It’s really easy to get lost in how pretty things look when designing things. While aesthetics are important in design, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we need to communicate a message first and foremost. I will illustrate this concept by quoting here some comments I made for recent makeover projects on About Desktop Publishing. Other designers have made comments about the look of design elements, how to allign them and so on, and rightly so. However the way you chose to convey the message and the reasoning behind it are very important as well, it’s the backbone of the creative process, which also helps with the positioning of various design elements.

You can read the description of the makeover project here. There are many submissions and much feedback to read through, if you want to get some tips. I am going to take up two submissions in this article. You can find the whole thread here.

Submission by Rezzyrezzy

You can find the submission here.

My comments
I like the colours and the reflection although all that blue feels maybe a little too cold and corporate, however here is the question for you: Does that image you chose communicate “Art?”

The world, as the only big image in that poster communicates “International” to me, but not “Art”. The font you have used is often used for stationery, corporate identity and things like that, admittedly not only that, so while I might or might not have chosen some other font (although I don’t consider it wrong and it’s better than just using some random script as it’s often the cliché choice when talking about art related stuff) the image still bothers me a little. As it is now, with the colours you have used, it could mean anything. Some worldwide company, some ad to help people in need, etc.

My comments will focus not on the execution of the idea, not on how pretty or orderly things look, but on the development of the idea itself.

You are not the only one who used the world in the poster, others did too, but some submissions had something else that connected it to “art”.

On the other side, the uncluttered one-image-look is excellent as it’s an immediate message. Just not the full message. So in your poster, how do you keep that speed of communication? That one image that tells you everything at once without information overload? I am almost tempted to let you answer that question on your own and let you make the changes before I say more. But if you want to read on…

Make the world “artsy”. Maybe make it look like as if it were painted. Even the reflection. Or frame it into a sheet of paper with some pencil or a paintbrush or something. It doesn’t matter what you do, but if you made it look like the product of some form of art, the idea of “international art” would jump in the eyes of the beholder without him/her realising it. They’d think of “international art” without making a conscious effort to read your text.

Once that idea hit the audience through your imagery, they will be ready to read what you have got to say.

Following the same trail of concepts, now that you settled on your imagery, you can chose another font, should it be needed (and yes even a script one if it fits).

Too long didn’t read: The imagery, the first-impact, especially in a poster or flyer which you only look at for a few moments, is really important. It has to be the ambassador of your message. In many cases it has to speak more than words. I cannot stress this enough.

That said, there can be ways to make something communicate art without any real picture even. Example: make the whole poster look like a painting and the writing becomes part of the painting. But again, it’s a strong visual and the whole poster+writing is your imagery in that case.

The beauty of design is that there are as many solutions as the human mind can think of.

I often cringe when I open a magazine and I look at those beautifully executed ads, awesome aesthetic… but they feature a beautiful woman. And while I realise that surveys might indicate that a beautiful woman is associated to perfume, she is also associated to clothing, cars, jewellery… Sometimes I don’t know what such ads are advertising until I have looked at them for a long time. The most rampant example was this ad, again, an oh so stunning woman, with some awesome looking glasses, a beautiful necklace, and really stylish clothes. And the logo of a brand, which I didn’t know. No more information. I still don’t know to this day what was being advertised. The sunglasses, the jewel or the clothing? Or was I supposed to just gape at the stunning sight?

How many people look at magazines for design purposes, like me, or actually read them and skip the pages with the ads? So if I couldn’t get a clear message out of that ad after scrutiny, how many people would have? Only those who knew that brand, I guess. But still the message was weak. Even though beautifully executed, it was just as bad as random clip art thrown in without real connection and writing randomly placed somewhere out of the already inexisting eyetrail that the random, incoherent and unlinked graphics had already messed up.

That kind of advert can work if they are part of a campaign that gets hammerred on you through each communication channel (TV, internet, banners…) so you instantly recognize them, but that is often not even the case. However if a poster that had the ingredients I mentioned above was in their stead, even just flicking through the pages, your eye might have stopped that half a second longer to see what it is and maybe look at where and when it was.

