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Font soup

October 13, 2009 in Marketing Communications, design | No comments

fontimage1Fonts come in all shapes and sizes. Add a pinch of Serif or sans serif, a dollop of roman, bold, italic, and then stir in a little condensed. You can assemble any combination of these like bold italic, condensed light roman…to get your perfect recipe. It’s wonderful, yes, but as you scan the list of ingredients and delve deeper into the pot, you quickly learn how complex, and unpredictable, fonts truly can be.

1. The first cut.

Imagine. You navigate the myriad of typefaces and find that perfect font, the one you absolutely can’t live without. It’s tall, trim, with just enough edge, but not too showy to take away from the message. But, hold on! Don’t get too attached to that pretty face just yet. Unfortunately, all fonts are not created equal.

2. Read the label.

You see, font designers, including those at Adobe, and Bitstream, personalize fonts. It’s like a signature. The serif turns up, it turns down, maybe it disappears altogether when it becomes italic. Or perhaps it is a bit fatter, squattier, or even thinner. Don’t assume your Century Roman is the same as client X, or client Y, or even mine. They may be subtle changes, but different nonetheless. Make sure we all have the same font, from the same foundry, so we see the same thing.

3. Salt or Pepper? Mac or a PC?

OK, so you chose the perfect typeface, you have the same creator, but wait, are you a Mac or a PC? That’s right, many fonts are platform specific-Postscript and TrueType on the PC, Postscript or T1 on the Mac. And they don’t like to talk very much. But you need a little of both, perhaps? Well, thanks to the recent collaboration between Adobe and Microsoft, thousands of fonts now work on both systems. This new cross-platform font file format, called OpenType®, makes translation back and forth between systems easy.

But, beware. Not all fonts are available in OpenType yet. The good news is that there are some great converters available, including one I particularly like called FontXChange® from FontGear.

Fonts. They’re enough to send any designer into a tizzy, never mind the average PC user! Happy Fonting!

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How does messaging affect color, type, and imagery in design?

April 14, 2009 in Marketing, Marketing Communications, design | No comments

I recently had coffee with one of my all time favorite creative guys, Paul Ciavarra. After meeting nearly 15 years ago, Paul and I ended up living in the same town. After catching up on each other’s lives and families, I asked Paul to lend some insight into the question: What affects your creative choices when working with a client? Without hesitation, “corporate messaging” was his immediate reply.

A company’s positioning, its core messages, and how it wants to be viewed should be the driving factor in all creative decisions. That includes color, type, and imagery, across any delivery medium—online, print, video, etc. Whether you have the benefit of working with a creative team or you need to “go it alone” as a smaller start up operation, here are some tips for making your creative execution work.

Before you begin any creative work, take the time to:

1.    Define your corporate positioning. Clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and where you fit in your market.
2.    Define your company’s personality. Are you aggressive or compassionate, youth-oriented or mature?
3.    Define your audience. Are you talking to financial executives, consumer gamers, or software engineers?

Once you know who you are and what image you want to portray to your target audience, then you can move onto developing a creative platform that can be used across the spectrum of communications tools:

1.    Choose 3-5 core colors that fit your corporate image. Don’t choose purple because YOU like it. Think about the look and feel you want to convey to your audience. Are you eco-friendly? Then you may choose browns, greens, and yellows. Financially-focused? Then perhaps darker, muted colors are more your style. Aggressive, hip? Then you’ll probably gravitate to clean, crisp, bolder colors. Regardless of your personality, sticking to 3-5 colors from a complementary palette that you repeat across the spectrum of marketing tools is a good start in designing a consistent image.
2.    Use 3 complementary typefaces that are applied consistently, for example, in headlines, body text, and accents. As a conservative company you may take a traditional approach and choose a bold, sans-serif font for headlines, an elegant, serif face for body text, and a simpler italic font for captions. But, if your business is more progressive, you may opt for a complementary selection of all sans serif faces. Note that if you are working with a designer he/she may take the liberty with more, but for the novice this will keep you out of font overload. With thousands of typefaces available, and the advent of desktop publishing it’s easy to mix and match and quickly distract the reader from your message.
3.    Select imagery that reflect your personality and supports your messaging. The choice between photography and illustration, stylized or direct approach, can sometimes be subjective. However, try not to influence image selection with your own preferences. Think about what would be best communicate your message to a customer. Is it important to show a piece of hardware or product packaging that will be recognizable to a consumer? Or, do you need to invoke an emotion with your audience that is best conveyed through artwork?

