Please join Pi Design as we launch our new venture, Pi Studio Printing. We are opening our doors on March 12th to artists, photographers, friends, family, clients, and design professionals! To showcase the capabilities of our latest addition to the Pi family—the giant Epson Stylus Pro 11880 printer, we will be showing the breathtaking work of David Pu’u, editorial photographer and cinematographer. David will be in attendance and to share his experiences traveling the world photographing and filming surfers, sea life and other wondrous phenomena.

Please join us for refreshments and great company as you tour the Pi Studio Printing facility. This grand event takes place two days prior to our favorite holiday, Pi Day! In honor of this glorious day we will, of course, have much pie on hand as well as other roundish treats.

Pi Studio Printing will be raffling off all kinds of great prizes like gift certificates to Vie, the Spa upstairs, David Pu’u prints and more!

Leave work a bit early on Friday and come have some pie with Pu’u. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

When: March 12th 2010 from 3:30pm to 6:30pm
Where: 760 Las Posas Road, Suite A1 and A2, Camarillo, CA

To RSVP click here

Read more about David Pu’u here: http://www.davidpuu.com/bio.php

1. I already have an idea for my logo, on this bar napkin, and I shouldn’t have to pay someone just to stick it on a 3.5″ x 2″ piece of paper along with my name and phone number. Can’t you just make copies of it? Oh, but I want to make the letters nice and clean and maybe spruce up my drawing a bit.
2. I can download free fonts and a paint program to create an effective brochure for my upcoming trade show… Can’t I?
3. 4 Colors?! WTF?! There are billions of colors in the world and that !@$#@ designer only wanted to print with 4 of them?!?!?
4. That web designer had the nerve to suggest that I didn’t need the cool splash page with our famous spinning globe for our e-commerce site. How will people ever know that we are a “global” company?!?!
5. PANTONES?!?!? I don’t need no stinkin’ Pantones! I can print the red I want on my inkjet at home! Why can’t the expensive print shop just do it?
6. I already did this awesome layout in MS Word. It’s ready to go straight to press. What does the printer mean by resolution anyway? The photos look just fine on my monitor. Besides I want to be able to manipulate the document after the first print run of 75.
7. I used a graphic designer once and she made the logo so small on the letterhead that you couldn’t read it from 15 feet away. No way! Never again!
8. “We’ve got to cut money somewhere, so my uncle’s brother will print it, in his garage, for free. He wants the files in publisher since he doesn’t have those fancy programs.  He has a lot of lime green paper and a bottle of orange ink left over from a soccer team job, so can you change that photograph to something orange? Oh yeah, and he said to let you know that his Apple IIe doesn’t have a lot of RAM, so he couldn’t open the last file you sent!”
9. Those designers will charge me three hours of work for something that shouldn’t take more than half an hour. It’s a simple photo and a logo large enough to cover a 40’ wall. Screw that. I’ll do it myself. I just need to learn the programs.
10. I don’t need no expensive, artsy-fartsy, overly-trained freak with their fancy computer mumbo jumbo. I have the 128 color box of Crayolas… with a built-in sharpener! …“A Sharpie?!” . “No… a Shar-pen-er”. Why would I want a “Shar Pei”  Why does a dog need a marker anyways? Weirdo.

There are a constant barrage of business cards left on my front porch from tree trimmers, cleaning folks, landscapers, gardeners and others insinuating that I am not doing a very good  job of these things myself. I don’t take offense because I am busy and don’t put as much attention into my house as I probably should. Hopefully my friends and family get that and don’t think less of me. But, as I am sort of in the market for a cleaning person, I kept two cards in particular from last week. This first one wasn’t too horribly offensive design-wise. With a cute little cleaning girl and an easily legible typeface, I wasn’t tempted to throw it immediately into the trash. Monica and Lucio might be someone I would give a call regarding my need for help with the housecleaning though I am a bit worried about the “Chemical Included.”

But then the next day I found this treasure. I was blown away by the care and thought put into Jackeline & Dalinda’s marketing efforts. I really appreciate that they care enough about their image to create such an adorable business card. I truly believe that they will put that same care into the cleaning of my home.