Submission by Screenprinter

You can find it here.

My comments
I do have a couple of questions on the shopping experience quote and the hamburger image. Did you make up a scenario? Such as the festival being held in some shopping center or some such?

What I get from your poster is that you are trying to say, “Right, there is an art festival, and in this festival several arts are shown. But there are also some side activities, and if you like to stay here all day, you can eat here too.”

That’s fine, this wasn’t specified in the initial “brief” of the project, but we did give a lot of leeway.

However there are a couple of issues with how you are trying to convey that message, which are connected mainly to positioning. I might repeat some of the things that Faith has said by the way.

Your current positioning: The shopping experience quote is at the top. The International Art Festival writing is underneath, almost same size. The world is huge. Then the dancer on the side, nice silouhette, but she’s thin so she doesn’t get a lot of importance. The quote related to art is very small. I can’t read it unless I zoom in, so if I were a person walking past the poster I wouldn’t read it at all. Then you have all the stuff on the side, I like them where they are. On the bottom left you have the location and timing etc. That’s fine too although I don’t like that the text is center aligned.

Here is what I would change.

The shopping quote is too important. Either place the International Art Festival or the Michelangelo quote on top. Why the Michelangelo one? Because you are not plainly spelling “international art festival” but you are letting art talk by itself. You intrigue the reader who then will discover an art festival is going to happen.

The shopping quote can be quite smaller, and I would place it near the location information. On top or below, it doesn’t matter. Use it as the branding. As the thing that identifies the place people are going to. (Assuming that place had that slogan for ages).

Make the world a little less important and make the dancer more important. You work out how. International Art Festival can be bigger than the Michelangelo’s quote. Place it somewhere it can be seen. Just ask yourself, how do I make the eye of the beholder go fluidly from one point to the other? If you haven’t already, do read the feedback I gave earlier. Your copy (as in text) explains things, but the main message is carried by the graphics. Based on that you need to decide how much weight you are going to give to your copy. Yes design is a lot of decision making and problem solving.

If you want to give that extra bit of information about food being available, I would probably place the food photo at the bottom, maybe with something that looks like a voucher that shows maybe some special offer. “First burger is free!” (assuming there is such offer). Of course people are not going to cut it from the poster, but it’s the concept of promotion that matters. You don’t have to do that of course, it’s just some ideas I am throwing there because I know too well from experience how clients want you to convey 30 messages in one go. It isn’t optimal but sometimes you can’t help it. Whether you make up a promotion or not, the picture is too far up at the moment, and it’s more important that people see the other art stuff first.

One thing I often do when designing (of course it depends on the project) is going around the office showing the design without any text and ask people what it is about. Even if people don’t understand it’s about an art festival but they understand it’s about art, it’s still quite good. The copy can do the rest of the talking after. But in your case, with all the elements you have put in, you can probably walk around without any copy at all and people would get pretty much the whole message. It’s just a matter of giving the right importance to things. You do need the pictures on the side showing the other arts because without them people would think it’s a dance competition on first sight.

There are other ways to show arts without using those pics on the side, but then it’s not your submission anymore! And your solution is perfectly vaild, you just need to polish it and give the right importance to things.

After looking at some of our makeover projects and a meeting I had in my design studio today, several concepts just keep lurking in my mind.

I remember some time ago I was a fairly big supporter of the fact that design is art, and posted a poll in the About Desktop Publishing forum. While I still think that, I view this in a different way now.

Art is often regarded as the expression of self. It has to comunicate something, and that communication will be very subjective to the beholder, but what you communicate as artist is your message, something that was created by your mind and you realise through artistic means. The means you use can be paintings, drawings, or any number of graphical arts that can include the use of graphics software.

That’s where people get confused. “Graphical Arts” are very different from “Graphic Design.” In Graphic Design you use the artistic tools to communicate a message, like you would do for art, but while you might achieve that through your ideas, you are not trying to convey your own personal message.

