Put the Genius back in the wall

Regardless of what you think about Elizabeth Gilbert or her notorious book Eat, Pray, Love, I insist that you listen to this TED conference presentation. I don't normally insist that anyone do anything but, as a creative person (or a person who hopes that today will be the day that I do something truly creative), this presentation fills me with optimism that I might one day be able to do something great. I hope it inspires you to keep "doing your job" and that it will be a creative one.

Andrew Loomis Illustration Manuals

Escape form Illustration Island (with the help of many other enthusiasts) has collected five out-of-print books on illustration techniques from Andrew Loomis and made them available as PDF files. They are truly amazing examples of anatomy for artists, color theory, perspective and so much more. Go. Now. Download and study these fabulous works!

Advice for design students

Frank Chimero's advice for design students:

Design does not equal client work.

It’s hard to make purple work in a design. The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel. You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true. This never stops. Most decisions are gray, and everything lives on a spectrum of correctness and suitability.

Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, and the worst ones are the ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we’ve come to expect it. Eat breakfast. Realize that you are learning a trade, so craft matters more than most say. Realize that design is also a liberal art. Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling. Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, and it smells great.

If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

To read the rest of Frank's advice, visit his blog.

Masters Workshop in Italy

This summer the School of Visual Arts is offering a two week seminar studying design and typography in Venice and Rome – the birthplace Western typography. Students will study typography and design history and put into practice what they learn, observe and encounter by drawing type, working with letterpress type and collaborating with fellow designers and teachers on contemporary design projects.

Before&After Magazine

Before&After is a print and online magazine that is full of honest-to-goodness tips for the layperson on building better design. Started in 1990, this site (and publication) helps put real world design tools into the hands of people who may have to design without ever been given the training like real estate agents and small business owners.

Individual articles are sold for $5 each and a subscription for PDFs is $24 for 32 articles. A print edition of the publication is also available as well as books. Each article is around 20 pages and many look like tips and tricks that might even help a seasoned designer rethink their approach to a design problem.

Online Photography Course: Ways of Seeing My Self

Photographer and blogger Susannah Conway is offering her Unravelling: Ways of Seeing My Self as an online course. Using non-traditional approaches to self-portraiture through photo and writing assignments, Conway hopes to inspire students to challenge themselves creatively to see their world and themselves in a new light – to reconnect with who they are and where they want to go next. The next course starts Monday, May 4th.

Help for the web curious

As a designer in today's economy is it best to know as many skills as possible. As a print designer who jumped to web design, I know it can be difficult to learn the ins-an-outs of a new medium. For those of you in NYC, the AIGA wants to help. On March 30, 31 and April 1 from 6-8pm, the AIGA will offer a FREE seminar called Moving from Print to Web. The seminar plans to cover the basics from workflow to software to programming language.

Type Metrics, I Love Typography-style

In the past, we've told you how great I Love Typography is. They demonstrate their greatness in their post on the inconspicuous metrics of characters in a font. Its filled with the kind of information and visual details that a thousand design textbooks have neglected to address. While fonts look completely gridded and geometric, they stealthily break all their own rules in order to create the visual harmony we call readability. ILT gives the inside look at this subtle art.




This is the kind of detailed view of characters that make me appreciate and admire the master of type design even more. Go forth and marvel.

SVA: Study Design in Italy

School of Visual Arts is offering an opportunity of a lifetime for designers to spend two weeks in Italy. Spend a week in Venice and a week in Rome studying the typographic landscape in the country reknowned for its art.

The program is an opportunity to study a variety of artistic disciplines including architecture, fashion, literature, theater, and even cuisine. Collaborate with area design organizations and businesses to create projects and products for publication and production.

Interview and completed application are required for acceptance into the program. Applicants must be seniors in a design or art program or a design professional. For more information and application, visit the SVA site.

Plugging the Firm, The Intern Edition

Hey, all you art school students out there!

Hallmark offers PAID summer internships. It sounds like one of the best internships out there and I speak from a place of authority as my internship consisted of grunt work and subservience.

To apply, you need to get your application in by March 16, 2009. This .pdf file will give you more information or you can go directly to Hallmark's Creative Careers site to apply. For more information about Hallmark and the Kansas City area, check out the Cre-a-tiv-i-ty blog.

Strobist Lighting 101

Kirsten and I were talking about taking "good pictures" today and I immediately started extolling the virtues of Strobist. This is a blog and a Flickr group surrounding the idea that good lighting makes good pictures -- and the best lighting is "off-camera". Both Kirsten and I were trained in photography through fine art and journalistic techniques which both tend to poo-poo using a flash as the realms of Sears portrait studios and Glamourshots. A few years ago though, I discovered The Strobist and learned that in order to get the shot, sometimes you have to employ "any means necessary" and sometimes that means using a flash.

So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm attaching the introductory video from Strobist's Lighting 101. Even if you never intend to purchase a flash, a shoot-through umbrella or a bounce, you will now have a better understanding about what is needed to take a good picture and might help next time you have to work with a photographer or wonder why someone else's photos look better than yours.

