Logo design and brand standards are still developed like the digital revolution never happened, or worse, it just picks the advantages of the digital process and forgets about the pitfalls. The logo templates from a micro stock agency presented in this article look nice but are bad logos. So what should a designer care about in logo design and brand standards for the digital age?

1 – Digital first or digital last?

Digital first is the new hype and describes starting the design process with the digital consumption as a starting point. This is a fair point, but analyze your clients customers to be sure what medium the branding will be consumed most and what reproduction techniques will be required. Logos still need to be printed, screened, molded etc. Logo design is not just online or offline, so improve your skills if you lack certain aspects.

2 – The square and the skyscraper

It is very common these days that the logo is “boxed” in a square (Twitter avatar) or a skyscraper (Facebook Profile). Test your logo for this cases. Do you need a lot of white space to make your design shine? Does it stand out from the surrounding design elements? It may be required that you make special versions of the logo for these cases.

3 – The missing Micro-Sizes

In the past the designer defined a minimum size for the logo. He knew that his design will not perform under a certain size (pixel or mm) and forbid therefore the use. Today a designer has to provide a Micro-Size of the logo – It’s the Favicon used on the website, the Facebook Bookmark etc. It’s a legit use case and it’s part of the logo design, so provide a 16×16 Pixel version to your client.

4 – Wrong collaterals

The typical collaterals designed for a client who wanted a simple identity have been a letterhead, business card and an envelope or an full page ad. Today consider delivering a Twitter background, a Facebook profile image, email footer and a standard banner ad.

5 – Falling for the hype

Logo and brand design should never follow the hype. While designers tend to be always on the edge and try something new, they also like to follow trends. If you look at the most known and recognized brands you will see that the logo changes little over time and often you cannot tell when it was designed. A certain timelessness is required. Expect a logo to stay a least 10-15 years the same – longer than any given design trend.

Doing charts is a almost a daily business for any graphic designer. Most of them don’t need to be super-fancy, but some spice can always help. Creating a 3D Effect is quickly done with the standard tools we all use – rectangles, lines and gradients. But if you have to do many charts (for an annual report) then this options can really slow you down. Unless you use a tool to speed up the process.

Why not use the 3D Tools provided by Illustrator. The positive side effect is that you don’t have to worry about the shading and you can apply text on the surfaces (the trick here is to convert the Text into symbols). The best part is that you start from the 2D versions of the charts – easy to change and to manage. The examples I show here are neither fully styled or finished, but should give you a hint about what you can do.

Download the sample Illustrator file to get an idea behind the example given. This is a great starting point and you can dress the result up and quiet easily.

Stock images are cheaper than ever and access to creative commons material is great, but often not available in print resolution. Having your own stock photography is better – and easy. I show you how.

This will be quiet short and is more a reminder.  Yes a reminder – I want to remind you to take some more pictures for your stock library while you are taking photos for your private albums.

How many times have you bought a wood texture background or a crowded place or a busy street? I have many times. Once I needed a picture of Picadilly Circus, nothing fancy, but all the photos I had where with some of my friends in the middle. I lived in London for 6 month and have not taken one picture of the place except those “tourist” photos.

So remind yourself when you are on vacation or on a business trip – take a few extra pictures with the eye of the graphic designer. You don’t have to have the greatest gear to take good pictures , but you need a little bit of practice. A blogpost over at Boagworld actually tells you how to make unique stock photos for your website

And most important, tell your wife/girlfriend/friend why you are taking pictures of the floor, the wall and the scenery without them on it. The photo of this post for example was shot on my old balcony during a bbq session – perfect for various uses, don’t you think?

So go out and take the lens cap off (as they say in the TWIP Podcast)

At times it seems in the design community that printed paper not only doomed, but it is actually something of the past. But is it really so, or does it just seem that there is more web designers than print designers?

The technical mysteries of print design

I understand the disenchantment with print. Print is not as easy as online. Don’t get me wrong, to do good UX design and the technical details behind web standards etc. are as complicated as in print design, but getting started and getting something out to people is relatively easy.

If you want to get something on paper you have to embrace a big effort. You have to design your work with a professional tool like Illustrator, Indesign (or Xpress), export it in PDF for print in 4C and get it to the print shop. You have to know about color management if you want to get good results, image quality, paper and many many other factors. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) is only in part true.

If you are not the kind of guy (or girl) who loves/needs getting a physical product in your hands at the end of your work you might want to pursue print design – but if not, you might be happy by looking at a design on a monitor.