So tell me, who would you call?

1. What services and/or products do you offer?
2. How would you describe your corporate culture?
3. What makes your company unique?
4. Where do you see your company in 5 years? 10 years?
5. Why do you want a new identity? How should it be different? How different do you want it to be?
6. Who are your target customers?
7. Who are your competitors? What are they doing right and wrong in your mind?
8. Do you have a slogan or tag line? Would you like it incorporated into the new identity?
9. Do you have specific imagery in mind? (Prosaic, abstract, concrete representation)
10. What are your existing brand colors and should they be maintained in the new look?
11. What feelings should your logo convey?
12. Do you have preferences for typefaces? (Script, Sans Serif, Bold, Thin)
13. What are the primary and secondary uses of the logo (website, signage, print, product graphics, etc). This will help designer determine if the logo should be horizontal, vertical, square, etc.
14. What is your deadline? (product launch, trade show, etc)

Before we begin, I feel it only appropriate to preface this article with a public service announcement, brought to you today by Pi Design:

Friends don’t let friends use comic sans.
Together we can overcome.

With that out of the way we can now proceed.

You might be thinking to yourself (at least I hope you are), “Who in their right mind would choose to use that typeface for a wanted poster?” This example is clearly a dramatization to illustrate a point, but I kid you not, the poster was based on a real life example.

Choosing typefaces to use for your project isn’t something that can be determined by answering a few predefined questions. There isn’t a set of rules that are written in stone that designers can refer to, but we instead rely on years of education and experience to lead us to the best choice. When faced with the task of choosing a typeface, many factors must be considered, but among these, content, media, and audience should be considered foremost.

Content

“Did you ever feel like the whole world was a tuxedo
and you were a pair of brown shoes?”

—George Gobel

When the wrong typeface is chosen, your reader might not be able to express what it is exactly that is wrong with your piece, but they can just feel it. In order to ensure that your intended message is communicated as strongly as possible, the chosen typeface should not contradict it, but instead should help to support the message. If your message is meant to be taken seriously, then a more conservative or traditional typeface should be used. If you’re creating an invitation for your nephew’s 4th birthday, then your choice should reflect the lightness and youthfulness of the event.

The use of the comic-sans typeface in a business and commercial setting, is an extreme, and sadly, common example of the wrong typeface in the wrong place. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for comic-sans (there’s always some dark, forgotten corner of the closet under the stairs), but that there’s the correct situation to use it.

Media and Usage

When all is said and done, where is your message going to end up? Is it going to be read on a billboard, computer or television screen, t-shirt, or magazine? Is it the headline or intro to an article, or the article itself? How is it getting printed and what is it getting printed on? These are only a few of the variables that need to be addressed when choosing a typeface.

Audience

Often times people will choose a typeface from within their own personal vacuum, by which I mean, they pick a font because for some reason, they just like it. What they fail to take into consideration is that other people, besides themselves, are also going to be interacting with it. When designing for an audience, its age, sex, culture, and even physical health must be taken into account.

Without taking a look at all these factors, you risk the possibility of alienating a whole segment of the population. While in some cases this may be your intended goal, in the event that it is not, the efficacy of your efforts can be greatly reduced. If your intended audience is made up of senior citizens, most likely experiencing some level of vision impairment, using a small, light, and delicate typeface might not be the best choice.

