Peeps I Dig – Nov ’10

The weather is getting chilly and the holidays are upon us! It’s November and because you’ll be spending more time inside this month’s inspiration is about sites that I dig. So grab a cup of hot chocolate, snuggle up with your laptop, and enjoy.

Abduzeedo

Abduzeedo.com is “a collection of visual inspiration and useful tutorials…The blog is run by design junkies for design junkies, always striving to provide the community with the latest and hottest of what the web has to offer”.

The site is Brazilian born but has expanded it’s workforce to the USA and has readers from across the globe. I enjoy a majority of the inspirational posts and actually comment on quite a few of them. There’s daily, weekly and monthly themes ranging from illustration to architecture. They even have an iPhone app!

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COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a global, creative community where people who are tickled by color gather, share, and discuss colors, palettes, patterns and trends.

I have often used this site to light a fire under my color creativity.

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Yahoo Directory

The Yahoo Graphic Designer’s Personal Exhibit Directory is simply a listing of portfolios.

It is a fantastic place to spend a bit of time for inspiration. There’s a wide range of talent from all over the world and I find it very exciting and extremely inspirational to peruse this listing.

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Graphic Design Blog

Graphic Design Blog is “a podium giving professional insight on graphic designing, graphic designers, logo designs, typography and much more”.

I frequently enjoy GDB’s posts and they’ve recently added a forum that I’m sure will become a valuable resource.

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Toxel

Toxel is a design, inspiration, and technology blog.

I love this sight for the sheer variety. It examines inspiration from everything. When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. It’s a really cool site to peruse but make sure you have time because you’ll definitely get lost in the world of Toxel.

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Be sure to check back monthly for more Peeps I Dig. Next month’s theme: holiday designers that inspire me. Who inspires you?

Back to the Basics of Design

I was surfing the ‘net and ran across something that brought back a ton of design school memories. It’s a site that was set-up for a book put out by Princeton Architectural Press and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Spring 2008. It’s a guide to basic design principles: Graphic Design the New Basics.

The site itself is a bit frustrating since not all of the links are active but if you can bare through it there’s some solid info on the basic principles of design. There’s also some exercises that brought me straight back to my foundation year. So if your a design student or just someone looking to get back to the basics, check it out.

Got any good resources for basic design principles? I’d love to hear about them.

Beneath the Surface at Rutgers

I attended a really interesting lecture and exhibition this past week: Beneath the Surface: Poster Exhibition from Iran at Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts. It’s a collection of Iranian posters curated by Nahid Tootoonchi, Townson University. AIGA has an excellent article about it.

Tootoonchi, Iranian herself, felt that her purpose in doing this exhibit was to open up an opportunity for Westerners to be exposed to Iranian design. In fact, each piece in the show is from her personal collection. She visited each of the artists in their studios and discussed their design with them. I found this to be really cool and very much appreciate her efforts.

During the talk, she gave a quick and dirty run-down on Farsi because typography is a major element within Iranian poster design. As a monolingual designer, this aspect of the presentation was especially interesting. The Farsi was beautiful. Hard edges are non-existent and each element flowed seamlessly into the next.

Many of the designers used English and Farsi simultaneously within the designs since the posters were often internationally displayed. Seeing the two juxtaposed side by side created an appealing tension between the hard, straight edges of English and rounded, graceful strokes of Farsi.

Another element that caught my eye was the lack of imagery. I’m not that familiar with Muslim but learned that the use of human imagery is frowned upon because it could be considered worship of a deity. If imagery was used, it was obscured in some way which gave way to an air of mystical mystery.

There were movie posters in the mix and it was odd but refreshing to see them done without pictures of people. It seemed that the boundaries of creativity were pushed due to this restriction and the intelligence of the viewer stimulated.

The styles spanned the spectrum from graffiti looking to folky. Whatever the style each piece was a learning experience in itself. It was like getting a little sneak peak into Iranian culture. Makes you wonder what tidbits people around the world get from our posters.

The exhibit is fantastic and I highly recommend you attend. Here are the designers that are highlighted:

Reza Abedini

Mohammad Ehsaee

Maryam Enayati

Fatemeh Karkehabadi

Narges Safaei

Bijan Sayfouri

Saed Meshki

Masoud Nejabati

Ghobad Shiva

Parisa Tashakori

How to be dashing with dashes

One might not think about minor details like dashes when contemplating design; however, it’s those little things that can make or break you. Besides, who cares about the design if something is spelled wrong or has bad grammar? Designers aren’t editors but it pays to make sure that whatever you’re putting out into the world is grammatically presentable.

I see a lot of things that fall through the cracks due to the grammatical rule not being widely known, such as double spacing after periods—a hold over from typewriter days.

Another instance is the use of dashes. People commonly use hyphens as dashes such as the double hyphen in place of an en dash and the triple hyphen in place of an em dash. This usage of hyphens really drives me crazy! I strive to clarify the confusion between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. Down with double hyphens!

Fret not, fellow dash users. Here are a few simple rules to guide you through using these mysterious pieces of punctuation. We’ll start with the easy one: the hyphen.

The hyphen is used only when hyphenating words or for line breaks. The keystroke for this on Mac and PC is simply the hyphen key located on the top right of the keyboard next to the plus/equals key.

The en dash is longer than a hyphen and shorter than an em dash. It gets its name from being about the width of a capital letter N. An easy way to remember how to use en dashes is that it reads like the word “to” although an en dash should never replace the word. This tip works for me because it’s used to indicate duration such as “January–March”. En dashes can also be used with a compound adjective when one of the adjectives is more than one word. An example would be “pre–Vietnam War period”. The keystroke for this on a Mac is the option key with the hyphen key. For PC, hold down the alt key and type 0150 on the number pad.

The em dash is the longest dash and is about the length of a capital letter “M”. It’s used when there’s an abrupt change of thought and in place of a colon or parentheses. Check out the second paragraph of this post for an awesome example of how to use em dashes. The keystroke for this on a Mac is the shift key with the option key and hyphen key. On a PC, hold down the alt key and type 0151 on the number pad.

Onward designers! Dare to be dashing with your grammatically correct dashes!