Have you every been working on a project- a poster, a flyer, an album cover- and felt like you just couldn’t find the right font? The average person will get about 50 different fonts with the purchase of a computer and operating system- which is more than enough. Most people will recognize these well known typographic choices:

But for graphic designers, these simply won’t cut it. Which is why we have gigantic collections of fonts that could be used for every imaginable project. When we are trying to convey of sense of social responsibility mixed with a youthful enthusiasm- which font works best? When we are trying to make a logo that “looks sort of like the competition, but better” which font do we use? Ligatures? Small caps? There are millions of choices out there from small typographic foundries who sell sets for less than $50 to Large Foundries whose offerings can reach up to $2,500 euros (Like this one.)

There are also many websites offering free fonts for download, though these fonts present their own problems. First of all, you never actually know if a font is free because the creator of the font intended for it to be free, or if it was somehow circulated without his or her knowledge and using it for commercial purposes could later get you into trouble. Some sites, like Abstract fonts, have recently incorporated a tagging system for the fonts they offer, differentiating between, personal use, commercial use and distribution.

Secondly, free fonts are usually incomplete, which you don’t find out until you are trying to type a word with an accent, or use numbers or punctuation marks. That’s always a disappointing moment.

But we’ve seen a new trend emerge in the past couple of years- physical objects as type. I first noticed it a couple of years ago at a graphic design conference I attended in Mar de Plata, Argentina called TMGD. Outside the venue in a grassy field they had placed large letters lit up- TMDG.



It was like a sculpture and people were immediately drawn to them. I later saw a photo of these letters used on postcards advertising events for that weekend.

I have since seen many examples of the “font as object.”

A postcard for an art show, several campaigns (Corrado Mattresses, Imagining Mozambique) from this Italian design group, and on many of the “Do not disturb” segments on Fox television.

So next time you can’t find the perfect font, think about how you might create it yourself- from clay, wood, cloth, legos, branches, metal or whatever else you’d like. Then grab your camera and start shooting. Now you can avoid having to add any 3D effects in Photoshop and the final image will be much more original. Viva “font as object!”

Tags: font as object, fonts, TMDG, typography
Posted in Graphic Design, Innovation, Just Plain Cool | No Comments »

When people think of Canada the first thing that usually comes to mind is hockey- a fervor and passion that Canadians seem to share whether male or female, young or old, professional athletes or out of shape co-workers getting together once a week. But, Canada is also responsible for inventing other great sports- the most famous of which are lacrosse, bowling, basketball and ringette.

While it is said that lacrosse was originally played by tribes of Native Americans, it wasn’t until 1856 when the dentist Dr. William George Beers founded the Montreal Lacrosse Club. In 1867 he codified the rules, shortening the length of each game and reducing the number of players to twelve per team.

In early December 1891, Dr. James Naismith, a physical education professor and instructor at a YMCA Training School, sought a vigorous indoor game to keep his students occupied during the long New England winters. Nailing a peach basket to the balcony of the gym proved to be the beginning of the now immensely popular basketball.

Whether or not you already knew this, you’ll have a new opportunity to remember each time you send off a love letter or thank you note. The latest in a new series of four postage stamps designed by Toronto firm q30 feature the original equipment used in each of the sports with an outline of the court or field in the background.

Sophisticated and timeless, the stamps emphasize the sports’ beginnings, which, as q30 principal Peter Scott claims, “are indebted to the creative thinking of their Canadian inventors.”

Posted in For Your Information, Graphic Design | No Comments »

Last week the Vancouver Organizing Committee unveiled the designs for the 2010 Olympic Tickets. So far VANOC has only release images of tickets for four of the events: opening ceremonies, curling, cross-country-skiing, and of course—hockey (pictured at left).

The designs match the aesthetics and include the design elements that all of the superbly branded Vancouver 2010 promotional posters, banners, and clothing.

More that 1 million ticket in all will be printed. Each ticket will be printed with a holographic images, a watermark on the back, microprinting, and special ultraviolet light-sensitive fibres to reduce counterfeiting. The tickets are beign printed by the same specialty printer responsible for the 1996 and 2000 olympic games ticket.

