Design Glossary

Ascender: The portion of a minuscule letter in a Latin-derived alphabet in typography.

Align: To position letters, words or images to fit on the same vertical line: “aligned left”, “aligned right”.

Baseline: The imaginary line on which a line of letters is positioned.

Bleed: A printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming.

Block quote: A long quotation – four or more lines – within body text, that is set apart in order to clearly distinguish the author's words from the words that the author is quoting.

Body type: Roman – normal, plain, or book – type used for long passages of text, such a stories in a newsletter, magazine, or chapters in a book. Generally sized from 9 point to 14 point.

Bullet: A solid dot (•) normally used to indicate the start of a new item, etc.

Placing Graphics

There are tons of tips and tricks you can take advantage of while placing images. Here are a few of my favorites:

In the Place dialog box, hold shift while you click Open to show Image Import Options and allow you to set the visibility of layers, apply cropping and clipping paths, assign color profiles, etc.

When you are placing several images at once, you can see thumbnail previews and the number of images remaining to be placed at your cursorUse your arrow keys to change which image gets placed next.

Google finds almost 10‚000 new malicious websites every day

Google’s security blog on Tuesday revealed new details on how the search giant is keeping Internet users safe from malware. The Mountain View-based company protects 600 million users through built-in protection for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that warns users of dangerous websites. Every day the company encounters about 9,500 new websites that have been compromised or specifically designed for malware distribution. Approximately 12 million to 14 million Google Search queries, and 300,000 downloads, also trigger the company’s warning to caution users on a daily basis. “By protecting Internet users, webmasters, ISPs, and Google over the years, we’ve built up a steadily more sophisticated understanding of web-based malware and phishing,” Google wrote. “These aren’t completely solvable problems because threats continue to evolve, but our technologies and processes do, too.”
sources: Agencies

Definition of graphic design

The process and art of combining text and graphics and communicating an effective message in the design of logos, graphics, brochures, newsletters, posters, signs, and any other type of visual communication is the formal, short definition of graphic design. Today's graphic designers often use desktop publishing software and techniques to achieve their goals.

Prepress tips for graphic designer

When you design artwork for print, standard practice is to send a PDF to your printer. But are you 100% sure you got the settings right? Are you confident the size is correct? Have the colours been set to print standards or client brand guidelines? What about font usage?

So many things can go wrong, costing you and your client money. So to help, Sigurdur Armannsson — art director at the Icelandic Ad Agency — has prepared these 16 prepress tips that cover the major aspects for correction in your artwork. By checking each tip as you go your file will be in excellent shape for sending to the printery.

Computer keyboards – Macintosh typing diacritics and special characters

To insert special characters with the Mac keyboard (Times New Roman font):
Accent Key Strokes Available Characters
Grave ` option ` + the character À È Ì Ò Ù à è ì ò ù
Acute ´ option e + the character Á É Í Ó Ú á é í ó ú
Circumflex ^ option i + the character Â Ê Î Ô Û â ê î ô û
Tilde ~ option n + the character Ã Ñ Õ ã ñ õ
Umlaut ¨ option u + the character Ä Ë Ï Ö Ü Ÿ ä ë ï ö ü ÿ
Key

Selecting hair on Photoshop CS5

Significant changes to the Refine Edge dialog take masking hair to a new level. The choices are daunting, but the steps are simple: make a selection with the Quick Selection tool (W); Option-click (PC: Alt-click) to remove unwanted areas; then continue to Select>Refine Edge. Using Black & White (K) from the View menu, choose a 10-15 pixel Radius, enable the Smart Radius checkbox, and voilà! Use the Option-click (PC: Alt-click) method with the new Refine Radius tool (E) located in the Refine Edge dialog to refine the final mask.

Ten Steps on the Path of Page Layout Enlightenment

Rule 1
KISS(Keep it simple stupid)

Rule 2
Take advice, you never know too much that you can’t take the advice of others, look at other magazines, newsletters etc, and especially, the rest of this list…

Rule 3
Determine what kind of document you’re producing. If we can break it down into two kinds:
… you have to read me, so it really doesn’t matter how I make it look, and I don’t give a damn anyway…
… please read me, I have something to offer and I hope you’ll take the time to read on…
for those with the first kind of document, just stop reading now, for others…

Rule 4
Is it a formal or informal document?
Formal documents need to be well structured, look as if they mean what they say, keep them consistant in terms of fonts and layout… be businesslike
Informal documents can be looser, make them inviting, choose an informal (optima etc) font, lots of white space. Make the reader want to read on.

Rule 5
There are a number of socially correct mechanisms to make sure that whatever type of document you are producing looks good …
One font for body text and one for headline text …
Never put more that one space between words, especially after punctuation. …
Respect other languages, use the correct accents when appropriate …
use the correct quotation marks (not feet and inches symbols) …
be consistant with paragraph spacing (first line indent, inter paragraph gap) …
not too much hyphenation (if any) …
beware of widows and orphans…
respect your reader

Rule 6
Select an appropriate format for the type of document you are producing. A5 booklet, A4 report, A3 broadsheet etc.

Rule 7
Consider the reproduction mechanism. …
If you are photocopying the end document, beware of the limitation of tints on any specific photocopier (hint: fine tints smudge on some copiers) …
Professional printing of the final document: choose your paper with care, ask the advice of your local printer (print office) before getting too deep in the production process. If they have preferences regarding the tools they use for preparation of documents, consider them (ie Pagemaker etc).

Rule 8
Keep backups (copies) of items as you go along, make sure that you have copies of all documents (pictures, logos, main document etc) well secure. Sodd’s law will ensure that something untoward happens in the last hour of your deadline.

Rule 9
Having selected a publication format, edit to that format, not the other way around. Do not try and make the format fit the pieces…

Rule 10
Remember Rule 1

15 MAC applications for web designers

We have lot of nice apps available for Mac OSX that aren’t available for Windows.
I’ve compiled a list of Mac Apps I have in my OSX dock that I use on a daily basis and should be useful to other Mac users and/or web designers.