Week of 4-19-10:

Beginners guide to OpenType
“OpenType (OT) is a cross-platform type for mat that includes expert layout features to pro­vide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control. Using OT technology you can substitute your characters for differEnt glyphs using many different methods; Ligatures, Small Caps, Oldstyle Figures, Fractions, Superscript/Subscript, Ordinals, Alternates, Titling Characters and many more.”

Ten Graphic Design paradoxes
“I’ve just finished writing a book about graphic design. Yep, just what the world needs — another graphic design book. In my defence, the book is about the stuff that doesn’t get written about much. It deals with subjects like rejection, envy, and plagiarism. There are also entries on kerning, the wisdom of using only lowercase letters, and the merits of Univers. But mostly it’s a book about the soft stuff — the stuff that we deal with every day and tend to take for granted.”

Typography for lawyers
“Even though the legal profession depends heavily on writing, legal typography is often poor. Some blame lies with the strict typographic constraints that control certain legal documents (e.g. court rules regarding the format of pleadings).”

99% Conference recap
“It was another huge year for the 99% Conference this past Thursday and Friday in New York as 400+ creative minds came together to focus NOT on inspiration or idea generation, but rather on the mechanics of making ideas happen.”

Brand New: Classroon
“We will be publishing identity work from students around the world who tackle redesigns of well-known brands as a class assignment. The focus will be as much on the final result as the process to get there. All of our readers are encouraged to provide constructive feedback, whether you are a student yourself or a seasoned professional.”

So you need a typeface?
A beautiful infographic on how to go about choosing a typeface for a project.

On Design Feedback
“It is easier to explain to a designer why you’ve done something in a certain way, and it is much easier for them to provide feedback when they have a background knowledge of design. We do some things for a reason, and this is something that most clients would never understand hence the reason why it is best to get design feedback before a design presentation.”

How to successfully educate your clients on web development
“If you are running a design agency, your job is very likely to combine business development, graphic design, technology and user experience design: a basketful of very different fields. When dealing with clients, one faces the challenge of clearly and effectively communicating the goals and results of the work done in these areas.”

What is typography today?
“Most people think Typography is about designing and selecting fonts. This is true as far as architecture is about designing or selecting furniture. In reality neither is a purpose but a means to an end.”

Week of 4-12-10:

14 Designers discuss logo, brand and identity
“To clarification of the differences between Logo, Brand and Identity, I have asked 14 designers from around the world about their opinions in Logo, Brand and Identity and How he/she definition each of them.”

The experience belongs to the user
“We all like to play God. We like to imagine that the design we create is ushered into the world and all those who use it have an epiphany…they do things exactly in the way we have prescribed. They approach, use, and experience our design in the manner we envisioned, resulting in an amazing user experience.”

[Solid] Adobe Creative Suite 5 Review
“The Adobe team kindly invited us to an exclusive sneak peak demo of Creative Suite 5 and they also provided us with a pre-release copy for this review.”

Free eBook: Interviews with Twenty-five Popular Bloggers (includes an interview with yours truly)
“Purpose of this Questions and Answers Interview e-Bookwas to explore and compare how experienced and well-known bloggers/designers think, how they organize their workspace, solve their problems, get inspiration and much more. Learn from them because as you can see their way of thinking works!”

Designing for iPad: Reality check
“The question, Are we designing desktop programs, web sites or something entirely new?, has been torturing us until that express package from New York finally crossed our door sill. A quick write up of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at our office.”

Puma re-invents the shoebox
“Puma has partnered with The Fuse Project to completely redesign the packaging for their shoes. A team spent 21 months studying different boxes and packaging schemes, searching for the most efficient, sustainable way to get shoes to consumers.”

Fast Company on iPad Typography
“Disappointing, but not surprising. Apple has made some puzzling decisions over the last few years that leave one wondering if they really care about typography as much as they did in the 1980s when the Mac launched the desktop publishing revolution.”

