New Year, New Web Design Goals
Yep, it's December 31st. Which means tomorrow everyone will be kicking off the new year with gloriously over-zealous resolutions for 2009. And why not? It's good to challenge yourself, to set ambitious goals and get pumped up about progress. I'm big on self-improvement and growth, so I always make "in the year ahead" lists for myself. This year I'm skipping the weight loss and exercise goals. Being 6 months pregnant is a great excuse for laziness and extra chocolate. Instead, my list includes a whole bunch of ideas for career growth.
Finding a Job in the Design Field
I recently had the opportunity to give a talk to senior design majors at my alma mater and review their individual portfolios. A few weeks before the event, I was having a hard time wrapping my head around how I was going to conclude the presentation. I realized that a recap of my personal design career saga probably wouldn't be the best closing. Instead, I decided to focus on two things: the easiest way to get a portfolio online, and the best job sites that cater to designers.
My Typography Talk: Typography is the Foundation of Good Web Design
The web can be a daunting typographic place for both designers and developers. Current limitations with web typography can frustrate designers who are accustomed to a wide range of typographic options, while many front-end developers find themselves facing a struggle when refining the details of type to be more legible during build-out. The web is a perfect example of designing under constraints, and while we are on the way to a web with less limitations, there are plenty of small things a designer can do to enhance typography now.
After writing several conceptual blog posts and giving similar presentations, I took foks' feedback and decided to put together a talk that demonstrated many of the vague concepts of web typography through step-by step examples.
To best illustrate my points, I chose a website that was in sore need of a "typographic" makeover. Knowing I needed to choose a site that was indisputably in need, I scanned my memory and recalled one I came across last year while shopping for a Christmas gift for my sister. With the body-copy typeset in papyrus, this particular website offered a unique service of a printable spa gift certificate, (which was exactly what I needed being that we live in different locations). But FINDING that printable gift certificate was difficult because of the site's illegible copy and undefined hierarchy.
In order to demonstrate the power of typography, I decided to redesign the site only using typography. Below are three excerpts from the redesign that demonstrate my three "pillars of web typography:" legibility, hierarchy, and expression.
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Create A Style Toolkit, Save Time and Mental Energy
Whether you're designing 20+ mockups for a complex web application or 5 templates for a basic marketing website, all of your layouts share basic components. And if you're working in Photoshop, you find yourself copy and pasting those components over and over again as you mock up each page. I found myself wasting way too much time dragging things around in the layers palette. (Because you're organizing all your layers into nice neat folders, right?) If the project you're designing is big, you'll inevitably end up with hundreds of folders and multiple Photoshop documents to keep in sync.
In my constant quest to simplify everyday tasks, I've started creating a "style toolkit" PSD file to go along with each new project. As I create reusable elements, such as a header font treatment or a button style, I drag them right into my toolkit PSD. I keep this document open on my second monitor so I can easily grab things when I need them. If you don't have a second monitor, you can keep it minimized and pull it up when you need it.
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Photoshop Type Time Savers
The following two Photoshop type tips are small, basic, and quick, but may save you a few minutes here and there if you're not using them already:
- quickly convert between point type and paragraph type
- change fonts on multiple layers at the same time
Do you have other time-saving type tips? Share them in the comments.
* Note: Photoshop CS3 is the version being used in this demo.
2008