To coincided with the release of the ticket designs VANOC has released more that 150,000 additional tickets for the winter Olympic events. The 21st Winter Olympics, will be held February 12-28, 2010, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with some events held in the resort town of Whistler nearby. Both the Olympic and Paralympic Games are being organized by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC).

Between ticket sales, tourist visits, and the construction efforts VANOC estimates this year alone the Games will inject more than a billion dollars into the economy, most of it here in Vancouver.

More on the ticket designs available at The Vancouver Sun

Posted in For Your Information, Graphic Design, Just Plain Cool, Vancouver News | No Comments »

Just like in any profession or hobby, the interrelated worlds of printing and graphic design have many ins and outs, lots of important details and according to who you ask- very specific tools, processes, shortcuts and insiders’ tips. There are plenty of resources to help anyone better understand the design process and its follow-through to a great printed product- from books and magazines to blogs with tutorials and instructional videos. While all of us at Colourtime consider ourselves to be experts, any professional can benefit from a little brush up from time to time. If you consider yourself to be a desktop publishing connoisseur, here are a few tests you can take to see how you measure up:

The first one has to do with color in general and hue specifically. According to Wikipedia colors with the same hue are usually distinguished with adjectives referring to their lightness. This test shows four sets of color swatches with the varying hues mixed up between them. You have to rearrange the swatches so that the spectrum is correct.

Hue Test

Now good designers know how to effectively use typography to completely change the look of any composition. Pre-press technicians must have almost encyclopedic knowledge of fonts as they are often missing in files sent by customers and they must locate or find a suitable substitute for the missing font. This test, presented by www.ilovetypography.com could use some improvement, but it is tricky and even you experts may find yourselves forgetting the difference between script and calligraphic!

Font Test

Now, I did spend a good chunk of time looking for quizzes out there covering a variety of appropriately print-related topics such as inks, paper, composition and white space, even software shortcuts, but no luck. I did, however find what appears to a SERIOUS online review and final exam broken down into eight separate quizzes:

1. What is Desktop Publishing?
2. Page Layout
3. Prepress
4. Printing, Printing Presses
5. Elements of Design
6. Principles of Design
7. Typography
8. Text Composition

These quizzes are based on the material presented by the site itself- so their validity as the absolutely correct answers across the board certainly varies. I also found some of the questions irrelevant based on each printers’ own work-flow and preferences. One question in the pre-press section asks the difference between a contact proof, a contract proof and a press proof. In the print world you will also hear the terms soft proof, blue-line proof, final proof, customer proof…the nomenclature is essentially unimportant as long as you understand the concept. If you have a few minutes go ahead, see how well you do on the About.com final exam.

Desktop Publishing Final Exam

These tests are not only useful to those who work in the print world, they are also helpful to customers of the print world- whether you are a designer or just an independent business owner, familiarizing yourself with the print process makes you a better, more informed customer and ultimately increases the probability of the product turning out exactly how you want the first time around.

P.S.- As many print designers are also web designers, (the two worlds are converging at an alarming rate) I include a fun quiz that doesn’t actually test any knowledge on your part, rather it asks you to check adjectives that describe you from a long list of possible choices. It only takes about 3 minutes at the end of which you find out based on your answers which of the 144 named HTML colors describe you. The colors are found based on hue (how you think), saturation (how much you do about it), and lightness (the effect you think it has). Apparently I’m paleturquoise #AFEEEE!

HTML Color Personality Test

Posted in For Your Information, Graphic Design, Print Industry, Tips and Techniques | No Comments »

Though I am a graphic designer, it has only been a couple of years since I dared to identify as such. Like with many professions, there seems to be a line dividing those who dabble and those who do, and crossing that line means choosing that title above all others to explain who you are. This is especially true in the creative professions- to study or to enjoy as a hobby dance, theater, art, jewelry making, or fashion design is one thing. To cross over into the professional version can often be a grueling process with little or no wages, compromised ideals and a lack of support from friends or family.

