What is Typography?

Simply put typography is the art of print. In our daily lives we are constantly surrounded by it. Typography includes greeting cards, books, posters, newspapers, just about anything you can imagine. As simple as it may seem typography subtly combines communicative and artistic elements to create a print both pleasing and easy to read.

Clear communication and good design

A small font or one that is fuzzy is obviously hard to read which makes the intended message difficult to understand. Good typography is not only clear and legible but easy and pleasant to read. Typographers achieve this by selecting the right fonts, lettering and print types.

A typographer also makes sure that the right lettering design has been chosen to convey the intended effect of the print. For example newspapers, being a source of news and facts, typically have a straightforward, black print fonts, while on the other hand wedding invitations are more ornate and elegant in accord with the happy occasion they announce.

The world of typography

Typography is an enormous field that has both digital and physical applications. Jobs in this field include everything from graphic designers who choose type and position them on the page to type designers that craft letter styles. Modern day typography includes more and more digital work related to the internet and other computer-related projects.

For print lettering to be successful it must complete two basic roles: it must clearly communicate the intended message and do so in a visually effective way that takes into account the design element. A print type that can do those two things is readable, artistic and attractive.

Source: www.adigitaldreamer.com

What Makes a Great Logo?

When it comes to first impressions in the marketing world nothing is more important than logo design. Logos become synonymous with a company’s image and its impact, whether it be hip, interesting or boring, is extremely important. A great logo has several key components that make it work.

Logo Functionality and Representation

Any successful logo design must be functional and practical. Complicated logos often leave potential customers confused, wondering what is being presented or sold. A good logo designer will carefully craft a logo that is clear and straightforward.

Logo designers must also take into account the company’s product or service and create a logo design that represents the company’s image attractively and effectively. The image of a computer monitor would only be misleading and futile for a window installer. A good design gets the company’s message across quickly and accurately.

Two marks of a great logo: Distinctiveness and Image

Because there are so many logos it’s easy to confuse and forget individual ones. However, a great logo is designed to be distinctive and one-of-a-kind ensuring that it does not blend in with the rest. Unoriginal or trendy logos are rarely successful and can lead to lower sales.

A company’s image depends enormously on its logo. The logo designer is responsible for creating a design that gives the company a favorable and desirable appearance. A poor logo can damage or even ruin a company’s image.

A great logo merges art, science and psychology to create a simple, unique and representative design that is instantly recognized and can boost company sales or services.

Source: www.adigitaldreamer.com

Design by Metaphor

Design by metaphor or, as is often the case, design by simile—happens when a client provides design and development in the form of a reference to another product. This can occur both in high-level concepts, such as, “MySpace, but for B2B relationships,” and in individual details, like “the login should be just like Gmail’s.”

Spoken language provides an interesting analogue to design by metaphor: If you’re not a fluent speaker of a particular language, you’re often forced to stretch your limited vocabulary into bizarre, descriptive phrases instead of the exact words that say what you mean. Maybe you remember the last time you were overseas and asked directions to the “shop of changing banknotes.” In the same way, you’ll mostly see similes in specifications provided by clients who may not know how to say that they want “database of user registrations with reports X, Y, and Z” or “JavaScript menus that degrade into CSS-formatted lists.”

Metaphors and similes are also excellent ways to summarize multiple, loosely-related concepts in shorthand. After all, the basic behaviors of any web-based discussion forum, contact form, or shopping cart are largely the same as those of any other once you factor out the specific content of the site.

Why put up with comparison-driven design?

When used to pin down abstract concepts or unusual design details, design by metaphor or simile bridges a major gap of understanding. The customer may not be able to pin down what he wants from another site, but in some cases, pointing to that site can be enough to make the features he desires apparent to experienced developers.

Conversely, comparative references can be extremely powerful for explaining design decisions back to a client. Few client-provided specifications are all-inclusive, and you can expect questions when your judgment calls don’t match what he imagined. If you explain that you designed your booking process “like Expedia,” you can easily summarize a wide range of choices through the system, as well as gain added authority by showing that your choices mirror those of a successful system.
When comparisons attack

Unfortunately, the power of this method of communication comes at a significant cost. If a client says he wants his new auction site to be “like eBay,” what does that mean? An artist hears “It has a tacky color scheme.” A developer hears “It’s scalable to 20 million users.” A user hears “It has feedback ratings on all sellers.” Which, if any of these, did the client mean? You may spend dozens of hours writing specs for eBay-esque features that didn’t capture the client’s heart.

Conversely, defining your own work in terms of other products may set up unacceptable comparisons or fixations in your customer’s mind. If you boast that a new shopping cart works 95% like Amazon, the client may grow obsessed with “fixing” the 5% that’s different, or incorrectly believe that his site has acquired the capacity and features of Amazon across the board.

