These are two beautiful short video pieces I recently discovered – one showing the process of creating a letterpress poster and another celebrating the ABC’s via various fonts.  Watch and enjoy!

Letter Press Video by Naomi Ross

Alphabet Font Video

Ready to get started? Pull up your website and ask yourself…

1. Where do your eyes go first?

A visitor to your website typically has an attention span of only a few seconds. That means your website must hook them in that amount of time. Make sure the first thing they see or notice is something interesting enough to buy you more time. Make sure your home page tells your new visitor succinctly and clearly “what you do” and “who you do it for.” Include key keyword phrases into your text without making the content stilted; include keyword phrases in headings, sub-headings link text, menu text and in alt tags.

I often hear the term “design style,” but I’ve been thinking maybe that’s not the phrase that should be used. Style implies that a person visually designs a certain way all the time. I think a better term is “philosophy.” I’ve always been interested in why someone designs the way they do, not how. A person can potentially design different ways visually, but there will seem to be a connection between their designs if they have a certain philosophy.
So, what’s your design philosophy? Do you have one? Do you need one? Is there really a difference between philosophy and style?

From a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philadelphia Museum of Art’s modern design collection has grown to be the biggest and best-regarded of any general museum in the country, but it has lived mostly under the radar. Even the name of the group largely responsible for that hefty trove has kept a low profile.

With the advent of cameras as a standard feature on cell phones, everyone’s a photographer. The immediacy of taking a photograph and uploading it instantaneously to websites such as Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket for world-wide distribution has flooded the virtual universe with a photographic record of daily lives. Cameras are less expensive, smaller and more widely available now than ever before. Not to mention, it is far less expensive and faster to produce an image today. The evolution of the camera is a fascinating topic unto itself – but it will have to wait for its own blog posting.

By: Laura Deutch (Instructor, CE)

From June 4 – 11, 20 national and international participants ranging from frustrated commercial designers and bankers looking to fulfill late life dreams, to me, an MFA graduate looking to hone my teaching skills, gathered on the Duke University campus in Durham, NC for an eight-day, intensive documentary workshop. Hosted by the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke, this Documentary Video Institute very skillfully walked participants through the foundational steps of documentary production: story development, interviewing, camera, light, sound and editing techniques.

How much vision goes into a design project? Most of us would agree that you have to start with a good creative brief with plenty of strategy, vision and objectives to draw from. You have to consider your target audience, the personality and tone that you are trying to convey, and the primary message at very least. Done. We’re past that. Once all the important strategy and branding objectives have been decided, there is still plenty of room for differing and unique executions. How do you start the process of building a layout? Flipping through reference books? Sketches? Start right in with a layout program? Where do new compositions come from? Is it a random process, an exercise in experimentation and discovery? Did you, the designer, know it was going to look like this when you started?