Graphic design seems to be one of the few creative professions that earns a begrudging respect, even amongst the most conservative critics. I would argue that this has to do with a designer’s obligation to the client’s needs and demands as opposed to an individual commitment to the designer’s own artistic vision. It is precisely for this reason that many designers live a sort of dual existence. Unsure or unwilling to commit to making a living as a “true artist”- words ripe with romantic connotations – many graphic designers have stumbled upon their profession as a compromise between artist and businessperson.

That said, there will come a point in every designer’s career where they feel a certain frustration. Imagine spending hours, weeks or months carefully crafting an image, an advertisement or a logo that culminates in what seems to you to be pure perfection. However, after numerous consultations you discover that the client wants the text to be bigger because bigger is more exciting, and then they want to change the green to blue because they think that maybe one time the CEO said he doesn’t really like green and then the image of the rabbit that they had demanded should now be a kangaroo…and suddenly your perfect creation gets turned into a horrendous Frankenstein- an unsightly compromise between your skills and vision and the clients’ demands.

But, of course, that is the essence of graphic design. So what are some ways that a graphic designer can stay sane and maintain decorum? A designer friend of mine gave me some pointers. “First of all, you can’t use your work as your creative outlet. Your work is your work, and even if you disagree with what the client wants, your job is to convince them otherwise. Failing that, you’ve got to do what they want- they’re the ones who are paying.” So what does a designer do with all that bundled up creativity?

“Every designer should have their own projects on the side where they are the one making all the decisions. You could paint or draw, do graffiti, sculpt, sew, whatever you like…for instance, I’m in a band, which is where I get to let out all my feelings. I do what I want without having to worry whether or not my creative output is “commercially viable” or “appealing to upper-class women between the ages of 18-25.” I think without my band I would get really frustrated with my job.”

Not bad advice. It seems that British design firm Attik seems to agree. While they describe themselves as producing “strategically driven branding, advertising, design and interactive work,” it is their side project, Noise, that seems to get a lot of the attention. Noise is a series of art/design books they have published beginning in 1995 and whose latest edition is set to be released this summer 2008. In their own words, “Noise is the space in which we experiment, creating new avenues for us to explore. Without the limitations or practical parameters of the commercial world, we are free to harness ideas and concepts that might falter in the traditional design process. Noise is the most personal and honest representation of our talents.”

So let this serve as a lesson to all you graphic designers out there. Whether you are self-employed or work for a multi-national company- make it a priority to have a creative outlet apart from your work in which you explore ideas and concepts with the utmost freedom. It will probably make you a happier person and who knows, it may even make you a better designer…

Posted in Graphic Design, Tips and Techniques | Comments Off

It is no secret that technology helps make our lives easier- navigating in our cars, communicating with our friends across long distances, traveling to new places without getting lost. We can be assured that our Granny Smith apples will always have that same taste thanks to patented and genetically modified seeds, we can sleep easier at night knowing that the carbon monoxide alarm in the hall will alert us of any deadly gas, and we can drink our milk assured that it has been pasteurized and hermetically sealed.

However, technology is also inadvertently responsible for an absence of the human touch, as these days few things are rarely hand-made. Sentiments for loved ones are better expressed by store bought greetings cards and a myriad of fast food restaurants have made it easier than ever to avoid preparing home cooked meals. Instead of stopping by a friend or neighbor’s house we prefer to send a mass email, updating everyone at once as to how we are doing. Given the state of things it seems harder and harder to maintain that personal touch.

One small but interesting idea to combat this trend is to make a font from your very own handwriting. After all, so many of us are using the computer more and more, and handwriting all those Christmas letters or thank you notes for a wedding seems like an impossible task. What about sending out an electronic invoice with your signature confirming a received payment? Wouldn’t printing name tags for an event or labels for scrapbooking seem a lot more personal if they were printed with your own handwriting?

Now some of you may have heard of Fontographer, the most famous and most popular font creation software. Those people probably also know that the most common Bézier drawing programs used for vector output are Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. But most people probably don’t know that it was Fontographer, not Illustrator or Freehand, that was the first Mac-based Bézier drawing program back in 1986. Since then Fontographer has become an important tool for many designers, however at a price of $350 US, it has remained out of reach for most non-designers.This is where the website Fontifier comes in. With the Fontifier website you print out a template, write in each letter, number and symbol (they have a template with accents for writing words in other languages as well), scan the page and Fontifier does the rest! They show you a sample of your new handwriting font and if you like it, for only $9 you can buy the TrueType format (for PC or Mac) that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica or Times New Roman.

