Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips

New location for Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips

Thank you for visiting Roger C. Parker's Graphic Design Tips blog.

I have consolidated all of my graphic design, marketing, and writing articles, resources, and tips into my Published & Profitable blog.

At my Published & Proifitable blog, where you'll find over 1,000 posts about content marketing, print and online graphic design ideas, latest trends in design, and information about upcoming events.

You may also enjoy visiting Design To Sell Online. Although I'm not currently updating the site, it contains a graphic design blog and chapter downloads from my recent Design to Sell book.

Best wishes on your graphic design explorations!

Roger C. Parker

 

Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type offers perspective, details, and value

Ever since I wrote Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design many years ago, clients and students have been asking me for "the best book about type." There are many of them--many reviewed here--but few stand out from the perspective of both quality and value.

Ellen Lupton's recent Thinking With Type is a winner on both counts. It's a refreshingly simple book, in terms of page layout and presentation of the myriad details involved in setting type. You don't have to "study" this book, you can read it for enjoyment, while learning how to use type effectively in print and on on line.

Best news of all, the book only costs $$19.95 (US). (Princeton University Press, ISBN 1-56898-448-0.

I've spent over $50 on some type books that haven't had one-tenth as much to say as Ellen manages to communicate in just 176 pages of concise, conversational tone, augmented by visuals large enough to be studied. Reading it is like sitting in the audience at one of her presentations, where her passion and enthusiasm for quality typography is communicated to everyone in the audience.

Do you agree with Chuck Greene's Design Constitution?

There's more to graphic design success than the ability to visual images and create attractive logos and pages. Success requires happy and satisfied clients.

If you're looking for a fresh perspective on client relationships, review Chuck Green's Design Constitution located at his Ideabook web site. Like all important documents, the Design Constitution's writing is simple, and the words are few, but they contain valuable insights.

You'll find guidelines for lasting client relationships in the fourteen articles that make up Chuck's Design Constitution.

Be sure to contribute your thoughts about the Design Constitution below, as a Comment, or submit comments on Chuck's site.

Master the finer points of spacing and arranging type

Although the tools used to set type change, the rules of typographic excellence have been known for centuries. And, although each generation tends to want to "reinvent the wheel," sometimes the most inspirational writing is to be found in books that are considered "typographic classics."

One of my favorites is Geoffrey Dowding's Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type. This slim, elegantly designed and printed volume provides an excellent and highly accessible review of the basics of text alignment and spacing, in a way that drives home information you may have encountered elsewhere, but that failed to make an impression on you.

First appearing in 1966, and now available from Hartley and Marks, the advice and straightforward illustrations in this book will reaffirm your desire to pay attention to the tiniest details of typography, in order to achieve grace and easy reading in everything you produce.

Looking for an easy way to set your publication apart?

Graphic designers interested in creating a fresh new image for a client will appreciate the Mentor and Mentor Sans typeface family now available from fonts.com.

Mentor, a serif font, and Mentor Sans, consists of a full family of typefaces designed to harmonize with each other, yet provide ample opportunities for typographic contrast. A variety of weights are available: Light, Regular, Bold, and Black. True small caps and old style figures accompany the Open Type versions.

An outgrowth of a 1999 book cover project, Michael Harvey, the typeface designer, went back to drawings originally created during the 1960s. In use, Mentor and Mentor Sans project a strong, but very readable, presence on a page.

Because the x-height of the serif and sans versions is the same, Mentor Sans subheads can be used to introduce paragraphs set in in the serif version of Mentor without the need to adjust size, as is typically necessary. Click to learn more about the Mentor family, see it in action, and print out specimen sheets.

Slim book takes the mystery out of choosing color combinations

Confused about color? You're not alone. Choosing the right color palette for your corporate identity--your ads, brochures, newsletters, and web site--is of crucial importance to you, and your client's, success.

Luckily, help is at hand: Jim Krause's Color Index: Over 1100 Color Combinations, CYMK and RGB Formulas for Print and Web Media. This volume is slim enough to have have constantly by your side, next to your computer, yet you'll probably never outgrow it. It's one of those books you'll refer back to time after time.

To learn more, here's a special issue of Guerrilla Marketing & Design newsletter devoted to Marketing with Color.

Is this the best book on type?

Effective graphic design is based on choosing the right typefaces and using them intelligently.

Few books do as good a job of relating the centuries-old craft of typography with today's digital environnment as James Felici does in his Complete Manual of Typography: A Guide to Setting Perfect Type.

This is the best single volume available for anyone who wants to know how to make their ads, brochures, newsletters, and other marketing communications more attractive and easier to read. This book does the best job of combining the aesthetic aspects of typography to the capabilities of today's page layout programs.

Click here for a copy of my Guerrilla Marketing & Design newsletter discussing other favorite books on typography.

Learn the 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design

Guerrilla Marketing, a name coined by Jay Conrad Levinson over twenty-five years ago, is a marketing philosophy based on efficiency and results.

Guerrilla Marketing puts a premium on obtaining big results from small budgets, eliminating the ego and creative excesses characteristic of so much graphic design.

Download my free special report, The 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design, and learn how a marketing  philosophy of results and restraint can revitalize the way you deliver your messages.

Subhead formatting no-no's to avoid

Subheads are not sentences.

Therefore, they should not end with periods!

Periods after subheads add a subtle amount of clutter to the page. Periods also create barriers that discourage readers from reading on.

My Marketing Your Business with a One-Page Newsletter contains more formatting tips as does my Newsletter Marketing blog.

Three tips for more effective subheads

Here are some tips for increasing the communicating power of subheads. Subheads are short phrases that preview the next topic in a newsletter article, proposal, or on your website.

Subheads play a major role in making your message more attractive and easier to understand by "advertising" the text that follows, converting skimmers into readers.

1. Keep subheads short. Restrict subheads to just keywords. Never use full sentences. Subheads are like highway billboards; they should communicate at a glance. Subheads should never occupy more than one line!
2. Use white space purposefully. Avoid subheads that "float" between paragraphs. There should be more white space above the subhead, separating it from the previous paragraph, than between the subhead and the paragraph it introduces.
3. Put typeface contrast to work. Subheads should be set in a contrasting typeface, type size, and type style, than adjacent text. If you are using a serif typeface for body copy, use a larger and bolder sans serif typeface for subheads.