Blog Posts - Graphic Design

Over the years I’ve noticed most people in our industry know how to “speak designer.” With that said there are a handful of terms or issues that routinely come up that seem to cause confusion. Here’s a short list of some of the most common offenders and how they’re defined by a designer. TYPE: Distressed: Essentially type that looks worn – think of old painted letters on the side of a 50 year old exterior wall. Typeface: A specific style of alphanumeric characters. E.g. Times New Rom

In this first installment of my 3 part series “Breaking Code: A Designers Guide”. We’ll be going over GREP Find and Replace and GREP styles in InDesign and how you can use them to take control of text with automatic styling. Every designer worth a damn realizes the power behind setting up and leveraging the power of Paragraph and Character styles. Not everyone realizes though that there is a second tier of power built into Paragraph styles that is mostly unused and underutilized. Understan

With increasing efforts to go paperless, forms for almost anything can easily be turned into interactive PDFs. Whether you start with a form made with a number of applications (Word, Excel, InDesign) or a scanned paper form, Adobe Acrobat can turn it into a useable PDF form. Here are a few advantages: The form can be used with any free version of Acrobat Reader. PDF forms can be printed, saved or automatically sent by email, significantly reducing paper consumption. Easier to read: Non-legible

It’s been noted before by my previous blog that I am an obsessive font fiend, but I have never delved into the world of font creation (though I have edited fonts here and there when a character pestered my design). As a “creative” my brain naturally gravitates towards learning new skills, new programs, and new ways to be creative, so it was inevitable that I would find my way to trying my hand at designing a font eventually, and then here we are... In approaching font design, I discovered

There’s nothing more exciting to a designer than being given the chance to create or recreate a brand, and all that comes with it: from the logomark and logotype to the brand voice, design hallmarks, grids, font families, and colors. It’s a rare opportunity to mold a brand from the ground up and to create a personality that fits a company’s beliefs and values. Once the long road of research, exploratory, presentation, revisions and approval has reached its end (and congratulations if the r

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics which are graphics that, as the name suggests, are scalable and therefore they look nice and crisp at every size and pixel density. Unlike normal image file types like JPG, PNG or GIFs, SVGs aren’t really graphics—they’re actually XML code! This allows SVGs to be easily manipulated and animated with CSS. Additionally, any live text within an SVG document is even searchable and indexable. SVG Creation is a Multi-Phase Process Much like a website, SVG

Have you ever had to create an Indesign document that incorporated form fields spread across many pages? Has a co-worker discovered you sobbing quietly at your desk while manually updating font styles using acrobat’s “Prepare Forms” tool? Well, if you said “No” or “What the H$%# are you talking about” then read no more.  If you answered “Yes!”, I’m sorry you have to work on forms, but hopefully, this will save you a ton of time.  I recently discovered a simple Javascript fo

Let’s speak about creativity. Perhaps I’m an anomaly in my field, but my relationship with the word “creative” is dubious, and weighted with baggage. Creativity, like art, is never decoration. Creativity will not “jazz up” a layout or ever make anything “pop.” Creativity should appear efficient, never seeming to employ more touch than is absolutely necessary. Discovering a creative execution though is an exhaustive task. People often conflate creativity with being removed from ra

There are fonts for just about every mood or message, and the right font can completely make your message. But, finding the right font isn't always so easy. The problem comes when you have thousands upon thousands of fonts, and your font library becomes an overwhelming black hole to search through. Up until a few years ago, I found myself using the same fonts over and over, and only using new ones I just happened to stumble upon or saw in a coworker’s design. I found it very difficult to scro

We've all heard the phrase "love it or leave it", but in the world of advertising, we prefer to  "love it AND leave it". In this case, "leave it" refers to the leave-behind, a tool used to promote your brand, portray a message and just do fun stuff!  In my position as the Print Production Manager at TXC, I’m often asked to recommend options for what I so fondly call “trash and trinkets”, with the goal of ultimately making sure those items get produced, printed and delivered on time.  Th