences, but what I appreciate the most about them is their uniqueness and individuality–their preciousness.  - j

Stepping down from the podium and into yet another snow-drift has me attempting a course redirection with these posts, perhaps a little more observational than instructional (but hopefully with some interesting facts infused).

That brings me to the color white. Technically, it’s either the absence of color or the combination of all colors, depending on if you’re working with pigment or light, but the main gist is that white is white.

Tell that to my ceiling.

Only in a world where you have products such as Icy Hot®, are you going to have three dozen colors of “white” at the local hardware store (and that doesn’t even begin to cover finishes). I’m not even talking about “off-white” of which there are probably hundreds, but just WHITE!

After a hurried roller-job left green marks on my rear-room’s ceiling and the basement cabinet full of previous owner hand-me-downs left me with no matches, it was off to the paint store. Explaining my needs, I was soon pointed towards a straightforwardly named “white ceiling paint”. Bingo! My Spidey-sense told me to just buy a pint, which turned out to be a good thing as my new white ceiling paint was significantly darker than my current white ceiling paint.

Back to the store…

The paint guy was trying to be helpful, but he couldn’t tell me with confidence if “Brilliant White” was whiter than “Ultra White”, or where “Premium White” and “Super White” fell in the lineup. I can’t recall which one I ended up with, regardless of the catchy and descriptive name, but it wasn’t a match either. No surprise there.

Nonetheless, it was close enough that if I feathered the edge, I was able to get away with it. At least that’s what I told myself, and that’s all white with me.   - j

Penny’s get pinched when the economy is tight, by individuals and companies alike. Why pay a designer to put together a new ad campaign or design your logo when you already have an employee who likes using different fonts in Word and has access to a large library of clip art? The utility of the job will get through and you’ll save money. Besides, who cares if it’s clever or looks good? Nobody has time to pay attention to that kind of stuff anyways!

Your iPod begs to differ.

From cell-phones to cars, disposable razors to televisions, cameras to coffee-grinders, good design is making its mark. It’s not that your music sounds better coming from an iPod instead of an iRiver or SanDisk, but that an aesthetic and tactile experience ends up making the usage of the device all that more pleasurable. People like that, and if Apple’s stock is any indication, people are willing to pay for that.

Graphic design works the same way. When you have an idea or design that brings it all together, creating something both clever and memorable, the attitude towards the design is transferred to the client. You make that jump from “Hey, that Volkswagen ad was great” to “Volkswagen’s pretty cool for making such a clever ad”. Sure, Volkswagen’s still got to make the sale with the car, but they got you in the door. That’s half (and a necessary half) of the battle right there.

The choice is yours to make. Put the time and money into crafting an image that will attract the best of people, people that actually want to be with you, or toss a worm on your line and see what bites.

What do you think? - j

Most people understand that pixels play some part in electronic imagery. You’ve probably bought digital cameras that pushed ever-higher MEGApixels, but the question that lingers is:

 ”What is a pixel?”

In simplest terms, it’s the most basic unit of color or value in an image. When you blow an image up on screen, pixels are usually defined as squares. Though you can’t see it from viewing distance, your display, whether an LCD or old-fashioned tube, only has three colors–red, green, and blue. They’re arranged together in groupings of three, one of each color. With LCDs, which have a specific pixel-count, each pixel is defined by one of these blocks of three. The most common type of color image is called 24 bit, meaning that each of the three colors has an 8 bit span of color value (8×3=24). 8 bits = 256 steps, from completely dark to fully bright. With each color having 256 steps, a single pixel, made of 3 colors, has 256 x 256 x 256 color variations (16.8 MILLION!).

When I said “fully bright”, I didn’t mean all the way to white. I mean that the sub-pixel element goes from off (black) to a bright red, bright green, or bright blue. The white you see on the screen is all three of these colors in their brightest state. Grab a magnifying glass or loupe and take a look!

This is RGB color, the way that light-projecting devices show color. Even if you’re working in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) for print, it’s being displayed via RGB on your display. Conversely, if you print out an RGB photo in color, it will be converted to CMYK on the paper.