I went through the process and found it to be very easy. A couple of my letters didn’t turn out quite the way I had expected (a really fat capital “K” and a lower case “a” without a hole), so after scanning the page in .TIFF format I edited the few screwy letters in Photoshop so that they were consistent with the rest of my casual and spunky print, thus avoiding having to rewrite all the characters on a new template. The final result spreads the letters out a little more than my actual handwriting, but I can easily adjust that in Illustrator. I have used my new font several times already and am glad to have it as one more tool in my arsenal. So if you are looking to add a personal touch to any digital document, try this idea out and see how it feels to have a your very own font!

Posted in Graphic Design, Innovation, Just Plain Cool, Tips and Techniques | Comments Off

Awhile ago I was talking with one of my co-workers and he mentioned that he’d heard of a financial report that the shareholders actually had to bake in an oven in order to be able to read it. It sounded too good to be true- financial reports make up a large portion of a lot of printers’ business, and are generally comprised of dozens or even hundreds of black and white pages filled with dense text, charts and graphs. In short, these sorts of documents don’t seem like the kind of thing that anyone would put that kind of creative effort into.

However, it is commonly understood that while annual and financial reports are a necessary byproduct of all public companies and many privately held ones, most shareholders don’t relish reading them. In fact, Glenn Curtis states in an article for Investopedia, a Forbes media company, that when these reports begin to “clog up mailboxes across the country… a large percentage of shareholders might toss this document in the trash can when they receive it.”

So what should a company do to create a compelling financial report, one that any recipient would find intriguing, even delightful? When faced with just such a dilemma, Podravka, the biggest food company in South-East Europe decided to hire the company Bruketa & Zinić to spice up their annual report. Called “Well Done,” the report consists of two parts: a big book containing numbers and a report of an independent auditor and a small booklet that is inserted inside the big one that contains the very heart of Podravka as a brand: great Podravka’s recipes.

This smaller inner book contains blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that when wrapped in tinfoil and set to bake in an oven at 100 degrees Celsius will reveal both recipes and illustrations of the previously empty plates filled with food.

To see more photos and read in detail about the project, visit Dezeen. The comments are also interesting to read as they reflect everything from praise to a somewhat misinformed outrage about possible environmental impact. I found this project to be an inspiring piece of communication design and it has certainly created a buzz, which is of course a great form of promotion. At the very least I hope it will encourage companies and individuals to introduce and implement creative ideas in traditionally non-creative realms.

Posted in Graphic Design, Innovation, Just Plain Cool | Comments Off

Photography, whether digital or traditional, is a tricky art form. With the aid of photo editing software such as Photoshop, the possibilities seem to be limitless- changing not just basic color information such as sepia tone or black and white, but allowing the user to reach into the photo and change, enhance or diminish reflections, skin tone, back lighting, and lens flares. A photographer can make a photo appear to be a watercolor painting, a charcoal sketch or even a high tech rendering of etched glass. Colors can be flipped and inverted so that the end result bears almost no resemblance to the original image.

Of course all of these tool and tricks must be used with caution. The internet is full of sites where people show off their photography (Deviant Art, Flickr) and in viewing these you are likely to come across many cityscapes that have been converted into candy-land renditions of an acid flashback. Tweaked beyond repair, these photos are the evidence that in addition to fancy software and a fast computer, in order to produce a truly great photograph one must also possess the more traditional aesthetic mindset which naturally leads to excellent composition, interesting subject matter, appropriate lighting and good taste in general.

Now, even if you have all of the aforementioned items checked off your list, if the photo is out of focus, you’re pretty much out of luck. Of course you can try to work around it, use the Sharpen tool, make a mask and use the Healing tool on the background to increase the contrast between the two…but ultimately, even the most talented photo editor will agree, there is little to be done with an out of focus photo. And in most instances, we cannot go back to that time and place to capture that same magical moment.