Webdesign is easy

What does it take to publish a site? An online web design degree? Certain artistic capabilities? Turns out the answer is nothing,  if you go on platforms like WordPress.com or Squarespace. Not even professional software. If you want something more personal or “fancy” you have another option. The easiest way to get a site with an original design online is Adobe Flash. The experienced web developer might shook his head, but for the average designer it is actually true. Flash has a bad reputation but I know many designers who like the freedom of just designing something in Illustrator and importing it in Flash and transforming it on a timeline. It’s dirty, it’s fast, it’s commodity design. Believe me, there is a market for this. And as a sidenote, there are things you cannot do without Flash

Design is easy

Another factor in my opinion why there seems to be much more web designers than print designers are the developer/designers. These designers often do not have a design school background, they come from computer science classes. They studied the web technologies and build websites. Designing the website is part of building it, so they often do it themselves. The result might be not as elaborated as a fancy Flash site, but it maybe is HTML5 and webstandards compliant.

Online beats print design 3:1

Finally I want to add all the UX Designers who focus on one work field and excel. They are also doing web design and therefore add up to the other web designers.

Print is not dead

Online and mobile is the “new black” and even the smallest business in the most remote place wants a website. Big companies like swisscom have now a corporate design which works best online (spinning logo).

Still not all the customers are online and not all print design is flat on paper – think about all the packaging and the local “deals” through leaflets and brochures. A inlet advertisement in the local newspaper has a far better reach for a local store than a website.
Catalogs and price lists are not dead as well. Many B2B clients of mine wanted to switch to online catalogs to cut costs, but could not because the customers they had simple didn’t have a computer in their workshop or preferred a book.

But while printed paper is not going away soon, the graphic designers who design this printed products seem to be invisible. The students coming from vocational schools and colleges are all “multimedia designers”, where print is just a part of the mix. If I ask these young designers in what they are interested they will talk about the web and at most about logos (for the website). Print is not on their mind. The only exception is typography – but this is another story.

Conclusion

There seems to be more web designers than print designers. The easy access to the tools and the low cost of delivery make it easy to publish a site. While it has never been so easy to do print design (and have the design printed the right way) it is still not easy getting started. In the end it’s no surprise that an aspiring designer tries first the online route.

Foto by Ruben Bos

Briefing

Ewo asked after the success of “Book one” and “Book two” for a technical catalog. While the books target where architects, this new catalog was aimed at techincal planners.

Solution

A good mix of technical information with all the variants available of the lamps. Complete with item numbers and measurments. The classy finish is obtained by using silver color for decorative elements in the tables and lines as well as for the cover.

The complete catalog can be viewed in the following presentation.

How many times have you looked at your website and wanted to do an complete redesign? And how many times you said, ok I do it next month when I’m less busier. The truth is, that we just keep postponing the redesign and don’t do anything. But maybe just a little evolution and some small tweaking would do the job and would improve the website. How to decide if you need a complete new design or just some improvement? Here some questions to ask yourself and if you answer the majority with yes you need a complete overhaul.

Is your webdesign “trendy”?

Design is like fashion, there are trends. And the bigger trends of the last couple of years have been grunge, comics, <insert other trend here>. The beauty of the internet is, that it’s evolving fast. But just like in fashion, your site can look old fashioned in a blast. So if you don’t plan to renew the site design every year or so don’t get too trendy on your next design. And if your design is trendy now, get on to the next trend – sustainable web design.

Are you changing (or need to change) your website technology?

You are on a self hosted wordpress installation and want to switch over to a tumblr blog or get over to squarespace to not have to deal with updates and servers any more? It’s a good time for a redesign. You spend as much time to recreate your website on the new services as redoing the whole design. It can be evolutionary at large but take this opportunity.

Is your website  just in Flash?

While I’m not a Flash hater and I see many uses of Flash in the real world that make sense, I cannot see the point of having a complete site in Flash anymore. It’s not even ok for “business card” sites with no content and who don’t want to get found in the search engine except for your local pizzeria which name you know but not the telephone number. Many of this businesses want something “flashy” and don’t mind the technology. It’s easier for a designer to please them with a nice Flash animation – and often it’s also quicker to do a Flash site, but you will get in trouble when mobile gets more important and the sites won’t work correctly. So I hope that with the advent of HTML 5 we will get rid of these problems – but if you want to prepare yourself now, get rid of Flash.

