Author archives

Involve your designer early

After running into this situation a few times now, I thought I’d write up a post about the importance of involving a designer early on in a project. I think this really applies to anyone who’s going to be responsible for adding form or functionality to a product.

It’s easy to see a designer as someone who just “puts a face” on a finished project and, in fact, I’ve been called in at the end of a 2 year project and asked to “make it look presentable” in a week! While not impossible, this approach generally produces work that hasn’t been given its due thought and research. If you’re going to put 2 years into a project, wouldn’t you like to have it look its very best?

An analogy I like to use is building a house. I wouldn’t make sense to have the builder put up a solid frame, lay plumbing and pour a driveway before talking with an architect about where the kitchen is going to go or how the light from the window will affect the heating and cooling needs. There is a partnership that needs to exist so that the work can be done efficiently and effectively and the expertise of both professionals can inform the decision making process.

What I propose is a method of working where you involve your designer early on in the process so that they have a full understanding of the work that’s being done as the project advances. Plus, the advanced notice will give more time for design research and execution to ensure that the project looks its best and the final result is the most appropriate option. A designer might also be able to mention things along the way that you might not otherwise think of. For example, maybe the final brochure would be really effective with “before and after” photographs. If you don’t think of that ahead of time, you’ll miss your chance!

By David Gnojek | August 3rd, 2010 | View Comments

Museum design as inspiration

I just recently returned from a trip to Washington, DC which seems to be, in my mind, the museum capitol of the world! It’s a wonderful city and I found lots of interesting sources of inspiration for my design work. One that I wanted to share came as I visited the variety of museums around the city. It would seem obvious that you could find inspiration in the master works of classic painters, but what I really noticed was in the design of the museums themselves. All of the plaques, posters, captions, and videos are designed to convey small bits of information quickly for people who are walking from case to case and from exhibit to exhibit. They have to be very direct to get the visual and written message across in such a small amount of time, much in the same way that a well-designed presentation to an audience has to be.

The take-away for me was this: if you are needing some inspiration for designing an upcoming presentation, take a trip over to your local museum and see what kinds of things they do to solve that problem. You’ll find a wealth of type and image combinations that are effective at drilling right down to core information while still giving meaningful insight into what you’re learning about. If you happen to go to Washington, DC, I highly recommend the US Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Ford’s Theater to see really effective museum design in action!

By David Gnojek | July 6th, 2010 | View Comments

A Word About Printers: Part 3

I’ve written before about printing (Part 1 | Part 2) to demystify some of the terms and procedures involved in getting your brilliant ideas out on paper. In this third installment, I wanted to briefly talk about sustainability and printing which is an important topic, especially in recent years.

The first question to ask when printing sustainably is “does this need to be printed at all?” A few months back, Aaron talked about the efforts of the Center to reduce our consumption of paper. We realized that for some of the materials that we provided, a paperless solution was cheaper and more efficient for us. This allowed us to redirect money and provide higher quality printing on the pieces that DID need to exist physically. Next time you’re running handouts or printing emails out, think if it’s necessary or if a paperless solution might work just as well. I love this quote: “I want to see things earn the privilege to be objects.”

I love designing and producing print pieces and I hope print never dies off. Call me old-school, but there is something special about holding something in your hand vs. reading it on the computer (think of holding a record album instead of an mp3 file!) So, for times when printing is necessary, there are things that you can consider to make the process more environmentally sustainable.

Many printers offer recycled paper stock, which looks and acts just like regular paper, as well as corn/soy-based inks. There are also paper vendors that operate using “green” energy like the wonderful French Paper Co.

There are also many “finishing” options available in the industry like laminating, coated paper, and vinyl printing. There are certainly times when these are necessary, but it’s important to stop and think if it’s critical enough to have your documents sit around for hundreds of years into the future! If you can get by without the use of vinyl and plastics, that’s another sustainable choice for you to make.

We all have a part to play in the environmental impact of our professions and many of the problems can be reduced or solved using simple means. For printing, options are available, so don’t hesitate to ask your local printer what they can provide and I’m sure they’ll be happy to help!

By David Gnojek | June 1st, 2010 | View Comments

Self-assignments

I think most of us can agree that it can be difficult to break new ground when submersed in a day-to-day work routine. Tasks have to be completed and often those tasks follow certain time-tested procedures to complete them. This makes for great efficiency and productivity, but it can make it challenging to push the boundaries and explore new things. One great (and low risk) way to practice a new skill or explore a new idea is to give yourself a self-initiated assignment.

Recently, San Francisco designer Alex Cornell posted his reflection on a personal assignment in which he created a series of YouTube videos. He had been creating videos of his music for quite some time, but wanted to introduce new graphics and a fun storyline to go with them. He recognizes the pitfalls of the project, including confusing some of his viewers and struggling with the time commitment, but he was able to immerse himself in a project that was totally his own and that was personally satisfying to him.

