February 20, 2008
This article was published in .Net magazine before Christmas last year. I was asked to write a small article on making the leap to working for yourself (as it was still fresh in my mind). It’s by no means a definitive guide (for example, there is no mention of the legal aspects of setting up and running a company). It’s also aimed at a UK market, but a lot of this will work no-matter what country you’re in. Most of it is actually just common sense.
It’s been eighteen months since I went freelance, and almost six months since starting my small design studio. I’m no expert. So, this article documents what I did, and when. It also features a little interview with our very own Colly.
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October 15, 2005
Semiotics, loosly speaking, is the study of signs. Simple enough. What becomes difficult is defining what a 'sign' actually is.
When we think of signs we think of the things on the left there don't we? We think of something visual like a signpost. But, 'signs' are made up of many different components - words, sounds, body language and context - all of which combine to create a visual language which help us understand something, be that the way to the beach, or if somebody doesn't really like us the first time we meet them.
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August 09, 2005
The third installment to this series is going to be a little different. The previous installments have been talking through some of the basics of grid construction using ratios as the primary device. They've also dealt with grid construction for print media. Unfortunately, as designers for web media, we don't have some of the luxuries as our print designer collegues.
Rather than go through tutorials (I'll be covering these in the last two installments), I'll be using this installment as a platform to discuss some of the challenges and rewards of designing grid systems for the web.
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June 26, 2005
Following my article in Design in Flight I've received countless emails to elaborate, in some way, on how to correctly design grid systems. It's quite a complicated field and so distilling it into 'Five Simple Steps' has proven to be quite tricky, so much so that I thought I needed to write some sort of preface before we get on to the first part.
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May 18, 2005
The final part in this series, I'm glad to say is a little more cut and dry than the last in the series. It's more about historical typographic theory but with a simple, practical guide to ensuring a balanced use of typeface weights.
Typeface weight, and the choice of weight, is perhaps one area of typography that to most designers is simply a matter of choice. That choice is dictated by answering a design problem which is aesthetically, or content, motivated. What many designers do not realise is that there are rules which should govern the choice of weight - a typographic pecking order - which when followed, aids the designer's typesetting and can produce stunning results.
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May 09, 2005
I've struggled a bit with the latest addition to this 'simple steps' typography series. Mostly because it's not so simple and it's a bit more of a grey area than the previous three articles.
Typographic hierarchy, put simply, is how different faces, weights and sizes of typefaces structure a document. Some of these hierarchical devices are well-established conventions, such as cross heads and folios, so I'm not going to touch on them in this post. To keep it simple I'm going to concentrate on two things - size and weight. The first of which is size.
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April 12, 2005
Well, here it is. After a few weeks in February, several late nights and a lot of help from my wife and the Design in Flight's Editor Andy, my article "Feeling your way around grids: Making sense of the Golden Section when designing grid systems." has been published in the latest edition of Design In Flight.
Design in Flight is a fantastic PDF magazine and a bargain at just $3 an issue, which is about ?2. There are some superb articles in this issue from the likes of Khoi Vinh, Suw Charman,
Veerle Pieters and
Molly E. Holzschlag.
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October 01, 2004
Just posted the first the series of the Grid Articles. The first in the series - Why use a grid? - explains just that. The rest of the grid series:
- Why use a grid?
- A grid for the printed page
- A website grid
- A purists view on website grids
- Where next?
Any comments about the latest, and upcoming, articles can be posted here.
I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for