The day I got back from TypeCon, maybe two minutes after I stumbled into the office, a coworker asked, “What’s the font that’s used on highway signs?”
Um . . . Um . . . “I should know this, but I don’t.”
Continue reading “Coming soon to a highway near you”
to glut yourself on Dino dos Santos’s typefaces at half price.
The sale ends on Tuesday. Run!
Continue reading “You have four days”
“I love Quark, but . . . at some point you gotta stop hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.”
“Calli means ‘good’ and graphy means ‘writing,’ so calligraphy means ‘beautiful writing.’ Isn’t that neat?”
Because some users don’t know how to type curly quotes instead of straight ones, you should make fonts whose straight quotes are the same as the curly ones—are you !@#$% kidding me?
Cabarga talks softly, is clever with Illustrator.
Elements 3E signed by Bringhurst!
Hotels with lousy Internet must die.
Many pretty Mexican typefaces.
Anything is interesting for only twenty minutes—almost.
Back when I was first asking y’all about how you find illustrators, I stumbled across illoz.com, a cool portfolio site with some handy art direction tools built in. I signed up, and since then I’ve made a lot of folders in my illoz account, with lots of samples by people whose work I like. But not until two weeks ago did I find an artist whose work I thought would be the perfect match for a specific story.
| story | illustrator |
|---|---|
| is about a girl at camp, mostly takes place in woods | draws a lot of girls in woods |
| is creepy | can draw very creepily |
I confess that I didn’t contact Sam Weber using the lovingly designed art direction interface on illoz.com, though it certainly sounds nice—
An art director account at illoz gives you the ability to initiate project assignments with any illoz portfolio owner. Sketches can be viewed here at the site, then commented on and approved. After that, final art can be downloaded directly from a portfolio owner’s personal area. The job can go from start to finish, right here at illoz.
I think the thing is, I’m a socially challenged geek to begin with, and I’d always rather contact someone through a structured form than by phone or e-mail, so I try to fight that tendency by occasionally picking up the phone, instead. Not that I picked up the phone in this case, either. But I did write a long, no doubt overly detailed e-mail directly to Sam, mentioning that I’d found him on illoz. And he wrote back! And he accepted the job! And he did it very quickly! And I love it! And it’s on our home page until tomorrow morning, and in the story indefinitely!
So, that’s my illoz success story.
The story Sam illustrated, incidentally, is by my colleague Ellen, and I think it’s really good. You should read it if you’re, you know, one of the few designer-types who knows how to read.
Apparently Paris was a hotbed of elegant bookbinding, back in the 1920s:
Here’s another thing I looked up for the dozenth time that I thought you, too, might want not to have to look up. I use picas as the default unit in InDesign because I find them far more useful than inches when working with mostly type. But I wanted to tell someone how big an image needed to be, and I wanted to do it in inches, and math is hard!, soooo . . . I knew there was some way to get the units of measurement shown in the control palette to change on the fly, but I couldn’t remember the keyboard command.
The answer, per InDesign Secrets, is CMD+OPT+SHIFT+U on the Mac, or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+U on Windows. Keep hitting that combo until the palette cycles through to the unit you want.
While trying to find this shortcut, I also came across a CreativePro article, one of whose tips I’d never seen before: InDesign How-To: Six Small Things, Six Big Results. The third, “Sneaky access to options,” was new to me and seems like it’d be useful.
Bonus non-InDesign discovery: Palette Generator: Automagically create a harmonious color palette from a photograph (via The Paper Pony).
Have you looked anything up lately? Do tell.
Photo: Inchworm on the rim of my cup… by seahorse_ / melanie; was licensed CC-by-nc 2.0 on 7/13/07, but the photographer has subsequently changed the license to copyright.
The Psychology of Fonts, commissioned by Lexmark Printers and written by psychologist Dr Aric Sigman explains how a typeface will significantly influence what the reader thinks about you.
Courier is seen as the choice of “sensible shoes” type of people or “anoraks” and curvy icons like Georgia or Shelly suggest a bit of a “rock chick” personality.
So that’s why I like Georgia: I’m a rock chick! Duuuude!!
The study found rectilinear fonts were more appealing to men, while the more round and curvy fonts with prominent tails were favourites with women.
Huh. I wouldn’t have thought it’d shake out in quite that way, but that shows you what I know about the sexes.
(Via Design Observer.)
Photo: erika’s licks by Lex in the City / Alexia; some rights reserved.
If you’re a book designer or merely wish to play one on TV, Stephen Tiano’s got a few things to ask you. Interesting questions, interesting answers.
Photo: Questioning by Ann Douglas; some rights reserved.
What I liked about art directing, was that I love working with people and I love pulling strings and love finding artists. And I always liked typography, even though I wasn’t a great typographer. See, an art director can do it all. You can be an editor, you can be a designer, you can be a mover, you can shake things around, you can do formats; I just like the entirety of the process. But as an art director I never really loved photography; I was always much more involved in illustration. I always preferred it.
Illustrator Zina Saunders, who for some time has been posting a series of illustrations of and interviews with other illustrators, has now started working on art directors. Steven Heller is the first.
See also Zina’s several other galleries, and her websites ZinaSaunders.com and Overlooked New York. My favorites: Profile of James, the Super and An Ethnic Treasure Bites the Dust.
Illustration detail copyright © 2007 Zina Saunders. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