Being a designer means first and foremost being a communication counsellor. Your client wants to get somewhere and it’s your job to make sure he gets there the best way possible. Of course you have your own taste and your own style, but that cannot and must not compromise what the client wants to communicate. You are a problem solver, you are not an additional problem the client needs to deal with. I know this is a much colder view of design, but even with this view in mind, you are still able to use your creativity.

Sometimes your solution will not satisfy your client. It may be because your client has different tastes, yet you know that your design concept communicates his message. Sometimes your design might actually not communicate what the client wants. It is possible. If you are a real professional, you are able to take the client’s input and decide whether it’s time to change what you have done, or to put on your counsellor hat and tell the client why your solution works best. This has to be an honest look, and you cannot afford to simply say, “I am misunderstood” and keep going your way. You will lose clients.

If you cannot objectively look at what you have done, then you are not doing design, but you are doing a work of art, as art is very subjective. Design is objective… to a degree. Personal taste and style will always influence anything that has to do with creativity.

The trick is to learn how to channel that creativity.

A very important step in achieving this is to understand the client’s brief. Ask questions, make sure you fully grasp the message yourself. Then it will prove easier to think of ideas that carry that message. It’s hard to relay a phone message to a colleague, if the line of your cell phone was breaking up and you didn’t understand half of what was said, right?

Every designer at some point will come across a client who wants everything done yesterday. They give you a “brief” in the evening, they want the design the morning after. Then you follow the instructions and that isn’t what they wanted.

I had a client just like this the other day (alas not the only one) but this one was fairly difficult to deal with. He also requested something that was graphically incorrect and even almost impossible to realise. It wasn’t just about a colour that doesn’t go well with another. It was a request that was very similar to asking to set a fire by throwing cold water on wood.

The job comes on my desk in the morning, at 9:30 with the request that I get it done by 11am. The client calls at 10:45 asking me if I did it…

After the first draft, which was exactly per his instructions, he decided he didn’t like it and changed the instructions. Of course, what he asked wasn’t possible, but it was nevertheless my fault. He also went on about how he waited from 10:15 to 11am for my draft, to get something he didn’t like. Following the new instructions, still fairly impossible to realise, I tried to do them as quickly as possible, also explaning to him that I will refine them once he decides on one. By 13:00, he had 5 drafts to choose from.

He still wasn’t happy.

I don’t think I ever had so many problems with a client before. Eventually I just said one of our salesmen will contact him and we cancelled the job, and encouraged him to go to the other designer he really wanted to go to and with whom he had previous arrangements (which was the main reason of his impossible requests to me). Yet, the cherry on the candle: “Your designers take 5 minutes to make drafts, they don’t even spend time to work on them.” However it was by HIS request that I speeded up a job I already did quickly, and that others also saw and thought was well done.

Furthermore whoever contacted him didn’t have a contract. So I lost more than half a day in the end for a job that didn’t result into any income for the company. Needless to say, I had other things to take care of, one of them being 3 editions of a magazine.

This should be a lesson about spec work. Always have a contract (in this situation, I wasn’t the one taking care of it). Always specify the number of changes, drafts or hours in the contract. And when people ask you to do something in very little time, too little for the job you are being asked to do, try to explain to them that it requires time to do something properly, because in the end, as this very example showed, even they won’t be happy about it and will say you don’t even care for their job, even when you try to suggest to them better solutions, which I did.

This client wanted me to spend more time to take care of his job, but he didn’t have time to allow me that. I consider myself a decent designer, but that is out of my reach still.

I now resigned to the fact that I simply cannot read magazines. As much as I try, I always wind up looking at their design, at the ads, at their layout… Same for flyers, I might look at them when I wouldn’t normally consider them, I might not even care for the content, but I will look at their design, take them home and put them in my “inspiration” folder.

