I am happy to announce that I have accepted an offer as art director from hybrid digital agency Motive in downtown Denver, Colorado. I look forward to holding it down with the creative team there and will be posting updates in regards to the things we are doing there.

Yet another beautiful info graphic project by Nicholas Feltron. See the project in its entirety here.

I love watching a well developed identity being rolled-out on a wide spectrum and scale. Seattle-based boutique design agency Mint Design has done just that with their work for the new artisanal brewery Hillard’s Brewery— and its quite impressive. I particularly like how they have managed to strike a balance between the vernacular and European blackletter typography with a contemporary feel. See the whole project here.

An electrician isn’t an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job.

Neville Brody

The Right Brigade is a website dedicated to the spirit of cultural & political resistance of the 99%. We seek to inform and organize the masses in an effort to directly challenge a system that failed us as citizens of the world.

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.

Paul Rand

The Relentless Rebel opening spread from Scoreboard Magazine Issue 03. You can see the magazine digitally formatted in full here.

Do not offer to handle aspects of a project in which you cannot control the quality and outcome.

This is often a lesson learned the hard way, but without a doubt an invaluable one. Essentially it means that if you take responsibility for the end result of a particular part of a project which you do not control, you could very easily find yourself in a compromising position. Not good.

The Grid

I was astonished when I learned that the designer of the aforementioned editorial team did not use a baseline grid. Their excuse was because they were uncomfortable with arranging elements within the grid— in other words, they lacked experience with the grid in general. I think this reflects a huge failure in design education: to not understand the grid is like being a mechanic thats afraid to get dirty.

The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.

— Josef Muller-Brockmann

I couldn’t imagine working with any design, especially an editorial design, without the use of a well thought out and clean grid structure. Its is essential to the process and provides a framework for which everything else relies on. With that being said, here is a breakdown of the grid structure I follow:

Baseline Grid

The measurement of your baseline grid depends entirely on the leading of your body copy font and its point size. Generally the larger the x-height, the larger the leading will need to be. Once the body copy font and its leading is decided, you can set the baseline grid to be the exact measurement as the leading. The baseline grid is important because not only does it allow for consistency with the alignment of typographic elements, but also serves as a guide for imagery. I even use this grid to determine heading sizes by adjusting the size of the heading until the cap height is aligned with one of the grid lines.

Margins, Columns, Rows and Gutters

After setting up a baseline grid, I make sure to set up the remaining template guides. I start by determining the number of columns I want to work with. This depends on the page size, but it’s always best practice to ensure whatever number of columns you decide upon, the copy stays in the range of 40-80 characters per line for readability. Also, I tend to always work with an odd number of columns— it has always proven to be more balanced and versatile when it comes to layout, and it follows the principle of the Rule of Thirds. Moving into rows: I don’t always set vertical row guides, but when I do, it generally is also an odd number and always aligns with the baseline grid.

Now, on to setting margins and gutters: as a general rule of thumb margins should be double the gutter width, and the gutter width is determined by the leading measurement. I usually double the leading measurement to determine what I want to set the gutters to.

Typography

Typography is perhaps the most important element of the design and should never be treated as an afterthought in the development process. I begin a project by reviewing the subject and immediately make connections to possible typefaces and type treatments. This means making notes and then playing with font combinations which make sense for the project on more than just a visual level; There should be a connection with the type and the subject of the project on a conceptual level.

Once the type is decided on, I always make sure to set up some paragraph/character styles in the design document (after the grid is created, of course), which I can begin to use right away while continuing to create these as the design progresses. I always make sure the leading is consistent by aligning the text to the baseline grid. I do make exceptions on elements such as cutlines, but the leading I choose for these elements always correlates to the original baseline grid measurement.

Just to give you an insight to where I am coming from on this one: while in art school, my design instructor would often hold up our projects to the light in order to examine whether or not the lines of type where consistent on both sides of the page! This taught me a valuable lesson; Working with images and type is a craft with which comes the responsibility of perfection, or as close to it as humanly possible.

The Document

Another practice that the aforementioned editorial team followed was breaking features/articles/etc. into separate documents in order for them to be reviewed individually by the rest of the team. This might be unavoidable for some teams— often the timeframe for a project is short, and therefore it is necessary to work modularly throughout the entire process.

What I have found works best is quite different though: design the project as a whole document which contains all pages and make minor revisions all at the end, while making major changes during the primary development. The advantages to this is the magazine/book/etc. will have a much more consistent feel, as it was designed as a whole. In addition to this, edits are made on a priority basis, leaving copy edits to take place at the end of the project instead of distracting the designer from the layout and artwork. It’s also great when you have a close relationship with the editor. This way, copy edits can be made in favor to the design as opposed to attempting to prevent rigid copy from breaking a layout.

Similar elements are grouped in the document on separate layers for easy editing and organization. For example: background elements go on the ‘background’ layer, headings go on the ‘headings’ layer, etc. This is provides for a smooth transition of the document from one designer to another: all elements are easy to find, and layers are locked when elements in them are not being edited.

Imagery/Artwork

When it comes to photography, the process is pretty straight-forward; Make sure images are big enough for what you intend to do with them, and always do a bit of post-processing. Even if the photo has been post-processed by the photographer, I always ensure it will print as intended. It is always a great idea to keep an eye on color levels (all print designers are aware of those dreaded color shifts, especially on colors like blue), as well as ensuring the image is in CMYK mode. It’s always nice to have the ‘okay’ from photographers or the art director to add those little touches to the photographs that will make ‘em shine.

Artwork is my favorite part of the entire editorial process. I often do the artwork for publications I work on, so I like to begin working on them in the beginning. This way, I am extra enthusiastic going into the project, and it’s a break from the more technical craft of layout/design/typography. Often, however, the artwork can change or be modified during layout. To combat this, I always make sure to place layered Photoshop/Ai documents into the project document instead of flattened jpegs/tiffs/pdf’s. This way any element of the placed artwork can be modified on the fly, then the design document can just be updated to reflect the changed artwork without breaking the flow.

Wrapping up, all imagery/artwork must be 300 dpi at the size it will be in the document. This is a rule of thumb that should not be broken (you would be surprised at how many designers think it is ok to not follow this strictly). It’s the principle here; Once you allow for lower resolution images or artwork to be placed, you are compromising the quality of the final product. These elements should be top-notch quality. Leave the low-res stuff to the local newsletters, not your professionally designed magazine.

Conclusion

In conclusion, its important to make informed decisions about every aspect of your design in editorial projects— “winging it” just will not do. Documenting the decisions you make and why is equally important. This allows you to review the process upon completion of the project and decide where improvements can be made. The end result is a continually evolving process which is refined and modified after each project.

Just got the third edition of Dan Cedarholm’s Bulletproof Web Design and am currently devouring it a chapter at a time. I am a huge fan of Cedarholm’s books, especially Handcrafted CSS (which is essentially how I learned proper CSS implementation). With its focus on standard’s based strategies, I highly recommend this book for HTML/CSS noobs and pros alike.

Visit the site at http://pashhra.org/