I think one of the most interesting ways to start a personal assignment is to establish some restrictions that will keep it small and manageable. For example, next time you have to make a PowerPoint presentation, try keeping every slide to 2 sentences or maybe use one large photograph per slide. If you are interested in photography, shoot only in black and white (on your digital camera!), only take photos of animals, or shoot only things with straight lines for one day. Writers might pick one object on their desk every day and write a poem about it or maybe write a review of a new gadget you just got. Perhaps all of your dinners for the week contain broccoli or have all raw ingredients (think Iron Chef here). There are endless possibilities! Whatever the restriction, stick to it and see what interesting results come of it. Don’t be afraid of “failure” since you have nothing to lose!

Journals or blogs are great ways of documenting personal assignments and even if you never share it with anyone, you might find that some of your experimenting will find it’s way into your professional work and add new life to whatever you’re working on. Have a personal project or idea to share? Tell us about it in the comments below!

By David Gnojek | May 4th, 2010 | View Comments

The Art of Sketch

Today’s post is a quick thought on the importance of sketching and I’ll start it off with a quick story . . . On the first day of class in design school, I was given one of the more challenging tasks that I’d had up to that point in my life. The assignment was this: choose a bird, a dog or a horse and draw 200 unique images of that animal that are due in 2 days. All of my classmates and I just looked around the room wide-eyed for a few minutes until we realized the clock had already started! During the first hour or so, I found myself drawing out the beaks, feathers, legs and wings of my birds, adding texture, shading and even a little color here and there. After standing back and looking at the five drawings in front of me, I realized that even without sleeping, I’d never hit 200 at this rate! It was a very real (and stressful) exercise in quick sketching, a skill that I still use on a daily basis today.

What, then, is the value of sketching? For me, it’s very easy to get lost in the details of a project, particularly when it’s new and unexplored territory. I might get fixated on one or two versions of something that may initially look OK, but disregard the other 9,998 out there that might be a better design solution in the end. Sketching allows me to flush out many, many ideas very quickly, so I can cast my net wide at the beginning and then start the process of weeding out ideas until I find the 3 or 4 that are worth developing further.

I think a lot of people would be surprised (and disappointed!) to look in a designer’s sketchbook. Instead of beautiful renderings and clever, tight illustrations, they are often full of shapes, dots of color, scribbled notes and other sloppy remnants of visual brainstorming. The beauty is in the process and that’s the critical step that’s often underestimated in projects of all types. If you click the image to the left, you’ll see one of many pages that I sketched during a recent website design. That’s right, it’s a ballpoint click pen on ruled paper and there are no references to color, typefaces or photographs at this stage. In fact, I’m probably the only person who can derive any meaning from them, but that’s really the point!

Sketching can take on all forms and isn’t limited to drawing. Perhaps you create several rough outlines of a presentation you’re going to give. Maybe the next lesson plan you create could go in 20 different directions and you need to find the best one. What if you recorded 10 voice mail greetings and then picked the best one instead of re-recording the same one over and over again? I think it’s a valuable skill to be able to look at the big picture and then focus your thinking down from there. It might just help you hit on your greatest idea yet!

By David Gnojek | April 13th, 2010 | View Comments

From mediocre snapshot to powerful communication: digital image editors

I’m sure many of us have had the experience of taking a great photo of a friend, family member, landscape, or other photo-worthy scene only to find that the final image contained red eye problems or that the color was shifted a little too warm or cool. Although this is a frustrating scenario, it’s not necessarily the end of your image! I wanted to pull together a few options out there that people can use to do basic editing so that their images look great and are ready to print, upload online or embed in their PowerPoint or Keynote presentations for professional development.

The default software that comes to everyone’s mind is Photoshop of which I’m a huge fan and use on a nearly daily basis. However, I’ve been using Photoshop for about 8 years now and it’s taken me about that long to learn only a fraction of what it’s capable of doing. The steep learning curve coupled with the several hundred dollar price tag is the main reason that I don’t recommend this software to people who need just basic editing capabilities. Adobe has released a few other options for people to consider that are much more user friendly including Photoshop Elements (a stripped down version of it’s big brother) and the surprisingly full-featured online service www.photoshop.com.

Most online photo services also provide many basic image editing features like color correction, cropping, contrast, etc. Some of these that you might consider are Flickr, Google’s Picasa, Aviary’s Phoenix, or Kodak Gallery (for printing). There are many others, too, but these are a few I’ve used.

There are also inexpensive software packages for both the Mac and PC that are worth looking into. On a Mac, iPhoto usually ships with the system, so you probably already own it! On a PC, there is a good program called ACDSee. There are also several image editing apps for the iPhone that allow you to edit the images your camera takes right in your palm.

All of these programs allow you to have more creative control over your images and can help you turn a mediocre snapshot into a powerful communication tool. I’m not endorsing one program over any other, so if you have other thoughts or experiences with good image editing tools, feel free to sound off in the comments!

One big tip I’d like to pass along: always make a copy of your image before you go in and edit it. You never know when you’ll need to get someone you’ve cropped out of a photo back!