TypeTips from the FontFeed

While snooping around on FontShop's website I came across a couple other nuggets I just had to share. The FontShop FontFeed (get it in your RSS now!) has a series called Type Tips that contain really great information for improving your typography skills.

The beloved Erik Speikermann offers his seven tips for not looking like an unprofessional dunderhead. Trust him, he knows things.

A personal favorite set of tips, Alternatives to Helvetica helps you get out of your san serif font rut.



Finally, there is a whole piece on a series of ads for Dexter that are recreations of magazine covers. Its a great experiment in recreating the look of a magazine cover, making it look like a true parody and not a farce. Its also a chance to play guess-the-font used on these covers. I'm particularly fond of how well the ads replicated the design quality of each of these publications.

There are several other tips that make a trip into the FontFeed archives worth a few minutes of your time. They never cease to impress me.

Questionable Characters

Ben Barry and Frank Chimero have started a blog called Questionable Characters in an order to answer some of the many questions that they've been emailed by students. They provide a he said/he said reply to the questions and have opened themselves up to additional questions, both serious and silly. Sometimes its just nice to have a place to ask those questions you've wondered about regarding our profession but felt too ashamed to mention at your last AIGA function like "Do you use a non-repro blue pen and if so, for what?"

New Yorker Cover by Bob Staake

Once again Bob Staake shows that its not the tools that make the illustrator, but what he can do with them. Bob created the latest New Yorker cover using Mac OS 7 and Photoshop 3.0. Pretty amazing.



[Links via Gizmodo via Boing Boing via Bob Staake]

Rethinking Libraries

For her senior thesis project, Valerie Madill reconsidered how design could make using the library more engaging and easier. She used half-wrap labels that would unify a particular subject by color as well as provide a consistent place for relevant information about each book. The result is a more sensual, desirable library experience that could draw more people to libraries and make find material more intuitive.

As library geeks, this is the kind of design and creative thinking that makes P+P giddy.

Today's Inspiration

[Illustration by Ken Riley from Today's Inspiration]

In many of our posts, we talk about our love for vintage book covers, matchbooks and record albums but an endless source for really great in-depth information about American illustrators of the past is Today's Inspiration. In lengthy posts, topics range from a specific genre of illustrations to a particular illustrator or to a studio or school that trained illustrators. On occasion, I've considered posting one or two images from a particular post but its seemed to provide such a narrow representation and my writing couldn't possibly give the full breadth of the original. So, if you have an interest in the history of illustration in America as a curiosity or as a career ambition, visit Today's Inspiration. Bookmark it. Add it to your RSS. read it regularly. You'll be glad you did.

Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type

Next to the Elements of Typographic Style, Thinking With Type is a book no designer should be without. Ellen Lupton also created a web site to make the resources from the book readily available to everyone. The site offers quick inspiration and clarity about the fundamentals of type design. This is a great resource to pass along to students or a subtle reminder to a fellow cube-dweller who might be mangling type.

Web Design Tips from Coroflot

Coroflot, the online portfolio service, has collected Six Things to Never Do When Designing Your Online Portfolio.

Here are the highlights:
1. Don't think you're a web designer unless you actually are.
2. Don't think you're a graphic designer unless you actually are.
3. Don't go nuts with the branding thing.
4. Don't write like a 12-year-old, or like a used car salesman.
5. Don't expect it to be perfect immediately.
6. Don't re-invent the wheel.

They followed it up last week with Six Things to Always Do.

1. Make sure you are in there somewhere.
2. Get your own domain.
3. Be broad. And deep.
4. Make sure at least some of your images are professional quality.
5. Pick–and stick to–a consistent visual style.
6. Make it easy to get additional information.

To be honest, Coroflot's Creative Seeds is full of a lot of great tips and advice for designers and illustrators from all career levels. Worth a peek!

Frank Chimero shares his process

Frank Chimero kindly took the time to show the steps he goes through to create a finished illustration. From sketch to preliminary drawing to final piece, he carefully documents his process in images and text. Thanks, Frank, I believe that by sharing our processes and tips, we can all become better artists and designers.

Danny Gregory: An Illustrated Life

[Sketchbook page from Peter Arkle]

Danny Gregory, author of Everyday Matters and The Creative License, is working on his third book, An Illustrated Life: drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators and designers. I've been a fan of his loose, carefree drawing style since I first acquired a copy of his personal journal, Everyday Matters.

The Creative License was a great first step to getting me (a designer) to be committed to developing my own drawing skills. Like so many other designers, I never felt like I drew very well so I never drew very often -- which I'm sure you're aware is a self-fulfilling prophecy. An Illustrated Life will provide a chance to peek into the sketchbooks of artists great and small (or famous and not-so-famous, depending on your point of view).

To find out more about Danny's new book and his philosophies on art and journal-keeping, check out his podcast and check back with his blog to find out when An Illustrated Life will be available for sale.

[Tip thanks to Illustration Friday]