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Mar 14, 2011

Getting Outside of Your Comfort Zone as a Designer

As a designer (and I’m pretty sure this applies in all fields — I could write a similar treatise about being a musician), there are certain techniques and approaches that will come naturally to you, and certain genres and styles with which you will become intimately familiar and comfortable. Other techniques, approaches, genres, and styles will be harder for you to master, and you may shy away from them once you have gotten into your design comfort zone.

On the one hand, there’s something good about this — you may get really excellent at what you do, and like streams following their natural paths, your skills may coalesce to become a mighty river of excellence. On the other hand, you’re likely from time to time to fall into design ruts from which it is difficult to emerge. For this reason, it’s important for us designers to look outside of ourselves for design inspiration from time to time — seeing what others have done (where other mighty rivers are flowing) can move our imaginations in directions they wouldn’t ordinarily go. And, if we are brave enough to try some things that we wouldn’t ordinarily try, we might get lucky and develop new avenues of excellence.

Typographic Inspiration

One of my main design interests is typography. I’m amazed at the incredible variety of beautiful work that can stem from just a few dozen letters. And for regular infusions of typographic inspiration from other minds I turn to the following showcase sites:

• We Love Typography
• Dribbble
• Fonts In Use

Here’s a screenshot from WLT:

Note the easy-to-browse, gallery-like setup. All of the above sites are similarly organized, and they all are completely and expertly moderated to cull only the best of the best that’s out there, so your browsing experience is immediately and deeply rewarding. Of course, if you want to brave a wilder and less moderated experience, get thee to Flickr, where plenty of typographic mayhem (often quite wonderful) resides.

Going Retro for Inspiration

One way I’ve gotten tons of design inspiration over the last couple of years is by seeking out so-called “retro” designs. Looking to the past shows you font use and color palettes you don’t see in everyday contemporary life. Check out these links to thousands of scans of vintage paperback book covers, and get ready to spend a long time browsing through the fascinating variety therein:

• http://www.flickr.com/groups/vintagepaperback/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/paperbacks/
• http://www.bookscans.com/
• http://luridwasbeautiful.blogspot.com/

Many covers from the era reproduced actual paintings on them, and so the color palettes are generally very well thought-out and lovely. And, if you’re not a painter, you might not think to develop similar palettes in your own work. Take the cover shown here from 1954, featuring a painting by Rafael DeSoto.

One possible color palette of five colors taken from the painting is represented beneath the cover in the screenshot below:

Given the way my brain is wired, there’s no way I would have come up with this palette on my own. Dark, grimy pink and dull greens? But it really works, and could be applied to a (say) web design with very interesting and perhaps lovely results.

Other Vintage Inspirations

There are a lot of other areas to plumb for design inspiration. I like to browse through vintage album covers as well (jazz album covers are a particular weakness of mine):

• http://www.flickr.com/groups/52240935629@N01/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/favouriterecords/
• http://www.birkajazz.com/archive/columbia.htm
• http://lpcoverlover.com/

And vintage signs offer some interesting typographic and color choices as well:

• http://www.flickr.com/groups/ilovesigns/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/41655158@N00/
• http://www.waterwinterwonderland.com/vintagesigns.aspx

Designers: don’t get bogged down in your comfort zones! Get out there and see what other people are doing, and what people have done before you.

Jan 24, 2011

Happy new year, typophiles! In the spirit of looking back on the year that was, I thought it’d be interesting to parse through the seemingly limitless font releases of 2010 and give a few hat-tips. There are far too many excellent fonts from last year to mention even a fraction of them, but here, in no particular order, are ten of my favorites, chosen from the realm of display fonts: fonts that shine for few words at large sizes — for headlines, logos, and the like.

Placarto 4F is a striking and unique ultra-bold display face from Sergiy Tkachenko. Perfect for eye-catching posters and big ads, and to add a dose of modern, industrial vibe to your designs.

Affair, from Alejandro Paul, is a lovely script font that is likely to make a lot of top-fonts-of-2010 lists. Lots of alternate glyphs and ligatures make Affair really fun to work with, and give designers a lot of latitude. It is elegant without being yet another stodgy wedding-invitation font.

Biographer is another script font with Alejandro Paul’s hand in it, designed in conjunction with Angel Koziupa. Note the long, lean, and unusual upright forms. Lovely. The creators suggest it for use on book covers and packaging.

Monroe is a slab serif with interesting swashes and alternate glyphs. I didn’t realize it until just now, but this is the third font from the Sudtipos foundry to make my list. Monroe combines the strength and stability of a slab serif with gentle curves and a sense of playfulness.

LaSalle is a font design from the 1950s, brought into the digital age with great care and a full compliment of professional features. If you’re going for that 50s, hand-painted sign effect, this is the font for you.

Caudrifonte is a playful, bold, hand-drawn font, with three styles and an available set of illustrated dingbats. It manages to do three things that are difficult to pull of in a handwriting sort of typeface: it maintains its hand-drawn look; it has a unique character; and the letterforms all cohere beautifully.

Speaking of handwriting… Sheila is a lovely hand-lettered script font from Laura Worthington. Designed to look like it was written with a ballpoint pen, Sheila would be great for taglines or quotations in ads.

Breathe is an incredibly complex and carefully crafted script font with nearly limitless combinatorial possibilities for use. It pulls off a very elegant calligraphic look without being boring. Wonderful for posters, declarations, invitations, and other display uses.

Voodoo Script is a wonderful display font that has a great retro feel to it. A really unique font, great for signs and packaging projects.

Fusion Sans is a strong, condensed font, great for headlines and other large displays of text. It stems from a proud line of other similar fonts, but has some genuinely unique features that make it stand out from the crowd (as well as support for Greek and Cyrillic).