An image that occupies the CMYK color space has pixels that are defined by FOUR colors, each having 256 values, so you’d think you’d get a wider range of colors this way, but it’s just not so. I’ll leave those worries to the designers. The rest of you note that every snowy shot you take this winter with your digital camera is blasting the red, green and blue sub-pixels. Just stay away from the snow that’s only made up of the red and green subs (that’s YELLOW!).   - j

In the Web World, there are two main formats for graphic files–jpegs and gifs. If you’re not creating web pages, this may not be important to you, but you might find the differences in their approach to be interesting.

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format and rhymes with “Jiff” (like the peanut butter), though most people pronounce it with the hard “G”. The format is limited to 256 colors at a time, so it tends to work better with graphic images (non-photographic). 256 colors may sound like a lot, but full-range color has millions of different hues and values, and a full-color photo saved as a GIF will show banding in gradients and have a pointillist quality to it. For graphic images, you’ll have a very sharp reproduction with nice, crisp edges. Once the file is saved, you can open it and save it over and over and it will always look the same. This is called a “non-lossy” compression. GIFs also have the benefit of being able to show multiple frames for animation.

JPEG is named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group. With a full-range of color, this is the format of choice for photographic images and the one your digital camera is most likely to use. The downside of JPEG is that it’s a “lossy” compression, meaning that saving a file to JPEG format throws away information that you can never get back. You might not notice this in a high-quality JPEG, but a low-quality JPEG will show you that the image is broken down into groups of 8×8 pixels and then approximated. A higher setting gets this approximation close, but a lower one may reduce the 8×8 block to a single color! Even if you save in high-quality, if you open it up and save it again, it will further approximate these blocks, degrading the picture quality each time (so keep this practice to a minimum). Most cameras have high-enough resolution that you can compress them pretty well once or twice without noticing “compression artifacts” on a print-out, but when doing web-work, one has to strike the right balance between file size and aesthetics.

So there’s your education in image degradation. See you next month! – j

So that print job you just received didn’t look the way you expected it to and you’re wondering who dropped the ball.

Printers are always suspect and that designer you talk to might have been thrown off by the yellow tint in his Buddy Holly glasses, but I have a better guess. Look at your monitor! No, I’m not coyly pointing out your reflection. I’m talking about your screen. Many people don’t know that monitors need to be calibrated to give a decent approximation of what the person on the other end of the job is showing you. You need to set your black point, your white point and your gamma. Then there’s the whole color thing!

Macs come with pretty good monitor calibration software (assuming it’s used), but you may need to step outside of the basic Windows suite in order to straighten out your PC. At the very least, your monitor should be adjusted so that a gradient of black to white, running across your screen, does not clip at either end. If your dark end is pure black for a bit or your light end is pure white, then that means you’re getting clipped and your contrast is probably set too high. Take a look around online. There may be some freeware that can get you in shape.

“Gamma” is the term for where the middle grey falls. One would intuitively think that duh, it falls in the middle. 50% right? Well, here’s a nice little quirk for you. This point is adjustable, making your screen have a lighter or darker feel without clipping your endpoints. On top of that, there’s one gamma that’s used for the web (PCs are set for this point) and another for print media (where Macs are), giving PC screens a darker feel than their Mac counterparts. And hello Mac users, your latest OS (Snow Leopard) now sets it’s gamma to be the same as PCs. Print may not be dead, but the web and video are demanding more and more attention!

Once you do get your monitor calibrated, take notice the next time you send something to your printer. Does it match what’s on screen? If it does, consider yourself lucky! You really need to calibrate and match your entire workflow, from the monitor to cameras, printers, scanners, etc. It’s enough to make you see red! (Or is that orange?)  - j

As we’re getting ready for an exciting change of location here at Alstin, it’s not merely the walls and building exterior that are taking on a new look. There are lots of little details that need to be updated. Though we’re able to take our email addresses and phone numbers across the street, taking our physical address was not a possibility. That means a lot of new print runs that cover business cards, invoices, stationary, envelopes, etc. It also means updating electronic signatures in emails, quotes and faxes. Busy, but simple, right? Not so fast!

One element that tends to be taken for granted because it’s supposed to be an unchanging cornerstone is the company logo. You’d think that after all that goes into expressing the character of a company through a graphic mark, the logo would be safe, but it seldom is. Alstin is no exception.

Sometimes companies will make radical changes that scream “I’ve been updated!” – think back to 2003 when UPS updated their logo.