But printed material isn’t the only thing that can give you inspiration. Stephanie Orma in her article Crank up Your Design Radar over at Smashing Magazine tells us:

No one understands the statement, “design is everywhere” better than us designers. But comprehension and integration are two totally separate acts. From food packaging, to billboards, to book covers, catalogs, websites, and everything in between, we spend the majority of our waking hours on our computers designing and/or looking at these designs through the portals of our monitors. But when the computer is shut down, does your “design radar” go off-line, as well?

Do you see design everywhere? Where do you get your ideas from? Are you sure you are not overlooking sources of inspiration? The article on Smashing Magazine is certainly a good read. You will realise there are so many things you just overlooked, many ideas just around the corner screaming, “Look at me!” and you just shoved them aside!

Here I am on my way to work, half asleep on the train. Two studends are sitting nearby and at some point one goes,”A gradient filter is… hm… makes you go from dark to light, and maximises… Damn! I don’t remember and I just studied it!”

So, still half sleeping, I raise an eyebrow and think, “Maybe they are not talking about imaging.”

A third guy joins in and the same girl asks, “Since you have already studied it, what is ‘noise?’” He answers that he’s going to look at his notes and opens his copybook, he goes through his pages and says, “It’s something that doesn’t belong to a photo–then he looks at them and adds–Like a wrong colour or something.”

At that point I think, “Wait a minute” I kinda wake up and say, “Noise is dots on a photo, or scratches that don’t belong to the image.” Very simplified explanation of course and the word “dot” in the Italian version of that sentence makes more sense. The proper definition is here.

So I sit and think, “What the hell are people teaching at school?” And that’s when I think that having done tailored courses and on the job training actually helped me more than my design school. I thought my school was bad, but it doesn’t seem the only one.

What do you feel has helped you the most in your education?

Self promotion is very important for freelance designers. If you want to get clients, you need to let them know you exist, you need to tell them what you can do, and, most of all, you need to show it to them. To that end having a portfolio is not an option, and it is the only tool that will actually tell the tale about your ability to design. Even if you don’t plan to work as a freelancer, you still have to show your work to the companies that will hire you.

Jacci Howard Bear has written a 6 day course that will give you guidelines, tips and directions that will help you put together a portfolio which will speak for itself. As she puts it:

“Desktop publishing or graphic design portfolios should be more than just a few samples thrown into any old folder. Potential employers or clients use examples of your work to help determine whether they want to hire you. The samples you choose for graphic design portfolios and how you present them can affect whether or not you get the job.”

This is an email course with lessons sent to you daily, however you can do the course at your own pace.

Remember that if you can’t present a good image of yourself, others won’t be compelled to put theirs in your hands.

Adobe released Creative Suite 3 today, which is probably their biggest release ever. Since the merge with Macromedia a lot of speculation has gone on about which programs were to make it into the Suite and which ones were to be ditched. For the web designers who were wondering, GoLive has been replaced by Dreamweaver, for starters. You will find Acrobat 8 in CS 3 Design Standard Edition (finally!) and Flash in the Premium Edition. Yet talking about CS 3 as 1 suite is a mistake. There are 6 different suites, which address the needs of print designers, web designers and video editors.

Sue Chastain of About Graphics Software presents us a comprehensive and very hard to beat overview of the Suite, so I am not going to repeat what she has one, and, without any more delay, I encourage you to see the overview for yourself.

I was travelling to work by train, as usual. I guess I am not in the best of moods when I am still fresh from bed, but I was getting really irritated by the doors between compartments. I don’t know how many times I have had to help elderly people get through them because those doors are really heavy. Surely the person who designed them was thinking of a way to make sure the doors closed themselves without mechanisms that could wear off. Impeccable logic if it wasn’t for the fact that people can’t even open them. Yet there are several trains like that.

Another time, still travelling by train this time for totally ludicrous reasons, I notice the train has nice glass doors between compartments. I go though one and take a sit, wondering whether there was the same designer behind this idea. It didn’t take long to realize that it probably was the same designer. The door kept banging and the noise was really annoying. If it didn’t bang, it still made noise because of the vibrations of the train. This door was easy to open, but it never really closed.

