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 Monday, 18 February 2002
Graphics Teaching Recommendations.
A friend who teaches graphic design and multimedia at one of the top Sydney colleges—Enmore Design Centre—emailed the other day to ask for my recommendation about how and what to teach to Photoshop students.
Bearing in mind that new graduates need to be up with current trends, as well as have a good grounding in all aspects of design theory and practice, I told him the best thing he could do was first lay his hands on a copy of Attik’s latest printed opus, Noise Four: Future Lab, Culture Life, Reality Archive.
Out now: Noise Four—Future Lab, Culture Life, Reality Archive.
Then I told him to go out and check out 6 Friends of ED books, as they have recently expanded their subject area way beyond Flash:
The reasons for my recommendations? The Attik design group is one of the most successful and financially viable global design firms, with offices in Sydney, London, San Francisco, New York and beyond.
Design students need to aim at something concrete while still studying, and one way of doing this is to plan on being accepted into an exciting and cutting-edge design agency on graduation. Then they can continue their education on the job.
Attik is one such, and there are others including The Designers Republic and Tomato who also publish books of their work. But Attik is the only one with an Australian office. I am not a huge fan of their imagery—too British, too dank, dirty and dark for my Australian eyes, but I appreciate their sheer professionalism and consistency.
9:28:59 AM 
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Why Do I Love Type So?
Aside from the sheer aesthetic pleasure of beautiful type, which I used to revel in when visiting the British Museum’s books and manuscripts department, there is the question of presentation.
As a visual person who is also a writer, I appreciate having my words presented in the best way possible. The way to do that is to select well-designed and evocative type, then do great typography.
Whenever I can, I like to write the words using a page design product rather than a text editor, and seldom if ever do I use a word processor. Usually I write in a text editor and page design software simultaneously, trying out new words and then seeing how they look and sound.
8:56:18 AM
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What Is…
What is a screen font, you ask? Good question; I’m glad you asked that.
A screen font is one that’s designed using pixels, for maximum legibility onscreen. Used correctly, they have razor-sharp edges. That’s achieved by choosing not to anti-alias the font when you are setting it as a graphic with a product like Photoshop or FireWorks. If you choose smoothing instead, then a screen font will lose its sharpness and begin to resemble non-screen fonts with their fuzzy, aliased edges that do not align precisely with your monitor’s pixels.
Sample of Mini-7 set at
10 pixels and 20 pixels.
It seems far too few web designers know about the existence of screen fonts. I’ve seen many web sites lately containing plenty of tiny aliased graphic type that borders on being unreadable. Screen fonts set at the exact size they are designed for, with anti-aliasing turned off, are the solution to this needless problem. Using them will also considerably reduce the weight of your graphic text, as GIFs containing it can be reduced to just 2 colours.
Sample of Tenacity set at
10 pixels and 20 pixels.
8:29:38 AM
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More On Type.
Further to yesterday’s type theme, there’s a new type foundry I recommend you go and visit on the web.
It’s called MiniFonts.com, it’s run by English designer Joe Gillespie of Web Page Design for Designers fame, their prices are excellent, and their fonts even more so.
There’re a few font foundries offering screen fonts, most of them pretty good and some of them free, but MiniFonts has the best range I have seen. What I particularly like about their work is that they always include accents and accented characters. The web is becoming less dominated by English-speakers, and so we cannot assume web designers only need to use English language font sets.
8:21:26 AM
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