Moreover, the ability to identify a loose aggregation of features via a single comparison may cause clients to accidentally include irrelevant or needlessly expensive features in their specifications. For example, many off-the-shelf shopping systems include extensive support for multiple currencies and tax jurisdictions. This adds many layers of complexity, and if you’re running a single outlet in Chandler, Arizona, you probably don’t actually want to spend $5,000 more on development to ensure your “just like Zen Cart” shop is ready to handle British Value Added Tax.

Finally, a client who can only speak in similes may be unable to bring the best possible choices to the table. If the client is selling merchandise, he’ll probably say he wants a self-contained shopping system styled after his favorite e-commerce site—but his comparison is limited by his experience. Odds are, he hasn’t seen an example of a hosted shopping cart service, or a single-action “Buy Now” button that he can allude to, even if those would suit his needs better. Your experience and expertise comes in there, as you’ll be able to offer your clients choices they didn’t realize they had and rescue them from the tyranny of comparison.
Bounce back to the real world

The ambiguity inherent in comparison-based design communication must be managed, or you’ll end up trying to build mutant websites which work as YouTube plus Newegg multiplied by DeviantArt…on a $750 budget. Fortunately, there’s a practical strategy for controlling runaway scope: limit the use of metaphors and similes to the phases in which they work best.

It makes sense to start with comparisons, especially if you’re about to develop a significant new functional unit. However, if you do so, the second round of specification development becomes critical. Once you understand what the client is asking for on a high level, you should restate that understanding in more concrete terms that will form the basis for binding design documents. You can even walk through the comparison product part by part and ask the client what he really means with his comparisons. There is absolutely no harm in asking “what part of this process do you want to copy?” Developers often over-complicate vague requests, and it may turn out to be a pleasant surprise when it turns out that all the client really wants to lift from the $300,000 commercial backend is its color scheme and menu placement.

You may also be able to control ambiguous comparisons by treating them not just as a design reference, but also as a source of benchmarks. Compare compatibility and performance of the model site: when you bring a focus group in, let them attempt to complete tasks on your site and then on the sites the client presented as models. Direct comparison of user experiences and task success rates are solid evidence that your site matches, or even exceeds, the models. Such a strategy is particularly effective when the client has questionable assumptions about user behavior.

When it’s clear that the client is relying on a poor or inadequate analogy because he lacks a better choice, you can combine his understanding of comparisons with your wide design vocabulary. Speak his language, and propose that “instead of doing it like your example, what if we try doing it like this other example?”

Finally, don’t miss the possibility of the sum of a client’s models being significant as well. If all the sites he idolizes average 700k per page of images and Flash, the unspoken message could well be “a seamless, graphics-intensive look is more important to me than 28.8 modem users.” Reading between the lines is no less important here than it is with a more conventional specification.
One more communication tool: no more, no less

Design by comparison can help to engage your clients in the development process while keeping the discussion at a level they’re comfortable with. However, its practitioners must realize that poorly analyzed metaphors can say too much or too little. The need for this delicate balance keeps the technique from being a panacea, but doesn’t prevent it from being useful.

by Jack Zeal
Published in: Business, Graphic Design

It’s finally here! The new EdgeFlow Media website was launched today. After many months of planning, designing, coding, sorting out our portfolio pieces, editing, writing……well, you get the picture. Although we have a few minor details to polish up, we’re extremely excited that it’s online and feel that all of the hard work was worth it.

We have been encouraged by all of feedback that we’ve received throughout the development process and now that the site is live, we would appreciate your feedback as well to help us make it even better!

Thanks for your continued support!

The EdgeFlow Media Team

Human-to-Human Design
by Sharon Lee

* Published in: Brand Arts, Graphic Design, Information Architecture

Human-to-Human Design

It’s not new to say that we now live in an age in which survival in business depends on your ability to communicate effectively through the internet.

What is new is the realization that just having any old website isn’t enough. The quality of your site and the nature of its content are paramount and your ability to communicate with your audience is the key.

A good website is built on two basic truths—that the internet is an interactive medium and that the end user is in fact human. In other words, it is meant to be an experience. As with any adventure, a little strategic thought is needed to ensure that the experience is enjoyable.
Respect me

Remember that the person on the other side of the computer screen is a human being. They want to know that your business understands them.

Take the time to find out who they are and what they like. Then tailor your message and design to suit them. A real-life analogy is the approach you would take to initiate a conversation with a stranger at a party (a person with whom you hope to become better acquainted). You would do well to listen intently to what interests them and then craft your conversation to suit. You wouldn’t bore them with a lengthy extolment of CSS or Ajax on a Saturday night, would you?

