I came across this article tonight which has some great keyboard shortcut tips for Mac users. I don’t usually just share articles but this one is useful :

10 Coolest Keyboard Shortcuts You Never Knew About from Mac|Life

I was growing tired of the old site design so have installed a new, cleaner layout from http://www.flexible7.com.  I want to test it out for a few weeks and get some opinions.  I will probably be tweaking it a bit but the main theme is there.

Please do let me know what you think – whether you’re a new visitor or a returning visitor.  I have no problem with reverting back if the general opinion is that I should!

Just a note to mention that I’ve finally added a couple of new print designs in the gallery.

I don’t usually post links to other blog articles but I saw a post on urbanghostsmedia.com this morning that really caught my imagination and I wanted to share.  While upgrading Notting Hill Gate station this year, vintage 1950′s advertising posters were discovered telling us to ‘Travel Royal Blue’ and ‘Wonder where the yellow went’ with Pepsodent toothpaste.

This is right up my street.  I love these posters and they serve as a great source of inspiration with their bold colours and fun artwork.  Unfortunately, these wont be available to anybody to view, the area is completely inaccessible but will be left intact.

I will definitely be storing these images they’re just fabulous!  I can almost see and feel the hustle and bustle of 1950′s London in this photo.

Read more (www.urbanghostsmedia.com)

I was just taking some time to look at the designs over at LogoPond when I accidentally opened another graphic design web site from what I mistook for an innocent LogoPond link.  This very clever web ad invites the viewer to select from a variety of design styles or items – business cards, logos or websites.

You can see it here, beneath the actual LogoPond navigation with three ‘options’ in green and the rest in standard black/white.  Now as someone who has made a huge number of web banners in the past I have to complement the designer on his/her style, very clever, albeit very crafty!

Click on the image to view it in full size

It’s prompted me to keep a look out for other sneaky web ads.  I’d love to see some others, please share some that you have seen.

I have been thinking about font costs lately and am starting to wonder how other graphic designers approach the purchasing of fonts.

Are you a bulk buyer taking advantage of packages?
A person who buys only when you need a specific item?
Someone who impulse buys when they see something nice because ‘it’s bound to be useful in the future’?
Maybe you only use free commercial use fonts?

Perhaps you fall into more than one category.  Also, do you always use the same resource or shop around?  What are your favourite font sites?

Please leave a reply to share your answers and opinions.

Ok time for a small geekiness part of me to come out of hiding!  This isn’t mine, it was taken from a post on a forum over at estetica design forum but I just had to copy and share it here.  I just love ‘You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth‘ and ‘you need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off’ because they are SO true!

They made me laugh – let me know which ones relate to you or which just made you chuckle!

• You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at the Airport
• You watch the superbowl just for the commercials
• You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away
• You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas
• You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes
• You are completely immune to subliminal advertising
• You look upon a well-designed project with either sympathy OR extreme jealousy
• Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse
• You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride
• You practically take caffeine intravenously
• You have an appreciation for everything unique
• You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.
• “You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.”
• “You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”.
• (even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)
• “You look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am”.
• “You need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”
• “…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”
• “… when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what the mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..”
• Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.
• You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.
• You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.
• You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
• You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.
• You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
• Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
• You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
• You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
• You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.
• You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
• The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”
• You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.
• The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.
• Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash
• You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.
• You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.
• You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
• Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
• And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…
• You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
• Apple+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.
• You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.
• You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.
• You know that rivers are more than just water.
• Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop
• The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!)
• Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.
• Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.
• You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.
• when your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.
• when you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.
• If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.
• When deciding on the right crop doesn’t involve a choice between corn or wheat.
• You’ve considered naming your children things like ‘Kern’, ‘Pica’, ‘Bézier’, and ‘Serif’.
• When you think watching “Helvetica” is the best thing to hit DVD, and even worse, when you know that the name Helvetica was derived from the Latin word for Switzerland and that it was originally called Neue Haas Grotesk.
• When you can’t remember the word “fog” and instead refer to it as the “Gaussian Blur.”
• When you write essays, papers, and letters with InDesign.
• When the best use for papyrus you’ve seen was on toilet paper.
• You look forward to seeing PMS
• Printing your wedding invitations cost more than the dress, engagement ring and honeymoon combined
• Your favourite scene in American Psycho is where they discuss business cards
• You test the stock and weight of EVERY piece of paper you come across
• You always travel with your X-Acto kit
• Your idea of a hot night is joining the serifs of two Baskerville L’s
• When your mousemat is also your placemat
• You’ve named your fish Gill Sans
• You physically can’t get a Tattoo containing wording, for fear of the kerning being incorrect, or the characters being just that little bit different.
• You cringe when text formats on a web page such that it has widows EVERYWHERE.

