• filed under
• Graphic Design
• Life
• Writing

Someone pointed me at Natalia Ilyin’s brief rant about how designers can’t write—but, worse, believe they can anyway. It reminds me of the endless string of self-help books and slogans we’ve seen over the last several years—things like The Secret—that suggest if we only believe in ourselves, the power of positive thinking will carry us through.

This is bullshit.

And it’s not just bullshit for the big things, like cancer, but for the little things, too, like writing ability. Believing you’re a good writer (or designer, or marathon runner) won’t make it so.

Instead, I recommend my new, patented technique for self-improvement: The Power of Negative Thinking™.

It works like this: look at your work, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and focus on what about it sucks.

Chances are, you can find a lot. Absorb your work’s flaws. Study them. Learn them. Look at how other people, people better than you—which is near everyone, right? remember, we’re looking at the thing you suck at—dealt with those areas.

Now, next time you do that sort of work, pay attention to those flawed areas. That’s where you need to improve. Learn from the other people (people better than you). Do it better.

Once you’re done, look at your work, and focus on what about it sucks. And so on.

That is how you get better at something. If at first you don’t succeed, suck, suck again. Eventually, you’ll suck at something else instead.

But why listen to me? I suck at this, too.

• filed under
• Graphic Design
• Typography

I often protest the ubiquity of Gotham, the beautiful typeface from the foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Gotham’s attained tremendous success—and rightly so. Since it became the principle typeface of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, however, it’s use has really exploded, from Media Matters to the National Rifle Association, in the ads of Pepsi and the packaging of Coke. Starbucks even picked it up.

I think this is a terrible development.

I was discussing this with a friend the other day, and she didn’t quite see what I was complaining about:

—“I object to the overuse of particular fonts,” I said, “mostly because I think fonts carry real meaning, and if you start just using one for everything then I’m not sure it means much of anything anymore.”

—“What you’re saying,” she countered, “is that, if something says ‘dog,’ the font has bark. The typeface has to conform to the mood. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

—“No, I’d say it’s more I think the font should be capable of barking (or not barking) at all.”

—“I can make Gotham bark for you.”

And she submitted this snarling example of Gotham’s barkability:

Much gnashing of teeth there.

But what’s going on here? Is Gotham really barking? Or is it just the dog?

I think it’s a great deal trickier. Gotham is a refined, clean, stripped down font; a warmer geometric with subtle concessions to humanist forms, along the lines of Avenir. It’s orderly, restrained, not quite corporate but never unruly. It’s just not the barking sort. The dog here, straining its lead and snapping, is barking through Gotham. It’s caged by the restraint of the letterforms. That the font does not bark itself makes a statement. It changes the photograph completely.

This is what I mean about wanting typefaces to be capable of barking. A font has to have its own identity for its use to have any effect—as it undoubtedly does in her example. And, indeed, this is obvious. If we could mold every face to any purpose, make it say anything we wanted, then there would be little purpose in choosing one over another. A designer might as well choose at random and then mold the font to their needs. But that’s not what we do—and with good reason.

I mentioned, a bit later in our conversation, Times New Roman, a font which through years of abuse has come to symbolize one thing above all else: Microsoft Word. Since it became the default text face in Windows, its statement about the typographer (or, rather, lack thereof) has come virtually to drown out any voice it might have of its own.

Much the same fate has befallen Trajan, which has found use in such a mind-bogglingly wide variety of movie posters and book covers that it now recalls those more than it does the Roman inscriptions from which it is derived, and in movie posters signifies nothing beyond another bland, establishment-endorsed film.

So I’d say Gotham is a font to avoid—not only to help rescue it from such a fate, but you risk having your own message suppressed as the font descends into incoherence. At this moment, the font is in such heavy use as to be a default for any brand wanting a refresh, without regard to the subject at hand. It risks looking more careless than elegant—unless it’s used with extraordinary care. And for heaven’s sakes, don’t bother with it in branding or advertising. Even when it’s done very well, it still looks a bit generic.

Above all, I hope Gotham can go on not barking.

• filed under
• CMS
• Graphic Design
• Web Design

Remember how I said I was doing a redesign a couple months ago? Well, of course not, no one reads this blog.

However: here it is! 100% Expression Engine goodness.