5 Tips to Choosing a Typeface

1. Limit your use to two (three at the most) typefaces for a single piece. Just because you have 638 fonts loaded doesn’t mean you have to try and use all of them at once. Having too many typefaces can cause your piece to appear fragmented, weakening your message and confusing your readers.
2. When choosing a combination of typefaces, don’t pick two typefaces that are too similar. A safe bet is to pair a serif typeface such as Garamond, Caslon, or Times with a sans-serif typeface like Helvetica, Frutiger, or Futura. Choosing two typefaces that are too similar may appear to be a mistake on your part.
3. Consider how much copy your audience is going to be reading in the typeface you choose. Is this a headline that needs to be read in a second or two, or a long passage of text? Choosing a light or thin typeface for either of these cases is probably not the right choice. Headlines need to be noticed and should be set in a strong and legible typeface. Choosing a light typeface for the body of a long article can strain your reader’s eyes to the point where they simply stop reading.
4. Think ahead and determine whether you’re going to need to reproduce the typeface at exteremely small or large scales. Not all fonts are created equal, which should be evident by their range in price. Cheaper fonts are generally not as well-drawn and detailed as the expensive, and while at normal point sizes this may not be too obvious, at larger scales, the imperfections can be glaring.
5. Choose a typeface to convey the type of personality you want your piece to have. It may seem like an oversimplification, but if you want it to be taken seriously, choose a typeface that looks serious; if you want your content to appear fun and bubbly, choose a fun, off-beat typeface. Look at it this way, if you were trying to get a job at the bank, would you show up dressed like a clown?
6. I couldn’t help but throw in a bonus tip: When you feel the urge to select comic sans from your list of fonts, let go of the mouse, step away from the computer, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and think twice about what you’re about to do.
   

Another post from the purposely silly “This Looks Awsome” Series (yes, we know it’s spelled wrong. It was done on purpose to be silly, you nit)

1. Create your project in any program with “Microsoft” in the name. You’d be better off finger-painting with mud on an old pizza box, dousing it with gasoline and throwing it briskly into a portal to hell.
2. OPTIMA OPTIMA OPTIMA. Did I forget to mention that use of COMIC SANS will also immediately discredit you as a designer?    
3. Forget to run spell check. This is the best way to show how disinterested you are in the subject matter. Typos also demonstrate that you’re too lazy to finish the job right. That gives the rest of designers an undeserved bad name. How could we be lazy with all of these extremely tight deadlines that we have worked so hard procrastinating for?
4. Add an exciting red starburst with the word “NEW!” in some lame block font doesn’t really make anyone want to buy your new product. It actually makes them want to spray it with bug killer and smack it with their shoe. Twice.
5. Clip backgrounds from photos using the Magic Wand tool. The icon for the magic wand should be replaced with a sparkling crutch. Don’t use it to pull out background images from photos. Take that time that you’ll be ridiculed by all of your peers and put it to good use learning how to mask.
6. Add an outline to the lovely cursive font you have selected and watch the readability disappear.
7. Use really low resolution images taken from someone else’s website for your brochure. Please note that if you’re going to use stolen imagery for your brochure you have to decide if it’s worth spending time in jail for copyright infringement. Seriously, if you’re going to go to jail anyway you should at least have a nice brochure from which you might possibly get some business to pay for your court fees.
8. Accidentally outline all the text in your document and then stand by praying that the client doesn’t ask for any copy changes. Come on, we have all been there, furiously trying to move around the big block of blue boxes created by the outlined paragraph instead of having to re-type the whole gosh darned thing.
9. Fill the white space by cramming all the copy you can onto the page thereby eliminating any sense of focus to the overall message. This is one of the easiest ways to confuse the audience and remove any chance of successfully gaining new customers for your client. This often results in no more paying gigs for you.
10. Stretch and squish your photos just to make them fit into that little space you have backed yourself into by filling the rest of the document with needless copy. Don’t worry, no one will notice.
11. Show your masterpiece to the client and ask, “Would you like to see any changes?” (If you’re a client and you’re reading this, we’re just kidding…really)

I recently did a bit of internet research with her to discover some new shapes she could fold and found the following design inspirations. These people have taken their fetish for paper to a new level. Please enjoy these amazing sites and videos.

Peter Callesen is a Danish designer who magically transforms flat sheets of paper into figures that expand into the space surrounding them. Please enjoy all the wonderful creations pictured on his website at http://www.petercallesen.com/index/index2.html

My Paper Mind: An experimental animation in a technique being called “stratastencil” devised by Javan Ivey. Each frame is one piece of 4×6 card stock

High Heel Paper Lanterns: Carlos N. Molina, Paper Genius, has been working with paper since his early childhood in Puerto Rico. His miniature origami shoes have long amazed me. He was recently featured on HGTV’s That’s Clever with his mermaid paper doll. Check out his website for more colorful paper designs: www.carlosnmolina.com

This video reveals the progress on their latest gadget, a flapping robo-sentinel. It is the first-ever hovering air vehicle to use flapping wings while carrying its own power source. The hope is that the hummingbird will be useful for indoor and outdoor surveillance, as well as dropping off listening devices and other super-spy cargo.

