In search of material written in Arabic, I accompanied my mother to our local magazine store. I only saw stuff in roman characters, so I wandered over to the design section. After some thoughts about branching out from my staple of PRINT, and periodically, HOW, I picked up a magazine called Layers, subtitled “The How-to Magazine for Everything Adobe.” Since I’m still supposed to be getting comfortable with InDesign (which I have yet to possess a copy of) I thought a magazine of tips and tricks (and shortcut keys) for Adobe applications might be a nice breath of fresh air. The night before, I had discovered the joys of Transform Each and Effect > Roughen in Illustrator by tripping over some design tutorials, and remembered how much potential for improvisation how-to guides offer. Why not bring in another round of possibilities with this magazine?

I later found myself wandering onto their website and scanning through the available articles there. The Columns section yielded some interesting (and informative) finds after only a quick search:

“Simply Borderless”. A quick-fix for people working with the $99 desktop printer that doesn’t have full-bleed (to the edge of the page) capabilities. Instead of mourning the inescapable appearance of white margins on a page, the resourceful designer stops crying over the price of fancier printers, and deliberately works a white border into his/her design. A nice reminder for anyone about the universal can’t-beat-join-principle, but the column continues by providing examples of layouts that make intentional use of white space, and this is where the reader strikes gold. Thank you, John McWade, for giving us a simple pointer, and then smacking us in the face with all of the cool opportunities that can come from it.

“What’s the Right Typeface for Text?”. So, I easily get excited about books on design techniques, and vow to read them cover to cover and absorb every beautiful principle inside, an acitivity that will of course completely revolutionize my design work and improve every facet of my being. Unfortunately, I hardly ever make it cover to cover, and I suspicion I have a brainHack that periodically cleans out all of the little concepts that I read over and never use–or never figured out how to use. I should design a series of examples of the principles about the principles as a design refresher course. In the mean-time, I will keep an eye out for articles like this one, written by John McWade (I’m starting to become a fan) that state flat-out a question I’ve had before, and then reveal to me all of the design principles I probably read somewhere, but never connected properly to solve my dilemma.

In the case of this column, Mr. McWade addresses the question of typefaces in use for the miles upon miles of text that swarm books, sprawl through magazines, and power weblogs. Books on typography love to talk about letterforms, but if you’re a bit of an ADD- or short-termed memory reader like I can be, not all of those notes on serifs and x-heights get synthesized properly for text en masse–for me, they tend to be isolated concepts that can fade away without attention. That is, of course, my personal mistake, but it is extremely helpful to encounter articles like this one that take concepts I’ve heard before and put them together in a way that effectively solves a problem. It’s a great example to wake me up and inspire me to follow. Check out the article for a list of obvious rules I didn’t think to apply, see if you can find any you didn’t expect.

3 Revamps of a Jewelry Artist’s Line Sheet. A quick graphic design version of one of my favorite shows on HGTV, “Designer’s Challenge.” It’s fun to see designs other people have come up with–but it’s three times as much fun to see what designs three different people have come up with for the same thing, side-by-side. Really pushes into perspective what can be done with any content. P.S. Next, can they redesign the precieux website? Or at least touch up the opening photograph?