Update (announced as I was writing this): Google welcomes Picnik

Update: Here’s another online image editor that’s been getting good reviews called Thumba.

By David Gnojek | March 2nd, 2010 | View Comments

The 2010 kucrl.org Redesign

After a (not so) brief hiatus from writing, I’ve been welcomed back to write a monthly post for the Stratepedia blog to share some design-related thoughts and useful tools. For my first post back, I wanted to give a quick overview of a major project that has been in the works for several months now – a complete redesign of the www.kucrl.org website!

Julie Tollefson, CRL’s Director of Communications, and I headed up the redesign effort. What prompted our initial thinking on this was the rollout of a new web design template at KU last year. As part of the university community, we wanted to meet the design criteria set forth by KU. We were also finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the day-to-day content updates that were coming to us from all reaches of the Center. For this reason, we decided to look into using a CMS (Content Management System) to help us organize our content and make it easier for others to help us keep things up to date. After doing some research, we decided to go with ExpressionEngine because of it’s ease of use, vast flexibility, and great user support.

Once we decided to go ahead with the redesign, we had to go through and organize all of KU-CRL’s web presence to figure out how it should all piece together. We created a 9 page sitemap that allowed us to look at what we needed, what we didn’t need, and what we wanted to improve upon. We also hoped to incorporate some new features of the web into our site to make it easier to communicate with the public about the kinds of things we do at the Center.

So, without further ado, here’s the website before our update:

And here’s the site after our update:

A few of the new features we implemented are:

A rotating slideshow featuring important KU-CRL news stories at the top of the front page
A news blog with RSS enabled
A front page listing of all 6 of our research divisions
An events calendar
A page to showcase featured KU-CRL people, projects, and stories
Searchable research article and staff presentation listings
and visible links to the KU-CRL Twitter and KU-CRL YouTube accounts

We also wanted to consolidate some of the content and clean up the design, allowing for more white space and easier navigation.

Head on over to www.kucrl.org and take a look for yourself! We welcome any feedback you might have, so feel free to leave us some comments at www.kucrl.org/feedback.

I should mention that this is the first stage of a broader web site upgrade for nearly all of the KU-CRL affiliated websites, so I’ll be posting again next month with more information on other parts of our site as well as some more thoughts and tips on design.

By David Gnojek | February 2nd, 2010 | View Comments

Streaming Video Capture

I just came across a website that will allow you to capture streaming video to your computer from sites like YouTube or Google Video. A possible use for this might be for video clips that you’d like to use in a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. Please keep in mind that there are copyrights on most of the published content online, so use this tool with respect for the work of others.

http://keepvid.com/

By David Gnojek | January 16th, 2009 | View Comments

LIFE Magazine’s Photo Archive

One of the top buzz items across the internet this week is that LIFE Magazine, with the help of Google, has scanned and archived millions of photographs from its archives and put them online. This collection includes photographs and etchings dating back to the 1750s and by the time everything has been put online (only about 10% is there now), there will be more than 10 million photos available worldwide. The archive includes photographs taken by some of the most well respected photographers in history including Margaret Bourke-White and Robert Capa .

Of course, this isn’t the first time a valuable image collection has been put online. In early 2008, the Library of Congress put a section of their collection online and invited Flickr users to help them add tags to the photos. Shortly thereafter, several other institutions followed suit and helped create the The Commons on Flickr.

These online resources are a priceless way to learn more about history and culture that was previously only available in museums. Now, people all over the world can enjoy these treasure troves of photography.

By David Gnojek | November 19th, 2008 | View Comments

Font Management

For me, fonts are kind of like t-shirts. They tend to accumlate over time and, although they’re all fun to wear, I don’t necessarily need all of them them in my closet all of the time. As a designer, I use a ton of different fonts for the work I do (and clearly, metaphors as well!) If you’re loading a lot of fonts into your system every time you start your machine, you may find that it needlessly slows your computer down. That’s why I’ve been trying out some font management software lately to help alleviate the problem. These software programs allow you to install your fonts into their interface and then turn them on and off as you need them. They can also scan your computer for damaged fonts that might be causing problems.

If you are a Mac user, there is a program that comes pre-installed on new machines called Font Book. To be honest, I haven’t had much luck getting this to work the way I need it to. If you want to give it a try, I’d definitely recommend reading the help documentation before giving it a shot.

Another program that I’ve been using for a few years now is called Extensis Suitcase (now called Fusion 2). This piece of software is relatively inexpensive ($99) and works extremely well. The interface is very simple and it even interacts with some pieces of software like those from Adobe. They have software available for Mac and PC.

A third option is one that I just started using a few days ago. It’s a free program called Linotype Font Explorer X created by the Linotype Font Foundry. The interface is similar to iTunes and the setup is extremely easy. They even have a “store” so you can buy fonts that you need directly from them much like buying music in iTunes. After just a few days of using it, I’m extremely impressed.

If any of you have had similar problems or successes with fonts, be sure and leave a comment below!

By David Gnojek | November 13th, 2008 | View Comments