Design is about doing Letter. Word, Sentence, paragraph

The new brief is a live competition  linked to a new HOW book being published.


The Submission guidelines


ELIGIBLE WORK
Any design/art that has a typography focus. Posters, brochures, logos, stationery, annual reports, web sites, magazines, advertising, packaging, t-shirts, custom typography, custom fonts, you name it, we want it. There is no entry fee.

PLEASE SEND
Please send a high-res print quality digital file (see below for guidelines). You may submit as many entries as you like. Please be sure to complete a separate entry form for each submission. To send printed pieces please pack prints carefully. All prints are non-returnable.

DIGITAL FILES

• 300 dpi resolution (or vector)
• Minimum size 4 x 5 inches (8 x 10 inches preferred)
• Only TIFF, EPS, JPEG and PDF files accepted
• Illustrator, InDesign and Quark files NOT accepted
• Any Fonts included must be vector (outlined).

We are not responsible for color-correction of digital files.

DEADLINE
Early entry deadline is January 21, 2011. Final deadline is March 30, 2011. Upon publication, designers whose work is selected for the book will be notified.

SHIPPING
Package prints well for shipping. If you choose to mail a CD/DVD, please label disc with your name/company name and file names. Color prints must accompany the disc and must be labeled with file names. Please ship using a trackable service such as FedEx, UPS, Certified Postal Mail or other priority service to ensure your package arrives on time.

SEND TO
Denise Bosler LLC
C/O Type Book
704 Old Swede Rd
Douglassville, PA 19518

Questions: typebook@allabouttype.com




Background to HOW


The HOW website


The goal of HOW Books is to provide advice, inspiration, tools or entertainment for creative people.

While we publish a variety of books, the common thread is our dedication to top-notch design. HOW books are intriguing, useful, beautiful, provocative—or all of the above.

Some HOW typography books




Opposites
A website which offers you the Opposite word!


Graphic / Vague, unclear, implicit


Not sure if I agree with this one!




Decorative /Ugly


Massive/ Minature


Definitions of opposite

adj.

1. Placed or located directly across from something else or from each other: opposite sides of a building.

2. Facing the other way; moving or tending away from each other: opposite directions.

3. Being the other of two complementary or mutually exclusive things: the opposite sex; an opposite role to the lead in the play.

4.

a. Altogether different, as in nature, quality, or significance: The effect of the medication was opposite to that intended.

b. Sharply contrasting; antithetical: had opposite views on the subject.

5. Botany Growing in pairs on either side of a stem: opposite leaves.

n.

1. One that is opposite or contrary to another.

2. An opponent or antagonist.

3. An antonym.

adv.

In an opposite position: They sat opposite at the table.

prep.

1. Across from or facing: parked the car opposite the bank.

2. In a complementary dramatic role to: He played opposite her.

More opposite ideas

Wet to dry

fast to slow

full to empty

Hot to cold

Fat to thin

Bold to light

Beautiful to ugly

Flowers to weeds

Digital to hand crafted

run to walk

Steam to Ice

Winter to summer

Death to Birth

Old to Young

Joy to sadness

Open Closed

Hard soft

Left Right

More Less

High Low

Front Back

In out

High Low

Inside out

Distant Intimate

Neat Messy

Simple complex

compression expansion contraction 

addition subtraction 

disruption 

repetition 

elimination 

migration 

Opposite colours are complimentary colours ie red and green, yellow and purple, orange and blue

Opposite can also be the position of something in relation to another object ie two people sat across the table from each other.

Some interesting ideas on Youtube

Dirty and clean

Some images

Tauba Auerbach

Ellen Lupton - Thinking with type

FREE ADVICE

	It is easier to talk than to listen.
Think more, design less.	Pay attention to your clients, your users, your readers, and your friends. Your design will get better as you listen to other people.
Many desperate acts of design (drop shadows, gradients and the gratuitous use of transparency) are committed in the void left by a strong concept.	Design is an art of situations.
Say more, write less.	Designers respond to a need, a problem, a circumstance, that arises in the world. The best work is produced in relation to interesting situations.
Just as designers should avoid filling space with arbitrary visual effects, writers should remember that no one loves their words as much as they do.	No job is too small.
Spend more, buy less.	A graphic designer can set out to change the world one business card at a time—as long as it is the business card of a really interesting person.
Cheap stuff is usually cheap because of how it’s made, what it’s made of, and who made it. Buy better quality goods, less often.	An interface reveals itself at its point of failure.
May your thoughts be deep and your wounds be shallow.	Design helps the systems of daily life run smoothly. Sometimes, however, design should expose the system, revealing its construction and politics.
Always work with a sharp blade. Many late-night accidents involve dull X-Acto blades. Protect your printouts from senseless bloodshed.	The idea is the machine that makes the art.
Density is the new white space.	(Courtesy of Sol Lewitt.) A strong concept can drive decisions about form, while formal experiments can lead to powerful concepts.
On page and screen, a rich texture of information can function better than sparseness and isolation.	The early bird gets to work before everyone else.
Make the shoe fit, not the foot.	Know (and use) your best time for thinking: early in the morning, late at night, or even, in rare circumstances, during class or between nine and five.
Rather than force content into rigid containers, create systems that are flexible and responsive to the material they are intended to accommodate.	Build the discourse.
Make it bigger.	Design is social. It lives in society, it creates society, and it needs a society of its owns. Read, write, and talk about design whenever you can.
(Courtesy of Paula Scher) Amateur typographers make their type too big. Experienced designers, however, make their type too tiny.	Go forth and reproduce.

