In this quick tip I’ll show you some font identification tools to help you find that special font.

Links: Identifont, Fonts by similarity, What The Font

Hey everyone! I received an email today from the lovely folks at Typekit notifying me that I had invites to giveaway! If you haven’t noticed I have been using the lovely Skolar by TypeTogether for my blog article headlines. So you want in on this Typekit business? Leave a comment and let me know what projects you would like to use Typekit for! I’ll randomly select 4 winners on Sunday October 4th. Yay! Also stay tuned for some more giveaways in the future!

I’ll admit it – I had a HUGE design crush on El Lissitsky when I was in school. I had just discovered Russian Avant Guard work and was in love with the red and black color scheme, harsh angles and visual punctuation, and geometric simplicity. Whats not to love? We can learn a lot from El Lissitzky’s work and apply it to our own designs.

Visual Hierarchy

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Visual hierarchy is the grouping of elements arranged according to emphasis.

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) This is one of the most famous examples of El Lissitzky’s work. The design of this poster utilizes direction, movement and hierarchy. Through the use of geometric shapes, color, and size your eye is directed from left to right in the poster. Your eye is first drawn to the large red triangle, and then to the white circle and then the remaining black area surrounding the circle. After this you notice the text and all the secondary elements of the poster.

When designing consider the placement of elements in your composition. Do you want your viewer to see this element first? Consider placing it in the top left. Is it the most important element? Consider making it bold, or large, or using a color that stands out from all the other elements. In the same fashion consider the importance of secondary information.

Not sure if the hierarchy in your design is working? Print out your design, take a step back and squint and see which elements stand out to you. You can also ask others not involved with the design to tell you the order in which they see things.

Visual Punctuation

For the Voice 1923

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Suprematicheskii Skaz (About 2 Squares) 1922

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Visual punctuation can include space intervals, rules, or pictorial elements to separate, connect, and emphasize words or lines.

Another design element Lissitzky is known for is visual punctuation. In the book and magazine layouts above Lissitzky uses large type, horizontal and diagonal rules to direct your eyes around the page.

When designing consider where you want our users eyes to go and pause within the composition. Add visual elements to direct your user and make sure the direction is clear. Make them stop and read important information with design elements.

Texture & Depth

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Texture and depth are another way to add visual interest and direct your users attention.

The Constructor (1925) is a photo montage that features movement, contrast texture and depth. (Can you believe this was all created BEFORE Photoshop?)

Depth adds detail to composition and draws a user in. The users eyes pauses at the illusion of depth created where the hand intersects with the eye. The strong lines and texture of the graph paper also cause the users eye to be directed in a vertical or horizontal motion.

When designing consider adding depth by layering photographs using blending modes in photoshop or through some other means. Add texture that directs your users eye around the composition and directs them towards important design elements.

Looking for more Avant Garde inspiration?

I know I know! I can’t seem to get enough of the dymanic geometric design either! For more inspiration from Russian Avant Garde artists visit: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2002/russian/

Also check out this flickr photoset of avant garde books: http://www.flickr.com/photos/migueloks/sets/72157612436281954/

What have you learned from designers that came before us?

Share what you have learned from designers past! Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Thanks so much for calling in and asking questions! I’ve tried you answer your questions to the best of my ability. See the questions below from this episodes callers and answer them or ask another question in the comments! If you have a design question please feel free to call 617.752.1483 and leave a voicemail!

Chand Engle: - What do you think of list posts on design blogs?

Steve Gordon: – Best online printer for business cards or any print media – quality not price?

Nikki Jeske – if squirrels could design – what fonts would they use?   font usage on http://designcoyote.com/

Brian Galloway – Contact form for website

http://wufoo.com

Brian Klepper – Most important aspect of design? color? typography? layouts? grids?

Brandon cox: Thoughts on usability of horizontaly scrolling websites
http://www.benekdesign.com/

What do you think?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the video format. (please excuse my rudamentry imovie editing skills) Do you have answers to these questions? Leave a comment and help these fellow designers out!

So I randomly stumbled upon a few commercials last night while watching CNN. Both commercials are very interesting in…their own way. I love seeing bananas being used in advertising . Click read more to view the videos!

The first is a Sprint commercial with tons of lovely data-info-facts. I think this is a really well done commercial that throws a lot of facts at you but is still memorable. What do you guys think?

The second video is a crazy Japanese commercial for Dole featuring the Banana Man! Not really anything of substance here, just thought I’d throw this in for laughs. Although, this commercial did prompt me to go out and buy bananas!

