Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The problem contains the solution.
Simplicity, wit, and good typography.
Every little job counts. Design counts.
Everyone can have an opinion on a logo.
I'm not sure about my design work every time.
I have a really shallow idea about what Australia is.
Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
It's a cliché, but typefaces are really just ingredients.
The truth about logos is that they are not that hard to do.
Part of maturing as a designer is discovering what you're good at.
We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.
If you can announce the Higgs Boson in Comic Sans, clearly anybody can do anything.
BE PURPOSEFUL AND THOUGHTFUL IN THE CHOICES YOU MAKE WHEN THE OPTIONS ARE NEARLY INFINITE.
If you ask people in the US what logos they like and recognise, they'll name Target or Nike.
No one loves authenticity like a graphic designer. And no one is quite as good at simulating it.
Most processes leave out the stuff no one wants to talk about: magic, intuition and leaps of faith.
Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.
I'm not an expert in typefaces that serve scientific writing, but I'd guess that's another dozen or two.
If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.
I had a lot of enthusiasms that were very contradictory, I was never very doctrinaire in the type of design I wanted to do.
A good cook can make something amazing out of even the blandest ingredients. Still, you don't want to eat the exact same dish every day.
I think different designers have different points of view and different strong personalities can influence the way certain cities are perceived.
I'm always conscious of the context, the history, the specific environment of anything that I design and what it is going to be operating within.
I think once the artistic world of the type designer merged with the scientific world of the computer programmer, you began to see this crossover.
A lot of times, you design a logo to be timeless, but with something like the Olympics, timelessness is maybe not something you should be going for.
Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.
Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.
I actually don't think that brand new logos are worth that much or mean that much in and of themselves. So why not have a class of third graders compete to design your logo?
Australia seems to strike a balance between big and small. It's big enough to have that diversity, but not so big that it disintegrates into something that is not connected.
I have half a dozen designers who work for me, they 'realise' most of the design work, and I act as the design director and the main point of client contact on each project.
If you look at the Olympic graphics for Mexico or Los Angeles, those programs don't look contemporary by today's eyes but they really look like they are of their place and time.
I can see how some people get sentimental about how we used to do things in 'the good old days' but in a way I just think they are being nostalgic for the way they were brought up.
If you do good work for good clients, it will lead to other good work for other good clients. If you do bad work for bad clients, it will lead to other bad work for other bad clients.
People in the UK will say that the design community in the US is much more coherent than other countries. It has no government support at all, so it's really like a grass roots thing.
I've never really acquired any facility for working on the computer, though one day I think I would like to. My generation just barely missed it, which I don't think is a good thing or a bad thing.
A simple MS Word document, or a Powerpoint presentation, has its limits, particularly the unpredictability in how the page will actually display. With a PDF, you are locking down all those variables.
I believe sans serif typefaces - today upheld as models of neutrality and legibility - were called "Grotesques" in the 19th century because people thought they were hideous. But now we're used to them.
Australia has always put out some good design, particularly environmental graphics. I associate that with Australia, more so that a lot of other places. Whether that has anything to do with the landscape, who knows?
I actually think it almost works the other way sometimes: making a college textbook, say, look really "user friendly" tends to also make it look less "serious," even if nothing changes other than the design treatment.
It's hard to predict what will happen as reading on screen becomes more of a universal norm, and when the formats dictated by social media - Twitter's 140-character limit, for instance - start to influence what we're used to.
In the US you have New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami and dozens of other cities; a few of them have a really strong visual character. But even with those there is just too much space between them and too many people.
Target for example, is just a dot with a circle around it, that's all it is, so if you want a logo like Target, you don't need to hire a designer, you barely need to know how to operate a computer program, the logo may as well be anything.
The scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, "Because I like it."
I've heard some designers talk about the design process being centred on invention, starting with a blank slate. I admire that and occasionally I'm capable of that, but I have to admit that I really have trouble working with completely open briefs.
The design of the notorious Palm Beach County "butterfly ballot" in the 2000 Presidential election is certainly one of them. But I would say most of the time this is less about a conscious attempt to manipulate an outcome, and more about pure ineptitude.
I grew up in a Cleveland suburb called Parma, Ohio. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with a typeface called Bodoni. It turns out that Giambattista Bodoni had his foundry in Parma, Italy. So I pick Bodoni because us guys from Parma have to stick together.
Most people have no idea how much goes into designing a typeface. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, usually with two versions of each, upper and lower case. Punctuation and alternate characters and numbers - let's not forget numbers - can add another 40 or so.
It was stone carvers in ancient Rome, scribes in the Middle Ages, all the way through Gutenberg to the present day. That's a pretty long track record. More likely we may reach a point where each one of us is a typographer with our own custom proprietary typeface.
Australia is one of the few places that I can think of where the cities, at least those I've been to, seem to have strikingly different characters and visual textures. To an American like me, there's basically Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and the rest is all bush.
We use the word typography to describe two different things: the design of letterforms, and the layout of typeset passages on a page. Both of those experiences are really important to communicating information, especially when that information involves complex ideas.