You may have noticed that over the last week or so I’ve been having problems with my rss feed.  This occurred at the same time I upgraded to WordPress 2.9.1.

I was getting various errors but mainly the ‘Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at line…’ error.  I tried everything from removing spaces in php files to reinstalling feedburner plugins.  Still, nothing seemed to work.

Today I thought I’d test something else.  I went to my WordPress dashboard settings, clicked permalinks and hit save.  The default option was already selected.  That was it – and for some reason my feeds are working again.

I don’t know why it went wrong or how that helped exactly as I’m no WordPress expert but thought I’d share my experience in case anybody has encountered the same issues.

I wanted to write about a logo designer or design company who I consider a big player in the design world, so I chose to write an article about Wolff Olins.

Wolff Olins are a company of 140 people founded in Camden Town, London by Michael Wolff and advertising executive Wally Olins.  Although the original founders left the company in 1983 and 2001 respectively, the company has continue to grow and now has offices in London, New York and Dubai.  The company have an impressive portfolio with some massive clients many of whom have hired Wolff Olins to transform their image from the past into the present, or even the future.  No article about Wolff Olins can be written without a mention of what is probably their most notorious logo – I am talking of course, about the design for the London 2012 Olympics.

London 2012

This logo has caused a lot of controversy and at a cost of £400,000.00 it most certainly had Britain talking.

Like it or love it, this is the London 2012 Olympics logo.

According to various reports this has even caused a number of epileptic fits which of course, added to the controversy.  If you look carefully you can work out the ‘2012’ that makes up this logo, but you do have to look carefully and I have spoken to lots of people who completely missed that.  Worth a years work and £400,000.00?  I’m not sure, and many people have their own designs they would rather see in it’s place but personally I am used to it now and really…it’s not that bad!

To avoid me diving into a full article about the Olympic logo, I will move on to some other Wolff Olins designs.

Sony Ericsson

This logo embraces the shiny, glossy web 2.0 style that of course has been around for some years now (which is another subject all together).  The circular image was used as a replacement to a heart within a successful Sony Ericsson £8m marketing campaign in 2006/2007.

Tate Modern

Another logo that caused a degree of controversy due to its apparent disregard to common design ‘rules’.  Instead of simply designing one logo, Wolff Olins designed a number of logos for Tate which caused some to question the strength of branding with multiple logo versions.  The logo also lacks sharp defined edges preferring instead to go with a blurred or smudged and even fading effect.   The question here is doesthis unusual design style cause the logo to be more memorable?  The thing to remember here is that the art gallery in question is one that displays modern and sometimes controversial pieces.  The logo also gets people talking about art, so with that in mind perhaps the logo series is just perfect.

Unilever

Wolff Olins wanted to turn Unilever into a brand that would be noticed, not one that would simply be lost amongst packaging.  To achieve this, Wolff Olins had the idea of ‘adding vitality to life’.  If you look closely at the Unilever logo, you can see how the design team used the vitality thought process to create a logo from many individual pieces.  They have taken items from nature, sun, water, air, earth, science, food and used them in an inspired way to create the large ‘U’.  Each element is designed in a simple but effective way and combined so well that the overall effect is rather beautiful.  Simply glancing at this logo doesn’t allow full appreciation of the design.

MacMillan Cancer Support

MacMillan cancer nurses have been a invaluable source of support for many years to those suffering with cancer.  Now, MacMillan have taken on a new role to help families of those dealing with the disease, and to make cancer an openly discussed subject, rather than something people just whisper or are afraid to mention.

The rebranding introduced not a logo, but a complete style.  The new MacMillan campaign sports informal text and simple imagery, creating a relaxed feel and removing any notion of stuffiness that may have previously existed.  This is a rebranding case which supports the organisation in opening up to a whole new group of people and creates a fresh feeling.

In terms of practicality with this brand, I can see no instance where the large, chunky and casual lettering would not lend itself to a great marketing design.  The possibilities are endless.

Wolff Olins have taken a fair amount of criticism in the past, but to continue as a forward thinking company which breaks moulds and set trends, this may well be unavoidable.  After all, trend setters can never walk past without a few heads turning.