Designers and clients have mixed views on the benefits of having a style guide for an organisation's communications collateral. Why's that? Well exponents love 'em because they bring order out of potential chaos, helping to reign in the potential 'home-made' designers from trying to include kittens and clipart in publications. Detractors see a style guides as a restriction of creativity and a draconian, corporate bible, that does not fit their needs and hinders their expression. Thing is, a good style guide should remove all of these reservations and provide a platform for creativity and consistency – so that everybody is a happy bunny. What does a style guide do? What makes them good? What makes them bad? Read on...
British design is considered the finest in the world, from cars to Hoovers. Often nostalgic, our design icons define us. There are so many global design icons that originated in the UK. Here we focus on the motor industry.
Happy New Year, unless you are Chinese of course, in which case I'm a tad early. This newsletter is a tongue-in-cheek look at typical client requests made to designers and why a client might want to think again. :-)
If you're commissioning design, the process we take as designers may seem a mystery. Whether it's a new corporate identity, website or annual report, the process we go through with you sometimes needs explaining. I'll try to do it here... wish me luck.
Infographics are a brilliant way to quickly communicate a journey, a process, a service, all sorts of things. They are far more visually engaging than a paragraph of text and done right, can deliver complex messages quickly and with style. We do a lot of them and there are certain things that help make them work hard for you.
Graphic designers are always banging on about typography, but what are they going on about and does it really matter? In this installment we tackle the issues, discover the disasters and detail the do's and don'ts*.
The allure of creative freedom, public recognition and the joy of walking into a record shop anywhere in the country and seeing your own work, makes album cover design a graphic designers dream job. The days of the 12" double gate fold album offered a huge landscape for designers, now the reality is often a condensed digital download icon. The forerunner to Navig8, The Design Corps was established in the music industry back in the 90s. Let's look at the world's most iconic album covers and the designers behind them.
Colour plays a huge part in every aspect of design and can arouse strong opinions from clients and designers alike. Colours are often chosen on personal taste or some spurious theory. A client of ours once rejected a suggested colour pallet because it reminded him of the new curtains his wife had just bought, and he hated them. Let's look at good use of colour and how to get it right.
To be 100% clear from the outset, this is the Top 10 Graphic Design book for graduates and graphic designers starting out in the industry - but with an additional three books (shameless plug) written by our Director. We've all gotta eat, right? I've avoided design books that just show pages and pages of other people's work as much as possible. It turns out that a lot of these recommendations doff their caps to the past. That's not to say modern designers haven't produced great work and great books.
We all love infographics don't we? They are a brilliant way of communicating complex data, journeys, services etc. But like most things in design, they are not easy to get right. Things like too much content, not enough levels of data and the use of poor iconography will mean your infographic will not work hard for you, or at least not as hard as it should.
In this article I set out some of the things a client and designer should consider when creating an infographic.
Free pitching is a hot issue. Why do clients ask agencies to work for free? On many occasions, an agency will be asked to 'do the job whole' to be considered for the work. Madness.
The creative industry is the only industry, as far as I know, that gets asked to deliver work that has value, before being paid. Is this fair? Or as clients say, 'well that is just how it is'.
I picked up an old notebook that I used to jot down some handy graphic design tips when I was doing work experience and the first little while I was first employed. Some pretty useful tips in it to be fair. Here they are, I'm just going to write down exactly what I have in front of me:
If you don't have some sort of system in place to manage your work and suddenly you land 30 jobs at once you're going to feel overwhelmed.
We are often asked how to design a logo, so we have detailed our process which seems to work well for us…
Finding the perfect design process, that suits any brief, can be like finding a pot of gold (it will certainly translate to one).
