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?

QuarkXPress Passport is the multi-language version of the standard or single language QuarkXPress. It contains all the features of the standard QuarkXPress plus additional support for multi-language publishing, including multiple dictionaries and a user interface that can be set for any of the languages supported by Passport.

QuarkXPress Passport files can be saved so that the standard single language QuarkXPress can open and read it. When saving a file, QuarkXPress Passport offers you the option to save the file as either “multiple language” or “single language”. If you choose “multiple language” only QuarkXPress Passport will be able to read the file. If you choose “single language” then the standard version of QuarkXPress will be able to open and read it.

Make sure that the QuarkXPress Passport file is saved in a compatible version. For example, if you have QuarkXPress 5, the person using Passport has to save the QuarkXPress document as version 5 or earlier, or you won’t be able to open it.

But, What is this “Multiple Language” Option?
QuarkXPress Passport allows you to use different languages in one document. This means that if you have Italian, German and Spanish in the same document, you will be able to apply the correct hyphenation as it applies to those languages. So you won’t wind up hyphenating German words following Italian grammatical rules or vice versa.

You can also read this article and related ones on About Desktop Publishing.

For those who get tired of their wallpapers very fast, Smashing Magazine posts a collection of handpicked wallpapers every month. There are wallpapers for all tastes, from grunge to sleek, from illustrations to 3D rendered graphics. You don’t only choose from a wide range of sizes, you can also choose whether you want the monthly calendar, in this case for August of course, to be on them or not.

Come on, take a peek!

Recently my studio changed printer, and this new firm wants us to convert all text to outlines when sending PDFs to them. While for flyers it’s fairly straight forward, when dealing with magazines, i.e. long multipage documents, using the Convert to Outlines option from InDesign can be quite daunting.

Luckily I came across a handy article about how to convert text to outlines in InDesign on InDesign Secrets. As David Blatner says:

Here’s the whole tip in a nutshell: Don’t use Convert to Outlines at all. Instead, use InDesign’s transparency flattener to convert the text automatically for you when you export a PDF.

I encourage you to read the rest of the article to see how to go about that. It’s a very nice tip that will make you save a lot of time!

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?

Many of you probably know that if you don’t have the bold or italics version of a font installed in your system, you shouldn’t use your DTP application’s option to make it bold or italics, because that will simply result in a simulation which might work on screen or with a desktop printer, but that can cause problems once your file is sent to an external printer using a RIP.

A solution to this can be adding a border around type. Applications such as Illustrator, Corel Draw, InDesign and others allow you to do that. However there is a catch, which I discovered not long ago while working a my company’s logo (that I didn’t design).

When I was first hired by this company I was told that sometimes the logo looks thinner than it should. They had asked the designer to make it bolder when it was designed, so he added a stroke around the text since he had no bold version of the font (Andale Mono). The text in the logo is outlined by the way. Despite this the logo often just looked thinner than it should have.

One day I was making some tags for a packaging project and I used the logo. Since the tags were small, I had to shrink the logo. I made my PDF, did my preflight checks in Adobe Acrobat Professional and no matter what I did I kept getting an error about a stroke being less than 0.25 pt. For those who don’t know, printing a stroke or a line that is less wide than 0.25 pt often will not print because it’s too thin. Finally I figured out that the stroke was around the logo. In the original file, since the logo is bigger, the stroke is wider than 1pt, but once the logo is resized it becomes a hairline, thus being ignored by the printers’ RIP once it goes to press. That was why the logo was thinner sometimes. It wasn’t the designer taking “artistic license” it was just a technical problem.

Moral of the story: don’t use faux bold or italics, and when you use a stroke around text to simulate the bold version make sure you keep in mind how the design, logo, whatever you are doing may be used in the future. If the logo/graphic will be made very small, then try not to use strokes around text as it may not be printed.

