Thursday, November 19, 2009

An existing and proven business model?

I think I'll set up a design business like an insurance company. My customers will have to pay me a monthly retainer to do nothing. If they DO have a project come up, I will raise the rates and make them pay a certain amount of it up front, no matter how many months worth of retainer fees they have already paid. If they have any existing bad design, I will refuse to do any new design work to improve it. And if they ever try to do something on their own that I deem dangerous to good design, I will drop them as a client.

Should work, don't you think?

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Next they'll just put 'em in the Crackerjacks box

This just in... as posted by Babs, my icon and inspiration (and the answer to so many of my "drawing a blank" design times: "WWBD?") -- iStock has made it possible for all us designers to unload all those pesky logos that are just taking up space on our hard drives. And here it is:

If you create one of the first 10,000 approved logo designs for iStockphoto by January 1, 2010, we’ll pay you $5 per approved logo and another $5 if we reach 10,000 approved logos by that date. So fire up Illustrator to create some amazing logos or dust off all those much-loved logos that never made it past the third round with a client.
Woo hoo. "Fire up Illustrator", huh? This is just depressing.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Re-defined behind my back!

I've discovered something. Designers are now programmers, by agreement of just about everybody except myself. Listings for graphic artists are now all for User Interface Developers, Flash Developers, Actionscript developers... I'm sure there are quite a number of skilled visual creative professionals who also happen to be skilled programmers, but in my experience, the visualizers usually cringe at excessive use of code, and the code crunchers would prefer not to be pixel-jockeys. But during my career I have seen the job of "designer" absorb several other careers: image scanner, typesetter, lithographer (truly though, how many designers even now really understand how or why to trap their graphics?), air brush retouch artist . . . I miss the collaboration with all these skilled pros. As a new artist at an ad agency, just a few months out of school, I was able to spend a lot of time with one of the local litho shop owners, and I learned more from him than I did in any of my college classes. Now the guy sells real estate. Sad, this elimination of the team, but apparently it was inevitable. But I cannot for the life of me see how a designer is now also supposed to be a programmer. There is some helpful software, yeah... but I simply can't see it happening. Perhaps the programmers will now all be expected to be designers... aye me. I've already seen the results of THAT idea. No, no, it takes two completely different types of thinkers to really do both of those jobs well. Unfortunately that's not what the ole bottom line wants. The bottom line wants to cross right through one paycheck or the other. I have no solution for that.
...OK... let's see.

play_btn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, playMovie);
stop_btn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, stopMovie);
function playMovie (event:MouseEvent);void
Oh, yeah. That's what my BFA is all about.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Designer, Brand Thyself!

I finally got a custom header put together for this blog. Truthfully I didn't mind the "generic" Blogger layout at all. I like what they came up with a lot, and it was no chore for me to keep my musings under their very well-designed header while I figured what I should do on my own. It's much easier for me to design a look for someone else than it is myself. My sis can probably relate; it's similar to her hiring a professional organizer to help her clear the clutter. Hire someone who isn't ATTACHED, who can just get the darned job done. I'm much too aware of the huge list of fonts on my system and I want to try each one. Does it REALLY express what I want to say? Do I want to wear that as a brand, all the time? This process becomes a great exercise in learning empathy for my own clients.

The font I used this time is an old one, Lubalin Graph. It's not what I was planning to use at all; I was planning more of a hand-made font, maybe a very-slightly-funky sans serif. This one I just tried out and it sat there properly. For now. It may change. Right now it's just a header, I'm not calling it my brand.

The art is a painting I did called "Bright People." It's in oil, which is not a medium I use now (too messy!); I just really like the imagery here. What are those colorful people talking about? Why is everyone else blandly staring off in another direction? I would hope to be one of those bright people.

Now if I can just find a type face I feel that way about.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Blowups and no sense of proportion!

I can't get over how few people seem to understand the concept proportion. No drama, and nothing abstract or conceptual here, just the literal ratio of height to width. I get a lot of requests to enlarge a photo or piece of artwork to fit a certain area (usually to fit a standard-sized frame), and the toughest concept for people to GET seems to be this: if I enlarge it one direction, it's going to be enlarged the other direction too. Either that, or it gets stretched or scrunched. I'd think that anyone who works with images would have a good grasp of this idea, but apparently not.

I dunno if anyone will ever see this, but I'm going to make a recipe to follow here.
Divide the desired width by the original one. Take that number and multiply it by the original height. If that result is the same as the desired height, then you've got an original of the same proportion as the new size you want, and you can enlarge it without having to crop it. If not... guess what. Something's getting cropped off.

The options:
1) "float it" -- sort of like the "window box" that movies sometimes use if they are being shown on a TV screen.
2) Distort it -- if it's scanned digitally for enlargement, it CAN be enlarged more one way than another to fit; sometimes you can get away with it if it's not to drastic. Don't try it on a portrait though. Yuck.
3) Get a custom frame made.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Random graphic communication

I've been keeping watch lately for communication graphics without words that just show up as part of a day-to-day routine. It's actually trickier than I might have imagined to find them. A red octagonal sign at an intersection communicates "STOP" even before you notice the word printed on it... but the word is still printed there. Some of the nonverbal graphics I've been consciously aware are arrows (up and down buttons on an elevator. A severe bend in the road. More info on the back). I also will count the striped crosswalks painted at intersections; those have a pretty clear meaning without need for explanation. But I'm disappointed; it seems there would be more examples than that. I'm either seeing them but am so used to them that they are only registering subconsciously, or I live in such a small town that there just isn't much need.

There is one thing I remember from one of my previous jobs though -- it was in the pressroom, which was full of all sorts of big heavy equipment. One machine had a couple of huge rollers that paper fed through, and there was the silliest graphic stuck to it as a warning... it was a silhouette of a guy with long hair, and the hair was caught between the rollers. Silhouette-guy's mouth was wide open; I could practically hear the yelp. It was an effective graphic, I must admit, even though it would never win any design awards.

Who is using a contemporary iconography now? The search continues.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Accessible Info

In the last week I've been asked twice what exactly a graphic designer does. I'm sure there are graphics professionals who would define the role differently, but as far as I'm concerned, it's my job to make information visually accessible (as well as unique and attractive). The old Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes entry packages are an example of anti-design (my opinion). I suppose they served a purpose; miss putting one sticker in place and your entry is probably disqualified ("You may already be a sucker"). On the other hand, the early church had developed a whole iconography to make information accessible to even those who couldn't read (man with a bee hive? That's St. Ambrose. Saint with a palm branch? One that was martyred). Iconography is a little different now. Today if you see a symbol surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal bar through it, you know that you are not supposed to do something (don't smoke, don't enter here, no ghosts allowed). These are pictures that might save a thousand words, even if they don't necessarily paint as many.


I went to a design presentation some time back during which the speaker was disappointed in the lack of a contemporary iconography. Whatever Hieronymous Bosch might have been trying to say in his bizarre artwork is mostly visual gibberish now. And while this type of symbolism isn't quite as necessary now that more people are able to read, I think it is still possible to remind an audience an entire story with a recognizable picture. Our iconography has just changed from religious symbols to fantasy symbols: Indiana Jones with the bullwhip, the Jedi with their light sabres, Mary Poppins with an umbrella and really weird shoes. Or one of the bread and butter jobs of a designer now: branding. Red and white concentric circles for Target, a bloated check mark for Nike -- calling people to our new religion of commerce.


Those are my first thoughts on accessible information as a designer's job. I'm on the watch for examples of good communication and of buried communication. I'll see what I can post here.