A good place to look

Jen Gaily found this awesome link with a list of phobias http://phobialist.com/

not saying it's designed well but it's definitely informative.

enjoy

Gradients anyone?

So looked through Amanda's blog and found this awesome gradients page.

All are totally downloadable

Thanks Amanda!

Make your portfolio awesome!

Judith Ivry has been an independent bookbinder for over 25 years. She operates her bindery in downtown Manhattan. Judith has taught and lectured on a variety of bookbinding techniques. After receiving her MFA from Syracuse University, she completed the Diploma Program at the London College of Printing. Her business is distinguished by the diversity of both her services and clients. Among her many clients are book collectors, institutions, artists, publishers, designers, and corporations. Dedicated to the sympathetic and appropriate treatment of books, Judith enjoys working directly with her clients to offer the highest possible standards.

http://www.ivrybookbinding.com/

App Design Process

App Design Process:
Discover> Define> Design> Develop> Deploy> Document.
Design and Development are interchangeable and should be revisited many times.

The Three most important to initial app development in this class are.

Discovery & Research:
-What are users' primary goals and how can they achieve them?

Define:
-Which information is of higher importance? How do I draw user' attention to them?
-How should I incorporate the user feedback?

Design:
-Prototyping offers a huge opportunity for increasing process efficiency?

For the next class you should prepare: A Discovery Document.

Which includes:

App Brief and Document:
- Introduction to App
- Project Goals
- Application Specifications

User Persona:
- Age, Home, Family Status, Work, Interests, Approach to the App, Wow Factor, & Apps he or she may already own.

Mood Board:
- This functions similar to the persona but is a visual representation of who the consumer is.
- Should be designed and incorporate photographic, illustrative and typographic elements.

WireFrame:
- Simple visual layout apps screens and functions.- Can be very simple, line art and boxes really.

Further Development of the Discovery Document should entail:
- Paper prototypes, sketches with cut out buttons, photographed and used to refine layout possibilities.
- Style screens, one from each level of the app showing design and function details.
- Possible additional features for further updates of the app.
- Further develop wireframe and begin to skin the app based on your style frames.
- Decent style frames can easily be turned into a motion presentation for potential investor.

Why/why not to use free fonts on a design project?

Free Fonts: Technical And Artistic Quality

Type Tips, Typography Basics | Yves Peters | July 20, 2010

What comes next may sound biased to some readers, yet I simply can’t help it – it’s the reality of the situation. The vast majority of the free fonts out there are – to put it mildly – of inferior quality. And although a very small percentage is fit for professional use, statistics tell us you’ll more likely stumble upon – to put it mildly again – less successful creations. Because most free font websites are cluttered un-curated swamps, there is no quality control at all. An additional problem is that you don’t even know what you’re downloading. Is it a genuine free font? Or could it be an unauthorized clone, a pirated and renamed commercial font, or a stolen proprietary face? If this seems trivial to you, maybe read through my account of the tragic Hadopi story.

So proceed with caution. Here’s a list of things you definitely need to check when picking a free font for a design.

Artistic quality of the design

Say whatever you want, but the vast majority of the offerings on free font websites are poorly designed. Most of them are well-intentioned efforts by students, amateurs, and beginning designers. You may know what an “a” is supposed to look like, but digitizing that “a” using Bézier curves is another matter entirely. To use a metaphor – I can perfectly describe the different parts of a shoe and know how they fit together, but I couldn’t make a shoe to save my life. Very often the design of free fonts suffer from typical beginners’ mistakes: awkward proportions, poor thick-thin contrast, missing optical corrections, clumsy transitions from curves to straight lines and inversely, ill-balanced and misshapen letter forms, … we can go on and on. Before using a free font, make sure to carefully evaluate the complete character set for quality and consistency.

I didn’t do anything to improve the spacing and kerning on the sample above; this is the font used “out of the box”.
The popular freeware font above is a perfect example of a poorly drawn typeface. It may seem acceptable at first sight, but examining the design more closely reveals its many flaws. Besides the fact that the overall design tries hard but ultimately fails – that lowercase “e” and “g”! –, the actual drawings of the glyphs are littered with mistakes. To pick just one character – you can see the bottom of the bowl of the “a” is too high (no optical correction), the lower left part of the curve flattens unexpectedly, while the top left part has a nasty bump. Both the thinning at the top of the bowl, the spot where it joins the stem, and the weight progression in the top arc are very awkward. And there’s another bump where the straight line transitions in the top curve.

Read more about type design on Unzipped:
An Introduction to Type Design | The Type Designer as Artist
An Introduction to Type Design | The Type Designer as Craftsman

Technical quality of the drawing

Of course tastes vary. I myself quite like awkward if it is done well, like Christian Schwartz’s delectable Los Feliz, modeled after vernacular signage found in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. And the whole grunge movement thrived on DIY aesthetics – think for example of Barry Deck’s imperfect designs which were very popular in the late nineties, or the carefully balanced inconsistency of Mr. Keedy’s eponymous typeface. Personally I think there is a world of difference between voluntary and involuntary awkwardness, but truth is we can discuss about this until we are blue in the face.