Check out their website for more info on their other products:

http://avinc.com/

Typography involves the selection of appropriate typefaces and their arrangement on the page. Bad typography practices can negatively affect the reader’s view of your company. Good ones should be invisible, placing the focus on the content of the document and not the totally cool typeface you chose.        

It is a good idea to create some company standards and make sure that everyone follows them for all documents created for in-house use and especially for external usage. This will allow your audience to concentrate on your message instead of being distracted by the layout of the document. Below are some terms you should understand and some tips to follow.

Click here to skip straight to TIPS

Measure: The standard length of a line of type is called the measure. For ideal readability, the length of a line should be 2-3 alphabets (52-78 characters including spaces) long. If a line is too long the reader loses their place when starting a new line and often gets frustrated. If the measure is too short the it is very distracting and the message can get lost. A short measure can be OK if there is only a small amount of type.

Tracking: Also known as letter spacing, tracking can completely change the readability of the entire page. A more airy feel is created by slightly expanding the tracking across a body of text. In a title or headline that is all caps it can look elegant to extend the tracking a bit. Negative tracking throughout a document is a NO-NO. Negative tracking should only be used to adjust one or two lines of justified type. As designers, we carefully use tracking to keep hyphenated words to a minimum. This is the practice of working line by line adjusting the spacing little by little to create visually appealing layouts. The reader’s eye should flow through the copy without noticing the typeface, size or spacing.

Leading: This is a term that has been around since the days of hand-set metal type and it refers to the distance between the lines of type (also known as line spacing). Leading should never be less that the actual point size of the type. If you have created a wide measure (see above) then it is a good idea to increase the leading a bit to allow the reader’s eyes to easily find the next line. If you are reversing type out (making white type on a black background, for instance) then you should increase the leading and tracking. Because of the high contrast the letter forms need to be further apart, lighter in weight and have more space between the lines. You should also use a thinner font, by the way, in this case.

Hierarchy: A typographic hierarchy expresses an organizational system for content, emphasizing some information and diminishing others. A hierarchy helps readers scan text, knowing where to enter and exit and how to pick and choose among its offerings. Each level of the hierarchy should be signaled by one or more cues, applied consistently across a body of text. A cue can be an indent for a new section, or a change in type face color, size or style.

Typeface vs. Font: In this day and age where everyone uses computers the terms have become interchangeable but they actually mean very different things. The typeface is the original design of a style of type family. A font is a variation of a typeface like bold, italic or a particular size (9 pt., 10 pt., 12, pt. etc). I read a great distinction on The Font Feed where they compare typefaces to songs and fonts to MP3’s. You would not say, “I like that MP3,” in the same way you would not say, “I like the design of that font.” The font is the thing you actually use on the computer as a way of delivering a visual representation of the typeface. While we are on the subject of typefaces…

Typeface Selection: Skilled graphic designers choose typefaces based on their knowledge of history, awareness of trends and an understanding of the audience. We are constantly aware of the use of type around us all day long on signage, packaging, television, magazines. We instinctively know which typefaces represent fun, stability, elegance or action. When it comes to setting type for a business document you want to choose a typeface with a high degree of readability that disappears to the reader as their eyes take in the meaning of the words. Good choices are Helvetica, Garamond, Frutiger and Futura.