There’s now two sorts of posts: blog posts (these) and what I’m calling “whimsies” (because I’m silly like that), which are links off to other bits of the web I think are cool.

There’s probably going to be a good deal more design stuff on the blog now, since I do a lot more design work than I did when I started this blog a year ago.

I’ll have some more notes on this later, but for now I’m just thrilled that everything is working right and online. Let me know what you think!

• filed under
• Graphic Design
• Web Design
• Life

So, since I’ve come back from Christmas (and for a reasonable bit before that), I’ve done almost nothing with my free time save study web design.

It’s been fantastic.

I’ve gotten a lot better at it. The (many, many) mistakes I made designing this thing, and a number of the things I built at work, I’ve learned to work around. I’ve gained a lot of skills. I’ve looked at a lot of designs. I’ve tossed out several and started from scratch a lot.

This is a dangerous thing.

For one thing, designing for yourself is really hard. You can tweak anything, and so you do. Learning when to stop and be satisfied is very, very hard. (It’s seeping into my time at work, too, where I’m beginning to get impatient knowing I can do things better than I could last month, and wishing I could fix them.)

For another, it makes me less tolerant of the failings of others. I’ve already touched on my perfectionist tendencies a bit, but when I look at something that I can do well (like cooking pasta sauce), I get even more obnoxious about my standards than might otherwise be the case (which is really saying something). Bad design always drove me nuts, but now even mediocre design gets me a bit steamed.

Ah well, I’ll get over it. For now, though, I’m glad I’ve gotten better.

• filed under
• Graphic Design
• Games

Fallout 3 is out, and I hear it’s pretty excellent. I’ll probably get it at some point, but I’ve got plenty of stuff to play at the moment.

This iteration of Fallout is brought to you by Bethesda Softworks (the Elder Scrolls folks), which is a local company (based, apparently, in Rockville, MD, though I gather it used to be in neighboring Bethesda). It’s also set in the ruins of Washington DC. So it’s not much surprise they’re running ads around here. They’ve done the ubiquity ad buy at Metro Center, so literally every ad in the station is for Fallout.

They’re beautiful ads: a handful of mock-futuretro ads for cereal or cleaning products or the like, and some art from the game world. There’s also a particularly striking painting of a man in an armored hazmat suit helping Uncle Sam climb back up off a ledge, in front of a big American flag. Most disturbing, though, is a very realistic rendering of another hazmatted soldier carrying an assault rifle, standing on a pile of rubble with American flags flying behind him and the ruined Washington Monument, bricks missing and steel frame exposed, standing in the background. It’s more than a little disturbing, especially five blocks or so from the actual Washington Monument.

I’m all for art and I think it’s cool they’re advertising the game like this, but “Fallout 3” and associated information appears as small print at the bottom of the ads; to people who don’t know about the video game (which I imagine is a significant proportion of people filing through a downtown Metro stop), I can’t imagine it’s a very comforting image to see.

Joystiq had some of the ads in a gallery here, including the ones of the bombed out Capitol and Washington Monument.

(Update: Here’s one of them in pretty good detail. It’s very well done, really…)

• filed under
• Graphic Design

It’s long past time for another boring post on web design!

I have sort of a bad habit as a designer: I’m addicted to redesigning. I always want to tweak bits of things I’m working on, perhaps as my tastes or my capabilities evolve, or maybe just as my mood shifts. Whatever it is, I think the upshot is that I love to break standards. I am the Trotskyist web designer: always in a state of permanent redesign.

Not programming standards (in fact, I’m sort of obsessive about trying to remain within those), mind you, but design standards.

I started this blog with a design standard in mind, actually: bright colors, all serif fonts. You can see how that’s worked out. (It used to be brighter and serif-ier, by the way.)

The change since then is, in no small part, because I set those standards deliberately at odds with the way I usually design (dark colors, modern/humanist sans-serifs), in an attempt to break myself out of those tendencies. I haven’t totally regressed into them, but clearly I’ve tended back that way.

But I always want to make things look fresh and different, re-arranging layouts and changing fonts up and such from assignment to assignment. I suppose I just get bored with the status quo.

It can make real trouble when I’m working within an established style guide (as I am now). I suppose my challenge now is to beat that style guide within an inch of its life.