Los Feliz was inspired by amateur lettering, and professionally digitised.

This free font is a true amateur design. Personally I think there is a world of difference between this one and Los Feliz, but I don’t expect everyone to agree.

However – disregarding matters of taste – technical quality can be assessed objectively. Professional fonts are well digitised, with economic and efficient outlines that adhere to the rules of sound construction. Many free fonts feature glyph shapes with superfluous vectors and node points, faulty combinations of elements, stray points, incorrect overlaps, bad connections, … These technical flaws can cause the files those fonts are used in to behave erratically, and produce errors when processing said files (export to PDF, output on film or direct-to-plate, integration in Flash, …). The font is automatically substituted by a system font, certain characters disappear, counters are filled in, accents are displaced and show up in the wrong spot, spacing is shot to hell causing characters to overlap, … all kinds of problems whose precise origins are difficult to track down, and solving them usually takes a long time and a lot of trial and error. Unfortunately this type of technical flaws is very difficult to detect for the layman. The only advice I can offer here is to run a bunch of tests beforehand, like converting text to outlines, doing test prints and conversions, and so on.

Available styles

Professional text faces always include all the necessary styles, and often many more. On the other hand, if you want to use a free font for text applications, first you have to consider if everything needed for producing professional text setting is included. Most free fonts are single fonts, not families. Is there an italic style available? Is it a properly designed italic, or merely a mechanically slanted roman? If a bold is included, was it artificially emboldened? Is it bold enough, or too bold? Do you need an even heavier weight? Are the glyph shapes clear enough to remain legible in small sizes? And what about small caps and different sets of figures? It is of utmost importance to ask yourself these questions up front. This way you’ll avoid painting yourself in a corner when you notice halfway the production that the font you selected is inadequate. The available styles are very easy to check; however you need a trained eye to assess the quality of italics and bolds.

Read more about type weights and styles in Styles, Weights, Widths — It’s All in the (Type) Family.

Comprehensiveness of the character set

When acquiring professional fonts you can sleep on both ears. They will include both upper and lower case*, numerals, a complete set of punctuation, ligatures, mathematical symbols, and at least cover all North, West and Southern European languages, and often Central and Eastern European and Turkish, and sometimes even Greek and Cyrillic.
* A small numbers of display faces only have capitals.

FF Kava started out as a free typeface called Kaffeesatz, published by Yanone in 2004 during the early stages of his type designing career. When it transitioned from free font to commercial font, the character set more than tripled from 203 glyphs – which already is impressive for a free font – to 747 glyphs. Read the complete story and try it out in FF Kava With Extra Flavour.

Free and shareware fonts however are often restricted to the standard 26 letters of the alphabet, figures, and only the bare minimum of punctuation marks. It is quite common that suddenly you realize you can’t type that French name or that German idiom, nor put a ® next to a brand name nor a € next to a price, or that some punctuation mark is missing. So the first thing you need to do is go over the complete character set – for example in the “Glyph” window in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign – to see if everything you need is included.

Read more about the value of full families and complete character sets in FontShop’s Type Selection: Beyond the Look of the Letter.

Spacing and kerning

Strictly speaking anybody can draw letters – admittedly one typeface will look nicer than the next. However most people don’t realize the quality of a font is in large part defined by the “nothingness” between those letters – its spacing and kerning tables. Without proper spacing and kerning it is merely a random collection of glyphs, not truly a font. Spacing a font well is a painstaking, demanding, and time-consuming activity, and professional fonts also include hundreds of kerning pairs for all the exceptions. Proper spacing and kerning ensure that every single letter combination, every single sequence of characters – as diverse as they may be – are perfectly spaced, so that the text is well balanced and perfectly readable. And this is where almost all free fonts are found lacking.

The message here is again – do extensive testing if you want to use a free font. Set several blocks of text in different point sizes, and “feel” the rhythm as you read. Try to detect stuttering, gaps, anything that hinders the flow. And be prepared to do a lot of this if you want to stick to free fonts, because it will take some time before you find a properly spaced and kerned one.

via FontFeed.

Brands of brand designers

Brands of logo designers, brand identity consultants and graphic studios.

Left to right from top to bottom:
Siegel+Gale
Wolff Olins
Entermotion
Publicis Groupe S.A.
TYPO Interactive Design Inc.
Fantique
Simon & Goetz Design
Pentagram
Fitch
Vanderbyl
Gemma
LLdesign
Muamer
160over90
Tom Cannon Design
Kane+Associates
BrandBerry
Brandcore
Duffy & Partners
Lance Wyman Ltd.
Neogrey Creative
Mono
Design:Success
Denis Olenik
Double Brand
Dache
De Masi Jones
Nomadesign

Data Flow I&II - Visualizing Information in Graphic Design

Data Flow
Visualizing Information in Graphic Design

Data Flow and Data Flow 2 are great resources for info-graphics.

a.