Useful design tips for your iPad app
“Apps will define the iPad, it’s true. But in developing your app idea, which comes first, the idea or the device? Good news: neither. It’s people! When brainstorming and researching ideas for your app, step back and consider the context in which the device will be used by real live people.”

What brown eggs can teach us about niche marketing
“It’s how your customers perceive your value that makes you valuable. You may be just like all the other businesses out there, but if that’s how you distinguish yourself, then you’re going to become just another price-based commodity in the market.”

In response to ‘We use way too many fonts’
“For any designer to claim that a half-dozen or a dozen typefaces is enough — well that’s their prerogative. However, it’s one thing to say ‘twelve typefaces is enough for me’, but to claim ‘twelve typefaces is enough’, period; extrapolating a generalisation from a personal imposition is rarely, if ever helpful.”

Copy and Paste Letters and Ligatures
Quickly copy and paste a wide variety of characters and unique ligatures without knowing the shortcuts

Beautifully Banal
“Type Directors Club asked 16 designers to find a classified/personal newspaper ad from our local community to “hijack” typographically. When redesigned, the once banal and disposable classified ads are reinterpreted by the designer into a one-of-a-kind collectible poster.”

What were some of your favorite Tweeted design resources from the past week? Share in the comments below. Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Week of 4-5-10:

How to use the semicolon (properly)
A fun walk-through of how to use a semicolon (;) properly with hilarious illustrations to better demonstrate. It’s amazing how misused, or better yet underused, this punctuation is.

iPad UI Stencil Kit
“Use our iPad Stencil Kit to quickly mock-up application ideas for the Apple iPad. How can we refine the user experience? What type of interaction is going to make the app compelling? Let our iPad Stencil Kit help you answer these questions.”

iPad Peek
A nifty tool for seeing how your website will look on the iPad without owning one. Great for developmental testing.

The Fear of Sketching
“Recently I have been seeing more and more sketching going on. Either it’s always been there or I am now simply paying attention to it, either way, I’m loving it. I would say that drawing is what got me started as a designer.”

FlickrDesign
“At flickrdesign.com we pride ourselves in featuring the best graphic design uploaded to flickr.com. Everyday we search for new and impressive designs featuring beautiful colors, typography, concepts, style, and layout.”

Gentleface: Free Wireframe Icon Set
“They can be used for wireframes and software mockups creation, websites and software applications including iPhone and iPod apps. You’ll find a set of 8 cursors and 236 icons in black and white color versions.”

Letterhead Love
“Letterhead Love was born out of my desire to have an online repository of the best letterhead, stationery and collateral materials.” A great resource for stationery inspiration.

70+ Brilliant WordPress Site Designs for Design Inspiration
“In this designs showcase we trying to present you exemplary design trends, new practices, creative ideas and designer’s skills. There are so many different WordPress designs out there that it’s always hard to decide which one to select. We spent last few weeks to compile this list of highly beautiful, creative and most importantly inspirational site designs over web which might help you to get inspired with their work.”

The Dying Art of Design
“Progress is good, but we need to make sure that we’re progressing in the right direction. Our fundamental skills and the craft of design have started to take a back seat. Using the right tools and techniques is certainly an important part of design. But do our tools and resources make us better designers?”

20+ Designers and Freelancers you should Read, Watch and Follow
“Today we’ll take a brief but personal look at over 20 designers and freelancers that have made an impact in the online design community through books, blogs, tweets and various other means. Some are huge names, ubiquitous in the design community, while others are just getting their start.” The list even includes yours truly.

The Lost Element of Quality
“No matter what the field you’ll hear a lot of complaints about a decline in quality. From Super Bowl Ads to bacon, from television shows to toys, many would argue that today’s products and services are inferior in quality to products and services from the past.”

What were some of your favorite Tweeted design resources from the past week? Share in the comments below. Enjoy your weekend.