I recently received an email from someone asking me for a quote on a logo/illustration. Now In this persons defense – they are not a designer and probably didn’t know any better. Said person mentioned that they were also looking at the service of LogoWorks. And this made me curious so I did a Google search…

Now I must warn you…i’m going to go off for a bit…

Logoworks seems to be a bargain basement design shop aimed at geting small businesses up and running FAST. All their logo packages are less than $700. They promise a 3 day turn around and unlimited revisions on most logo packages.

They also offer 10 reasons why you should hire them. I’ll just interject some of my recently gained knowledge between the bullet points

Original, custom logos you can afford, with no hidden fees. See our packages.

…Well original logos you say? Wow…just google logoworks rip off and you will find dozens of direct and obvious rip offs of other logos. Here are just a few examples (originals on the top…rips on the bottom).

Check out the rest of the Logoworks rip offs here

A fast, convenient, and proven design process.

Logo works promises a 3 day turnaround. I’m sorry, but if a logo can be designed in 3 days then the designer is not utilizing the design process. I usually follow a 3 step process: 1 Research ,2 Designing ,3 Refining. Each phase usually takes about 10-15 hours. No way these designers go through all that in 3 days. One evident solution to this 3 day turnaround must be that they STEAL other designers designs!!! hmmm…

Professional logo designers in-house and freelance.

Another point i’d like to refute. If they offer logo packages for $300, how can they afford to pay professional designers? hm….

Over 45,000 satisfied customers – 98% would recommend Logoworks to a friend.

…what about those customers who found out their logo is a rip off of a trademarked logo? hmm…

Unlimited revisions for all but one of our packages.

Again this is against the way most logo designers work. You usually get limited number of revisions. Anything other than that you usually pay extra for. How can they afford to pay ‘professional’ designers and offer unlimited revisions.

So lets get back to the title of this blog post…Why Logos Should Cost More Than $300

Well…to put this very frankly: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. Great design takes time, research, hard work, discipline, experience, talent, and great communication with the client. When you take shortcuts (especially in price) you sacrifice these things and in turn sacrifice the quality of the logo. I understand that clients are usually looking for a good deal, but really cheap design is not it! (cheap design often ends up like this)

For further and probably more eloquent reading check out Jacob Cass’s article “Why logo design does not cost 5 dollars”. The logos below cost way more than $5

What do you guys think?

Is there a market for el-cheapo design? (obviously) Where does this stand in relation to your skills and services? Do you feel like you have to compete with companies like logoworks? How do we educate clients about these things?

While watching the news the other nice I heard a little blurb about a new logo’s to brand projects that are financed by Obama’s stimulus package. At first, I’m not quite sure what to think of the logos…but after viewing them for a while I found some things I like and some things that need to be critiqued.

A bit of background info

Lets start with a little bit of background information. These logos were designed by Mode Project, a chicago based design firm that designed Obama’s (immaculate IMO) campaign identity. Props to designers  Aaron Draplin and Chris Glass for their hard work on such a visible public project.

What I like about the stimulus logo

1. Color Scheme – I definitely like the color scheme of the Recovery.gov logo. Not to dull and corporate, but not to bright but still exciting. It’s serious, but its also fresh…sort of.
2. Symbology – Stars, Leaves, The Red Cross, and Cogs. Stars symbolize our flag, patriotism and national pride. Leaves symbolize growth and renewal and green energy. Cogs symbolize work and cooperation. The red cross symbolizes health care. Lots of symbols, lots of meaning packed into a somewhat simple logo.

What I like about the DOT Recovery logo

1. Color Scheme – Orange is a color that is almost universally associated with construction. It also gets your attention. The black is a strong color that balances with the orange nicely. Orange also means action to me – something is going to be done, or something is going to happen.
2. T.I.G.E.R. – I like that this logo uses an acronym (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) This makes it much easier to remember, and it spells and ACTUAL WORD!!!! How often does this happen with government agencies?

Things I DON’T like about the logos…

1. Visual Tension – The logos seems to have some problems with the way the stars are cut off on the edge of the stimulus logo and also with the stripes on the tiger logo. The stripes probably need to be thicker, and maybe the stars need to be bigger, maybe only use 3 or 4 stars.



2. Text Placement – I think that the Recovery.gov is awkwardly placed and probably needs to be more prominent. Perhaps the text could be placed outside the symbol?



3. Plant Illustration - The right leaf of the plant illustration feels a bit awkward. I think the right leaf needs to be a separate shape from the stem. Another option would be to make one leaf bigger and one smaller.

What do YOU think?

Sound off in the comments and let me know what you think of these two logos! I want to engage you guys in a discussion so let’s give it a go!

Liga-WHAT? What the heck are these funny little characters and where did they come from? I’ve gathered up some brief history and lovely examples of ligatures in use!

A Brief History

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components, and are part of a more general class of glyphs called “contextual forms” where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

Uh…what the heck does that mean…speak english please?

