Blog Posts - Graphic Design

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 Javas

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

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 ti

If you’ve been designing logos for brands or working in print design for more than the last 7 years or so, you likely felt the earth shake a bit in 2010 when Pantone introduced their Pantone Plus color matching system, which was developed to help printed PMS colors reproduce more accurately on computer displays. It was a move meant to better connect on-screen color with on-page color, but it came with unfortunate side effects to the average designer’s workflow. The worst of these side effect

Ahhh the logo. Even the word itself is unique. In order to be successful in business, every company will need a unique logo to represent their brand and to build equity with. Brands come in many forms such as companies, products, organizations, groups, causes, places, achievements, events…all things that need to be readily recognized through a single graphic element. It is the graphical tip of the brand iceberg, the spearhead of identity programs, the symbol of all that is good about your busi

A few months back our agency began working with a new client called “The Little Bottle Company”, a small business that sells custom arrangements of, you guessed it, little bottles. They were interested in boosting their online presence and jump-starting their brand awareness in the Alamo city with a Facebook campaign. The Goal: Get Page Likes! In all honesty, their arrangements are actually quite impressive and fun to look at. They’re also made of alcohol. Our team kicked off the project w

Fonts. They’re literally everywhere you look, on everything you read. Many times, they are a core component of graphic design and website development. Type purists like to point out, “You can’t even design without type.” And that’s true, assuming your work requires something to be read. With our eyes so trained to recognize words thousands of times throughout the course of any given day, it’s no wonder that the legality of font usage can be so easily overlooked. It’s almost akin to