Week of 3-22-10:

Plancast Penguin logo development process
“The first thing we discussed was the dual visual representation of a product that is as fun as it is useful. A tricky combination! Mark wanted Plancast to feel fun and exciting, but also seem like a product that could actually help you. It had to feel reliable and well crafted. It had to be accessible and interesting. “Quirky” was included as a possible adjective, but with caution.”

MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design acquires to ‘@’ symbol
“MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design has acquired the @ symbol into its collection. It is a momentous, elating acquisition that makes us all proud. But what does it mean, both in conceptual and in practical terms?”

Web Typography with CSS3 slides
Slides from a recent online lecture by Sean Gaffney and Matthew Smith.

What’s Brand?
“Brand is an important part of any business. So why do some of us claim we brand businesses, when we fall so short on it’s definition and limit ourselves at logo design?”

No problem Mr. Client, I just need to do a couple of things first
“You know how it starts, you have an idea in your head and you know it is the great idea you have been searching for your whole life. All you need to do now is create the website to make it a reality and then you are good to go. Simple as that, come up with idea and create website. Done. If only it was that simple right?”

New Photoshop CS5 Sneak Peak
“Bryan O’Neil Hughes shows off some rather eye-popping (if we may say so) technology for synthesizing texture inside a future version of Photoshop”

Beautiful Book Covers
“Let’s be honest; as designers, we almost definitely will judge books by their covers. When they’re all we have to go on when we’re deciding what to buy at the bookstore, who can blame us – or any book shopper, for that matter?”

The Value of Good Design
“It’s not difficult to find examples of businesses with beautiful websites but no traffic. Businesses with stunning websites that fail because the product or service they’re providing just isn’t good enough. Design only goes so far, and ultimately cannot save a business if the product just doesn’t cut it.”

Week of 2-22-10:

55 Examples of huge typography in web design
“Choosing the correct typography for your website is a very important part of the design process. And as a website is also a communication tool – a very powerful one – you can use the typography to help you on exposing your ideas!”

A guide to creating professional quality logo designs
“Let’s take a look at some of the general rules of logo design, see what guidelines we should stick to in order to build high quality logos, and see how they can all be put into practice to create a logo design that works in the real world.”

Improve your portfolio with pro bono design
“You’re a graphic design student with a portfolio full of fictitious projects. You want to work with clients to build your experience, but you need a more developed portfolio to attract the clients. A classic catch-22.”

Time tracking without timers
An upcoming promising app that should be out in beta in the spring. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Training the Butterflies: Better public speaking interview
“There are certifiably good reasons to fear public speaking, but Scott Berkun, author and professional speaker, points out that at least, “we can’t say that public speaking is scarier than death.” That’s why it’s curious that public speaking is often listed with some of the worst human fears—along with sickness, death, elevators, heights, and snakes.”

The Taxonomy of Type
“This is not a detailed overview of typography, and was not intended to be. Instead, this article’s purpose is to help us as designers to distinguish basic properties of types. Typography encompasses a large field of interests, and to put it all into one article would be difficult and unnecessary.”

Web FontFonts
“For nearly 15 years, web designers had two frustrating choices when it came to type on the web: use one of the few “web safe” fonts preinstalled on major operating systems, or substitute text with images and Flash/JavaScript® hacks. Not anymore. Recent developments in web standards and font formats make it possible to render HTML text in typefaces other than the same old default fonts.”

Geek talk with Brian Hoff
Check out my interview over at Geek talk discussing all things “geeky”

The Designer’s Survival Guide
“Navigating a design project gone wrong is like surviving a wilderness disaster: it takes strength, courage and cunning to make it out unscathed. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of survival. I’ll discuss a few tips and tricks that will help steer you to safety.”

The principles of great design
“As a designer or lover of design you might find yourself asking not what is design, but what makes a design great? How often have you gone through a gallery and looked at some great designs and told yourself that you are going to open up Photoshop or a browser and do the same thing right now only to find that when you are done the end result simply doesn’t match what you were expecting?”