Others might simply alter the font so subtly that only typographers will notice. But some tread even more gently than that. Perhaps the color is going to change from a dark green to a dark blue. Maybe you’ve added a trademark symbol or updated your tag line or even decided to include a tag line where there wasn’t one before!

One problem with updating the logo is making sure that everybody knows about it and is on the same page regarding usage. We’ve learned that it’s not enough to simply label a file “NEW CompanyX logo”. We put dates on them, and label them to reflect their proper usage. Then we put all the older logos in a folder called “Old CompanyX logos-DO NOT USE!” – but we don’t trash them as it will be inevitable that as soon as they are trashed the old logo will be requested by someone! (When UPS – an Alstin client for a series of projects – originally updated their logo, we started using it right away. However we were ultimately asked to go back to the old one for a few weeks until the new one became more recognizable.)

So as we move into our new location, I’ll be busy making sure I update everything that needs updating in the most consistent, company approved manner possible. Then I’ll move the older, improper logos that I should never use again into a new folder. And trash it.         - j

4-color process printing can be full of curve-balls. If you’ve ever printed a photo from your digital camera, you know that what you see on the screen and what ends up in your hands can vary quite a bit. It’s the same on the professional end. We can calibrate our monitors, explain to the client that the final piece won’t look exactly like our toner-based laser prints, and even go over the color-correct proofs from our printer, but in the end, all of our colors in processed printing are combinations of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

Those four colors can cover a good range, but there are weak points that either lie between the four or completely out of the gamut. You want a vibrant green or a juicy orange? Forget about it! You may as well be asking for a neon yellow, reflective gold or “shiny.”

What if you have a corporate color–one that designers and focus groups have whittled down to just the right shade–and it has to be exactly right for the newest batch of 50,000 company business cards?

The solution lies in spot colors. Spot colors are a pure, one-color ink, that does not vary (though you can get it in percentage tints). They don’t necessarily play nice with others, but can work well enough alongside. If you’ve ever heard of “Pantone Colors”, that’s what this is all about. You can get a great range of lush colors that encompass even neons and metallics, as well as spots of high-gloss (or no gloss) varnish. They give print-jobs a crispness that processed colors often cannot.

Most print jobs are 4-color these days and print jobs are identified by the number of inks they use on the front and back of the paper. A one sided flyer would be 4/0 (four inks on the front–zero on the back). An additional spot color would make that 5/0, which does add to the cost of the piece, but will hopefully bring some more zing for your dollars. On the saving money side, sometimes a job can be run as 2/0, with your favorite spot and black making up the front. This is common with business cards and stationary.

So the next time you’ve got a print job and you want to give it that little extra something, ask your account exec or designer if they have any catchy ways to incorporate a spot color or varnish into the piece. Not only will you end up with a little something extra, but your colors will be Spot On.   - j

When working on ads for a client, the first thing we end up needing is the logo. We addressed the problems in getting insufficient resolution for print-work in a previous post, so what I want to cover today is an even better solution–one that has no resolution at all–vector artwork.

“Vector” means that the artwork is described by mathematical formulas describing the lines, curves, colors, gradients, etc. Because it is not defined in terms of a defined grid of colored blocks (pixels), this artwork can be blown up as large as you want and still look sharp. For most graphical work, like corporate logos, this is the best format to use, especially since the file size of these pieces is usually smaller than high-resolution bit-map (made of pixels) artwork. Vector artwork can then be scaled to use online, in print ads, and even on billboards. A little file goes a long way!

Where vectors run into trouble is when they’re trying to define more illustrative or photographic treatments that have subtle blendings of shapes and colors, soft drop shadows and out of focus elements. In those cases, it just makes sense to go with the raster art (another name for bit-map). There are some talented artists out there that can reproduce almost anything as a vector drawing, but the level of detail ends up making the file size no smaller than the bit-map’s, and it still doesn’t have the same noisy texture that makes so many photos and photo-illustrations come alive.

