things i’ve learned in december

december 21:

GeoIP Wrangling

An excellent article on how to use IP-based geolocation to create a personalized greeting based on each visitor’s location.

Porchez Typofonderie and Delve Fonts join Typekit

New fonts and foundries have been added to Typekit, thus making it that much better.

Museo 500 typeface from exljbris

Go grab yourself the new, beautiful and free font from exljbris.

How a typeface is made

Christian Schwartz’s 2008 Talk “Couture Type and The New York Times.”

december 14:

Clients from hell

A hilarious and depressingly true collection of client statements and design requests as heard and told by the designers themselves.

The making of vesper

Insight into the making of a beautiful typeface, Vesper.

december 8:

Why snow is white

A different take on color theory, the basics of visual color perception and some wintry color palettes from the people at ColourLovers.

How to create branded urls

A great lesson by Shaun Inman on how to create personalized shorten URLs. (via: @gracesmith)

Performing a website redesign

A quick and to the point article discussing the opening presentation of A Site Redesign, by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Google chrome browser for mac officially released (BETA)

Google Chrome is now officially in live BETA for Mac users. It’s quick, snappy and search-able from the address bar.

Dragon dictation for the iphone [itunes link]

A super and free iPhone app. Dragon Dictation [iTunes link] allows you to easily speak and compose a text or email message. Did I mention that it works like a charm?

Phail-adelphia

The lovely city of Philadelphia, that I call home, now has a new logo that has Ben Franklin give the middle finger to and designers searching through clip art for similarities.

use twitter to design a logo

QUICK LESSON: For those unfamiliar with mind mapping here is a short definition:

“A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.”

[source: http://j.mp/mindMaP]

Now that we’ve had our lesson on mind mapping, or as I call it keyword sketching, we can proceed. Prior to starting any identity design, I jot down as many words as possible that relate to the name of the company and feelings/emotions that the client expressed in the Project Worksheet. This helps to start getting a visual/symbol/icon for the direction I would like to take with the logo. While at times this can be easy to generate hundreds of keywords within minutes, other times it can be quite daunting. NOTE: Even though you may not use any of the keywords that are generated, mind mapping is still a great exercise for getting creativity in motion.

social designing

Oh, the power of Twitter! Instead of spending an hour trying to drum up keywords that came to mind when I thought of the word ‘triumph’ — the companies name is Triumph Services — I asked my Twitter followers to participle in a collaborative mind mapping session by tweeting the first word/symbol/icon that came to mind when their heard the word triumph.

Within ten minutes I had over thirty or more responses and plenty of resources to get my mind going in the right direction. Even more importantly, working as an independent designer this allowed me to get feedback and assistance from my peers — a collaborate effort, and essentially “user feedback.”

Over the past year I’ve come to appreciate the power of Twitter more and more, and have added yet another reason to the list. Interact with your followers and they will interact back.

Thanks to everyone that participated. Your feedback was greatly appreciated. I will keep you all posted on the progress of the logo as I move forth.

step away from design and design

I’ve made up my mind — every Friday, give or take my work load of the week, I am going to dedicate 1–2 hours to just designing (and no I don’t mean designing for a client).

I aim to invest time to bring life and excitement into the work that I want to do, not only what is told of me and briefed upon. So today (Friday), I set aside an hour or so, opened up Photoshop and played around a bit. The poster seen below is the result.

if content is king…

A few days ago I saw an article floating around on Twitter titled “If Content Is King, Then What Is Design?” After thinking about the question my response was, “Design is the land of which the king rules.” My love for old vintage posters, with their quirky typography, complimentary colors and bold statements mixed with the article headline and my response led me to some exploration, letting go and about an hour and a half of fun.

Besides having a bit of fun at the end of a grueling work week, it also inspired me to jump back into the clients website design fully inspired again.

The poster reads If Content is King then Design is the Land of which the King Rules. Might go back into this at a later time and polish it up, but this is what my allotted time would allow this Friday.