Fol­low­ing on from Con­tem­por­ary Type Foundries Part 1, presen­ted below are the final six type foundries I’ve chosen to dis­play. So, without fur­ther ado…

The 20 Things pro­ject was a chal­lenge to break ground with new tech­no­lo­gies and deliver a rich, edu­ca­tional exper­i­ence that these tech­no­lo­gies make pos­sible. The Fi team rose to the chal­lenge and pro­duced a web app that is as fun to play with and explore as it is inter­est­ing to read.

Work­ing with typefaces is about as basic as it gets for graphic design­ers. A solid know­ledge of type, a keen eye for which fonts are appro­pri­ate for each pro­ject and an aware­ness of what’s avail­able to us are rudi­ment­ary com­pon­ents of the job. Many fledging cre­at­ives use only what they have in their sys­tem fonts lib­rary and a hand­ful of pass­able faces saved off a cracked disc of thou­sands of dubi­ous free fonts. Work­ing this way, a designer can pro­duce per­fectly good res­ults (some say this can be achieved through Hel­vetica alone) but it’s the wise designer who main­tains an aware­ness of modern-day type foundries. Between them, foundries release beau­ti­fully craf­ted, extens­ive and note­worthy font fam­il­ies year on year. Whilst many cost money (staff at foundries have to earn a liv­ing too) some are reas­on­ably priced and oth­ers offered for free. And besides the fonts, through their web­sites type foundries offer all sorts of help­ful advice and a glimpse into their fas­cin­at­ing pro­fes­sion, which is what I aim to show here, in the first of two art­icles on the topic.

Bind­ing, the col­lect­ive term given for the range of pro­cesses which hold and fasten a publication’s pages together, is essen­tial for, well, hold­ing and fasten­ing your pub­lic­a­tions’ pages together. Whilst on the sur­face not as com­pel­ling a design com­pon­ent as, say, print fin­ishes, a little closer inspec­tion reveals a range of dis­tinct pro­cesses which exist for dif­fer­ent uses. These bind­ing meth­ods aid func­tion; decisions on bind­ing neces­sar­ily affect a prin­ted piece’s robust­ness, longev­ity and form. Used cre­at­ively, they can even add an aes­thetic fin­ish­ing touch to a piece and help amp­lify mes­sages and inten­tions. The closer inspec­tion I men­tion above, and which bind­ing mer­its, is what this article’s all about.

At the same point each month, every month, an employed per­son receives a wage packet from his payroll depart­ment, and his his bank account is cred­ited with his salary. Safe in this know­ledge, he can plan his fin­ances around this fixed point. For the intrepid freel­an­cer things are a little dif­fer­ent, for he must send out invoices to his cli­ents, and then wait to be paid. So far so straight­for­ward, but there are sev­eral factors to con­sider with regard to invoicing, which I’ll be tak­ing you through below. After all, get­ting paid on time is what keeps us all afloat, and what freel­ance designer doesn’t desire that?

They come in all shapes and sizes, from all dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sional back­grounds, and we rely on them to pay our fees. A large por­tion of the freelancer’s life is spent look­ing for them, bag­ging them, and spend­ing a con­sid­er­able amount of our daily slog try­ing to work out what they want. I’m speak­ing of course about cli­ents, and this art­icle is all about work­ing with them…

Pau­ly­wood for istock­photo has released an art­icle on logo cre­ation. A great art­icle for those gradu­ates or stu­dents want­ing to get into cre­at­ing logos for istock. Below are our fav excerpts, check out the whole art­icle, its well worth the read.

Poly­wood profile

Istock­photo website

In the first of a series of les­sons entitled Pro­fes­sional Prac­tice, we have sourced one of todays hot­test work­ing Eng­lish based freel­ance design­ers to give you the leg up on build­ing your­self a truly pro­fes­sional Graphic Design prac­tice. Look out for the fol­low­ing in the new series; Freel­ance Fee Struc­tures & How to Quote, Pro­ject Plan­ning (Break­ing Jobs Into Mile­stones), Deal­ing with Cli­ents, Char­ging & Invoicing, Law in Design Prac­tice, The Port­fo­lio, A Con­clu­sion of Sorts. Being Freel­ance. Bene­fits & Pitfalls.

David Airey, super blog­ger and notori­ous designer has released a book called Logo Love Design. He offers a free to down­load chapter of his book, that illus­trates per­fectly a graphic design pro­cess that endorses the won­der­ful pro­cess of design, from Pen­cil to PDF. A recom­men­ded read and invest­ment for all design students.

In the work­ing world it has become increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to free your­self from the Mac and cre­ate some­thing with your hands. Make the most of ana­logue and crafty dis­cip­lines offered through design edu­ca­tion, and take your skills with you into the work­ing world!

Designed by Jonathan Ive, Apples iMac is out to seduce you!

The Graphic Design School have found a great list of Do’s and Don’ts relat­ing to PRE press/printing, cre­ated by Deborah Roberti of espressographics.com which should help you avoid one of these frus­trat­ing and embar­rass­ing (not for­get­ting to men­tion expens­ive) mis­takes when eval­u­at­ing your pre print pro­ject before it goes to press and some use­ful tips on image formatting.

Chances are you have heard of Open Source, and if you haven’t you will have used it in some form or another. But what does the term “open source” actu­ally mean and how does it relate to design­ers in terms of resources? Come on a shar­ing, caring ‘open’ jour­ney with us into the world of Open Source…

The most dif­fi­cult part of being a cre­at­ive of any kind is idea gen­er­a­tion. Why do you think there are so many copy-cats out there? There are sev­eral meth­ods avail­able to brainstorm.

Mind map­ping has been around since the 70’s, it’s uses and attrac­tion is snow­balling. So what is it? And how does it apply to Graphic Design?