Top 10 Type Blogs According to Eye Magazine

Golden age of type blogs?
A whistle-stop tour through the top ten typographic weblogs
Published on Tuesday, 14 April, 2009 9:31 am Here, at last, is our Easter week type special: the top ten type blogs, chosen by an anonymous panel of industry experts using strictly scientific principles (honest).
1. ilovetypography.com
Japan-based designer John D. Boardley created his blog in order to make people more aware of the typography that’s around them. It’s updated regularly and is very active on Twitter and Flickr.
2. typeneu.com
A huge repository for all things to do with contemporary design with a strong typographic bias.
3. swisslegacy.com
Swiss designer Xavier Encinas with his very Swiss blog focused on typography, graphic design and inspiritional matters.
4. typography.com
The blog of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.
5. blog.typoretum.co.uk
A blog about typography, letterpress and printing history by ex-Central Saint Martins student Justin Knopp.
6. typophile.com
A forum / blog system with discussion boards dedicated to all areas of type design, from identifying fonts to interviews with typographic designers.
7. slanted.de
A weblog published by MAGMA Brand Design from Karlsruhe, Germany about typography and layout. It complements their printed quarterly magazine.
8. ministryoftype.co.uk
Brighton-based designer Aegir Hallmundur’s blog about type, typography, lettering, calligraphy and other related things.
9. spiekermann.com
Erik Spiekermann, self-confessed sufferer of ‘Typomania’, gives his typographic perspective on a variety of things in his Spiekerblog.
10. typetheory.com
Another aggregator that pulls together all manner of posts on contemporary typography, created by US designer Ty Wilkins.

Portfolio and Magazine Publishing

You want to get your portfolio or mag published? Check out these links:

• BLURB
• LULU (quality is not always good)
• BOOKSURGE/Createspace (through Amazon)
• MAGCLOUD

For online publishing check out:

• ISSUU (New York Times "T" Magazine uses it)

a.

Software and Typography Resources

InDesignSecrets.com
Resource for all things InDesign.

Lynda.com
Software training online tutorials for Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and more.

FontFeed.com
Improve your typography skills with these basic tips and advanced tutorials.

computerarts.co.uk/tutorials
Computer Arts Tutorials

a.

Required Book for the course

Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton
Read the first 2 chapters, it's a great resource.
You can find it on amazon.com, strand, barnes and noble...
a.

Introducing the Google Font API & Google Font Directory

open source web fonts!

The Google Font Directory provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Font API.



Today we are excited to announce a collection of high quality open source web fonts in the Google Font Directory, and the Google Font API to make them available to everybody on the web. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers.

The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

read full article here.

AIGANY: Free Creative Suite 5 Workshop

---

MONDAY 10 MAY 2010 6:30-8:30PM

FREE/WORKSHOP: COME ALIVE WITH CREATIVE SUITE 5

Join AIGA/NY and Adobe to see what´s new in Creative Suite 5

With the right tools, your creative horizon changes. A tree is still timber, but suddenly in a whole new way. Old ideas germinate again, and new ideas branch into unexpected opportunities. Welcome to Adobe® Creative Suite® 5—software that will allow you to reach more people, more effectively, in more places, with whatever masterpiece you can imagine.

One lucky participant will have the opportunity to win a copy of CS5!

RSVP

Follow Adobe on Facebook and Twitter

How to Bind a Book

Artist James Sheehan shows Martha Stewart how to bind her own professional-looking book.

See here!

A&I Books - Online Publishing

A&I Books is an on demand fine art photo book publishing site.
They offer a range of fixed formats as well as custom sizes up to 11x17.
They can print books on a variety of paper stock

More Free Fonts

Thanks to Nicole for these 2 free font resources (also added to links on the side):

The League of Moveable Type

No more bullshit. Join the revolution.

We're done with the tired old fontstacks of yesteryear. Enough with the limitations of the web, we won't have it. It's time to raise our standards. Here, you'll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.

Like any revolution, we aim to make progress, and we need help. If you want to be a part of this free, open-source type movement, you should join us and contribute. If you have any questions about The League or the movement, get in touch.

Friday Fresh Free Fonts on this blog

I will be posting some fresh free fonts every Friday, yes I know it's awesome. I will look forward to bring a lot of great fonts that will sure help you improve your typography work. Check out what I selected for you on the FFFF#41 and make sure to comeback for more next week.

BOOK Kits from Paper Source

Here's the link to bookbinding kits at Paper Source

Binding/Publishing Resources

for binding portfolios/mags etc:

MagCloud (brienne says: had decent medium weight stock. good but not mindblowing--no choice in stock or size. It got the job done, though!)



Blurb


Lulu (quality is not always good)



BookSurge (through Amazon)

Type Timeline

click here for a great timeline of typefaces (also added to typography links on the side) - click on a typeface to find out more
(thanks to ryan sacks!)

Even with a small sample of 100 typefaces, a timeline shows quite accurately the acceleration and proliferation of type design during the 20th century. Click on a typeface name to find out more.

The scale changes increment (x3) from 1900 onwards to show the number of types produced; the important manufacturing innovations that fuelled this increase are shown in red.

Although the traditional categories of type (like old style, transitional etc.) are based on historical developments, in a diagram like this all styles appear to co-exist without any clearly defined boundaries.

Combining Fonts (by Hoefler & Frere-Jones)

follow this link for the full tutorial by Hoefler & Frere-Jones on how to combine fonts