Well, it all boils down to this: a long time ago (think: midevil times) ligatures were used to save space and increase writing speed. Scribes were scribblin as fast as they could and paper was expensive thus the typographic invention! After the printing press was invented ligatures were widely popular, until the Mr. Sans Serif came onto the scene with all his streamlined non-serifness.

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Ligatures are a way to fix what kerning can’t do. You know those awkward spaces that happen with every font (especially the FL and FI combinations).

Check out these stunning examples of ligatures in action.

Ligatures on the web

Go ahead…select the text below…ligatures as web test – who knew?

Æ æ Œ œ ß ff fi fl ffi ffl ſt st

The lost ligatures of Avant Garde

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Mrs Eaves has some beautiful ligatures as well.

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This guy is committed to this ligature…for life… WTF!!!

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Oh Garamond, such a sexy font with sexy ligatures.

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Apple also has a thing for ligatures, check out the lovely ffl combo!

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Nice ST combo on this post logo.
Not sure what country this is from – any help?

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Mmmm great beer and ligatures, good combination no?

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Not a ligature that you see to often, but damn this zy combo is nice!

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Nice little ss combo, almost a monogram.

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Letterpress + ligatures of the CT variety = a match made in heaven!

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Some of these may not be ligatures, but they are still great letter combination

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Is it just me or do non-english languages have more beautiful ligatures? This  ir combination is lovely!

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An interesting BH combination!

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More lovely ligature links

An interesting thread on Typophile on the creation of new ligatures and symbols for internet speal (lol wtf brb etc)

Our Friend the Ligature – a brief overview of the history of the ligature

What is your favorite ligature?

Leave a comment and let me know what your fav ligature is. Post a link to an image and ill include it in this post!

I got a chance to interview VinneyT on his hatred for Helvetica. Yes…thats right. This guy hates helvetica!!! Click read more to find out why!!!

First of all….what is wrong with you? All designers are genetically predisposed to liking helvetica… J/K

I never claimed sanity! I was not aware that I had to pass that test before the interview! We may as well scrap it right now …

Explain your beef with helvetica in 5 words or less

It is overused, mainly ineffectively.

Ok that’s not fair – further explain why helvetica rubs you the wrong way…in as many words as you like.

I think the overuse is really my most major, but by no means my only, problem with the face. As much as it pains me to say, Helvetica is actually a well-designed typeface. The problem comes when people use the face with no idea of what it was designed for and treat it as a face with no historical or visual connotations. Helvetica is a completely inappropriate face to use to design a poster about the Italian Renaissance, for example, 99% of the time. Yet, I have seen just this done … and not well! I have also seen posters designed that respect Helvetica’s intended design that are totally fantastic. As, I think, Massimo Vignelli has said, it is a face that truly tells you how to set it if you will listen.
Aside from that I just really can’t stand the letterforms. The face was well designed to embody an aesthetic that does not resonate with me and that I find very little visual interest in. The idea of trying to remove historical associations creates a historical association … of faces that tried to remove historical associations! It immediately dates the face. It is removed from the continuity of the human writing tradition that serif, Egyptian, modern, humanist, geometric and many other schools grow from – albeit in very different and sometimes more theoretical ways.

Is there anything specific that you don’t like about helvetica?

I find the wavy character of the descending stroke on the capital “R” and the entire shape of the lowercase “e” to be infuriating in a completely irrational way.

What feelings or thoughts does helvetica evoke for you?

Blandness. And that is my major problem with Helvetica. It doesn’t actually evoke ANYTHING inside me except a feeling of complete and utter: “Ugh. Really?”. That is not to say that it has not been used well by many designers and will continue to be, but my personal reaction to the face is apathy mixed with disdain.

If you hate helvetica so much – switzerland would be your personal hell wouldn’t it?

I don’t want to speak too largely of Switzerland as a whole, but I have been to Zurich and I absolutely adored it! And to make things even funnier for you: SwissAir is my favorite international carrier!
The Swiss – and I think Europe in general – are much less hung up on Helvetica than we are in the States. I see Helvetica on doors at the bank, in the subway in New York [isn't it just EVERY subway system?], on leaflets around the East Village, at the bodega on the corner, on “Beware of Dog” signs. It is just EVERYWHERE. When I was in Zurich – and other places in Europe – I have noticed a much more appealing typographic spread … especially the use of san-serif italics, for some reason.

What font do you suggest we use instead of defaulting to helvetica?