You have to realize that I have been in England for a few years and Italian trains had changed a bit in the mean time. While I might hate English food, I think their trains are a little better compared to Italian ones.

Finally, on another train, I see this nice glass door that slides itself open when you push a button. No vibrations, easy to open and it closed itself too.

Wow.

How long does it take to think of something so simple? Looking at the number of Italian trains that have doors with a problem or another, it must be quite long.

What does this have to do with Desktop Publishing? Functionality is the answer. When you design something you need to know that it will print. Your expertise will play an important role in this. You might need to go about things differently, while still obtaining the same visual effect, to make sure your design will print. For example you need to know that if you overprint a 50% black object (gray) on a red background, your gray will become redish.

This holds true also for the “communication value” of your design. I had an example of this some time ago. I was designing a flyer-map to show all the places where a certain type of wine was being served. Each place had wine from a different Italian region. Each region was listed separately, with a different colour for each (not my idea.) The client wanted me to put a glass of wine on the map on every point where the wine was sold, and they had to have a different colour, corresponding to the ones of the regions. On top of that, each glass had a number next to them, which showed the readers what shop it was and where the wine came from. I call that “overdoing it.” We had lots of different coloured glasses on a map that was already full of street names, as well as a bunch of bumbers. Some colours weren’t even showing well.

The purpose of the client was to stress where the wine came from, instead he was comfusing the reader. A bit like those train doors that either designed to close themselves but cannot be opened easily, or to open easily and then don’t stay closed. Eventually we just told the client that the numbers were enough and the colours were too confusing and weren’t doing the job, and I just used the key colour of the job, burgundy, for all glasses. Readers still knew what each place was and what wine they were getting there because of the numbers that were sending them to an agenda—which would have been there anyway even if the glasses had different colours.

I guess I should go onto trains first thing in the morning more often.

Have you ever opened a magazine, read an article and wondered, “How did the designer think of THAT design element?”

This is a question I have asked myself so many times that I lost count. Then I again I haven’t been counting. As a designer you need to know how to visually communicate a message, that’s the essence of your job. Yet sometimes you see an article about cows and you see a bell or a stylized face of a cow used as a bullet. Or you are doing a car catalogue and you notice that the page numbers have the same elements of the logo of the car. Sometimes you manage to think at those things in a snap, while other times you just have a design block. What do you do in that situation?

If your job is based on a full marketing research, you will probably know what people think of when you say “drink” or when you say “soccer.” Thus you start using design elements that are related to those subjects to get your audience to dive into the article they are reading. Other times you just don’t have that marketing research and it isn’t required that you do one. You still have to communicate your message effectively, you have to pound in the head of your reader that you are talking about soccer and the various design elements serve that purpose. The article alone isn’t enough. The design elements around that article have to clearly tell that it’s all about football. Yet you still have a design block. You really don’t know what to associate to soccer.

Internet search engines and SEO techniques are often a good tool.

“How?”, you say, “I already have an article about soccer, I don’t need more information about it. And my magazine isn’t going to appear on Google’s top entries, it’s a printed product! I really think you didnt drink enough coffee, want me to make some more?”

While I thank you for your offer, I am pretty much convinced you can’t beat Italian coffee, so I’ll have to decline. Think about it. With SEO you discover the keywords people use to find out about to a certain subject and you get to know what they are interested in. This will help you approach something with the eyes of your readers. After all in a marketing research you find out what people need and want, and tools like Overture do that in seconds.

OK, now you know what people need and want, you know how to word your phrases to strike them in their soccer supporter hearts, but still that doesn’t tell you how to find good visuals. Yet it does. Now you know what words to type in Google Images, or Yahoo! or whatever you are using, and you will get a lot of pictures and graphics showing you exactly what people think when you say soccer, world cup, football, etc. While you should not use those images without permission, you now have lots of ideas for your design elements. You can use the same keywords in stock photography sites and find images you can actually use too. This simple method does not replace marketing research, but it’s surely helpful to get ideas while you design. Most of you are probably doing that already.

