January 9th, 2012 by admin
For Christmas this year, I received a Kindle Touch. Ok, the truth is, while I would have liked to have received it, I didn’t, so I bought it for myself. Doing so has the advantage of being certain that I’ll get just what I want. But before purchasing, I needed to make a few decisions—the chief of which was choosing which one to buy. There is the Kindle, the Kindle Touch and the Kindle Fire. I took the time to demo all three along with the similar Barns & Noble Nook products. Truth be told, I felt that the B&N products had better interfaces and were, overall, nicer in hand but I had received an Amazon gift card so I was somewhat restricted.
The Fire was a nice tablet overall but it felt heavy in hand—like a plastic-coated brick. After handling it for a few minutes I couldn’t wait to put it down which is not the kind of user experience I was hoping for. The basic Kindle, on the other hand, was very light and while the screen was only black and white, it would suffice for the kind of reading I wanted to use it for. The E-ink screen would remain charged for long periods of time so I don’t need to plug it into the wall every night to recharge like every other gadget I own. But the Kindle is severely hobbled by the lack of a keyboard. To enter any text, an on-screen keyboard appears and I would need to toggle the button below the screen to select each character one at a time.
Nope. Not gonna happen. I understand the business model of doing this—it makes going outside of the Amazon store almost impossible and so the user is more inclined to stay fixed within the Amazon ecosystem but I would not be happy with this limitation. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: e-books, kindle, typography
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March 8th, 2011 by admin
I’ve recently been spending way too much time over on the History of the Book Flickr set, a collection of some 20,000 photos of initials, ornaments, and type from Royal Library, The Hague, and the Archive of Alkmaar. Its author, Dr. Paul Dijstelberge has scanned thousands of pages from European printed works from the 15th through the 17th century. Illustrated works, type specimens, medical illustrations, and engravings and cataloged by country and century of origin. There are a particularly large number of initial caps from various documents done in a range of styles.
The scans have been created at very high resolution-up to 2000 x 3000 pixels in some cases-and visitors can view full-resolution images online. This is particularly useful for type designers or typographers who are interested in studying the spread and evolution of type and printing in Europe. Fifteenth century French typefaces can be compared directly with 16th century German or 17th century Dutch styles without having to resort to looking through a loupe at one or two characters at a time.
The catalog is searchable, somewhat. Individual letters can be searched for and a list of available initial caps is returned. Searching by tags or keywords, however, doesn’t yield anything. Still, I searched for “W” and was given a page of initial caps using the letter. In comparing the character across the centuries and countries, I see that the early printed “W” did indeed look like two “V”s, often with the one of the interior diagonal strokes obscured. It’s easy to see how our “W” was originally thought of as a quite literal double-U. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 15th century, 16th century, 17 century, historyk, illustration, printing, typography
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March 6th, 2011 by admin
Poorly designed websites costs you more by not delivering customers.
We’ve been knocking on doors to expand our website design business for medical and healthcare clients and came across a couple of businesses that had two very different websites, both of which were only recently completed. And neither were serving the best needs of their owners.
The first doctor admitted she did not want to spend much money so she went with a company that allowed her to set up her own site for a modest monthly fee. And the fee was modest, granted, although several times more than a standard hosting fee. There were many HTML pages to the site mostly describing different medical conditions or procedures that the office covered. Unfortunately, the pages were rather long and tended to look all the same. The look of the site was not very professional, appearing as if it could have been put together by a rudimentary programmer circa 1998. The site was informative but dry and did not convey much sense of the doctors, or the office, nor did it foster an emotional connection with the user. The overall first impression a new visitor would get when arriving at the site was that the site (and by assumption, the office) was less than professional, which is a pity since the doctors involved are well respected.
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Tags: doctor website design, healthcare website design, medical website design
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February 22nd, 2011 by admin
The folks over at Google have written an online guide for everyday users who are curious about the basics of how web browsing works. Called “20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web,” this online guidebook is also built as a showcase of HTML5, Javascript and CSS3. With great illustrations by Christopher Niemann, it’s a fun and informative piece that everyone can enjoy.
Because it’s built in HTML5, there are a few nice surprises that the visitor can take advantage of. The app remembers where you were so that the next time you visit, your last page is shown. (No bookmark is necessary). Once visited, you can browse the app offline thanks to HTML5’s Application Cache. And CSS3 allows for web fonts, gradients and animations, all of which make for a much nicer user interface. As more and more standards are leaked regarding HTML5, it is becoming clear just how rich a web experience it will allow for. When it is finally complete in 2014, it will establish a strong argument for web apps over os apps on mobile devices by virtue that the user experience can be identical. Instead of clients having to incur the cost of creating multiple versions of a mobile app—one for the iPhone, one for Android, yet another for Windows Mobile—one web app would suffice for all.
While this application showcases the power of HTML5, the downside is that now that I’ve seen it online, I want a hard copy for my shelf. Check it out at 20thingsilearned.com ››
Tags: html5, online, Website Design
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November 11th, 2010 by admin
Would you rather be remembered or would you rather be understood?
The question is legitimate for written messages and points out the difference between legibility, readability, and memorability. Legibility and readability are different tasks required by typographers. Legibility refers to the quality of the font, the proportions of the characters, consistency of the set as a whole and the font’s own built-in kerning. These characteristics determine a font’s legibility. Sans serif fonts, like Helvetica, tend to be more legible at large sizes. That’s why we see so many signage systems using it.
Readability pertains to the ease of which a given text can be read and is governed by myriad of typographic conventions. Long texts are easier to read if set in serif fonts. Rivers of white caused by justifying text in a narrow column should be avoided. Upper and lowercase letters are easier to read than all caps. Italics and bold should be use for emphasis, not as a body style. These and many more conventions allow the typographer to establish texts that are easily readable.
But are legibility and readability always necessary?
Well, yes and no. If your job is to design an online banking screen that clearly shows a user’s account balance, gives instructions to navigate from screen to screen or allows users to get help easily, then, yes, legibility and readability are your primary concern. But how about a poster for costume ball? Sure, it’s possible to use various weights of Helvetica printed black on white to clearly display the information about the event. That would maximize legibility but is that the best solution to the problem? No. By breaking down the readability, it is possible to achieve a design that is even better—it becomes memorable. If the final design is illegible or if too much readability is lost, the message suffers. Knowing just how much play is appropriate takes good design sense.
I’d hate to live in a world where all design was created for the sake of legibility and readability. Then again, I’d hate to live in a world where those things were not considered.
Tags: legibility, memorability, readability
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October 20th, 2010 by admin
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been watching the development of the crowdsourcing of graphic design. For anyone who isn’t familiar with this, it’s the practice of having multiple designers “compete” to create a design for a client who awards the winner with a minimal sum. The only people that I know of that can afford to participate in this kind of process are starving students or design mills in India or Russia. Often, the designs are bland or just plain bad since the emphasis is to not spend much time and simply repurpose an existing design and submit it in hopes of winning a couple hundred bucks. If you can’t tell already, I’m against this wholeheartedly since it drives down prices beyond the point where designers can effectively compete and usually produces schlock.
But it’s interesting to follow the Gap’s logo redesign which was created by a traditional design firm hired by the corporate office—the antithesis of crowdsourcing. Upon the introduction of their new design (on the right), the blogosphere exploded with a wave of bad reviews to such a degree that the Gap pulled the redesign in favor of keeping their old mark. This brings up the question: should companies make design a democratic process? Should customers be allowed to vote on a company’s logo before it’s approved? For a consumer company like the Gap, it’s clear that they think so but I think that sets a bad precedent.
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Tags: branding, Design, identity, logo
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August 31st, 2010 by admin
Studio 23 threw its hat into the ring in the 2010 Dollar Redesign Competition. If you could redesign the United States currency, what would it look like? There’s much more to consider than meets the eye. Who do you put on today’s currency? How do you protect it? How do you make it accessible to everyone? And how can you do all of this without increasing the federal deficit?