A showcase of 50 amazing personal blog designs (featuring behoff.com)
“The importance of a unique, memorable and well designed blog, especially within the design community, should not be underestimated – First impressions will always count and your blog gives you an opportunity to showcase your skills and highlight how professional and serious you are as a designer.”

Happy Cog’s Redesign of VisitingPhilly.com: An exemplary modern webdesign

“In January, Jason Santa Maria sent out a tweet announcing that visitphilly.com had been redesigned by world-renowned design studio Happy Cog. My interest was piqued, and I couldn’t help but take a look.

What were some of your favorite Tweeted design resources from the past week? Share in the comments below.

Week of 2-8-10:

New Heinz Ketchup packaging
Ketchup lovers two cool ways to enjoy Heinz Ketchup: either tear off the tip to squeeze with pinpoint accuracy, or peel back the lid for easy dipping.

The ultimate website prelaunch checklist
“Do you think to yourself, ‘I know every pixel on this site inside out’ and put it live? Hopefully not. You’ll have a printed checklist which you complete before you go public.”

Georgia on my mind
Great read on a website redesign.Explains and showcases the inspiration for the site and explains elements such as typographic choices.

How to sell the value of a design
“As a designer it’s not always easy to stand up for yourself… clients often have demanding requests, tight budgets and due to one reason or another, designers will succumb to taking on labour heavy jobs at heavily discounted rates. This does not have to be.”

Cookie cutter websites
“We’re all learning better practices in web design, and that’s a good thing. But designing a website isn’t a simple recipe, and while it’s important to make a website useful, they don’t have to all look the same.”

The Oscars of typography
“Various type blogs and font foundries released their own best-of lists at the end of 2009. I sifted through them and cast my own votes. Each of the selections presented here comes from a published list of the year’s top typefaces”

Find your type match
This one is fun: What’s your “type?” Find out what your best match would be if you were a typeface.

Tips to choose good text type
“Today, I want to take time to analyze how to choose correct text typography design in different cases. It is very important to understand that these tips are not final word, but they can be good help at the moment of choosing a text type.”

Bring your websites alive
“Some have a passion for web design; others consider it a mere task! This article is for those who consider web design more than just a task, in fact, it is meant for those who always have a passion to create something new”

What were some of your favorite Tweeted design resources from the past week? Share in the comments below.

Week of 2-1-10:

CSS transitions 101
“Despite people’s expectation of change and movement on the screen, CSS and HTML have few controls that allow you to design interactivity, and those that exist are binary.”

Make all links feel subtly more button-like
“On this current design of CSS-Tricks, you may have noticed how all links bump themselves down one pixel as you click them. I started noticing this effect on sites of luminaries like Tim Van Damme and Andy Clarke’s sites, so credit where credit is due.”

New and high-quality icons for elegant design
“When working on design projects its always essential to have a good collection of icons. Designers use Icons to create breath-taking designs. Having the right icons can help to make a web design look much more professional and complete. Fortunately, there are some excellent free icon sets available that offer very high quality icons.”

Custom letters of 2009
“Appreciation for the people making Custom Letters. Inspiration for everyone else. A whole lot of great work.”

Life below 600px
A great writeup discussing the topic of ‘above the fold.’ Great to show clients if need be.

Ways to streamline your web business
“If I told you that there are twenty different ways you can streamline your web design business, makemore money and work less, would you believe me? What if I showed you – would you believe me then?”

Information is beautiful (and a showcase to prove it)
“Unfortunatly I never had the opportunity to do client work on an infography, but it seems to be one of the most challenging task for a graphic designer. The perfect infography must synthetize complex information in a simple visual representation, which is not easy. The following examples take information architecture to another level by making it beautiful.”

Elliot Jay Stocks interview on Unmatched Style
“Our most recent designer interview in our series is with Elliot Jay Stocks; designer, illustrator, speaker, musician and author of Sexy Web Design.”

Ampersand 10-pack
Hot Diggity Dog! Haäfe & Haph presents a selection of custom ampersands at just 9.99! These 10 ampersands come packaged as.eps vector files and an opentype font!

