I was recently asked to give design advice on a site trafficked by literally tens of people. I found this a little difficult to do, considering I have a considerable amount of contempt for amateur designers (not to be confused with ‘young’ designers), but here is what I said:

When in doubt, keep it simple. Don’t add in a bunch of extra junk that doesn’t need to be in your layout. Don’t make a logo of your initials. Don’t use helvetica. Don’t use any typeface that was already on your computer when you got it. Don’t use Photoshop filters. Don’t build your website in Flash. Do take a typography class.

There are a lot of people who are interested in “the arts” that don’t actually have any ability to draw or paint or sculpt. Like the dozens of young female pop stars that can’t really sing well and use auto-tune to mask their inability (Britney Spears, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne come to mind), many of these people figure that graphic design is their way in to a career in the arts, since the heavy use of computers eliminates the need to be able to draw, paint, or sculpt well. Photography has a similar problem, but it requires expensive equipment and a certain degree of technical know-how to get very far at all. An ‘amateur’ graphic designer only needs a pirated copy of Photoshop to start feeling ready to order up some business cards.

These amateur designers use system fonts. They use Photoshop filters. They don’t know what leading or kerning is, and they don’t know how bad the type controls are in Photoshop (compared to Illustrator or InDesign) are. When I first got a guitar when I was 13 years old, I didn’t go around calling myself a musician the next day. I was a kid with a guitar, not a ‘guitarist’. Not until I had hours upon hours practicing in my bedroom did I really consider myself a ‘guitarist’. The numerous twenty-somethings with a copy of Photoshop and a desire to call themselves a designer are just that, twenty-somethings with copy of Photoshop. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve told someone I’m a graphic designer and someone replies “Oh, my brother does graphic design”. Chances are, that’s just a dude with Photoshop. And it really annoys me, because they give real graphic designers a bad name. Like we all just took a class in ‘computer art’ and instead of a diploma we were give Adobe Creative Suite serial numbers.

When it comes to actually being good at something, anything really, I’m a firm believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, which essentially says you need to spend 10,000 hours doing something before you can really be an expert at it. Assuming a 40 hour week and roughly 50 weeks a year (holidays, etc.), that equals about 2,000 hours a year. Thus, doing something for roughly 5 years makes you an expert at it.

I think it was about freshman year of high school for me that I really started spending a lot of time working on anything resembling real image making. I wouldn’t call it ‘art’, since painting gridded photo-realistic images from photographs isn’t exactly ‘art’, but it was then that I started working with composition and layout. That was 15 years ago. I would spend 5 more years thinking I would be a fine artist or illustrator before I committed to being a graphic designer. I then spent 3 years learning graphic design, and pretty much only graphic design. Since then, I’ve spent 7 years working as a graphic designer. That has to put me at well over 20,000 hours. Respect!

So my real advice for amateur designers is to spend at least 10,000 hours designing. Beyond that, you either just have an eye for it, and some legit creativity, or you don’t. And seriously, don’t make a logo out of your initials.

The above quote was taken from a letter written immediately after LeBron James announced he would not be signing with the Cleveland Cavaliers, but would instead be heading to the Miami Heat. That same night, the majority owner of the Cavaliers drafted a letter to the fans that quickly descended into an angry rant. A screen grab of the full letter can be viewed here. I don’t have much to say about the actual argument made in the letter, but I have a lot to say about the font it was delivered in.

I’ve made arguments about the importance of a font, and how the font you choose to deliver a message in is really providing your personality or tone of voice for that message. The letter to Cavs fans is a great example of this, as it was posted in the infamous Comic Sans.

I’m not going to bother getting into what a terrible typeface Comic Sans is. Anyone that pays any attention to typography knows that it is one of the worst typefaces around. If Helvetica is the Big Mac of typography, then Comic Sans is that same Big Mac when it is shit out. I think most patrons of Comic Sans use it to invite people to their weekend BBQ, or to their son’s 4th birthday party. Though it is a pretty lazy attempt at looking like handwriting, it is also the most widely used typeface when people want to convey friendly, casual message.