What is design for screen - The fundamentals of graphic design

The fundamentals of graphic design published by AVA as a chapter about design for screen which gave me a different perspective of design for screen.

Screen designs have different physical considerations from printed design

Technological advances
Devices are getting smaller, as are screen sizes.  So where in the 80's the designer had to cope with a reduced canvas when the CD was introduced over the 12 inch Vinyl album cover, now designers have to think about limiting the number of pixels to a minimum.

As a result the layout, type and image have to work harder to communicate a message.   This has resulted in simplified fonts which are easier to read . 

An example of an APP designed for the IPhone winner of a D&AD award in 2010

Jamie Oliver 20 minute meals

Mobile Marketing / Mobile Applications
Jamie Oliver's 20 Minute Meals

Jamie Oliver and Zolmo teamed up with the objective of inspiring a new generation to cook. The iPhone presented an opportunity to create a completely new format, offering something that a TV show or a recipe book couldn’t. By successfully exploiting the contextual nature,inherent mobility and availability of the device, ‘20 Minute Meals’ put a cooking toolkit in people’s pockets that simply couldn’t have existed a few years ago. An international smash-hit, ‘20 Minute Meals’ has set the bar for cooking apps across mobile platforms.

I have been reading Steven Heller's latest book 'POP- How Graphic Design Shapes Popular Culture' published by Allworth.  He also touches on the challenges designers have faced in designing for a smaller space in the chapter 'Music Design: Think Small'.  He discusses that just in the way designers had to accept the CD packaging as standard following the Album covers demise, designers are now designing for MP3 and online platforms.Excessive typographic detail is now a thing of the past when the MP3 form demands 'simplicity, bold colour, stark image and unadorned type'.  
The new format 240 pixel square has actually led to some innovative solutions. For example by embracing technology Big Active designed The Enemy's album 'We'll live and die in these towns 'by offering an added element.  Each track change brings new track detail on the iPod screen in the format have a Train station departure board.

As I have been researching Collection 100 and think up the 100 product it has occurred to me that the record collectors love of packaging and information is missed with MP3 and iPod.  I think there is potential to develop an APP or attachment with an album which is like an interactive animated album sleeve which the viewer can unfold and open on the touch screen.  In the same way an album cover provided 'more' this cold be an added extra.

I have found this article IN THE WIRED written in 2008 about this very subject. IPod and IPhone users can actually add interactive album art and features through and App 'ITunes LP 'http://www.apple.com/itunes/lp-and-extras/ on their phone.

Television graphics

Traditionally Graphic design in TV had tended to be limited to the opening and closing credits of movies and programmes. However with the rising popularity of Chanel identification (Idents) with the introduction of MTV  and Channel 4 in the 80's, graphic content has increased.  Technological advances in graphics has led to agencies which specialise in Idents creation eg Imaginary Forces designs film credit for Hollywood.

Technology has also introduced a tool kit to solve some of these problems such as increase choice of colours can be displayed on screens.



An example of a MTV ident


                        

An example of a Channel four ident

Collection 100 - An illustrated alternative to Infographics

I was reviewing my final outcome with Jo and when she saw the Bubbles poster she was reminded of an illustration in the Basics Illustration series written by Mark Wigan called Text & image.  This is a very interesting and approachable method of recording data over a time line.

What is design for screen? Motion graphics

This motion graphic is visually pleasing to watch however the logo is not very readable.

3d logo

This one works better with a simple readable font yet the overflowing shapes keep your attention.

                                       
Print Juice from Victor Ruiz on Vimeo.

This is a good example of just using different typefaces to give a simple but effective message.  Particularly like the sound effects.  A messsage to start the New year on a postive note.  With my Moving image piece the focus was on the image and sound not the type however after seeling this I can image how I could have been more adventurous with the type.
                                        

Make it better from Sebastianbap on Vimeo.

Drive every drop campaign from Honda.  To appeal to the 'environmentally friendly' and economical audience with the earth association.  Simple visual with the drop turning into the earth.

 

HONDA DRIVE EVERY DROP from JOSE ORTIZ on Vimeo.

