Articles Tagged ‘design’
Jun. 25th, 2009
Let’s just ignore how long it’s been since I posted here, shall we? Ahem.
I’ve never really understood collecting - the feverish desire to have more, preferrably all of a particular thing - well, it’s always seemed a little bit soft-brained to me.
Then I looked in my drawers.
I have to admit it: I’m a little soft-brained too. I own so many nicely designed t-shirts, I could easily wear a fresh one every day for over three weeks without doing laundry. And as a designer, I’m more than a little in love with typography. Typographic t-shirts are like upperbody heaven to me. Maybe that’s something I should seek professional help with, or perhaps you understand?
So here’s my monster have/want list of typographic tees. Enjoy, and be sure to share your own favourites down in the comments.
Typefaces
Shirts not only set in, but also about particular fonts. No surprise: Helvetica wins the most love, hate, and love to hate.
Ampersands
Everybody’s favourite funky typographic symbol, the ampersand’s become quite a popular subject for shirts. In case you were wondering, according to Wikipedia the ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction “and”. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and”.
Numbers
I was surprised at how unpopular numbers are on typographic t-shirts, but there are a few good ones out there.
Hand-Drawn Type
All the warmth and analogue fallibility that Helvetica is lacking radiates from hand-drawn typography, which always brings a smile to my face.
Design Nerdery
In-jokes, obscure jargon, phrases repeated to clients over and over and over… these are the shirts to warm the cockles of any designer’s heart.
Just Shirts with Sweet Type
And the grab-bag of shirts that have nice type, but don’t quite fit into any other category.
If you’re a fan of type tees, there’s more here:
Have a favourite type tee that’s not here? Throw it in the comments!
What do you think? Leave a comment…
May. 12th, 2009
I use a 2.6 MacBook Pro with 4 Gig of RAM every day. Everything on this machine runs beautifully, and I rarely, if ever, experience enough lag in any app to become frustrated.
Photoshop CS4 is the only exception.
Extremely frustrating problems include:
- up to 10 second pause before refresh when zooming in and out.
- 5 to 20 second pauses when selecting/deselecting layers.
- stuttering and crippling lag when dragging an image around, especially when zoomed in.
- unresponsive reactions to layer nudging.
- anywhere from 10 second to 5 minute (not an exaggeration) pause while saving for web, accompanied by frequent crashes.
- all of the above problems are completely random and not consistently reproduceable, though they occur very regularly.
As a professional designer, I’ve been used to ignoring Photoshop CS3 and concentrating on the work I was doing. This is exactly how a good tool should function. With Photoshop CS4 I spend far more time frustrated and conscious of the unresponsive & clumsy tool than I do paying attention to what I’m trying to do. Apart from being constantly and unbelievably frustrating, it’s costing me time, and therefore money, and affecting the quality of my work.
Dear Adobe, you should be very worried. I have spent a great deal of energy lately wishing for an alternative to Photoshop. Having customers whose loyalty is based on nothing more than a lack of viable alternatives to your product is a perfect opportunity for a competitor to drink your milkshake, and earn the gratitude of customers like myself. You, the creators of the Quark killer InDesign, should know that very well.
The first Photoshop CS4 update, 11.0.1, solved none of my problems. As a customer who bought CS4 new, and not as an upgrade, I don’t have the option of downgrading to CS3, although I would dearly love to. Providing me with a free downgrade wouldn’t really solve my problem – Photoshop CS4 would still be painfully slow – but at least I could work in peace again.
How about it Adobe?
Are you a designer using Photoshop CS4? Tell me about your experiences in the comments below.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Apr. 6th, 2009
Oliver and the boys at Information Architects have done it again…
The beta version of the fourth Web Trend Map is out, and it’s gorgeous. Go have a look at all the beautiful details, and if you’ve got any feedback, let them know. They’re only printing 1000 of them, so shoot them a mail to reserve a copy! It’s a lovely piece of info-porn for the studio wall.
And if you like this one, the first, second and third web trend maps are well worth looking at as well, even if they’re completely outdated by now.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Apr. 2nd, 2009
If you attend two geek conferences back to back, you get to see alot of slide decks. And while the decks at SXSW and the IA Summit were chock full of good content, many of them had a few little practical problems, which would’ve all been easy to avoid. I’ve done plenty of pitch presentations, so I was thinking, “if I was presenting, I would wish I’d thought of that!” the whole time.
Here are ten practical tips for giving good deck, aimed at geek conferences, but hopefully useful for others as well.
- Make sure that your Twitter handle is big and clear on the first slide. If you say smart things, people will want to follow you, and the backchannel will want to use the shortest name they can find for you.
- Likewise, don’t forget a hash tag for your session, and keep it short. #gp is better than #greatpresentation, for example. Eating as few of the backchannel’s 140 characters as possible is good for your karma.
- If you’re on a panel, tell the audience to ask questions through Twitter. It can be a nice way of answering what you want when you want, and dodging the long, drawn out, “I have something to prove” questions that everybody hates.
- Use LARGE typography. From the back of a big room, type smaller than 64 px is going to be hard to impossible to read.
- We’ve all got laptops with us. If we want to read, we’ll use them. Keep your slides visually interesting, but go light on the text. The best presenters use the least text in their slides.
- Do not put slide-junk like the date, the name of the conference and your logo on every slide. We all know where we are, who you are and what day it is, and we’re having a hard enough time concentrating on your incisive insight without unnecessary distractions.
- Anything you really want people to see should be in the top two thirds of any slide. People’s heads will invariably block the bottom third.
- You never know how well set up the projector and screen will be, so keep away from the edges of your slides to make sure nothing gets cut off. As a general rule, keep a 10% zone on top, bottom and both sides free of content.
- Make sure your type/background combo is high contrast. If you present in a well-lit room, grey on black will be hard to read. Highest contrast, but boring, is black on white. White - or any bright colour - on black works too, and generally looks fancier.
- Unless you’re presenting some massively complex essay, present your material, don’t read it. If you’re reading your presentation, you seem stiff and you can’t connect to the audience. Even if you flub a line or two, you’ll always get more sympathy if you present without reading. Reading is a refuge for nervous presenters, but one you should work on getting over as soon as you can.
These tips won’t make you a great presenter, but they will ensure that your great presentation can be seen, looks good, and encourages backchannel discussion. Hope it helps!
What do you think? Leave a comment…
Mar. 29th, 2009
A few things that have flown across my field of consciousness in the past week or two…
- Jakob Nielsen recommends the use of mega drop-down menus.
- I’ve been watching quite a bit of TED lately. My top three TED talks of late are Don Norman on emotional design, Stefan Sagmeister on design & happiness, and Phillippe Starck on toothbrushes, super monkeys & God. In other words, design.
- A shocking piece of amateur data visualisation: what does one trillion dollars look like?
- And speaking of data visualisation, Wikirank puts a fun data pr0n face on Wikipedia.
- Plenty of food for thought in the Cult of Done Manifesto, though as Merlin pointed out, surgeons should please ignore it.
- I’m quite enjoying Wireframes Magazine. It’s nice to see how other scribble.
- Microplaza is starting to be a standard part of my info-grazing habits. It helps sort through links sent by those you follow in Twitter. Let me know if you want an invite – I’ve got 5.
What do you think? Leave a comment…