I have used the subject of soccer since it’s very familiar to people. It’s an easy subject to think with, so everyone can follow the article easily, I am sure you agree. However this very simple method can be used in other situations, with other subjects.

Now, how exactly do I know that soccer is familiar to most people?

Having a degree can be important in the design business, especially for people who look for firms to employ them. Let’s not forget what having a degree means, that is having the knowledge to use whatever communication channel to effectively deliver a message, whether it be through a flyer, a poster, a website or anything else you can think of.

Fear not, however, because BoDo (Business of Design Online) has just launched. This is one of the most brilliant ideas I have seen. I’ll let the people behind BoDo tell you what this new blog is about.

Many designers setting up shop have searched for answers and assistance by posting questions on various design forums, emailing pros for advice, reading everything on offer and googling when it’s not.

Forums, books and blog postings are helping to address this issue, but from our vantage point, concentrated help was needed. Help that would bring it all together, in one place. Easy to find.

As a Creative Latitude response, the Business of Design online (BoDo) was created.

Conceived and developed by Catherine (cat) Wentworth, Neil (nt) Tortorella and Jeanette (jay) Wickham (the BoDo team), BoDo’s aim is to provide a focused wealth of information, tools and techniques for successfully managing and marketing a design practice.

That’s right, there won’t be a Photoshop tutorial in sight.

On BoDo you’ll find continuously updated resources for running a design shop, including select e-books, business forms, excellent articles and more.

Although the team will contribute regular blog posts and the occasional series, we feel a big part of our strength will be the growing list of visiting authors.

On the design side, BoDo’s visiting author line-up includes Creative Latitude’s Graphic Make-overs host Alina Hagen of Alina Design. At Alina’s In-sights, Alina will post about life in-house. At Erin’s Review, studious Erin Harris of Sanguine Theory will share thoughts on various business of design books. As they happen, at Bean’s Biz, Stefan Bean of Pulse Creative Partners, Inc., will mull over the experiences of a new(ish) business start-up. Sometimes weekly, always monthly, Thomas (Tom) Stephan will have us grinning away in the work place at Dyer Straits.

As designers do not run their businesses in a vacuum, rounding out the discussion will be non-design authors such as writer and blogger ME “Liz” Strauss of Successful Blog, Letting Liz Be, Liz Strauss.com, The Blog Herald, and Performancing.com. Liz will talk about all things business writing at Write with ME. At Creative Conversations, Dr. Tammy Lenski of I Can’t Say That! and Lenski Strategic will share wisdom about conversations and conflict on the client and colleague front. At Creative Coaching, trained psychotherapist and creative coach Mark McGuinness from Wishful Thinking will instruct on the subject of creative thinking, communication and collaboration.

To get things started, we’ll begin with a bite, a nibble, a BoDo Niblet if you will, the “Starting Out and Setting Up” series. The two week series, pulling in advice from Abhijit Nadgouda, Alina Hagen, Chris Tomlinson, Danita Reynolds, Tammy Lenski Leslie Burns-Dell’Acqua, ME “Liz” Strauss, Mark McGuinness, Stefan Bean and of course Cat, Neil and Jay, will tackle knowing when you’re ready, managing money, equipment, location, etc.

Coming after will be two series running side by side – “Top 10 Marketing Missteps” (by Neil), covering marketing faux pas. And “Designer’s Working With” (by Cat). The “Working With” series talks about how to effectively work with other creatives such as writers, photographers, marketing professionals, illustrators, programmers, printers and pre press specialists.

In between will be Podcast Humpdays (wink, wink for all you Australians and Europeans out there), Resourceful Fridays, Weekly Recaps, Sunday Stressbusters, and a poll. Jay will come in with, what else, Ask jay, to answer individual business questions.

Starting out with a full schedule, the team looks forward to your comments and input on BoDo. It’s a win-win offer actually, as it’s our goal to help others wade through the new design business quagmire.

So come on down,
The BoDo Team
cat – nt – jay