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As a tribute to our new President, I’ve gathered some poster designs that are well-designed, moving or are just plain smart. The amazing thing is that many of these designers aren’t even American, but they believe in what Obama can bring to the American people so much that they’ve been moved to design.

Sustainability and style are what make green design, well, green. Green design balances environmental, economic, social and aesthetic concerns. Green design can go by many names: “sustainable design,” “eco-design” or “design for environment.” Green design produces buildings, products and artwork that reduces the amount of non-renewable resources. This helps minimize environmental impact and relates people with the natural environment. Green design is one answer to the global “environmental crisis” – i.e. the rapid growth of economic activity and the booming population coupled with the depletion of natural resources.

Everything from architecture to people’s bodies and computers are being covered with greenery. (Seems like it would be itchy, no?)

BuildingGreen announced its top 10 green building products for 2008. Highlights include:

Integrity block, which is a “compacted-earth block used as a cost-competitive replacement for concrete masonry units.” These blocks consist of up to 60% pre-consumer recycled content and almost half as much cement as standard concrete blocks. It takes 40% less energy to produce them.

PlybooPure bamboo flooring from Smith + Fong is the first bamboo to carry FSC certification. It’s made with low-emitting, non-formaldehyde polyisocyanurate binder. And isn’t the color gorgeous? This is one of those have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kinds of products – beautiful flooring that’s good for the environment.

Natura Paint from Benjamin Moore is an odorless interior paint. Finally – a completely odorless paint! This paint has zero VOC colorants. Impressive! 

PolyWhey wood finish from Vermont Natural Coatings uses recycled whey protein as a binder. (I mix whey protein into shakes for my strength workouts!) Whey protein is a by-product of the dairy industry, and helps produce this low-odor coating that has no toxic heavy metals and low VOCs. It looks just as good as the dangerous wood finishes! 

On to the more artsy recycled pieces.

Here’s one sculpture outside an Expo hall in Singapore that’s constructed from steel and other wire metal scrapes. Some might think of green art as being something that is biodegradable, but making art out of stuff that would end up landfills qualifies as recycling to me.

I didn’t know this was possible, but you can create grass photographs just by directing light on certain parts of a grassy area. (I say “just” but I don’t mean it in a simplistic way; this takes talent and patience.) The bad thing about grass photos are that they fade when the grass dies. But how beautiful when they’re in bloom! The first two were created by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey who use long-lasting, genetically modified grass.

How would you like to live in a shipping container? The folks at uShip have decided that surplus of 700,000 shipping containers should be used for living, not just stacking.

Typography is the practice of designing, arranging and modifying type. Type is defined as simply alphanumeric characters. You can arrange and modify type by changing the width, height, or basically any other characteristic associated with that type.

What are fonts?
A typeface is generally defined as the specific letter form design of an alphabet. Typeface talks about the style of the letters. A font is a collection of all these letters of a typeface. A font generally means a bold, italic or roman type, while a typeface means a consistent visual appearance or style. When you say I’m using Times New Roman, you’re talking about the font – the collection of that style of typeface.

Typefaces versus fonts
Many people use these words interchangeably, to the chagrin of many designers and type enthusiasts. It’s easy to forget what the words mean because they are so intricately related.  Mark Simsonson on Typophile has a great, somewhat clear definition: “the physical embodiment of a collection of letters, numbers, symbols, etc. (whether it’s a case of metal pieces or a computer file) is a font. When referring to the design of the collection (the way it looks) you call it a typeface.”

Nick Sherman offers this insight from a comment on Typographica’s Our Favorite Typefaces of 2007: “The way I relate the difference between typeface and font to my students is by comparing them to songs and MP3s, respectively (or songs and CDs, if you prefer a physical metaphor).” In other words, the MP3 is the way the song is delivered (the font); the song is the actual creative (the typeface).

Norbert Florendo finally made it really, really simple with a comment on The FontFeed: “…font is what you use, and typeface is what you see.”

Typeface classifications
Typefaces have 5 main classifications: serif, sans-serif, script, symbol and display. Each of these gives off a different feeling and that feeling affects your design. For brevity’s sake, we’ll focus on the most common classifications: serif and sans-serif. 

Serif typefaces have “feet” (finishing strokes) at the ends of the letters. Some examples are Garamond, Times New Roman and Georgia. Serif typefaces give off a traditional, serious appeal and are mostly used in businesses. Serif typefaces are generally easier to read in a smaller size, so serif typefaces are used in body text. So, Garamond is a typeface, and all the specific styles, such as Semibold Subhead, are fonts.

Sans-serif typefaces don’t have “feet” (“sans” means “without” in French). Examples are Arial, Verdana (often used on Web sites) and Century Gothic. Sans-serif typefaces are seen as more modern and clean. These are best for billboards or when you need a bigger typeface because they’re more legible at a bigger size than serifs. Plus, the serifs take up more room with their feet so you can’t fit as many letters in the same amount of space without sacrificing size. 

