Tag Archive for 'Design'

Stumped

As some of you might notice, I’ve tweaked this site quite a bit. The most important tweak I did are the fonts, I think. We all know how nice those Mac OS X fonts look like, and I figured I had to use them on this site (since most good-looking sites/blogs use them anyway). Well thankfully they’re available for Windows PCs. I suggest you download these fonts here, install them and refresh your browser.

I’m still meddling around with Wordpress 2.5 and my new iPod Touch, so that means no comics yet. I’m stumped anyway.

What a mess.

I should probably start cleaning up my work pc desktop. Srsly.

Desktop

I Wanna Be A Graphic Designer!

Ok enough of this. I’ve been doing professional graphic design for at least 10 years now, and I get frustrated each time I see someone whose knowledge of art and design is limited, doesn’t have a clue on typography, and without the least bit courtesy to use the grids that Adobe has graciously included in its software, calling him or herself a graphic designer.

These people are intent on getting the latest Apple gadgets, imitate latest fashion trends and spew designer jargons so that they’ll look cool and be worshiped by the ignorant masses as a graphic designer. I’m sick of this. I get really irritated when these people try to educate me about design! If you’re trying to educate me about Gestalt, you’d better make sure you’ve at least 10 years of professional design experience, and a portfolio to back you up! And if you insist that visitors to your site rotate their scroll wheel around a thousand times until they eventually get to the bottom of your website to view/read whatever you want them to, then you’ve failed as a designer.

Please do not shame the nature of graphic design. Please don’t. And stop embarrassing yourself.

Here’s a little something I found. Perhaps these n00bs can learn a little something.

Below is a list of very common mistakes that so called ‘graphic designers’ make.

How many of these do you do regularly?

  1. Take constructive criticism too personally
  2. Not knowing any famous designers in particular Paula Scher, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand and not knowing WHY they were famous
  3. Not Staying Up on Current Events and Design News
  4. Not Owning the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook
  5. Charging too Little for Design Projects
  6. Not Using Contracts to Cover Your Butt
  7. Not Setting Deadlines for Projects
  8. Doing Spec Based Work (If you like it you can pay)
  9. Not Asking for a Down Payment before Starting a Project
  10. Using Poorly Designed Fonts from Free Font Sites
  11. Using Display Fonts as Text Fonts
  12. Using the Comic Sans Font
  13. Using too Many Different Fonts in One Design
  14. Forgetting White Space is your Friend
  15. Not Sketching Before Designing
  16. Not Using Rulers on Screen
  17. Relying Totally on the Computer, Especially for Kerning
  18. Using Photoshop Filters After Your First 6 Months
  19. Using Low Resolution Web Images for Print
  20. Not Designing Logos in Vector Format
  21. Making Logos Unable to Reproduce Well Small
  22. Forgetting to Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
  23. Not Saving Frequently
  24. Not Backing up Files on an External Hard Drive
  25. Not Getting Enough Sleep!
  26. Stealing or ‘borrowing’ Other Peoples Work
  27. Using the dash quotation marks instead of true quotation marks.

If you are doing the following (below) I wouldn’t call yourself a ‘graphic designer’, well at least not a professional one and would recommend doing some more research into the subject area.

12. Using the Comic Sans Font
13. Using too Many Different Fonts in One Design
19. Using Low Resolution Web Images for Print
20. Not Designing Logos in Vector Format

/ENDRANT