What Comic Sans does NOT convey is anger. Maybe Dan Gilbert thought that a mock-handwriting typeface would look more personal, like this is straight from his desk or something. He also pulled a personal pet peeve of mine by inserting an image of his actual signature at the end of it (so…what, you signed my computer screen?). Perhaps the only typeface that would have been more inappropriate to his message would have been Curlz. It at least gives me some satisfaction that this did not go unnoticed across the internet. Maybe it will help raise awareness about choosing your typeface carefully.

I’m sick of Helvetica. I’m sick of it being used ironically, and I’m sick of it being used genuinely. There is no doubt about the fact that it is an absolutely beautiful typeface. It is considered by many to be the most perfect typeface ever designed. It is certainly the most well known typeface ever designed, thanks mostly to the fact that it comes pre-installed on pretty much any computer you can buy these days. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a graphic designer that would go as far as to say it is ugly or badly designed, but you will most certainly find designers with negative feelings toward Helvetica.

Some of those designers are featured in the 2007 documentary, appropriately named “Helvetica”. The film oozes respect for the typeface, and features a few old school Helvetica loyalists like Massimo Vignelli, but also checks in with Paula Scher who goes as far as to half-jokingly blame Helvetica for the Vietnam War. But most modern designers fall in between those two extremes. Among these moderates is Jonathan Hoefler (a personal favorite type designer of mine), who says that trying to talk about Helvetica is like being asked to discuss off-white paint.

The point the film eventually makes is that Helvetica is essentially a beautiful, but neutral typeface. It is a font that you just don’t notice. That is precisely why the old school designers liked it. They believed that the message is in the content, not in the typeface. That the typography should be clear and readable, and should not be noticed. Massimo Vignelli says “There are people that think that type should be expressive…They have a different point of view from mine. I don’t think type should be expressive at all…I can write the word ‘dog’ with any type face and it doesn’t have to look like a dog, but there are people that think when you write the word ‘dog’—it should bark”. To me, that is like saying that any time anyone speaks they should talk in a clear, but monotonous voice, because the message is in their words, not how the emphasis they are putting on the words. It is ridiculous. Of course type should be expressive. Not all type should be set in script, or some grungy font, but any typeface you choose contains a personality, and that personality has a huge effect on the content.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is most definitely a time and place for Helvetica. In fact, I use it on an almost-daily basis, but I almost always use it in blocks of type, or to compliment another typeface that is being used more prominently. The place where it really annoys me is when people use it for corporate identities. Why would you want to use a typeface that lacks all personality as your corporate identity? What are you saying about your company? That you are like everyone else? Now, I suppose it does say that you are a no-nonsense, efficient entity. It is kind like Steve Jobs wearing a black turtleneck and jeans every day. He is basically saying ‘I have more important things to spend my time on than fashion’. Using Helvetica as your corporate identity is like saying ‘we have more important things to spend our money on that having a cute logo, just set our company name in Helvetica and let’s get back to work’. And an amazing amount of big companies use Helvetica as their company logo. And every time, you get absolutely no idea what the company does or what their attitude is. For example:

Do they really express anything about these companies? Maybe a little. Some of them use all caps, some of them use italics, some of them use color to provide just a little bit of personality. But how about when you take the color away?

Now they are really dispassionate. David Carson, former Art Director at Raygun magazine and arguably the most famous participant of the typographic ‘grunge’ movement in the 80′s and 90′s, is shown in the Helvetica documentary with a variety of expressive words set in black Helvetica to point out exactly how unexpressive it is.

Of course, some of this is simply a result of overuse. Any time something is overused, it becomes less effective. The first people to use Flash in their websites may have made a big impact, but now it is everywhere, and it just either just fades into the background or leads people to search for the ‘skip animation’ button. But in the case of Helvetica, I think it is more that it is being abused so regularly. It is the typeface of choice for anyone that doesn’t care what typeface is being used, so it is usually being used poorly. It is kind of like how nobody considers skateboarding a real sport, because for every Tony Hawk, there are 1,000 local kids falling off their boards over and over in every town square in America. Perhaps Erik Spiekermann summed it up best in the Helvetica documentary when he said “Most people who use Helvetica use it because it’s ubiquitous. It’s like going to McDonald’s instead of thinking about food…’cause it’s there…it’s on every street corner, so let’s eat crap because it’s on the corner”.

