Sound Advice

I used to read a wider variety of blogs while I was in school, but now that I use Twitter I find it much easier to keep track of a few favourites that way. Today I was looking for a topic to write about and decided to check out some other blogs.

Brian Hoff's blog The Design Cubicle offers great advice for designers on a number of topics such as products, plug-ins, and lessons learned through experience. His most recent post was about the client/designer relationship and when to show concepts. While his posts are brief, he really gets the point across. "Get it right – the first time! Clients often ask Designers if they can update them daily, bi-daily, or other timeframes that suits their craving. Designers, stop doing this." Hoff goes on to explain that showing clients work you are not proud of undermines your abilities and your client's trust. When clients see unfinished work they get worried and often slow down the design process with changes and suggestions. Instead Hoff suggests waiting until you have a design that you feel comfortable standing behind, give yourself a chance to refine your work and come up with something great.

Pasted Posters

When I walk around Toronto I am never looking down but always at the things around me (thanks for the lesson on how to see Vince Sowa!). I have two paths that I take to work (on my bike or the streetcar) and even though I read the posters I see almost every day, there is always something new or different. A great example is a bus stop ad I pass for Gap, it features a model with a gap in her teeth. For a while the ad was left alone, but then someone added white out to fill the gap. The day after that someone drew back over the white out with black to put the gap back. I found it very interesting to see how people were interacting with the poster, fighting with one another as to whether the imperfection should be fixed or flaunted.

Last year I remember seeing the posters for Design Thinkers all over poles in the downtown core. Their vibrant colour (and the fact that I interned with the studio at the time they designed them), really attracted my attention and inspired me to look more closely at the posters around town. Since, I have enjoyed a variety of posters. Some are humourous, others help me better understand the neighbourhood I'm in and still others pop out with sheer ugliness.

While looking for images of the Design Thinkers 2011 posters, I came across a very interesting poster campaign/installation. In 2009, artists Sean Martindale and Eric Cheung attempted to liven up public space by attaching cone shaped planters to a pole at Queen West and Spadina. The result is visually intriguing and I am sure their goal to engage the public was successful.

Bantjes

I'm nearing the end of month two for my "Read all the stuff on your bookshelf before buying more books or getting a library card and borrowing copious amounts" project. It is going fairly well but my newfound love of riding my bike or running to work is cutting into my reading time. I recently moved on to the design section of my shelf and my enthusiasm for graphic design went wild once again. I forgot how much I loved reading design magazines, the articles make me feel like I am part of the club and get me thinking about new possibilities. Regardless I bring this up because I came across another great article.

Marian Bantjes is a "lapsed graphic designer" (Applied Arts Magazine, March 2010) who produces beautiful custom typographic solutions. After seeing a few of her pieces it is easy to identify her work, not because it is all the same, but because of the intricate details in her work. After dropping out of Emily Carr, in Vancouver, Bantjes spent ten years typesetting, designing books and doing production at Hartley & Marks/Typeworks. In 1994 she co-founded Digitpolis Media and taught herself corporate design as projects came up. Bantjes eventually tired of the strategic side of things and took a break to work on her personal style. It may be referred to as a break, but the work she produced and contributed for free to various magazines ended up landing her a job at Details. Things moved quickly from there and Bantjes is now contacted directly by art directors and designers, allowing her to stay fully immersed in her creative work.

My favourite part, aside from the images of her work, is that Bantjes is Canadian. There are many well known and talented designers from around the world, but it is great to have such talent coming from Canada.

Below are some of my favourites. (People who know me from childhood may understand my particular interest in the intricacies of her work, remember my graph paper drawings?)

The web design came back, the very next day

My first attempt at web design was pretty amateur and I almost fell asleep during the lesson (lynda.com is great but not on a day when you are tired). When my teacher expanded on the tutorials I understood enough to get my personal website built, and with a bit of help I was able to get a couple more sophisticated things working. Now that I have taken an eight week web design course I understand infinitely more and am actually having fun doing it.

As I am getting more practiced I feel more confident about my work and am even able to troubleshoot my own issues. Lately I have been working on rebuilding my personal site with proper code as well as updating my work's website. It feels great to be able to help out a swamped co-worker (she ran out of time for the updates) and have people coming to me with new work.

I was checking my Twitter this morning before work and was reminded once again that the most difficult and challenging work is often the most rewarding. After reading this I realized that was why I have been enjoying my web work so much lately, it is definitely a challenge, but now I can figure it out on my own and that feels great.

Spring Cleaning

One would think that reading magazines from three years ago (I've been skimming old issues the past couple weeks trying to catch up on my reading, college really slowed me down) would be a little pointless since all of the information is outdated, but today at lunch I discovered otherwise. My magazine for the day was Graphic Monthly Canada, a magazine devoted to the print industry in Canada. One of the articles near the front of the issue was talking about the effects e-readers have had on the book industry and in turn the companies responsible for printing the books. At the time (2009), the article said that e-books had 2% of the book market, up from less than 1% in the previous year. I mentioned this fact to my co-workers and wondered aloud what the percentage would be now. A tech savy iPhone user quickly looked up some information and concluded we are now up to 13%.

In an industry that changed so little for so long, it is amazing the progress e-books have made in such a short amount of time. The publishing company I work for is currently working on their second run of e-books and our main audience is people over 50. E-books are being read by people of all ages and publishing companies are realizing that. It is an interesting time for designers and I'm eager to grow with the changing needs of companies. I feel that the web course I took is a great starting point and I am excited to continue learning more about this emerging market.