Try to think beyond the demographic and envisage the individual. Many web briefs contain a far-reaching description of the audience. During the briefing session, try to narrow the focus. A brief may begin at:

Intranet Audience: 20–50 year old real estate agents

This can be divided into a primary and secondary audience, as follows:

Intranet Primary Audience: 20–35 (sales agents)

Intranet Secondary Audience: 35–50 (middle and senior managers)

From that point, it helps to imagine yourself as the agent, logging onto the intranet with a cup of coffee in hand half an hour before tackling early open houses. Do you see your desire for flash animation disappear in a puff of smoke? Do you see how “get to the point fast and be obvious” becomes a distinct directive? How about the need for personalization, so the agent can see what they require immediately, for example, appointments for the day, contacts, and their sales pipeline?

Closing the gap between yourself and your audience will help you to make the right decisions and tailor the design to their needs.
Tell me a story

Harness one of the oldest and most effective ways of communicating knowledge on your site.

Storytelling is a rich and compelling way to involve the user in a design, evoke an emotional response, or enhance a user’s learning experience. The question to ask is:

Is there a more creative way to present the required information to increase the user’s involvement?

News websites are increasingly rising to the challenge. In the past a breaking story would have been a single page of written text. Now it may be enhanced with multimedia to offer alternate ways to view the story including interactive timelines, streaming web-cam, animation, sound, and video. These elements can give the audience a broader and deeper understanding of the topic and the issues, which surround it.

The most wonderful thing about using the internet to tell a story is that it can be non-linear—the user can click to view fragments of information that interest them, rather than viewing the entire story from beginning to end. By telling a story through user interaction, you enable users to choose their own path according to their preferences or needs.
Engage me

As broadband becomes prevalent, web designers have increasingly begun to combine visual design with interaction and motion. Their role has become less that of a designer and more that of a director of experiences. To illustrate the difference between those roles, let’s look at the way the creative direction of a design might be described:

To promote your strength, which is the local content of the entertainment news, we will include the cityscape of each state within your brand.

The direction of an experience, on the other hand, would require more documentation in the conceptualization stage. An experience director must pull together content, formulate an interactive approach and style, and orchestrate the creative elements in which to propel the story. The web designers of the future may even be required to write a treatment, melding the design process with that of film direction.

By attending to the entire user experience, designers can create a rich, sensory experience, which helps to immerse users and encourage them to become fully involved in the site and its message. When a site is intended to educate, immersion is particularly important, as it can increase learning speed and overall understanding—especially when a site’s main users are children.

Through immersion, the user experiences joy and satisfaction: positive qualities that will be transferred to your brand.
Inspire me

Some people believe that web design starts and stops with branding. Their view is the visual identity of the brand is easily applicable to the web through the transference of common elements such as logo, colours and typography.

Indeed a lot of the traffic that will come to your website will be people who know or chose your brand in the real world. So when they arrive at your virtual world it is an ideal opportunity to reinforce it.

However, your site can do much more than mimic your identity. It can encapsulate the brand personality, whether that is inspirational, trustworthy, or authoritative. These traits were part of the reason why they chose your brand in the first place.

During the filming of Withnail and I, the director told lead actor Richard E. Grant to “stamp the celluloid”, meaning to go full pelt, not half-measure. It’s timely advice for when you want to inspire your audience and make them take action—don’t be polite, grab them by the throat—and bring your brand to life!
Enchant me

A beautiful design will give the user the impression that the site is easy to use, whether it is or not. Also, it is more probable that the design will be used because the human psyche is inexorably drawn towards beauty.

Transactional sites often fail miserably in the aesthetic stakes. The reigning thought is that it is the domain of the usability consultant—that design is secondary and often confined to the “coloring in” of table cells.

Yet highly complicated processes and pages can look deceptively simple with the right styling. Spacing becomes increasingly important as it allows the user’s eyes to rest before taking on the next batch of information. Design can create order and instill a feeling of peace and serenity—positive attributes when you are asking your user to complete a lengthy and profit-creating form. Professional design can also increase user trust levels, the single most important trait to attain for any transactional site.

If you’re not a professional visual designer, you can engender trust and loyalty and foster attraction by consulting a high-level designer for business-critical or transactional sites.

The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being. In doing so, you will extend their affinity with the design and foster positive attitudes towards your brand, company, or product.

Designing For Flow
by Jim Ramsey

* Published in: Graphic Design, Layout, User Interface Design

Designing For Flow

In web design, when we think about flow we usually think about “task flows” or “flow charts” but there’s another type of flow that we should keep in mind. It’s that feeling of complete absorption when you’re engaged in something you love to do without being disrupted by anxiety or boredom caused by tasks that are confusing, repetitive or overly taxing.

Flow, as a mental state, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. Software engineers might feel it when they’re writing code, gamers might feel it when playing Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he went sailing. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.

How do we create sites that inspire that feeling? Well, it starts with a site that solves a challenging problem and is complex enough to require a certain amount of learning by the user. The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.