Thankfully, it looks as though Gotham is gaining ground on Helvetica. Most people noticed it for the first time in the Obama presidential campaign. You know, all of those posters that said “HOPE”? That’s Gotham. It is a fantastic typeface, maybe even the best typeface designed since Helvetica, but it has just that hint of friendliness to it. Then again, maybe someone will be writing a blog 50 years from now about how sick they are of Gotham…

Google does a lot of things really well. They almost single handedly organized the internet. Before Google, there were dozens of different search engines, none of which did their job very well. There were even search engines that searched other search engines. (Side note: If Dex started with these anti-Google ads 10 years ago, and they were about every other search engine, then they would be accurate.) I use Gmail and Google maps on a daily basis, and their efforts to innovate and improve the internet should not be understated: they are likely the most important company of this century (so far, obviously). Yet, they don’t have the same kind of following/fanbase that a company like Apple has. That is likely due to the fact that they don’t make physical products. If the iPhone is like a fancy new car, then Google is the road you drive it on, and nobody gets excited about the road itself, no matter how good it is.

However, for all of the things Google does well, there is one thing that they do bad: design. All of their sites look pretty lame. They look like a web developer’s attempt at graphic design, which is what they probably are. I’ve never been a fan of their logo. Yes, it is iconic in a way, but is that just because you see it about a million times a day when using their site? In this article about the evolution of their logo design, I think I like pretty much every other logo shown more than the logo they ended up with.

The final result just ends up seeming like a lack of design more than anything. That is how everything they make ends up feeling. All websites have a balance of form and function, and Google’s sites seem to be 10% form and 90% function. It is like it is just a step or two above having a site with all Times New Roman with black type, with bright blue type for links. I think people like Apple’s products so much because they have a near perfect balance of form and function. In fact, their products work so great and are so well designed that it almost ends up feeling like their products are 70% form and 70% function (and I am aware that it mathematically incorrect).

A quick digression: Just days ago, Google unveiled a slight update to their logo in which they took out the somewhat prominent drop shadow. Some people suspect that they eliminated the drop shadow in order to have a smaller image file size. When that logo is transferred to users millions of times a day, that slight decrease in bits transferred from their servers adds up pretty quickly, and might save quite a chunk of money in the long run. If that is the reason for taking out the drop shadow, it is understandable, but it is still an interesting comprimise. It is also something Apple would never do.

The most compelling evidence for Google’s lack of respect for art and design is a dispute from back when Google was launching Chrome. Google hired several artists to create custom skins for their browser, which is cool. What isn’t cool is that in some (maybe even all) cases, they decided not to pay these artists. Apparently the reasoning was that the exposure for having done this work would be so beneficial for the artists, that they could consider that their payment. Now, as a working designer who frequently does work for nothing or next-to-nothing, I can say that this isn’t how things work. The work you do for free is the logo you design for your friend’s coffee shop, or the website you design for your cousin’s new business, or the invitation to the charity event your sister is organizing. You do this work in hopes that it will lead to something that pays. Maybe somebody goes to that charity event and asks who designed the invitations, and they then hire you to do some work. Your big break would be a call from Google, a company that has an unbelievable amount of money at it’s disposal, asking you to design a custom skin for their new browser. Finally, a big company with lots of money asking you to do a job. And then they end up saying that your payment is great exposure? No. You get exposure from your small crap jobs hoping that a company like Google calls one day and overpays you to make all of that pro-bono work worth it. [Read the Gizmodo article about this incident here].

As a graphic designer, I know from the many blank stares I get when I tell people what my profession is that most people don’t really understand design. People know that something about the iPhone feels better than other phones, but they don’t really know why. People absorb design without knowing it, and they can tell the difference between good design and bad design without being able to explain what the difference is. I don’t think that Google fully grasps this fact. Microsoft learned it the hard way, and spent years trying to catch up to the UI of Mac OSX…something they may have finally done with Windows 7. Google may be able to maintain their internet dominance forever without ever developing a true respect for art and design, but unless they do, they won’t develop a truly loyal fanbase. Most iPhone users are going to be iPhone users for a long time, because their love their phone. Google’s Android mobile OS is starting to overtake the iPhone in number or users, but I don’t get the feeling that people are really developing a real brand loyalty, something that may cost them in the future.

Throughout high school, my ability to render an image made me the best artist in school. I could take a photograph and produce a pencil drawing, a scratchboard, or an oil painting that looked very much like that original photograph. I decided to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, intending on being ‘an artist’ for a living. It took about 2 days into my freshman year to learn that my skill in photorealism was pretty much worthless. Not only could half of my classmates do it just as well as I could, and not only had straight photorealism been out of style for about 50 years, but it simply isn’t an important element of fine art. The main analogy I would use regarding the fine art opinion of photorealism is this: Admiring a painting for it’s realism is like admiring a novel for how well typed it is. It is the concept that matters, not the execution.

This took a while for me to really accept. My claim to fame as an artist up to this point in my life had been my ability to make this look like that and it was going to take more than one drawing teacher to convince me that I should ignore my biggest strength as an artist. A little further into my freshman year, in a 2 dimensional design course, I found that I had a natural rhythm in creating things on the computer. My teacher strongly recommended that I declare graphic design as my major. I had heard this before and it annoyed me. During several of the portfolio reviews I had in preparation for college, people were constantly suggesting that I look into graphic design. Looking back now, this makes total sense. The paintings I created in high school were basically graphic design with paint. However, at the time, I enrolled in art school to be an artist, not to work on a computer all day. I wanted to draw and paint and spend time in a studio, not stare at a computer monitor and spend time in a computer lab. So, I declared illustration as my major….and switched to graphic design after one semester.

In illustration I had a drawing teacher who basically said this: an artists most most valuable possession is their eyes. The ability to visualize a composition and know what to do and what not to do is the real talent. After that, anybody in the room can render it. At the same time I was becoming more interested in how I could use the computer to supplement my drawings. Most of the work I was bringing in to my illustration classes had a heavy computer element. Maybe it was the fact that a precise drawing wouldn’t have impressed anyone, but I was clearly moving away from drawing and toward the computer. So I figured I would just embrace what I’d been told for two years and become a graphic designer.

The upside to this decision is that it has been much easier for me to stay employed than all of my friends currently trying to be illustrators. I found an internship soon after graduating and have been employed every day since. The downside is that I miss drawing and painting, and while I would spend more time painting as a hobby, I keep hearing echoes of old teachers, telling me that I need to do something more than render pictures. If I’m spending time painting, it had better be ‘fine art’. I guess if I’m going to spend time doing it, I might as well do it ‘right’, and just painting a pretty picture isn’t ‘right’. But the thing is, I like rendering pictures. Maybe it is just a more impressive version of someone doing a crossword puzzle to relax, or maybe it is art.

In the meantime, I can tell anyone who is concerned that working on a computer will suck all of the art out of them that you use all of the same visual skills you use when making any visual composition, you just arrange it with a mouse instead of a pencil. No, you won’t really get to say that you are an artist when someone asks you what you do, but you can just do what I did and get a bunch of tattoos so that people know that while you might work on a computer all day, you are still more creative than they are. And being a graphic designer is still cooler than most professions.

I know I’m not the first person to notice the unfortunate similarities between the new Pepsi ad campaign and Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, but I feel compelled to weigh in on it. It is pretty obvious that it is an obvious imitation of the Obama campaign. Pepsi denies that any similarities are intentional, but come on, an all caps san serif HOPE with a red white and blue circular logo for the ‘O’? You aren’t fooling anyone.

The campaign is pretty lame all around. The logo itself is pretty bad. The different variations for regular Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and Pepsi Max are supposed to represent a smile, a grin, and a full blown laugh, respectively. But why even have it relate to the old logo if you are going to change it so much? It kind of looks like they just ripped off their own logo. Although, I guess I have to give them a little credit for having the balls to go with something that feels so unbalanced, I also have to condemn them for going with a logo that is pretty uncomfortable to look at. I don’t mind the new font they use for the word Pepsi, and it is kind of nice that they went all lowercase, but that smile thing seems like it probably worked a lot better in concept than in reality. Almost every time I see the logo I just see the high-priced ad agency in some conference room pitching it, and using words like ‘hip’ and ‘urgan’ and ‘internet age’ and ‘viral marketing’ and all of those other words that nobody in the those target demographics actually use, but everyone else think they use, and all of the executives sitting there just thinking it is great. I kind of don’t want to know how much they spent on the facelift.

So why HOPE? What does Pepsi have to do with hope? Do I have hope that there really is a delicious beverage out there? I understand that these huge food and beverage companies need to come up with new slogans on a regular basis, but can you at least have it have something to do with what you are selling? Pepsi makes a drink. Shoot some pictures of “urban” people with afros and the latest fashion accessory, throw some semi-hip slogan on there (like “I’m Lovin’ It”…because “I’m Loving It” wouldn’t be urban enough) and call it a day. Don’t try to make it seems like you are changing the world with your popular new black president (who has confirmed he is a Coca-Cola man, by the way). It’s just lame.

The part that really makes me cringe is that in the bottom right of all of these ads is a little logo that kind of looks like a refresh button on a browser with the line “refresheverything.com”. I can also see the ad agency getting to the ‘refresh everything’ powerpoint slide and being like “its a reference to the internet, all of those in the “blogosphere” are going to love it. I hesitated to even go to the website because I didn’t want to give them another unique visitor, but I had to…kind of like how I end up seeing all of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies, just so I am properly informed on why I hate his movies. The Obama ties really hit you over the head once you get there. They have all of these requests for your suggestions on how “Mr. President” should “refresh America”. Again, Pepsi, you aren’t accomplishing anything. You make beverages. Making a refreshing beverage isn’t going to stop the war, or end global warming, or fix our health care system. It is going to be tasty. And the whole ‘upload a video’ thing is so old. Note to everyone: you aren’t YouTube. Just because you are asking people to upload their own video doesn’t make you ‘viral’, it just makes you look like a huge corporation trying to cash in on the popularity of YouTube.

While the fact that Pepsi has so blatantly tried to steal some momentum for Barack Obama’s popularity is super lame, it is the pathetic attempt to join the new marketing strategies of the 21st century that really makes this whole campaign contemptible.

(train station photo from this flickr page)

Have you heard about this lawsuit mess between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey? Basically, the AP, who owns the photograph on the left, is accusing Shepard Fairey of stealing their image for his poster for the Obama campaign.

While I can see how it would kind of suck to be the freelance photographer (Mannie Garcia) that took the image after you see it explode into this huge icon without any kind of special financial compensation at all, the fact of the matter is that he and the Associated Press don’t deserve any financial compensation at all. Copyright law for this sort of thing is pretty tricky. In fact, I think the law says something to the extent that if a source image is used that you don’t own, that you have to change it 30% in your artwork in order to have made it your own. While giving it a percentage value seems pretty bizarre (what is 25% versus 30% versus 35%?), it is basically just saying that you have to have done something substantial to make it your own, and I would certainly say that Shepard Fairey has done enough to make the image his own. His art is popular because people like his graphic style. People like it so much that there are several sites where you can upload your own photo and have it turned into an “Obamicon”. The Andre the Giant Obey campaign didn’t get huge because of everyone’s undying love for Andre the Giant. It is worth pointing out that when the Obama campaign realized they didn’t own this image, they asked Fairey to make a new poster with an image they did own, and he did, and it wasn’t quite as popular. There is something about this particular image of Obama that resonated with people, but the fact of the matter is that it is Shepard Fairey’s stylization that really popularized the image. Something tells me that the following poster wouldn’t have made much a splash:

People ripping off design gimmicks from Apple is nothing new. For example, take a look at Microsoft’s “New Xbox Experience”:

Does this look familiar? If so, it is because it is a blatant ripoff of Apple’s iTunes Cover Flow:

Apple starting using the whole fake reflection thing, and it didn’t take long for every unoriginal graphic designer in the country to start ripping it off. I hope whoever thought of it got paid well.

Anyway, it seems like the latest Apple style that people are ripping off is the use of a simple white gradient along the middle of an image to make it look like it is a shiny button. It is used most noticeably all over the iPhone home screen. It’s nice. But that doesn’t mean you need to be using it. Not everything needs to look like a shiny button.

