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One of my favorite movie inter­ac­tions regard­ing the topic of morals and ethics is in the movie Elec­tion and goes as follows:

Jim McAl­lis­ter: Dave, I’m just say­ing this as your friend: What you’re doing is really, really wrong… and you’ve gotta stop. The line you’ve crossed is… it’s immoral… and it’s ille­gal.
Dave Novotny: Jim, come on, I don’t need a lec­ture on ethics.
Jim McAl­lis­ter: I’m not talk­ing about ethics, I’m talk­ing about morals.
Dave Novotny: What’s the difference?

What is the dif­fer­ence? That is the atti­tude a lot of design­ers take, whether it is brows­ing stock pho­tos or design annu­als. Tak­ing a photo, copy­ing a design con­cept or lay­out. Is it wrong? Is it ille­gal? Who cares?

Morals define per­sonal char­ac­ter, while ethics stress a social sys­tem in which those morals are applied. While some­thing may be wrong morally, eth­i­cally or both, it does not mean that it is ille­gal (although in most cases it may well be). (more…)

On Sep­tem­ber 27, I attended AIGA New York’s sold out event titled “Your AD Here: Is Design Reshap­ing Adver­tis­ing (Again)?” at FIT’s Katie Mur­phy Amphitheater.

The talk was sup­posed to dis­cuss design and it’s impact on adver­tis­ing. Ask­ing the ques­tions of why so many adver­tis­ing agen­cies are start­ing to hire graphic design­ers instead of tra­di­tion­ally trained “adver­tis­ing art direc­tors”, and why so many clients are turn­ing to design agen­cies to cre­ate their adver­tis­ing cam­paigns. (more…)

When you ini­ti­ate a project with a designer you need to do more than say I need a logo and my company’s name is [fill in the blank]. You need to know who you are sell­ing to, what you are sell­ing to them, why you are sell­ing to them, and why they will want to buy it. Typ­i­cally, this infor­ma­tion is pro­vided in a ‘Design Brief’. (more…)

Graphic Design is not like engi­neer­ing, law, med­i­cine or even plumb­ing, where you need to be cer­ti­fied in order to prac­tice the trade. Any­body can walk into a sta­tionery store, buy pre-fabricated busi­ness card paper and print their name and address on them, and call them­selves a graphic designer. Because of this, there are a LOT of design­ers out there. If you are in need of design ser­vices, your job is to qual­ify who the GOOD graphic design­ers and choose the one who is smart, cre­ative, and under­stands your needs. (more…)

Part 2

The process of design­ing is the abil­ity to con­trol the inter­ac­tion of ele­ments within a defined space. Under­stand­ing the prin­ci­ples of how to orga­nize ele­ments within this space is the sec­ond step to becom­ing a graphic designer. (The first is to be able to define the struc­ture of the ele­ments themselves.)A sin­gle image within a sin­gle defined space exerts a cer­tain amount of inde­pen­dent force. It instantly cre­ates pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive space. It defines itself and what it is not. The design­ers goal is to achieve an aes­thetic order within the space that makes visual sense for the over­all goal of the piece. The more ele­ments you intro­duce the more dif­fi­cult this task becomes. Below are five visual con­di­tions that an artist needs to be aware of when design­ing, mak­ing sure that the proper amount of each (or lack of) is not only appro­pri­ate, but also con­tributes to the mean­ing of the piece. (more…)

Part 1

When you build a house there are basic mate­ri­als that you need in order to com­plete the project. The basic sup­port struc­ture, fas­ten­ing mate­ri­als, roof­ing mate­ri­als, pan­el­ing, etc. Inside each cat­e­gory there are a mul­ti­tude of options (ie; your sup­port struc­ture could be alu­minum or wood 2×4s, I-beams, bricks, cement and re-bar, etc.).

Graphic design is no dif­fer­ent. In design we believe that there are 6 major cat­e­gories of mate­ri­als that are used when devel­op­ing your final piece. How you use these ele­ments will be dis­cussed in Part 2. In this arti­cle I will begin by dis­cussing the six cat­e­gories; Line, Value, Color, Shape, Tex­ture, and Space. When you under­stand the cat­e­gories you will have an eas­ier time iden­ti­fy­ing the choices you have within each. (more…)

Whether in print or on the web, typog­ra­phy is one of the key tools to every designer. Under­stand­ing the ter­mi­nol­ogy and his­tory of type can only help you in the long run of your career.

Every indus­try has a lan­guage of it’s own, and every cer­tain terms in each can be inter­preted dif­fer­ently by each indi­vid­ual per­son. Typog­ra­phy is the same. There seems to be two dif­fer­ent camps of manip­u­lat­ing type; in print and on screen. Some terms enjoy unan­i­mous approval, oth­ers are pro­pri­etary. I will try to help you under­stand both and point out some gen­eral “rules” along the way. (more…)

Graphic Design is a com­mer­cial art form of select­ing and arrang­ing visual ele­ments (typog­ra­phy, images, sym­bols, col­ors) to com­mu­ni­cate ideas for a pur­pose (con­vey infor­ma­tion or a mes­sage to an audience).

It is a col­lab­o­ra­tive dis­ci­pline: writ­ers pro­duce words and pho­tog­ra­phers and illus­tra­tors cre­ate images that the designer com­bines to com­plete the visual mes­sage. (more…)

Color The­ory is one of those sub­jects that takes years to fully under­stand. Some peo­ple have even turned it into a career. Here I will try to cover some of the basics the­o­ries of Color The­ory and show you some ideas you should think about when devel­op­ing designs of your own. (more…)