It’s all in the Mind of the Beholder

It’s really easy to get lost in how pretty things look when designing things. While aesthetics are important in design, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we need to communicate a message first and foremost. I will illustrate this concept by quoting here some comments I made for recent makeover projects on About Desktop Publishing. Other designers have made comments about the look of design elements, how to allign them and so on, and rightly so. However the way you chose to convey the message and the reasoning behind it are very important as well, it’s the backbone of the creative process, which also helps with the positioning of various design elements.

Graphic Design and Graphic Arts, The Graphical Expression of… Whose Message?

After looking at some of our makeover projects and a meeting I had in my design studio today, several concepts just keep lurking in my mind.

I remember some time ago I was a fairly big supporter of the fact that design is art, and posted a poll in the About Desktop Publishing forum. While I still think that, I view this in a different way now.

Art is often regarded as the expression of self. It has to comunicate something, and that communication will be very subjective to the beholder, but what you communicate as artist is your message, something that was created by your mind and you realise through artistic means. The means you use can be paintings, drawings, or any number of graphical arts that can include the use of graphics software.

Can QuarkXPress Open a QuarkXPress Passport File?

QuarkXPress Passport is the multi-language version of the standard or single language QuarkXPress. It contains all the features of the standard QuarkXPress plus additional support for multi-language publishing, including multiple dictionaries and a user interface that can be set for any of the languages supported by Passport.

QuarkXPress Passport files can be saved so that the standard single language QuarkXPress can open and read it. When saving a file, QuarkXPress Passport offers you the option to save the file as either “multiple language” or “single language”. If you choose “multiple language” only QuarkXPress Passport will be able to read the file. If you choose “single language” then the standard version of QuarkXPress will be able to open and read it.

The August Wallpapers from Smashing Magazine

For those who get tired of their wallpapers very fast, Smashing Magazine posts a collection of handpicked wallpapers every month. There are wallpapers for all tastes, from grunge to sleek, from illustrations to 3D rendered graphics. You don’t only choose from a wide range of sizes, you can also choose whether you want the monthly calendar, in this case for August of course, to be on them or not.

Come on, take a peek!

Converting Text to Outlines in InDesign

Recently my studio changed printer, and this new firm wants us to convert all text to outlines when sending PDFs to them. While for flyers it’s fairly straight forward, when dealing with magazines, i.e. long multipage documents, using the Convert to Outlines option from InDesign can be quite daunting.

Luckily I came across a handy article about how to convert text to outlines in InDesign on InDesign Secrets. As David Blatner says:

Here’s the whole tip in a nutshell: Don’t use Convert to Outlines at all. Instead, use InDesign’s transparency flattener to convert the text automatically for you when you export a PDF.

I encourage you to read the rest of the article to see how to go about that. It’s a very nice tip that will make you save a lot of time!

A Spec Work “Adventure” – Investing the Right Time for the Job

Every designer at some point will come across a client who wants everything done yesterday. They give you a “brief” in the evening, they want the design the morning after. Then you follow the instructions and that isn’t what they wanted.

I had a client just like this the other day (alas not the only one) but this one was fairly difficult to deal with. He also requested something that was graphically incorrect and even almost impossible to realise. It wasn’t just about a colour that doesn’t go well with another. It was a request that was very similar to asking to set a fire by throwing cold water on wood.

The job comes on my desk in the morning, at 9:30 with the request that I get it done by 11am. The client calls at 10:45 asking me if I did it…

Smashing Magazine – Crank Up Your Design Radar

I now resigned to the fact that I simply cannot read magazines. As much as I try, I always wind up looking at their design, at the ads, at their layout… Same for flyers, I might look at them when I wouldn’t normally consider them, I might not even care for the content, but I will look at their design, take them home and put them in my “inspiration” folder.

But printed material isn’t the only thing that can give you inspiration. Stephanie Orma in her article Crank up Your Design Radar over at Smashing Magazine tells us:

No one understands the statement, “design is everywhere” better than us designers. But comprehension and integration are two totally separate acts. From food packaging, to billboards, to book covers, catalogs, websites, and everything in between, we spend the majority of our waking hours on our computers designing and/or looking at these designs through the portals of our monitors. But when the computer is shut down, does your “design radar” go off-line, as well?

Do you see design everywhere? Where do you get your ideas from? Are you sure you are not overlooking sources of inspiration? The article on Smashing Magazine is certainly a good read. You will realise there are so many things you just overlooked, many ideas just around the corner screaming, “Look at me!” and you just shoved them aside!

Design Adventure of the Day

Here I am on my way to work, half asleep on the train. Two studends are sitting nearby and at some point one goes,”A gradient filter is… hm… makes you go from dark to light, and maximises… Damn! I don’t remember and I just studied it!”

So, still half sleeping, I raise an eyebrow and think, “Maybe they are not talking about imaging.”

A third guy joins in and the same girl asks, “Since you have already studied it, what is ‘noise?’” He answers that he’s going to look at his notes and opens his copybook, he goes through his pages and says, “It’s something that doesn’t belong to a photo–then he looks at them and adds–Like a wrong colour or something.”

At that point I think, “Wait a minute” I kinda wake up and say, “Noise is dots on a photo, or scratches that don’t belong to the image.” Very simplified explanation of course and the word “dot” in the Italian version of that sentence makes more sense. The proper definition is here.

So I sit and think, “What the hell are people teaching at school?” And that’s when I think that having done tailored courses and on the job training actually helped me more than my design school. I thought my school was bad, but it doesn’t seem the only one.

What do you feel has helped you the most in your education?

Creating Faux Bold with Strokes: the Catch

Many of you probably know that if you don’t have the bold or italics version of a font installed in your system, you shouldn’t use your DTP application’s option to make it bold or italics, because that will simply result in a simulation which might work on screen or with a desktop printer, but that can cause problems once your file is sent to an external printer using a RIP.

A solution to this can be adding a border around type. Applications such as Illustrator, Corel Draw, InDesign and others allow you to do that. However there is a catch, which I discovered not long ago while working a my company’s logo (that I didn’t design).

Changing Screen Angles in Duotone Images, Part 2

I advise you read the first part of this tutorial, so you understand the reason of this ste-by-step tutorial. Wrongly set screen angles and frequency can cause your job to print incorrectly. Most designers won’t need to deal with those settings, as printers will most likely do that themselves, but extra knowledge on this won’t hurt.

You are required to have Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe PS or any other driver that will allow you to make PostScript or PDF files. You will not be able to use the built-in Export to PDF option in InDesign or Export Layout as… in QuarkXPress to do what is described in this tutorial. With InDesign and Illustrator you will also have to produce separated files to be able to change screen angles.