The insider’s guide to a successful website: build (part 2) Establishing a Hierarchy of Goals for Everything You Design. What one thing above all else makes for a great design? Where should your focus lie? More importantly, is it possible or even desirable to focus on a single goal at the expense of others? Today we’ll take a look at why goal-oriented design is good design and discuss how being a designer means weighing several competing factors.
We’ll also discuss how to decide which goals are the most important and how establishing a hierarchy for each project will make for a better experience for the client, the user and the designer. The Magic Formula There’s constant debate in the design community over what the primary idea, principle or tactic is for creating “great” designs. I don’t possess such a formula, nor do I believe one even exists.
Accepting this premise still doesn’t get us very far. Design is Like Golf This problem is a lot like that of hitting a golf ball and having it land anywhere near where you want it to (which I’m incapable of doing). Design is the same way. Stakeholders Lead to Goals. A Crash Course in Typography: Principles for Combining Typefaces. Apr 11 2011 When combining typefaces, there are a couple of important principles you’ll need to keep in mind, namely contrast and mood. Effectively combining typefaces is a skill best learned through practice, and trial-and-error.
Once you’ve mastered the principles covered here, you’ll have the tools you need to try out combinations while making educated guesses about what will and won’t work together. Here, we’re mostly covering combining two typefaces, as you would for body copy and headlines. In the next part, we’ll cover combining more than two typefaces for things like navigation, image captions, and more.
Contrast Contrast is one of the most important concepts to understand when it comes to combining typefaces. But first, what exactly is contrast? Weight The weight of a typeface plays a huge role in its appearance. You’ll want to look for typefaces that have noticeable difference in weight, without being too extreme. Style and Decoration Scale and Hierarchy Classificiation Structure Mood.
Typography Deconstructed | A comprehensive guide to the anatomy of type. More Meaningful Typography. We have all heard of the golden mean (also known as the golden ratio or golden section): the self-replicating page with a proportion of 1:1.618 that is said to be found in everything from the design of ancient Greek architecture to the growth patterns of plants.
Article Continues Below This and other meaningful ratios rooted in geometry, music, nature, and history can be expressed as modular scales and put to work on the web. Fig 1: A simple modular scale: 10@1:1.618 Fig 2: Our example page, designed using a modular scale. A modular scale is a sequence of numbers that relate to one another in a meaningful way. By using culturally relevant, historically pleasing ratios to create modular scales and basing the measurements in our compositions on values from those scales, we can achieve a visual harmony not found in layouts that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers.
Let’s start by looking at what modular scales are, and how they apply to web design. Conclusion#section5. 19 top fonts most preferred by graphic designers from around the web | BonFX – Logo Designer & Freelance Graphic Designer. By Douglas Bonneville on September 9, 2009 Out of the huge number of fonts used by graphic designers, there really is quite a small pool of fonts consistently chosen over and over again by graphic designers as their “most used”. I took some time to search out as many “top fonts for graphic designers” search results (plus variations) that I had time to visit. I spent several hours visiting blogs, forums, magazine websites, etc.. I tallied up the top typefaces in people’s lists. The list was about 40 fonts long after the first hour, but could have easily been 100 fonts if I kept at it.
I then pared the list down and dropped off mentions of fonts below a certain threshold to get the list manageable and meaningful. After about 20 typefaces, the list took on the characteristics of the “long-tail” and it trailed off into more and more obscure fonts with no group consensus. What we have left is 19 top fonts that met the criteria of being mentioned at least certain number of times. 19 top fonts in 19 top combinations. Sign up and download immediately to take your typography to the next level! This classic contains some great stuff: An exceptional glossary of typography terms Killer tips on establishing typographic color Choosing and using the right typefaces 20 Action-packed info-dense pages!
Fuck Yeah Helvetica. Typophile gangsta. The Journal of Urban Typography. 26t. 5 More Typography Do’s and Don’ts Everyone Should Know. Yesterday we brought you part one of our ten do’s and don’t for working with typography. Today we’ll wrap up with five more! Read on to see if you’re guilty of any of the following blunders and how to make sure you never do it again. Don’t: Put Text Over a Busy Background I bring this problem up frequently simply because it’s something that countless people struggle with. Any time you’re working with photos, it can be really hard to incorporate a text overlay. Like many designers, I tried my best to make this text stand out on its own merit.
At this point, it’s pretty easy to get frustrated and set off in search of a better photo, or worse, give into the “good enough” mentality. It turns out, you can combine text with almost any image in a minute or less with one simple, stylish trick. Do: Give Text a Containment Device In the example below, I still used my crazy photo. It’s important to note that the example above is a generalization: one possible and typical solution of many. Conclusion. Trypography. Beautiful Type. Beautiful Type.