More Delightful Business Cards
In my quest to design the übercard, I came across this site. Many fine examples, most of which are antithetical to the Guy Kawasaki imperative.
The Art of the Business Card
Guy Kawasaki has a nice post about his new business cards designed by Justin Ruckman. I was very inspired by the design and took a shot at something for myself.
I don’t really want a black business card, so my immediate thought was to try red. The slab serif font (Serifa) felt right to me. Overall, I’m pleased with the result. I wanted it to feel a little edgy, but still professional. I think I’m going to try another version in a different color with a sans serif font (Officina, I think) and will post the result.
The Manual of Style
This is the first in a series of posts/rants about written & visual communication, and the intersection of the two. I’ve been thinking more about what it takes to produce successful writing, particularly when it will be read as a digital communication, and have come up with a few ideas.
The Mac is Not a Typewriter and Other Niceties
My husband shared this wonderful idea, book and author (Robin Williams) with me in the early ’90s, and it has changed my life. Perhaps the notion that a computer is not a typewriter is obvious to the graphic designers amongst us, but just about everyone now is a graphic designer of one sort or another. I mean this literally. If you think of everyone in their prosumer roles, almost all of us are producers of both writing and design at home and at work. Our products may be simple emails or homemade greeting cards, but almost all of us produce enough documents to have made the term “desktop publishing” all but obsolete.
It’s time for us to realize, then, that we can safely throw away the mannerisms of the typewriter. I’m not sure if these habits are limited only to those of us who didn’t grow up “texting” our friends, but they bear repeating.
Robin Williams gives you twenty or so rules. I give you five.
Five Rules to Live By
- You don’t need to hit the space key twice after the end of a sentence. Really.
- You have the em and en dashes available to you in both HTML and Microsoft Word. Use them.
- Figure out accent marks and key caps. If Mötley Crüe can, so can you.
- You can break up your paragraphs using a double hard return rather than an indent.
- Think about capitalization. The only people allowed to use caps for emphasis are your grandma and Germans.
Before & After: SCBMC Newsletter
Here’s an example of a current volunteer project. I produce the monthly newsletter for a local mothers’ club of which I am a member. The newsletter runs between 20 and 28 pages and circulates to 900+ women in both digital and print format. I took over in October of 2007 and will end my run in September of this year.
BEFORE: April 2007
My design goal was to, in a word, simplify. The newsletter had been produced in black & white for print and spot color for the PDF format. I designed around our printing constraints; namely, the newsletter is printed on 11×17 copy paper by a repro shop, folded in half and mailed. I chose to eliminate spot color (since it wasn’t reproduced in print) and instead use screens. I reined in the clip art, stuck to a couple of fonts, and focused on making information easy to locate by keeping sections consistent and page layout as clean as possible.
AFTER: April 2008
Before this project, I hadn’t worked in print since I published an undergraduate literary magazine using Pagemaker in 1993. Adobe InDesign is wonderful to use, and I’m enjoying learning the flexibility of the application.