Typography Tips

1. Ideally in Word documents, you should set the left margin at 1.25″ or 1.5, while the right should be at least 1″ for easy legibility if you are using 10-12pt type.
2. Do not double space after a period. If you learned, as I did, to type in the prehistoric typewriter era then you are probably guilty of this type crime. When they invented the word processing software we all use today they built in certain spacing functions such as the perfect “space and a half” after periods as a signal to our brains to rest before continuing on to the next sentence. So stop doing it manually because it creates an unsightly (to us graphic designers) triple space and large visual gaps that create “rivers” throughout your document. Typographic rivers are a subject I will save for another blog.
3. When creating marginal notes or captions try using Flush Right on those sections to add visual interest.
4. BOLD, ITALIC, AND UNDERLINED CAPS should be used in moderation for emphasis. Never use all three in the same document. You only need one to get your point across.
5. Use 10-11pt type for documents that have a lot of copy (type). 9pt is often too small for some typefaces and people over 35 like me. 12pt can look clunky and elementary on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper.
6. When you need a bold or italic font if at all possible use the pull down menu to choose the particular font (Helvetica Bold, Garamond Bold, Arial Bold, etc) instead of the toolbar icons provided in applications such as Microsoft Word. This may seem ridiculous to you but your eye does understand the subtle differences. Typeface designers carefully create each character in the entire type family (bold, regular, thin, italic, bold italic, etc) to ensure proper legibility of each letter and numeral to enhance the readability. The bold tool bar command will often just make the font thicker regardless of the thicks and thins inherent in the typeface and decrease overall legibility.
7. Using all caps in a headline can convey formality or power. But be careful not to make the headline too long or people will have a hard time reading it. Our eyes are trained to recognize word shapes in lower case so we tend to skip over long lengths of all cap type. A headline is supposed to stand out and be easy to read, not ignored.
8. Script fonts indicate formality and should be used sparingly for invitations, awards and other short important documents. Do not type an entire document in a script typeface. Also, never type anything in a script font in all caps unless you don’t want people to read it.
9. To create a clean professional document stick to fonts in the same family. Avoid pairing fonts that are only slightly different like two sans serif fonts (Univers Bold and Helvetica Regular) or two serif fonts like Garamond and Times New Roman. It is OK to make your titles in one typeface and your body copy in another as long as they are visually very different. It is always safe to use fonts within the same family (Bold, Italic, Thin). This is what they are designed for.
10. Don’t try to be edgy or cool by choosing a funky font for large amounts of copy. If you feel the urge to choose a crazy typeface to be different, again, use it sparingly. These typestyles can be draining on the eye if used for entire paragraphs at a time. The reader will become frustrated and likely lose interest in the information presented. So if you are trying to create a fun document go ahead and make the title in a crazy typeface and then set the rest in a more casual sans serif face like Helvetica, Gill Sans, Futura or Univers.
11. Don’t justify your type if you have more than one paragraph. The application you are using to create your document will stretch and squish at random to force the words and spaces to fit. Designers spend many hours of tedious work to type­set jus­ti­fied text that is truly well-​proportioned and leg­i­ble. A ragged-​right com­po­si­tion will give the text a more har­mo­nious appear­ance and make it easier to read.
12. When creating lists use bullets instead of hyphens or asterisks. Use Control+Shift+L on a PC and Option+8 on a Mac.

Look for more tips to come in future blogs and remember that all these seemingly small details can have a large effect on the professionalism of the overall document.

1. The flashing, pulsating, blinking bright yellow boxes with the red text on your home page look pretty.
2. No one ever contacts you from your site anyway…or at least they don’t stay long enough or dig deep enough to find the contact information which was supposed to appear on the home page but for some reason shows up on the third page of services and you have to scroll to the right to see it.
3. Your site loads rather quickly. By the time you make a cup of coffee and get back to your desk the home page is almost completely up.
4. It doesn’t matter that your site is all messed up when viewed in IE6 or Firefox because it looks just fine in Netscape.
5. Your IT guy says it looks awesome.
6. You don’t care that your company’s site shows up on page 126 of a Google search. It’s OK because you still have a yellow pages ad and people would rather lug out one of those big books than search on Google anyway.
7. The flapping flags and rotating globe let everyone know just how truly global your company is.
8. Those dead 404 Error links were fixed like two years ago.
9. You already spent an exorbitant $200 on your site back in 1999.
10. Your animated step and repeat logo background is outstanding. And so is your 3-D rotating logo with the flames.
11. The little visitor counter at the bottom of the home page is informative and cool.
12. Your MIDI background music ROCKS!

Do you relate to any of these? Contact us today so we can work with you to modernize your site. We can give you an attractive and functional web presence that will make customers want to pick up the phone and call you.