Today, America is a diverse country and we wanted to represent prominent individuals of diverse backgrounds that helped shape our country. Since the dollar is used internationally, the value of the currency is written clearly in multiple languages on each bill. This also aids visitors to the U.S. as well as residents who don’t speak English. The stars below the currency amounts would be raised in braille to aide the visually impaired. There would be many anti-counterfeiting measures including watermarks, color-shifting inks, microprinting and the like. In addition, to the right of the bill’s serial number is a line reading, “verify this bill at BillTrust.gov.” Bills could be tracked and verified through the use of optical scanners, or even webcams and cellphone cams. In addition, second graders from around the country could learn more about the U.S. by using the site’s bill tracking component. Fifth graders could go online and read about each of the featured individuals, learning about their particular contribution to America.
Finally, a small area on the bill would be reserved for a promotional space—the revenue generated from such a sale would more than offset the annual expenditure of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Instead of costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year, the Bureau would become a source of income for the federal government. In that respect, making this money could really make some money.
Note: this is not legal tender.
Tags: American, Currency, Dollar Redesign, Money, U.S., Vote
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July 21st, 2010 by admin
Print designers have it easy. They can choose from thousands of different typefaces that are available for them to purchase, download, install and design with. They are free to print posters, books, whatever they want once they’ve purchased the fonts.
Pity the poor Web designers. What do they have to work with? Sixteen measly cross-platform supported fonts of which maybe ten are decent enough to use (sorry Comic Sans).
Why so few? Well, most of the fonts on the Web are the ten common “Web Fonts” commissioned and distributed by Microsoft in the late 1990s. These few fonts are the only ones Web designers are sure will be rendered as intended on the end user’s browser. Even so, designers and developers have created clever workarounds to access a greater number of fonts using images, Flash and/or JavaScript. More about these in a minute.
Until recently, browser vendors had no standard for which they could specify font rendering. Only now in the soon-to-be completed HTML 5 standards is there a means to specify fonts easily using the @font-face tag. Will embedding fonts really become as easy as specifying a new tag? Oh, I wish it were that simple.
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Tags: Design, typography, web
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Design is Dead. Long Live Design.
November 3rd, 2010 by adminThe author makes an interesting point but confuses “design” with “typography.” Designers have historically needed to consider the channel (medium) of distribution of information as much as the content (message) when approaching any design project. With content becoming malleable across applications rather than fixed into a rigid format as in, say, a codex book, the challenge for the designer is to anticipate how the information may be used, clipped, displayed, and shared and structure it so that the content is useful for its intended purposes. That is very much a design problem and the thinking behind solving such problems will be increasingly important as society transitions to flexible-format devices (screens).
In the middle of last century when graphic design was in its infancy, designers would create thumbnail layouts and tissue comps to demonstrate, in rough ways, what a layout should look like. Their job was not to craft the final page but, rather, to sketch how the page could look. It was up to the support services of the typographer, photographer and printer to render the finished page for the designer’s approval. It was only later with the advent of the Mac that designers took on the role of typographer, (often) photographer, and printer and became responsible for crafting the page in it’s final, codex form. For those designers who approach their craft with only this understanding, it may seem like design is dead.
But typography, at least in the traditional sense, is dead as a result of the new technology. A quick look at the display of an iBook on an iPad screen shows any serious designer that typography is, in fact, DOA. But even so, I have hope for the future. For years Web designers have been limited to a few basic Web-safe fonts upon which to draw. With Adobe’s backing of Typekit and the release of IE9 and its rendering of the HTML5-compliant @font-face tag, I have hope that typography will have somewhat of a Renaissance online.
In the last ten years, the field of graphic design has undergone a sweeping change but design is far from dead. Good designers have become flexible at adapting content across various media just as the content itself has become flexible. Our role is changing. We’re increasingly creating the intellectual equivalent of thumbnail sketches as our support services become mechanized—the device becomes the typesetter, Flickr becomes the photographer and the screen becomes the printer. At least my barista hasn’t gone digital.
Tags: commentary, Design, photography, printing, typography
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