As you can see, each classification of font gives off a certain feeling. The Garamond fonts look classy and formal while the Century Gothic fonts look modern and clean. A designer’s choice of fonts and typefaces is crucial to the feeling of the designed piece, so it’s something to be carefully considered and thought through before committing to a choice.

Designers working in Web and print, or Web or print, often use many, many types of programs from Photoshop to WordPress. It can be hard to remember everything you need to know – all the shortcuts and such, that make your job a lot easier. I had that same problem so I found some “Cheat Sheets” or help docs that I have printed out and plastered to my wall. I thought others might find this useful as well, so here’s a list and links to the PDFs that you can print out.

WordPress Help Sheet from WPCandy and Liquidicity. You get basic template files, PHP snippets for the templates, PHP snippets for the header and other extra codes like one that splits up your content into pages. Since I’ve used Blogger and WordPress, this has definitely been a big help so I don’t get them confused.

Type Classification eBook from Jacob Cass helps designers learn the basic foundations of type. Don’t snub your nose – you could probably learn something! Many designers don’t learn this type of stuff in their classes at school and those designers that are self-taught can learn a lot as well. Cass is only 20 and still in college, but he’s a great designer and has a lot of awards and experience under his belt already. He’s so smart that you have to sign up for his blog (which is great, btw) to get a password to download the eBook.

dotMobi Mobile Web Developer’s Guide from mobiForge. You have to register for the site first, but it’s well worth it. The guide discusses the mobile landscape in detail and explains the imp0ortance of the mobile context. Full of code samples and shows how to publish a mobile-friendly site.

Web Designer’s Success Guide shows new freelance designers how to make the transition from full-time work to your own freelance design business. It also discusses how to find new clients and how to market yourself. It also talks about pricing your services appropriately. Solid guide. 

A Primer in Social Media is a white paper offered by SmashLab. It details what social media is, how companies are using social media and blunders to watch out for.

Introduction to Good Usability by Peter Conradie. This PDF covers interface design guides (breadcrumbs, linking, overlays, tabs) as well as his own principles on good usability. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s still a good read.

Web site Accessibility Checklist assembled by Aaron Cannon. This is a great resource for making sure your Web site’s markup, images and multimedia, and overall visual appearance and content are as accessible as possible for many varied users.

I love logos that contain some kind of play on words or a play on images. I like the intriguing logos that make me look twice. Your logo should reinforce your brand identity, and it also needs to fit on all of your product packaging, as well as your marketing materials. A good logo is good whether it’s in black and white or color.

Here are 20 inspiring logos that will hopefully give you some ideas for your own.

All designers go through designer’s block. You can’t be creative 24/7. Here are some tips that will help you get inspired to design and hopefully let the creative river in your mind flow.

kusut-masai.blogspot.com

1. Watch a movie. This isn’t to zone out and hope something pops up subconsciously (although, sometimes that does happen – yay!). Watch a sci-fi or fantasy movie that includes a lot of outrageous scenes like The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes seeing architecture and paying close attention to the graphics of the movie, rather than the storyline, can give you some design ideas. It’d be best if you have seen the movie before so you can focus on the graphics and scenery.

2. Go to the zoo. It’s amazing what animals can do for us. By relaxing at the zoo and seeing all the different stripes, spots and animal prints you are almost guaranteed to see something inspiring that could be turned into a great-looking poster or logo.

3. Go to a museum. This might seem obvious, but try going to a museum that you haven’t been to. Go to a children’s museum or an American Indian museum. Try going somewhere specific instead of your run-of-the-mill museum. Try going to a museum that you’re not sure you would like – getting out of your comfort zone wakes up parts of your brain that can lead to creativity.

4. Look through Flickr and stock photos sites. Real-life photos are often a source of inspiration for something drawn or painted. There’s no reason that inspiration can’t spill over to the computer.

5. Ask “What if?” questions. What if dogs could talk? What if we lived on Jupiter? What if all you could use was red in your design? Just thinking about questions like this that out of the ordinary can boost your creative flow.

6. Take a walk. If you can clear your mind as you walk, when you get back to the studio, your house or work, your brain will be like a blank canvas for you to draw on. Many times it’s not that we can’t think of creative ideas, it’s just that we are thinking of so many other things that we can’t concentrate.

7. Create an inspiration file. On the days when you see something in a magazine or online that catches your eye, file it away – either electronically or literally. Tear a page from a magazine or take a pic of a book’s illustration you really like. Then when your creativity well is dried up, you always have a place to go to replenish your well.

Sometimes we all have the need for a metallic surface in our design. Many designs and backgrounds incorporate a metal-look into them, I’ve seen folks apply this effect on their printed business cards and it turned out pretty cool. But how do you make one from scratch? This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating your own metallic surface so you can begin incorporating this look into your designs.

1. Start with a new document by going to File –> New or press Ctrl + N and make sure the settings are 400 px.

2. Click the “Default Foreground and Background Colors” button or press “D.” This will give you black for the foreground color and white as the background.

