Lineposters has a superbly crafted series of minimalist subway prints available for purchase on Etsy.

(via Laughing Squid)

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

Oh Shit! Has there ever been a better Kickstarter project to put your support behind?

Bravo, Safwat Saleem. The internet is gonna love you.

(via Laughing Squid)

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

Sometimes the truth hurts. A fantastic set of iPhone wallpapers by Nico Ordozgoiti.

(Via Quipsologies)

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

Just in time for the festive season, Brooklyn, NY-based designer Matt Raw has released Code Cards – a series of letterpress greeting cards.

Code Cards connect today’s digital developers with the analog coders of yesteryear. Celebrate your digital heritage with greeting cards featuring old-fashioned, letterpress printed code.

If these don’t sell like hotcakes, I don’t know what will.

(via Laughing Squid)

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

Full details here.

A Day in the Life of a Graphic Designer is a sweet new print from The Design Bureau of Amerika.

(Via Laughing Squid)

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

This is Google employee, Boris Smus’ attempt to create the most minimal business card design possible. The concept uses his email address to uncover his first name, last name, website and twitter account.

I’m not convinced this method would be effective for everybody, but I admire his approach in fitting as much information as possible within a constrained space.

What do you think?

(Via Kottke)

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Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

It brings together various designers and artists, who have had their custom artwork drawn onto 6cm wooden eggs using a robot called the ‘Egg-Bot’.

You can see the Egg-bot in action in the video below. It’s a rather impressive sight.

Via Creative Review

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

This is a guest post by Dennis Salvatier, blogger at Tanoshiboy and designer at Salvatier Studios, an award-wining design studio located in Southern California. You can reach Dennis through his website or on Twitter.

Crowdsourcing Won’t Help You

In the last few years crowdsourcing has become the single greatest enemy to design, more so when it comes to logo design. Let’s start off with an explanation about what crowdsourcing is.

This is when a company or an organization offers a fixed amount of money as a cash prize for a chosen design. They define this as a contest. The designers then submit their logo designs for review with the hopes of the potential cash prize. When a specific designer’s entry is chosen, that designer and only that designer, gets paid for their work; leaving the hundreds of other designers twiddling their thumbs.

From a layman’s point of view this contest might seem like a fair trade, but it’s not fair at all. Not to the company and not to the designer.

Why It’s Not Fair To The Company

The company is looking for a logo that will best define their brand and all that that will encompass. The problem is that the designers that participate in this method are usually creatives who have a careless engagement with the project. They know they’re working for free, so they skip what’s important about the process and churn out a piece of work they hope will win them instant fame. This careless engagement bypasses the craft of logo design and gives birth to mediocre work that is then declared the ‘winner”. The company is oblivious to the fact that their new logo lacks effectiveness and value. What is skipped in the process is the engagement between client and designer, and the design brief. Without those two elements you are essentially writing a biography without knowing anything about the subject.

Why It’s Not Fair To The Creative

You just won X amount of money and recognition throughout the web, but what you don’t know is that you’ve just had some discount sushi. What this means is that your choice seemed like a great idea at the time, but it will come back to hurt you. Why? Because you haven’t delivered good work and it’s now searchable on the web. When it’s found it will be recognized for what it is to those who see it. Disagree with me? Name one designer who has gone onto have a lucrative career due to crowdsourcing. There isn’t any. Designers who participate in crowdsourcing continue to crowdsource in hopes to make it big. Let me tell you right now, you cannot skip the starving-artist phase. It is a part of your growth process. You must go through the hurdles of being a young designer, finding your clients, serving them and doing great work every time. You must add value to your work and design as a whole (it’s all of our responsibility), and crowdsourcing cheapens what you and the rest of the design community does.

Conclusion

When a moth emerges from its cocoon it can spin silk, something that the more popular butterfly cannot do. They’re also faster, stronger, but struggle twice as much when breaking through their cocoons. Without that struggle they would be too weak to survive. The struggle is nature’s way of strengthening it. As designers, we’ll go through some rough times and take on less than exciting projects at the beginning of our careers. I promise you that no matter how small the project may be, it is incrementally moving you closer to where you want to be. Crowdsourcing is not the answer. It won’t strengthen you as a designer whether you win or lose. Embrace the struggle and become exceptional.

Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

Have you ever wondered why some designers produce amazing work, while others just mediocre?

Great designers eat, breath and live design. Great designers are passionate about their work.

Most importantly however, great designers never stop learning.

Successful men, in all callings, never stop acquiring specialized knowledge related to their major purpose, business, or profession. Those who are not successful usually make the mistake of believing that the knowledge acquiring period ends when one finishes school. The truth is that schooling does but little more than to put one in the way of learning how to acquire practical knowledge. Experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are known as “self-made,” or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. The person who stops studying merely because he has finished school is forever hopelessly doomed to mediocrity, no matter what may be his calling. The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.

Napoleon Hill, Think & Grow Rich

The author of this quote was not a designer, however his point transcends professions.

As a designer, it doesn’t matter how talented you are, if you stop learning you are doomed for mediocrity.

A scary thought. Time to buy some books.

What do you think separates great designers from the rest?

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Image by Thomas Hawk

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Logobird, Branding & Identity Design

Here is an example of the problem. If you look closely at the “I” characters you can see that they are slightly bolder than they should be.

This problem only happens after the font has been converted to outlines and exported to a PDF. If you print the PDF everything appears as normal. Also, sometimes if you zoom in or out, it goes away. It is quite strange, and something I can’t figure out why Adobe hasn’t fixed already.

In the past, when this had been particularly obvious in a client presentation, I would usually call the client to give them reassurance that when the design was printed, everything would be fine. Regardless, it always created a somewhat awkward situation.

Fortunately, I was recently sent a fix by one of my Twitter followers, and since I discovered that so many people were experiencing the same problem, I thought it would be beneficial to share it.

The Bold Character Fix

This fix came courtesy of an article written by ArminVit from the Speak Up archives. You can check out his original post here.

To fix this, is quite simple, so here we go.

Open up your original logo (or other design) file in Adobe Illustrator. Select the “i” or “l” character that appeared thick/bold in the PDF using the direct selection tool. Using the pen tool, create two additional anchor points exactly at the halfway point of each character (making a total of 6), as pictured below. Do this one by one for each character affected. Save the file, and transfer the design to Adobe InDesign, and the problem will be fixed. When you export to a PDF this time all characters display correctly. That’s it!

This fix is only really viable when a relatively small number of characters are involved, like in a logo design. However, at least it is something, and it works!

Thank You Twitter Followers

Thank you to all my Twitter followers who responded when I first tweeted about this problem a few days ago, including @gmsdesigns, @supervee, @JemappelleLowe, @isaacalves, @marnieb, and @krush_design.

An extra special thanks to James Reeve for tweeting me the link to the to the original article providing the fix. You can check out his rather awesome portfolio here.

Have you experienced this problem before? If so, how did you go about correcting it?

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Logobird, Branding & Identity Design