James West is a UK designer who earlier this year produced the booklet Fifty Designers’ Current Favourite Typefaces to raise money for people left homeless and starving in Burma in the wake of a devastating cyclone. Fifty of the world’s biggest names in graphic design agreed to take part. To James’ complete surprise, the booklets quickly sold out. Since then, he has very generously given his time to talk to me about a simple idea which caught his imagination before really taking off.
The internet is a fantastic resource if you want to improve your Photoshop or Illustrator skills. These days there is a big range of quality sites devoted to tutorials for major graphics software. I thought it was time to look at what’s available online for people who want to get back to basics and brush up on their drawing technique.
One of the challenges in designing websites is to create a layout which takes into account all the different screen sizes at which it may be viewed. Some websites use fluid layouts (where sections of content will automatically resize to fit the screen dimensions) to get around this. Not all designers want to work with fluid layouts, however. I have compiled a list of ten websites which are designed to work at small or medium screen sizes without using fluid CSS layouts, but which don’t look lost in a sea of blank space on a larger screen.
Can you remember your first-ever design job? Whether it was the first piece of work you got paid for, or the freebies you used to do for friends and which gave you the first inklings that a career in design was for you? Looking back is fun, but for me it’s also served as an interesting benchmark on how much things change, and how to change them for the better – even now. (more…)
The common wisdom for compiling a strong design portfolio is that you should limit the size to around a 10-15 samples of your work (give or take a few). I have perused a lot of design portfolios online, and it’s interesting to see how many break this rule. (more…)
I like to think that my website contains all the answers to questions that visitors and prospective clients might have about me and my work, but seeing that I anticipate that the first contact for many people will be via my blog, it makes sense to provide some information about myself here. (more…)