The way to make the complex feel painless is to design with flow in mind. By designing a site that is fluid and intuitive and inspires flow, you help new users get up-to-speed more quickly, reduce the chance that existing users leave your site to switch to another and create users that evangelize your site to other people. That results in more users, increased activity, and greater awareness of your site.

The following four rules are based on Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (more info) and are meant to help nurture the flow experience in users.
1. Set clear goals

The first step in designing for flow is to set clear goals for your users. It’s important to create both an overarching goal as well as smaller, incremental goals. Goals help users understand where they’re going and each step they’ll take to get there.

Marketing copy is often low on the list of priorities, but it can be key to helping users form their goals. When describing their products on their company homepage, 37signals avoids the typical marketing jargon in favor of down-to-earth language. Campfire’s description: “It’s like instant messaging, but optimized for groups. Especially great for remote teams.” These descriptions help visitors understand product differentiations and how each might be used in real-world situations.

On personal organization tool Backpack, 37signals provides a fantastic set of examples to help users understand the specific uses for the application. They show how one might use Backpack to plan a wedding, comparison shop or organize employee searches. For users who have a difficult time figuring out what they’re supposed to do with a site and who find a list of features meaningless, these examples can be invaluable in setting goals. Realistic examples help users understand how they might use the site and inspire them to achieve what they’ve visualized.
2. Provide immediate feedback

Once users understand what they can achieve via the site, they’ll want to start making progress towards realizing their goals. It’s the job of the site to provide the necessary guidance so that the user feels they are actively achieving them.

Wufoo, an application that helps people build forms and collect information, does an excellent job of guiding users through form creation. Their wizard-style interface provides instantaneous feedback by showing a live preview of the user’s form as they create it. By doing so, they’ve removed the potential anxiety of not knowing what the end product will look like. Users can see that the tasks they are performing are continuously moving them toward their goals.

Flickr’s Flash-based image upload tool is another good example of providing users with immediate feedback. File upload on the web has always been a less-than-ideal user experience. Typically, a user selects a file using a file upload form control, submits the form and waits, sometimes for quite a long time, for some sort of confirmation screen. Flickr has improved upon that process by allowing users to see the progress of each image. Users no longer need to fear a long wait just to see an error screen. They can watch the progress bar and know that photos are being uploaded.
3. Maximize efficiency

Once a user becomes comfortable with a site, they’ll want to start using it more efficiently. When they’re experiencing flow, users want to work more quickly and want the site to feel more responsive.

Google Reader has several features that make it feel fast and effortless. Perhaps the best example is the “endless scroll.” It eliminates the need for pagination by fetching new articles as you scroll down the page so that you can read all the articles in a tag or feed without ever clicking to go to a new page. The user never has to disrupt their reading by clicking a link to the next page.

Another way that Google Reader ensures efficiency is through the email feature which, when clicked, appears directly below the article and allows you to send a story to a friend without losing your place. Google avoids causing a disruption in flow by reducing the mental cost of taking an action, thereby promoting more engaged use of the site.

Backpack provides a great example of efficiency with its options for reminders. Rather than selecting a day, a month, a year, an hour, and a minute, they’ve provided some extremely useful shortcuts to let you select options like “later today” or “in two weeks”. They’ve avoided forcing an unnecessarily complex interface on their users because they’ve thought beyond how the data goes into the database. They’ve removing the friction that would be created by forcing users to think about specific days and times, allowing them to choose an option that feels more natural.
4. Allow for discovery

Once a user has begun to work with maximum efficiency, there’s a chance that they’ll feel less engaged and grow bored with their experience on the site. In order to avoid this, you should make content and features available for discovery.

For content sites, this may be as simple as displaying newly created content in the hopes that it will catch the user’s eye. The website of The New York Times includes a “Most Popular” module that displays the most emailed, most blogged and most searched stories. Even though these aren’t based on information of individual readers, these are extremely relevant to most users since they pinpoint the stories that grab the attention of the average person.

Ebay makes features discoverable by placing them in the context in which users will be most likely to try them out. For example, when looking at an item on Ebay, underneath the link to “Watch this item” are links to mobile or IM alerts. The people at Ebay know that alerts lead to more active participation, so they promote them where users will be most interested in them. This kind of discovery allows users to continuously learn new things and find new ways to interact with a site.
Go with the flow

Flow is a powerful psychological experience. Designing for flow requires an enlargement of empathy and a deepening of emotional and intellectual subtlety. It is the difference between creating chapter markers and telling a story.

A site designed for flow must appeal to new users and power users alike. It must stretch both sets of users in a way they find enjoyable rather than daunting. Despite the challenges, the rewards of designing for flow are a user base that is loyal and enthusiastic—one that will evangelize your site to others—and a more profound sense of engagement between you and the people for whom you design.