So you know we want vector logos, but how will you know them when you see them? A reliable sign is the suffix on the file name. If your file’s name ends with “.eps” or “.ai”, then it’s very likely to be vector in the form of an “encapsulated postscript” file or an “Adobe Illustrator” file, both of which work equally well. Please note that an .eps file created by dropping a low-resolution web logo in an Illustrator document and then saving it as an .eps doesn’t work and it defeats the purpose. If all else fails, get in touch with your graphics department. They usually know what they’re doing.    - j

I’m often surprised at the reasons for which some pitches (initially) get rejected. It’s not often that the artists end up going to client meetings, but we’ll get the reports when our AEs come back. While I am happy to report to you that the feedback is typically positive, there’s usually some give and take before the final campaign is nailed down.

Critiques can range the gamut, but we do hear things like design #1 didn’t work because it had a lot of blue in it and the lead on the client side hates blue, or that #2 was rejected because the guy in the photo we selected just wasn’t right for some reason or another, or perhaps that #3 failed because the client isn’t a fan of sans serif fonts.

It’s our job to keep the client focused on the fact that not much is set in stone in terms of the look. We’re not called the “Creative Department” for nothing. Variations in color needed? Want to change the emotional feel, or even the head on the guy in the back of the shot? Just ask! You’d be surprised at what can be done.

I have found that the best types of suggestions are open ones that allow the designers and copywriters to come up with a cohesive feel for the piece. We’re trained professionals here (stand back!) so I encourage clients to resist the urge to micromanage the piece.

One aspect of an idea that should never be chopped up and changed is the concept. If you don’t like it, let it go! Trying to change too much will result in a direction that doesn’t make any sense. For example, we could present (but we wouldn’t) a picture of a dog chewing a bone and the headline might reference the “dog days of summer”. Those designs could get passed around an office and by the time they get back to us, we’re told to 1) keep the headline, but change the dog to a roller coaster, or 2) keep the dog, but change the headline to “make waves!”. These examples may seem silly to you, but keep them in mind. They’re not far off! – j

Image is everything, right? Well, only if you have the rights to use it! The internet has put millions of images at our fingertips that we can copy to our desktops at will, but that doesn’t mean they’re ours.

I once worked for a man who LOVED retro imagery and would clip shots out of old magazines for us to scan in and place in designs. His thought was that if the client liked the concept, THEN we’d hunt down the rights to the work. Thankfully our clients never went in these directions, because as difficult (or impossible) as it would have been to find the source, it would have been ethically and legally our responsibility to do so.

There was a time when we scanned in a road-map as a background image. It was tilted back in perspective and the image was adjusted a bit further by adding pins and flags through an image editing program. Any map would have done the job and there was nothing special about the one we used – to us. But after the piece was printed, the map people noticed it and requested a fee, which we were obliged to pay. The point is that even a simple, non-critical background image that has been changed is still someone else’s image, and you need permission to use it.

Some images are called “rights restricted”, which means you pay to use them a certain way and may need to pay again to use them another way. For example, the perfect image you purchased for your postcard might not be able to be used on your website without additional fees.

Vice versa is true too. You may have had another company design your corporate web-site, but that doesn’t mean that you have the right to use those images whenever and however you’d like. It’s important that you know for certain how the images can be used.

Last time, we learned about getting images in the proper resolution. Now that we know that the image we’re using is both of good quality and OURS to use, what do we do if it’s not quite right? That’s for next time! – j

The usual state of business is typically “I need it the way I want it and I need it yesterday”. We’re all in a hurry and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for mistakes that need correcting. On the graphics end of business, many of the problems I run into are preventable on the front end, provided our clients understand what we need and why we need it.

Though you might be tempted to grab your company logo or great photo on your home page from the web to be set into a design for a printed piece, the truth is that very few (close to none) of the files that you can pull off a web page (72 pixels per inch) are going to have enough pixels for print work (250-300 pixels per inch). On top of that, part of putting images on the web means making the file size as small as possible. This means graphical compression in the form of jpeg or gif files which result in lower resolution and loss of detail when printed.

In other words, I’m begging you not to pull files from the web (or Word docs for that matter, though that’s another story)! If you find yourself hunting and hunting for that image you need to provide us with and the only one you can find is online, the end result will look like somebody made a mistake or didn’t know what they were doing. That’s not a reputation anybody wants!

The best thing you can do is spend some time before the rush is on, hunting down nice high-resolution files – usually someone on the marketing team will have them, or know where to get them. That will help your job run more smoothly and look a lot better.  Just make sure that whatever image you provide is one that you have the legal right to use. That sounds like a good Topic #2!