However, if you are going to go for that shiny button look, just make sure you do it right. First of all, the lighter top half needs to have a fading gradient. Just having the top half of your image a little lighter than the bottom half does not a button make. For example, look at this heinous site banner (click on the image to witness the horror in full size):

I put together an example below [I felt like I was doing one of those Bob Ross painting demos the entire time I put this together]. I pretended that I was putting together an iPhone button for my own page. Of course, the ‘Q’ doesn’t match anything on this page or my portfolio page at all, but we’ll ignore that. The button on the left has a white overlay with no gradient. See how weak it looks? The middle button has a gradient, which looks considerably better. And the button on the right has a gradient on the background color of button, which looks best.

So yeah, I guess I’m just saying that perhaps this type of thing is best left to the people who know what they are doing. If you don’t know how to do the button gradient thing, then just skip it. But if you are awesome like me, you can do a double Apple rip off and put a reflection on there:

There has been a lot of talk recently about how Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to really use the internet to his advantage during a campaign, but not much has been made in the national media about the strength of Barack Obama’s graphic design in his campaign. This isn’t a surprise, since good graphic design often goes relatively unnoticed. I don’t mean that to sound like I’m whining about how under-appreciated my profession is, I just mean that most of the time if a company has a great logo, people just have a general positive feeling toward that company’s look. They aren’t going to be able to articulate what they like, specifically, about that company’s logo. The same is probably true about Barack Obama’s campaign brand. I thought his designers did an outstanding job throughout the campaign. They started with picking one of my absolute favorite typefaces (Gotham by Hoefler & Frere-Jones), which was originally drawn to be a distinctively American form…a nice touch, and they let that typeface do a lot of the work for them (remember all of those signs that just said ‘CHANGE’ or ‘YES WE CAN’ in that typeface?). The ‘O’ logo was fantastic as well. I could go into a paragraph about the symbolism behind using the horizontal red stripes not only as a reference to the American flag, but also as a field (connecting with the average great plains American blah blah blah) with the O shape creating a sun rising over that field, which represents a dawn of a new age of American politics blah blah blah… I’m sure you saw that logo a thousand times, but did you think about all of that? Probably not. You probably just liked how it looked. But did you see these variations of that logo?:

They were made by the Obama campaign to be used by different support groups (Republicans For Obama, Environmentalists For Obama, etc.), and are available for download from a special ‘downloads’ section of the Obama website where you can download all sorts of logos, posters, signs, computer wallpapers, buddy icons, and site widgets (a section like this is unsurprisingly absent from the McCain website). The thing that struck me when I saw these logo variations is that not only did the designers do a good job with the campaign as a whole, but the campaign managers did a good job in allowing the designers to do their job. Often times in any campaign (not just political, but ad campaigns and many other large design projects) there are several levels of approval that need to take place before a design is finalized. And usually when a designer has a good idea (like the idea to make the above logos), there will always be someone along that ladder of people that doesn’t think it is a good idea. All it would have taken is one important campaign manager saying something like “well, I like it, but do you think just having an O will read as Obama?” or “I don’t think it looks patriotic enough, maybe it should have some stars in the logo” and that wonderful O logo is on its way toward being ruined.

The point is that there are a lot of good designers out there, but there aren’t a whole lot of people with the balls to let the designers do good work. Most good designers have years of training in design, so leave the design decisions to them.

PS: McCain’s graphic design was lame.

As someone who works with type for a living, let me give you some advice: Don’t mix uppercase letters with lowercase letters outside of title case scenarios. It is just bad news. The thing that is totally mindblowing is that it seems that when people make this mistake, they frequently do it with the one letter that is the worst possible letter to do it with: the letter L. For example:

You do realize that a lowercase L looks like an I, right? And when all of your letters are capitals except for the l, that it will look like a capital I? If you don’t believe that this is a consistent mistake, check out this blog that is dedicated to the problem: www.lowercasel.blogspot.com. It is mindblowing to browse through the blog. It is like people are trying in be INTENTIONAllY confusing.

By the way, bonus points to Renée Zellweger for the additional grammar error on the word “Rock’s”.