What is design for screen? Animation

Since attending the Moving image workshop the way I view animation has totally changed.  I can now appreciate the amount of time it takes to create even a small sequence. V WATER [viral animation] on the Behance Network

The animation from Behance  is really clever and reminds me of Take Hart, a programme I used to watch in the late 70's.

This animation is an advertising campaign for Coop Bank, quite different to the one above.  They have used paper folding and money to great effect: 

What is design for screen? Augmented reality

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or a indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality. By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real-world with a simulated one.


I found an example of this on the D&AD professional awards

Digital Advertising / Banners & Pop Ups
Augmented Reality Banner

• Add to My Library

The King loves tech but loathes printers, so when it came to Burger King using augmented reality, it had to be simple. Without using printouts, banner viewers could see a regular dollar bill turn into BK value menu items right in front of their eyes, just by using their webcams. Using facial recognition, users were then turned into the King himself. This was a tastyaugmented reality experience all within a BK banner, something that’s never been done before.

An example of how this works from Youtube

A completely new concept for me.  Really effective as it engages with a certain audience and also has the potential to become viral and spread.  

Digital Advertising / Art Direction
Recode | Decode

• Add to My Library

Saint was asked by the V&A to promote ‘Decode’, the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to digital art. Traditional art is normally created to affect you, while digital art is best when affected by you. We wanted this inclusive philosophy to extend beyond the exhibition, so we created an open-source campaign that encouraged people to recode ‘Decode’. We worked with digital artist Karsten Schmidt to create an interactive art application that invited people to create their own digital masterpieces. The best recodes were used to promote ‘Decode’ in an integrated campaign that blurred the lines between product and promotion, and helped attract over 235%of original footfall targets.

Credits

• Art Director
  David Gamble
  Rodrigo Lebrun
• Creative Director
  David Gamble
• Copywriter
  Rajeev Basu
  Peter Brown
• Flash Programmer
  Ali Kember
  Nick Watton
• Designer
  Dave Price
  Shaban Siddiq
  Sharon Chong
• Developer
  John Cleveley
• Digital artist
  Karsten Schmidt
• Design Agency
  Saint @ RKCR
• Project Director
  Chris Jefford
• Project Manager
  Ellen Chng
• Planning Director
  Mark Sng

I have listed the credits to demonstrate what a huge diverse team is needed to develop a Digital Design project such as this.

The V&A website 

There is an art gallery of Digital designs of people who have interacted with this promotion, making art available to the wider general public.  However this type of promotion relies on perhaps a younger more technically minded audience.  The gallery was displayed on the London Underground so in this way it reached a wider audience.  This tool was used for promotion, education and to engage.

What is design for screen? Digital advertising

As a starting point for this I looked at the D&DA professional awards.  The first that I clicked on was an Ikea campaign for the new Malmo store designed by Advertising Agency Forsman & Bodenfors. An inspired use of Facebook! 

"To advertise the opening of the new IKEA Malmö store we created a Facebook profile for the store manager Gordon Gustavsson and uploaded 12 showroom pictures to his photo album. The first person to tag their name to a product in the picture won it. All pictures reached the limit of 30 tags per photo within minutes of being posted. This resulted in the pictures reaching thousands of people through Facebook’s newsfeed function. When users looked at the photo and read the comments they became aware of the competition, and of course, they also gotto see how beautiful their homes could be if they went to IKEA."


The link to the video explaining the concept is here.  This was clever as it not only engaged by offering an incentive (the prize) but they had a 'sitting' target audience in mind.  Also by keeping the profile on Facebook real people were more likely to hook into the whole concept.


Below is another fantastic IDEA and HOOK.  So Graphic Design is very much about creating unique IDEAS and HOOKS. This campaign attracted applications from 34,684 people from 197 countires and it all started with a simple job advert.  This is the campaign created by Creative Directors James Burchill and Nancy Hartley.  They managed to create a Global phenonmem which resulted in the whole world's eyes on Queensland (unfortunately this would have been a disaster after the current news with all the flooding -Timing is everything!).  The whole concept also relied on the fascination people have with reality TV as the competition and winner was televised. The Best Job in the World


The next camapign concept is new to me given my only sporadic use of Facebook - I had no idea companies/films were designing digital games to advertise their products!  This game was called 221B, was to advertise the new Sherlock Holmes movie.  They even put a code in the closing credits of the film to ensure those hooked on their game went to the cinema asap to get the code.  Again this was targeting a specific Facebook age group audience. Biggest Boxing Day opening in history. 221B

Book works - further research

Before I decided to do an Illustrated book of red objects I did speculate about playing about with red lights and also perhaps focusing in on just the red in photographs leaving the remaining black and white.  Some of the pictures I experimented are in my Design practice

I found a photographer called Ellie Davies I liked who used lighting to great effect: