One of the big projects that I have this final semester is a group editorial design project. Although my group and I are still working out the final detailing, I thought I’d take a break and share some resources that I found were very helpful during the initial design of our magazine.
Here’s a great book lent to me by my friend, Richard, called “Universal Principles of Design” by William Lidwell, Kritrina Holden + Jill Butler. The book covers ideas and concepts that apply to different fields of design, from graphic design, industrial design, interactive design, to architecture.
This past weekend I’ve been listening to a really great podcast called Your Dreams My Nightmares by Sam Weber. Each week he interviews illustrators and designers, and asks them about their craft and working in the commercial arts.
After reading through Erik Spiekermann’s book, Stop Stealing Sheep & Learn How Type Works, I found out about this really great book in its bibliography called Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type by Geoffrey Dowding. I managed to find a copy and, wow, this is one of the most useful books on [...]
Here’s a fun little game called Kern Type that tests your kerning abilities. The game presents a series of individual words and you correct the letterspacing of the letters. After, you submit your solution and the game compares it against typographers’ solutions.
For the past week I’ve been reading this really great book, “Responsive Web Design”, by Ethan Marcotte. It outlines the reasons for and strategies used in building responsive web designs.
There is an interesting article in the monthly Stereotype column in the current October issue of Print Magazine. It talks about the ways in which designers get identified, not by their art direction, but by the typeface they regularly use in their designs.
One of the most challenging types of design work I’ve found is branding and logo design. It’s difficult to design with a symbol and/or wordmark that is visually concise and captures all of the ideas associated with a particular company. So I was thrilled to come across this excellent book on identity design called “Logo [...]
I found out today from a friend at work a fun little test for colour perception, or hue acuity. FM 100 Hue Test I scored a 4, which is pretty good. I always thought my colour perception was quite bad.
I recently stumbled across this really amazing online archive of Herb Lubalin’s U&lc (Upper and Lower Case) magazine on the fonts.com blog. They have been publishing a year’s worth of U&lc each month since October of last year. You can find it here: http://blog.fonts.com/tag/ulc/