Regardless of the color, type, or imagery choices you make, the important thing is to remain consistent in your use of these individual elements across all of your marketing materials. And, be cognizant in your selection that all colors, and in particular, typography, translate well in traditional print, digital print, online, and video applications.

Thoughts, comments, any additional tips you’d like to share? Let me know.

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Do you see what I see?

February 4, 2009 in Writing/editing | 2 comments

For whatever reason I’ve been blessed (frankly, sometimes it feels like cursed) with eagle eyes. No matter where I go, or what I do I see typos, bad grammar, and misaligned words and images. I can’t remember reading a book where there wasn’t a typo. I drive down the road and see them on highway signs. I see more typos at the movies when the credits are rolling at the end. With all the people listed in the credits not one of them is a proofreader for what they’re scrolling on the screen? And, I see them on Web sites and in blog posts on a regular basis. Why is it that no one else seems to notice these obvious mistakes? Could it be that no one else really cares? If that were the case I would end this post now. But I do believe that most professionals do care. So, below I’ve provided 7 key proofreading techniques I use, to help you in your next written or graphical endeavor.

1. Step forward then back. Reading your copy from left to right, beginning to end, as your readers will helps to ensure your prose makes sense. However, reading that same copy from right to left and bottom to top helps keep you focused on individual words, rather than sentences, to ensure those words are spelled correctly and that punctuation is used properly. Start at the end of the document and work your way forward for best results.
2. Turn it upside down. If you need to align text, numbers, or images, a simple way to check the alignment is to view your page upside down and from each side. Think this doesn’t work for electronic documents? Well think again. Sure, you can’t easily turn the page upside down when viewing a Web page. But, you can print out the page (see step 6 below). By viewing the page from different angles it takes the focus off of the content and puts it onto the visual aspects.
3. Take it one at a time. Don’t try to proof for every type of error at once. Create a list of what you need to proof for and reread the document, watching for one type of error at a time. Look for spelling, then capitalization, punctuation, titles, subtitles, columns, math, and pagination. Check for line spacing, alignment of columns, captions, font sizes and styles, color use, and rules. Check that captions match their images. Then look at the document again as a whole to see that it all fits together.
4. Look it up. There are wonderful reference books and tools available, even for the novice writer. I never leave home without my Chicago Manual of Style, The Merriam-Webster dictionary, and The Associated Press Stylebook. These tools also have online versions that you can use to personalize for your specific needs. Don’t forget to use spell check in your word processing application too. Another nice little book you should have in your library is Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. And, don’t forget your friends and colleagues. Another set of eyes is a great tool and asset to any proofreader.
5. Print it out. Whether you are writing or designing for print or online, always, ALWAYS print out your document to proofread it. Eyes get fatigued looking at words and images on the screen for an extended period of time. And while you’re at it, cover it up. Use a blank sheet of white paper to block out text and graphics to let you focus on one line or visual at a time.
6. Read aloud and slowly. Does your writing sound the same when you read it out loud as you thought it did when you wrote it? Reading your copy aloud and slowly calls attention to inappropriate wording, pauses, and punctuation. It lets you watch for little words that are easy to miss such as “to,” “in,” “it,” and “is.” It may help to identify misuse of a homonym too (i.e., there or their).
7. Got time? When you get ready to proofread, make sure you have adequate time for the task. Proofreading takes time. There is no way around it. If you rush it, you are sure to have mistakes in your materials. It’s that simple. Also, proofreading in the morning, after your eyes have rested overnight, gives you the best chances of success.

I’ve highlighted some of the top techniques I use for successful proofreading. Now it’s time for you to get to work. Take a look at your marketing materials, Web site content, and your past blog posts with fresh eyes and the above seven techniques for successful proofreading. What do you see? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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