Evolution is better

I just picked three questions for the revolution section because there are not many reasons to do complete redesigns. Many times small improvements can have a big impact and help your site. Big sites like Amazon and Wikipedia have gone a radical redesign if you compare them to 5 years ago, but the steps where small. One by one. Testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Is learning from nature – making a lot of small variations to experiment what works best costs less “energy” that redoing everything from scratch. The are some instances where your have to revolutionize – but more often than not, evolution beats revolution.

Image courtesy of StePagna

Next up in the series of font alternatives for popular fonts is Thesis – or better known as TheSans, TheSerif, TheMix, TheSans Mono. I’ve found 7 interesting alternatives – from huge and expensive to very big and resonable priced.
Thesis is maybe one of the most used font systems in the world. Most non graphic designers don’t recognize it, but be assured it is used a lot. I’m speaking about a font system because the variety Thesis offers is almost uncompared. I like to use it especially in corporate design for corporations with many different departments as I can use different speciments for different resorts.

But if you are sick of using Thesis I have here quite a few alternatives for you.

Top Alternatives

• Compatil (www.linotype.com)
  
• Fedra from (www.typotheque.com)
  

Runners up

• Leitura (www.dstype.com)
  
• Absara (www.fontshop.de)
  
• Generis (www.linotype.com)
  
• Nexus (www.fontshop.de)
  
• United (find it at www.houseind.com)
  

There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:

1. Quite out of date
2. Not very compelling any more

The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I  started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do.

Hosting the own portfolio site

The good

• Once the visitor is on your site all eye-balls are on your projects.
• You can make a design you choose
• You are not limited on how many project, what media, how many pictures and text etc.
• Basically you are in control

The bad

• Hosting a site is not always cheap, not only the cost of the hosting, but also the cost in time to maintain it (yes you have to maintain it like your pc)
• You have to be fit to get better results (design wise speaking) than the established portfolio sites
• You have to advertise your site to get any visitors
• If you are not a web-programmer you must look for a developer in order to setup the site

Using a portfolio site

The good

• You don’t have to manage a website
• The design is optimized for portfolio presentation
• There are already many users on the site
• You can use them as a social network and find job opportunities

The bad

• You are one among many – The distinction between a Pro and a Student is difficult
• There is advertising which is competing with you for attention
• Integration with Twitter and other Social Media is only sometimes possible
• You are limited by the site on how to present your work

Conclusion

You can see that there are advantages and disadvantages as usual when you have to take a decision. It would be easy to say to do both and get out the most of it – but in the end your time should not just be consumed to do your portfolio.

I opted for a self-hosted portfolio site because I already maintain a few sites (like this one) – but will also have some key projects uploaded to the portfolio sites. To minimize the effort of maintaining multiple presences I write the content for my portfolio in a way to reuse it when I need to.

More on how I setup my portfolio site and how I structure it in a future blog post.

(image © Cameron Whitman on Istockphoto)

Sometimes the biggest time savers are in front of your eyes the whole time but you can’t see them. Mostly because this great features are so part of the system that nobody actually talks about them anymore.

One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.

The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time.

Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.

The available abbreviations for the units are:

• Points – pt
• Picas – p
• Pixel – px
• Centimeter – cm
• Millimeter – mm
• Inch – Inch (in English) Zoll (in German)
• Cicerco – c
• Agate – ag

The font DIN typeface family is inspired by the classic industrial German engineering designs, DIN 1451 Engschrift and DIN 1451 Mittelschrift. This font comes since 1995 from two different foundries. While Linotype has the original designs Fontshop made their interpretation with the aid of Albert-Jan Pool under the name FF DIN. FF DIN became quite popular because it had a few more widths and was optimized for graphic design.

Linotype on the other hand just launched their new DIN interpretation called DIN Next under the direction of Akira Kobayashi. In this new interpretation you find 25 fonts and 7 weights. An impressive re-work with many additional features. Find out more on the official website of Linotype.

While this are good news in the tradition of this series I’ve looked around the foundries to find some other alternatives and found some interesting ones. So enjoy.

DIN

from Linotype (www.linotype.com)

Top Alternatives

• Konsens (www.hubertjocham.de)
  
• Gotham (www.typography.com)
  

Runners up

• T-Star (www.gestalten.com)
  
• Flama (www.vllg.com)
  
• Apex Sans (www.vllg.com)
  
• FF Utility (www.fontshop.de)
  
• Brauer Neue (www.lineto.com)
  
• FF Netto (www.fontshop.de)
  
• Notes (www.primetype.com)