AH, therein lies the controversy! I think the notion of a default font is completely and utterly ridiculous. I realize that for systems and everyday email communication – the kind of throwaway communication that you would not say is “designed” – any of your system standards will do, because that is what they were meant to do. But if you are going to sit down and actually design something, why would you start immediately with the answer when you haven’t even taken the time to really find the question? Most typefaces only answer a fairly narrow and specific set of questions, so find the right ones that work. That is part of the reason we are hired as designers.
Personally, I happen to be overly font of slab-serif faces, but I recognize that will not work for many of my clients, so that is not what I use to solve their design needs and business problems.

Aren’t you afraid of hurting Max Miedinger’s feelings? (the creator of helvetica) he is probably rolling over in his grave right now!

I have nothing but respect for Mr. Miedinger, his legacy, and his work. He created a piece of art that is wholly of the time it was conceived and designed in and that is no small achievement! It is not his fault that his typeface has graffiti’d the western world for nearly 50 years!

Have you seen the helvetica documentary? Thoughts? Or have you refused to watch it?

I did see the Helvetica documentary and I was a huge fan! I really appreciated the balanced approach to the documentary, addressing the love/hate relationship designers have with the face.
It did bring out some negative feelings in me, however. Such as when Massimo Vignelli – it always comes back to him when I talk about Helvetica, he may as well have designed the face for all he publicizes it! – said that it was one of only three or four good faces ever drawn. It made me want to throw pencil erasers at him. I am not a type designer and it still felt like a slap in the face to all the designers who do such amazing work and continue to refine their faces. Imagine he says there are three or four good faces and yet you have amazing artists like Zuzana Licko, Matthew Carter, Robert Slimbach, Carol Twombly, and Alejandro Paul – to name but a few – who are putting out incredible work all the time. Collectively they have drawn many times the three or four faces Mr. Vignelli throws around and yet he says something like that! To me, with all due respect to Mr. Vignelli, it seems the height of arrogance and maybe a little laziness.

Ok…I get it…so you don’t like helvetica. What is your favorite serif font? Sans serif?

I knew you would ask this and I really had to think about it and I don’t know if I necessarily have one favorite of each, so I will say two that really are just so brilliant to me:

For the sans, I have to say Frutiger’s Avenir. Brilliant face, especially the cap forms. Balanced, pure, elegant, strong, and nearly perfect. For the serif, you already know that I am fan of the Egyptians, so I would have to say Chapparal by Carol Twombly. It is just brilliant. Set it in all caps and it can be serious and maybe even jarring in some weights. Mixed or lower-case only italics are playful and fun, especially the “y” and the “w”. I have used both faces extensively in my personal branding and here and there for clients, where they made sense.

Thanks Vinney for letting me interview you! Check out his website and follow him on twitter!

What are your thoughts on helvetica?

Leave a comment and let me know!

I’ll admit it, While I do have a thing for bold fonts, I also have a thing for skinny, thin and beautiful fonts. I’m not ashamed! And I know you probably have a thing for skinny fonts as well. The list I have compiled ranges from cheap to affordable, to expensive. Enjoy!

Soho Sans Thin

Helvetica Neue Ultralight

More…Helvetica grew in popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and more versions of the family were introduced. This led to vast confusion: the same weight is often referred to by two different names, design features often vary from one face to another, and so on.  Linotype remedied this situation by redrawing the entire Helvetica family. This new drawing is called Neue Helvetica (German for New Helvetica), and incorporates an easy-to-use numbering system to identify various styles and weights

Chalet Paris 1960

Omnes Hairline

Originally conceived as the brand typeface for a national retail chain, Omnes meets the need for a rounded typeface which is neither overly mannered nor excessively literal in its approach. Selective rounding adds subtle texture & circumvents the ‘sausage-link’ effect, while non-geometric forms pay homage to 19th-century rounded Grotesques which appeared well before the crisp visual style of the Bauhaus.

Lubalin Graph Extra Light

Lubalin Graph was designed by Herb Lubalin. It is a slab serif font which retains a geometric appearance and the large x-height of the Avant Garde Gothic on which its design was based. Lublalin Graph filled the need for a flexible slab serif alphabet suitable for phototypesetting technology

Archer

Sweet but not saccharine, earnest but not grave, Archer is designed to hit just the right notes of forthrightness, credibility, and charm.

Apex Serif Light

Apex Serif is the seriffed companion to the popular Apex Sans family, but it is not an afterthought; the fonts were initially designed during the creation of Apex Sans. The development of Apex Serif was several months in the completion, as it was Thirstype’s first OpenType font, which was a huge technical challenge.

Paz Thin

Paz, a squarish 4-weight industrial family, ranging from extreme hairline to black. It is ideal for editorial headlines where type plays a major role in the overall design.

Want more skinny fonts?

Check out Font Shops Fine lines e-newletter or their blogpost about Ultra Fine Fonts.