3. Press and hold on the Paint Bucket Tool or Gradient Tool and the select the Paint Bucket Tool.

4. Create a new layer by clicking on the “New Layer” button in the Layers window.

5. Using your Paint Bucket Tool, left-click on the canvas to paint a black layer. Then go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise.

6. Make the Amount 400%, the Distribution to be Uniform, and make sure the Monochromatic box is checked on press OK.

7. Go to Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur.

8. Set the Angle to 0° and the Distance to 75 pixels.

9. Select the Crop Tool or press “C.” Hold down the shift key and drag your mouse from about 90% to the top right corner.

10. Release your mouse button and you should have a perfect square for you metallic surface. Press Enter to commit the Crop and you’re finished.

As is the norm in just about every industry, we marketers also have our own awards. Since design is such a large and important part of marketing, it’s important to highlight the best nuggets of info and inspiration that came about this year.

Best Ways to Enhance Photos
Using the Blur effect in Photoshop can do wonders to make a distracting background complement your focus in a photo.

In the photo on the left, viewers could be left wondering where this photo was taken instead of focusing on the woman’s uniform and pose, which convey strength. TutorialPulse.com has a great tutorial on how to achieve the Blur effect.

Photoshop tricks were all the rage this year, with people getting more creative as the months flew by. A list of the 30+ Nicest Photoshop Photo Tutorials, Part II includes tuts on how to make an eerily calm storm (shown here) using layers, fun lighting effects and how to make a vector portrait from a photo.

Best RSS Feed Icons
It’s amazing what designers will redesign next. Of course we’ve all seen the common orange square RSS feed icon, but have you seen any that look like this?

Pro Blog Design showcased 110+ Free RSS Icons that could fit into any Web site’s theme. This site definitely makes any site’s standard RSS icon look boring.

Best Typography
Typography is everywhere – print, Web, TV – you can’t escape it. Oftentimes, logos are created by typography alone. Type gives businesses personality. The list from Noupe shows off the best creations this year, including my fave from the list:

I love the two-toned colors and the hummingbirds floating about. The “holes” make it look more modern, and almost industrial, save for the colors.

Best Business Card Designs
There are a lot of “best of” lists out there for business cards, but I especially love this one:

It’s amazing how many different designs and techniques are being used for business cards these days. This card comes from a list at DzineBlog. The list includes business cards in the shapes of tear drops and circles, which make for an interesting design, but begs the question of functionality. Those are the cards that are most likely to get lost in the paper shuffle because they don’t fit neatly into wallets or Rolodexes, but is the unique shape enough to keep them on top of a CEO’s paper pile?

Best Inspirational Web Sites
SpyreMag’s list of 25 inspirational Web site designs is enough to get any designer’s creative juices flowing. I love this design snippet from Design Disease.

It’s very relaxing to the eye with the ocean blues and the waves throughout the page, not just at the top. It manages to be laid-back and professional at the same time.

For Web-only designers, you know what platform you’re going to be working on. You know that no matter what you do, it’s going to be on the Web. In the print world, you need to first decide what kind of print material you’re going to design. Does the company need a direct mail postcard, brochure, poster or flyer?

Selecting Your Printing Pleasure
One thing you have to consider with print design is portability. What will make people pick up this piece of paper and take it with them? Print does encompass including URLs, but you need to gauge where exactly the best place to put the URL is on the printed piece. And with no search engine or reviews to guide people to pick up a brochure, your design is that much more important. It has to follow the same design idea of the Web to grab someone’s attention in precious few seconds (the most time you get to capture attention is 5 seconds according to research).

You also need to consider what you want the printed piece to accomplish. What is your goal, or objective, for the direct mail postcard? To drum up new business, to announce a sale or to direct people to your Web site? All of these objectives lend themselves to different types of design and could be achieved by multiple paper sources, like flyers, postcards or sales letters.

Your Natural Competition
Once you choose what type of printed material would work best for your objective, you have to think about where people will be viewing your printed material. If you’re sending a postcard to people’s homes, there’s not much to think about there. But an item like a poster outside your building has natural competition, such as weather ruining your print job or trees blocking the view of your billboard. 

Depending on if it’s the rainy season or if your item will be in direct sunlight will influence your choice in paper and ink selection. UV- and water-resistant paper and ink will help weatherproof your work and will keep it fresher longer, but it might also change the way your colors look. That, in turn, could affect your design. Another factor is finish: a high gloss finish will stand up to weather conditions better than matte, so you’ll need to design accordingly.

You’ll also need to drive by the location your printed item will be hung – are there tree limbs in the way? If you’ll be hanging it on a red brick building, you won’t want to use rust red as a background color for your poster. Also, look at the location at night to figure out how street light will affect your printed material at night.

Another biggie is that in print design you have to catch people’s attention from everything surrounding your item; on the Web, people search you out and you convince them to stay. Be sure you use colors and an eye-popping design that stands out from surrounding elements.

As long as you take into account what will get a human’s attention, rather than a search engine crawler’s attention, you’ll have success going from Web design to print.