What MTV’s show The Jersey Shore can teach you about branding
“Branding can be a vague, nebulous concept to folks, particularly clients. We often try to teach them the value of building a strong brand by citing great ones that already exist. Unfortunately, we tend to fall back on a small list of great brand case studies, such as Apple, Nike, Harley Davidson, and a few others.”

Design tips that you can learn from Apple
“There is no shortage of companies that follow popular design trends to appeal to a mass market. Much more rare is the breed of company that actually sets design trends. Today we’ll examine the techniques of a company that occupies the top of the design food chain: Apple.”

Revised font stack
“Serious efforts are being made to get more typeface choices on the web to enhance web typography. Still, most of us prefer web-safe fonts like: Verdana, Georgia,Times New Roman and Arial. Though choices are limited, yet the number can be increased by exploring other pre-installed fonts.”

The missing Google Analytics manual
“Whenever I open Google Analytics my brain seems to go into freeze mode. Sure, I know how to see where my traffic is coming from and how much traffic I get overall but it pretty much stops right there.”

Week of 1-25-10:

Tips for better ideas [video]
A beautiful and inspiring video on how to be more creative. A must-watch!

‘Lorem  ipsum’ for images
Dummy text generator for images.

What makes design seem intuitive? [video]
“If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world.”

Hourly rates vs flat fees
“This week, we’re asking the panel what they think of the hourly rate – do they like it, hate it, how do they determine it – that kind of stuff. As you will see, some panelists prefer the hourly rate while others prefer a per project fee.”

What graphic design schools are lacking
“Design school teaches you how to talk to other designers … there needs to be an entire course on talking to people who are notdesigners.”

Fonts ideal for big and powerful headings
“Headings play a major role in the way users digest content. Through size and style, they help establish a hierarchy and make text easy to scan.”

Invoicing tips for designers and freelancers
“Most designers don’t particularly enjoy the financial side of running a business, but handling it properly is a necessary part of being a freelancer or running a design agency. The financial side of the business includes invoicing clients, and in this article we’ll look at some tips and best practices for invoicing.”

Website owners need more than web designers
“Website owners have an increasingly difficult job. Not only do they need to provide visitors with an engaging, usable and accessible website, they also have to interact with them through social media, great content and other online marketing channels.”

A brand for london
“While famous for so many things, London [still] lacks a unifying, cohesive graphic brand identity under which all sectors can co-exist. The Mayor, and other officials, sought to bring together the previously branded elements of transport, tourism, government, the Olympics, and other public programmes with the creation of a new branding effort.“

Designers these days…
A great article by CSS Tricks discussing skills and traits a designer these days must have.

Michael Bierut of Pentagram discussing Clients [video]
“Our speaker at the January 2010 CreativeMornings was Michael Bierut of Pentagram hosted at the fabulous Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. It was our biggest CreativeMornings audience yet with 300 (!) NYC creatives attending. Enjoy Michael’s insightful presentation.”

What were some of your favorite Tweeted design resources from the past week? Share in the comments below.

Week of 1-18-10:

Top 100 fonts of all time
Just like it sounds — beautiful typefaces galore!

The ultimate guide to CSS typography
“Typography is often overlooked in todays design specifically by web developers. It really is a shame because CSS gives us so much control over our type. That being said, we our limited to certain “web safe” typefaces but that shouldn’t decrease our creativity. Here are a few CSS tips for typography on the web.”

25 New high quality free fonts
“Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.”

Resources for easily creating web forms
“Almost every website needs some type of form, whether it be a contact/feedback form, a registration form, a survey, or an order form. Despite the fact that forms are a necessity for just about every project, designers and developers can often be frustrated by the process of creating them, especially more advanced forms.”

CSS transitions
A nice guide to CSS transitions from WebDesignDepot

The importance of teaching your clients and being the boss
“What I have come to realise over the last few years is that too many people are trying their best to please the client over the visitor. The client is not the primary aim, the visitor is. Of course the client has to like and approve the site but you should not be letting one persons clouded judgement determine the outcome of the entire project – design is personal and subjective – the sooner you realise that and the sooner you teach your client that, the better off you will be.”

