Ask Cecily: Design Conferences

Post originally appeared on the Iguana Inc blog.

If you could attend any design conference, which would you pick and why?

Um, all of them? Any of them? I'm not picky!

If I HAD to choose one, it would probably be Adobe Max because it seems to be the most comprehensive and it's a big name event that lands big name speakers. It also offers good variety in design topics and doesn't just focus on web or interactive, like many others. As if all of that isn't enough to sway my decision, the website for Adobe Max had a LOT more information on it and was easier to navigate, which tells me (perhaps incorrectly) that it is more organized.

Other conferences that would be in the running: SxSW, How Design Live, and TED (TED is borderline if it even counts as a design conference...)

Ask Cecily: Web vs. Print Design

Post originally appeared on the Iguana Inc blog.

Do the core design principles vary when it comes to web design vs. print design? When you sit down, do you approach the project differently if it's for print or for the web?

First, I think I should clarify that print design and web design are no longer two completely separate entities. Ok, back up… people use "web design" interchangeably when they mean designing a website AND when they mean something designed for use on the web. For the purposes of this question, we are going to assume that web design means designed for the web (because I HATE designing websites!).

All of the core design principles apply to both applications because at the end of the day, the majority of things designed for print will end up on the web and vice versa. It is, however, important to know all of the design specifications upfront so that you can create the document correctly the first time around. If it is for web, the resolution will likely be 72 ppi and for print it should be 300 dpi. A web document would use the RGB color mode and a print would use CMYK. For web, a design doesn't extend beyond the required dimensions, but print design often requires bleeds for the printer. Most designers have been through the headache of a project starting out being for web (thus it is designed at a low resolution) and then suddenly gets changed to a print design, forcing the designer to go back and rebuild the design at a higher resolution.

The design approach I take has much more to do with the type of project than print versus web, although that is still a factor. If I am sitting down to design a business card, I know that I have limited real estate, I have a variety of paper choices, I can print on one or both sides, and the end goal is to give out your contact info. On the flip side, a poster design would require a different approach because there is usually a larger end goal and it won't go home in someones pocket. For another example, when I recently sat down to design envelopes for a client's thank you cards, I knew that I had 2 sides to work with and I wanted the design to wrap around it, which isn't something you deal with when designing for the web.

Typography Class with Cecily

Post originally appeared on the Iguana Inc blog.

How did you first get interested in typography? 

College is really when I learned to love and appreciate typography. In high school, everyone types their papers in Times New Roman, and when yours doesn't meet the 3-page requirement, you switch it to Typewriter and BAM! all of the sudden your paper is twice as long!

One of my first projects in Desktop Publishing (the initial computer-based design courses in the graphic design program) was to go through every font on the computer, type out every character, print it out, and turn it into a little reference book for yourself. That way when we needed to choose a typeface, we could look through our reference book and make a conscious choice. Either Font Book on the Mac didn't exist then, or our teachers purposely didn't tell us! From there we would have a couple assignments per week that involved taking a page of the newspaper or a magazine, laying a piece of tracing paper over top, and figuring out all of the type specifications on the page including font, weight, point size, leading, etc. 

After Desktop Publishing, I took Typography I and Typography II, which as you can guess, is an in-depth study of all things related to type. In addition to memorizing characteristics of various typefaces, we also had to create our own, and I ended up creating 2 very different typefaces. When you really study type, you learn that it is so much more than text on a page; when used correctly, it can be more expressive that a picture!

Care to share a recent type project of your own, and someone else's you admire? 

Right now I am really into hand-drawn lettering as a style, which starts with drawing the letters by hand and then vectoring them into a work of art. I took a Skillshare class taught by Neil Tasker on the art of hand lettering, and it was amazing and incredibly enlightening. 

My completed Skillshare project.

One of my (recent) favorite typographic pieces of work is by Dylan Roscover, formed by actual Tweets about the product.