Author: steve

One of my favorite papers to design with is “Kraft”, a strong brown paper or cardboard made from wood pulp.Not only can you use recycled materials like cardboard boxes and grocery bags but you can also buy kraft paper for sheet-feed through laser printers. It is also available as a crack-and-peel stock for laser or…

I renamed a number of companies and products that would otherwise have misled or confused the potential customer. Do not underestimate the power of a good business name. I refer you to this book. These principles, since 1980, have been a key part of marketing. Positioning the Battle for Your Mind. Positioning Wiki A designer…

My brother, Brad Teare, and I identified 12 main Photoshop action effects to build. This sparked the idea of discovering if I could design 12 CDROM packages using short-cuts. Another weird experiment for web images! These were never used commercially. Just design thrill-seeking again. Being a nocturnal beast, my goal was designing them all in…

If you study the work of good graphic designers, you’ll find they have favorite font pairs. They may have as few as a dozen families of serif and sans serif faces, they really work with on a regular basis. This knowledge is acquired by examining portfolios of your design mentors and peers. Then start collecting…

BEFORE screen 8K page weight. No purple background. This somewhat bland webpage, above, weighs only 8K. To give you a speed-weight comparison, the average Internet webpage weight today is 1 to 2.3 megabytes. Page weight is the aggregate file sizes of all graphics and code elements summed together for one page. That means this page…

I self-published two books with Blurb. The first was a simple uncoated black and white piece with a gloss color cover (perfect-bound paperback.) I ran 10. The turnaround was good (as promised) but there was a small mark on the back cover in the dedicatory text I had there. I gifted these to my children.…

Target audience vs owner ego? Frequently, the owner (client) thinks they’re the clone of their audience (potential and actual customers). Of course, they aren’t. We’re all different and have different perspectives and opinions for many reasons. That’s good. Otherwise, this would be a pretty boring place. I’ve catered to small, family-owned, high-tech corporations. In that…

Christine McGavern wrote the following on The Now-defunct Grid design forum. It’s good stuff so I “borrowed it” but I give her full credit. A designer had asked for help making a t-shirt for a bike race. Here’s what Christine had to say: Will the cyclists be GIVEN the shirts to wear while they race…

No designer wants to touch the taboo topic of selling “stock art.” I have mixed feelings about “stock design”. I don’t create stuff to sell on these websites. I’m the kind of guy who might go there to get a creative idea (like from a scrap file). But I rarely buy this sort of stuff.…

Value analysis identifies and selects the best alternatives for designs, materials, processes, and systems. You repeatedly ask “can the cost of this item or step be reduced or eliminated, without diminishing the effectiveness, required quality, or customer satisfaction?” In other words, value analysis is a method of optimization. It requires creativity. It consists of 5…