Blog Posts - Graphic Design

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

It’s 2016, a new year — new opportunities and a chance to reflect on our successes of the previous year. Brought to mind during these moments we spend in observance of the passage of time are the tools and processes in which I spend the majority of mine. 2015 was a year of great progress for TXC. All of it for the better. In an effort to continue to embrace change that has served us so well, what follows is a set of considerations for the designer in the New Year. 1) Make Adoption Routine Pr

… or, That One Time Word Didn’t Make Me Want to Walk Off the Job and Sell Used Tires for a Living. There are a handful of phrases that make designers want to tuck their tails between their legs and run home to mommy: “Let’s fill up this white space to take advantage of the entire spread.” Or, “Can we make this pop more?” And, perhaps the king of them all, “Can you give me this layout in a Word document so I can make edits myself?” Ah, Microsoft Word. The one piece of software t

You may remember that in an earlier post I talked about “How To Get The Most Out Of Your Designer” and the four building blocks to helping me be the best designer I can be for you. I outlined a brief methodology of design and we took a look at the type of information I, as a designer, want to review and study before the design process begins. Next, I want to explore the steps that follow, which is sometimes where the REAL fun begins! Once discovery sessions, organizational goals and creative