I advise you read the first part of this tutorial, so you understand the reason of this ste-by-step tutorial. Wrongly set screen angles and frequency can cause your job to print incorrectly. Most designers won’t need to deal with those settings, as printers will most likely do that themselves, but extra knowledge on this won’t hurt.

You are required to have Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe PS or any other driver that will allow you to make PostScript or PDF files. You will not be able to use the built-in Export to PDF option in InDesign or Export Layout as… in QuarkXPress to do what is described in this tutorial. With InDesign and Illustrator you will also have to produce separated files to be able to change screen angles.

Changing Screen Angles in InDesign and Illustrator

Those two programs are definitely the most straight forward when we talk about changing screen angles. You do almost the same thing with both programs. Here you can see the screenshot of InDesign’s Print window and you can see Illustrator’s Print window here.

1. Go to File > Print. The Print window will show up. Choose PostScript File, Adobe PDF or whatever other printer allows you to either create PostScript files in the Printer option which is at the top of the window. Note that choosing Adobe PDF will not create a PDF file, it will create a PostScript file also.
2. Click on the Output tab. In the Colour option, choose In-RIP Separations (the most common separations method).
3. As you can see in this screenshot, there are 5 inks—the 4 process colours and 1 spot colour. Click on the spot colour and change screen angle and frequency. If you are not using cyan, you can just use the screen angle and frequency used by cyan, otherwise use the ones for magenta and yellow. If you are using all the colours, it is best to consult with your printer. You will usually need to make sure there is a difference of 30º amongst the screens.
4. Save to PostScript and you are done.
5. Don’t forget to Distill the file to PDF before you send it to your printer.

Note: Once you have chosen to separate your file and you have changed the screen angle of your inks, you can then choose to output your file as a composite. Once you choose Composite CMYK in the Colour option though, you will notice that you are no longer able to edit the screen angles and frequency of your inks. Yet if you choose Separations again you will see that your changes have been recorded. I suspect this means that you are able to create composite files with custom screen angles with InDesign and Illstrator, but I am not totally sure. If you have any information about this, please fill in the comment form below and let me know.

Changing Screen Angles in QuarkXPress

Unfortunately with QuarkXPress and Photoshop changing screen angles isn’t as straight forward as it is with InDesign and Illustrator, but it can be done easily. To change screen angles with QuarkXPress:

1. Go to File > Print. The Print window will show up on your screen. Click on Printer.
2. The Printer window will come up. Choose a printer that will allow you to either make PDFs or PostScript files as I mentioned at the beginning of this article (see illustration). Click on Print. If you have chosen Adobe PDF, you will be asked where to save your PDF file. Once you specified it, you will not yet create the file until you finished all the steps I am describing. So go ahead, name your file and press OK. QuarkXPress will save it wherever you told it to, once you have done all the needed steps. In the Printer window, click Print. Again, you will only be brought back to the original Print window mentioned in step 1, QuarkXPress will not yet create the file.
3. Now that you are back to the original Print window, click on the Setup tab and choose either Adobe PDF or Generic Colour as your printer description unless otherwise advised by your printer.
4. Click on the Ouput tab. To change the screen angle of an ink, first select the ink, then click on Angle and choose Other. You will be prompted to enter your custom screen angle. Do the same with the frequency.
5. Press Print and your PDF or PostScript file will be created.

Changing Screen Angles in Photoshop

Photoshop doesn’t take into consideration which printer you are using or whether you are separating your file. It just lets you change screen angles with no fuss.

1. Go to File > Print with Preview. Check Show More Options. Straight under it, you will see a drop down menu set by default to Colour Management. Click on that menu and choose Output.
2. A new set of options will appear. Click on screen. When the Halftone Screens window shows up, uncheck the Use Printer’s Default Screen option. You can now change the screen angle and frequency of your inks (see illustration).

Summary

Here is how you change screen angles in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator and Photoshop. Though most printers will do this for you, it is always good to know what screen angles and frequency are, how they can affect the print quality of your jobs and how to deal with them in case nobody else will do that for you.