Recommended for design reading
“I often receive emails asking for my favorite typography book or a good book recommendation on learning web design and CSS — so I’ve decided it’s time to organize my recommended reads in an Amazon store organized by category:typography, graphic design, creativity, logo and brand identity, web design, andbusiness.”

Building your knowledge portfolio
“In their book, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Hunt and Thomas refer to something known as the “knowledge portfolio”. They call it a portfolio because they believe it should be invested in over time. You should always invest in your portfolio so that it grows and never becomes an excuse for holding you back.”

My (ILoveTypography) favourite fonts of 2009
“Perhaps the most difficult part in compiling this list is not what to include, but what to leave out. There are, then, many other typefaces that should be in this list, but aren’t. Perhaps some of your favourites from 2009 coincide with mine; perhaps they don’t”

The identity recession
“The following is excerpted with permission from Tony Spaeth’s Winter 2010 article in The Conference Board Review.”

TypeTogether’s Adelle: two weights for free!
“Santa is late but he’s finally here! The OpenType Basic version, full commercial licence, of Adelle Bold and Bold Italic can be downloaded free of charge at TypeTogether’s website.”

Week of 1-11-10:

Design blogs you should be following on Twitter
“With the vast majority of design blogs within the blogging community its hard to keep up with who is saying what. Using twitter along side your favorite RSS reader is a great way to find out about new articles that design blogs are writing up.”

How to make yourself stand out as a freelancer
“The cybersea is full of freelancers all out to make their mark and their money to keep their freelance fires burning. With an abundance of opportunity pouring in to the market, getting yourself out there and making sure you are heard and seen will help you sway those opportunities more your way.”

Impressive Tumblr customizations
“Over the past year, there have been a few different services that have popped up that allows you to post content online a lot faster than WordPress would. Two of the most popular ones are Tumblr and Posterous.”

Your personality, summarized in a typeface
“If you’ve ever sat down with a type designer, what you quickly realize is that they rarely talk about fonts in purely aesthetic or even functional terms: They talk about assertiveness or calm or friendliness. In short, they talk about personality traits. It makes sense, then, that your personality could be translated into a typeface.”

On small caps
“I just read this post by Joe Clark, linked from Daring Fireball, about why you shouldn’t use small caps for acronyms. In it, Clark provides some examples which at first glance seem to support his argument, but a little thought reveals them to be mere examples of ill-considered typography rather than a crushing blow on the use of small caps”

Dyana Weissman on Kerning
“As designers, kerning is one of those esoteric terms we love to use. Not only is it vital to quality typography, it’s also a great word to throw into a conversation with non-designers whenever we want to sound smart or abstruse.”

A Negative View of White Space
“After reading through the article on The Web Design Ledger, “Whitespace: The Underutilized Design Element” I felt compelled to respond and clear up what I feel is spreading misconceptions about design in relation to white space.”

Educate Your Clients On What You Offer With a Guide
“Educating clients on the services you offer can be a tedious process, especially if you find yourself doing it over and over again. There are a few options for providing your clients with a resource that can bring them up to speed on what you can do for them, without you needing to explain over and over again.”

10 big and bold slab fonts
“Slab fonts are a part of the serif font family and are incredibly effective for logos, headlines and in printed media. Slab fonts can be rounded, angled or block like, the common stand out feature is that slab fonts are chunky, bold and big.”

Type on a curve
“Setting type on a curving path can alter the balance and relationships between characters. Here’s how to make sure your text still looks good.”

The Most Relevant Identity Work of the Decade
“I gave myself a deadline of January 15 to do a recap of identity work in the 2000s, assuming that it wouldn’t be an editorial faux pas to do a list of this sort well into the new year. So here it is. An admittedly incomplete — it would take months to do this exhaustively — compilation of the most relevant identities of the past decade.”