This is where Adobe comes into the story, the protagonist and superhero ready to lend an able hand. Or at least, ready to tell you about a prototype of a piece of hardware that they will encourage camera companies to manufacture in order to use a new tool they would like to introduce in their software in say, 10 years. But the hope is there, and the prototype is oh-so-cool, so let’s take a look.

Adobe, most well known for programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, seems to have effectively taken over the market when it come to graphic design. With their purchase of Macromedia in 2005, Adobe now offers a slew of programs to do anything from creating animated banner ads for cell phones to complex websites to laying out entire newspapers and magazines. To stay competitive, the researchers at Adobe came up with a camera lens unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It has 19 small lenses and prisms that capture the same scene from slightly different angles in order to create a “3D photograph,” according to Dave Story in a French press conference in October of 2007.

At first glance, Story shows19 versions of the same photograph, and the difference is so slight that it makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. Then he explains, “With that we are able to determine the depth of every pixel in the scene.” Story then shifts the focus from the statue in the midground to the statue in the foreground, then again to focus on the wall in the background, changing the depth of field in a matter of seconds. Very cool. Then he keeps the statue in the midground in focus and the foreground out of focus and goes in with a “focus tool” and essentially “paints” the parts of the image he wants to be in focus. Conversely, he later goes in with an “unfocus” tool and “again “paints” the areas he would like to be out of focus. The result is really impressive- imagine taking just one photo and having all these options that before would have been utterly impossible to do with a camera alone and difficult, messy and unprofessional to do with the current tools available in Photoshop.

There are those who are drooling all over themselves waiting for this new fly-eye lens to come out on the market, and there are those are ideologically opposed, claiming that soon no one will need to have any skill whatsoever to take a decent photograph. Watch the videos yourself and see what you think. The French video is pretty low- quality but is a longer explanation and shows the “focus” tool I mentioned. The NotCot site has a higher quality video but it is much shorter and includes less explanation.

Posted in For Your Information, Graphic Design, Innovation, Just Plain Cool | Comments Off

Color is a fascinating concept and far more complicated than one might expect considering that the names of colors are one of the first things we learn as children in school. Though color theory is most often studied by artists, designers, photographers and other creative professions, how a color comes to be is actually quite scientific.

Scholars have learned that all the colors in the universe, from the yellows and oranges of leaves in autumn to a neon green paint job on a hot rod, originate from a mere fifteen fundamental physical causes. And these fifteen causes of color combined with the signals received by your eye and sent to your brain are what make us say things like “Wow, what a beautiful sunset!”

The average human eye has three types of cones that sense three different sections of the light spectrum. One cone perceives mostly short wavelengths (450 nanometers) which translates into a bluish color, another cone perceives mostly medium wavelengths (540 nanometers) which we see as a green color and the third cone perceives mostly long wavelengths (580 nanometers) which we interpret as having a red color.

Now anyone who is familiar with photo editing software will immediately recognize these three colors as those that make up the RGB spectrum. In most software of this type, a person is able to adjust the level of each color individually thus changing the overall appearance of the photograph.

The RGB (Red Green Blue) colorspace actually grew out of early experiments done in the late 1920s by W. David Wright and John Guild who mapped all the colors visible to the human eye in a three dimensional graph.As for most people, from an early age it’s hard to grasp the idea that red, green and blue combine to make white. As anyone who used finger paints as a child will attest to, combining red, green and blue paint only leads to a murky brown.

The difference, of course, is that the RGB colorspace is an additive model that combines all primary colored lights, while black is the absence of light. In the CMYK model, it is just the opposite: white is the natural color of the paper or other background, while black results from a full combination of colored inks. CMYK, the model on which the entire printing process is based, stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and K is used to represent Black, though the letter K actually comes from the word Key, as in the key line on the metal plate used to transfer the ink to the paper.

The interesting part comes when we at Colourtime try to match colors designed in an RGB space to our output colors based on a CMYK model. But of course, with the level of expertise we have, it’s no wonder the documents we print end up looking fabulous every time!To learn more about these forms of color, from “made light” to “lost light” to “changed light,” visit the Causes of Color website.

Posted in For Your Information, Graphic Design | Comments Off