The Blog of Joshua Krohn

Graphic Designer. I go by Joshua.

[joshuakrohn]

Mid-Year Check In

It seems like it was last week that I was writing my 2014 Year in Review post. Where has the year gone?! It is really June already? The Summer of 2015? Holy smokes. I don’t know about you but it’s sure flown by for me.

Well, at the end of that post, I mentioned a follow-up post regarding personal goals for 2015. While I didn’t get around to publishing that list, I figured I’d take the opportunity of 2015′s midway point to go ahead and do just that.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to this list. It’s all over the place from personal and professional interests but I’ve organized it into categories and given a small status of each item. So with that, here are my goals for 2015.

PROFESSIONAL

Illustrate more – Okay, so I’ve totally botched this one up. Last year I had a few projects where I could use my limited illustration skills. The projects took me out of my comfort zone...but I loved it. I’d really like to hone this more but relative to everything else on my list, this one falls to the bottom.

Read more books – This could fall into the ‘Personal’ list as well but overall, I want to read more books related to design and business. I’m notorious for starting a book, only to get a few chapters in before moving on to the next book, or something else entirely. I haven’t done well on this one either. I have started a few books but haven’t finished any of them. My current reading list consists of:

Every Good Endeavor

Nicely Said

How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer

Imagine

Deeper front-end skill set – My first-ever experience with web design was a teach-yourself-HTML book in high school (15 years ago). I became proficient in HTML and CSS along the way but not as fast as the industry has moved. Things like Javascript and SASS interest me but unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to dig into this stuff yet. And frankly, I’m not certain the interest is there.

Learn After Effects – Now this is something that definitely piques my interest. After high school, I dabbled around in Flash for awhile, tweening some really horrible animations. I’ve had the opportunity to use After Effects on a couple projects this year and have absolutely loved it. The complexity and sheer vastness of what you can do with the software is daunting but it’s been a blast so far. I definitely want to keep going with this.

Port blog over to own server – This goal was born out of not liking how Tumblr stylizes posts that have text and images. If you have text in your blog post, Tumblr automatically resizes images within that post to 500 pixels wide. For a designer who loves big images, that’s no bueno. I don’t have a ton of previous posts so it wouldn’t be that much work to port over. And I don’t use the social aspect of Tumblr so that wouldn’t impact me. It’s just a matter of choosing the CMS (looking at Kirby or Perch) and coding it up.

Blog more – Blogging is a thing I’ve read you’re supposed to do but I just never got into it. Last year, to help me blog more, I had this goal of doing a weekly post of ten things that I found interesting. A lot of it was design-focused but there were quotes, videos, and other miscellany. I think I did it for about three months and eventually grew tired of it. I felt like the time I spent doing that could’ve been better served elsewhere. I have some ideas for future posts but with so many other things that interest me, blogging usually falls to the end of the list.

Complete at least one side project – In 2012 I ran The Just Love Project, which really was such a blast to do. While the project had a lot of design focus at the beginning, after it launched it was a lot of project management and admin-type tasks. I have a few ideas that I want to work on (a children’s book [oh hey, illustrating!] and a couple digital products) and I really want to get to at least one of them this year. As of right now, I’ve only dreamt about them.

PERSONAL

Play more chess – I learned the basics of chess when I was in grade school but never more beyond that. Nearly two years ago to the day, after watching Tyler Schwartz on YouTube, I wanted to start playing chess again. I was absolutely terrible when I started and have become slightly less terrible. I try to at least solve a few chess puzzles every day and play about 10-15 games a week.

Complete a 5K – I’ve never been a runner but the need to run was necessary to counteract my sedentary work/lifestyle. The past couple years have been tougher to run (family and work obligations) but at my peak, I was running about a 25-minute 5K. I want to get under 21 minutes at an actual event.

Write and record more music – Before I was a designer, I was a musician through and through. That’s what I thought and dreamed about every day. In 2011 I released an EP of four songs into the world. I’ve slowly been writing material since then and would love to finish it up for another release. I’ve been teaching myself Logic Pro X this year in little chunks here and there and am stoked about the possibilities.

There’s a lot of stuff on this list. Some of the goals I might not reach this year. And I’m okay with that. All of these goals, for me, are a nice-to-have. They’re peppered into my daily life where I try to be a good husband, father, and friend.

What about you? What goals are you working towards this year? And how are you doing in achieving them?

[joshuakrohn]

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Teaser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngElkyQ6Rhs

[joshuakrohn]

Futuralbum: The Moon Is Down

Back Story FUTURALBUM is a collaborative album art design project created by artist and illustrator Troy DeShano. The goal of the project is to reimagine artwork for an album of the designer’s choosing within these two constraints:

Use only images from Flickr’s Internet Archive Book Images (of which there are nearly 3 MILLION images available for non-commercial use!)

Use only the Futura typeface for all typography needs

When this project first popped into my Twitter feed, I was hoping that I would be able to contribute. As a lover of vintage and mid-century aesthetics, plus my affinity for CD packaging, this project was right up my alley.

I chose to reimagine “The Moon Is Down” by Further Seems Forever. This album is dear to me and I wanted to pay homage to the band that created it. (Thank you to Josh, Nick, Chris, Chad, and Steve.)

The Design As designers we’re taught early on to shy away from designing too literal. This project has “moon” in the title? Better stay away from anything with a moon lest we fall into visual cliches. But knowing these rules allows you to bend them to your will when the occasion arises.

The theme of my artwork centers around the stark visual of an eclipse. While the artwork doesn’t literally show the surface of a moon, the essence of the moon is there as it passes in front of the sun. Because I was so enamored with this visual, I chose to repeat it throughout the artwork in order to give it cohesiveness.

The moon, sun, and eclipse lend themselves to an astronomical theme so I used those visuals to further tie the artwork together.

The inclusion of the eclipse presented delightful juxtapositions as seen on the “Snowbirds and Townies” spread.

Sometimes it didn’t make sense to include the eclipse or astronomy theme. And that’s okay. Here I took the opportunity to give a nod to a very old FSF t-shirt design with the “Madison Prep” artwork.

Here are the additional spreads of the booklet drawing further on the eclipse and astronomy theme.

Reflection Projects like these walk a fine line. Asking designers to contribute their time for free? Not a week goes by that I don’t see designers publicly shame companies who run design contests because it devalues the design profession. Or see us balk, scoff, and roll our eyes at the emails that ask for free work in exchange for great exposure. Or scorn those who freely redesign that big-company homepage without anything in return.

So how is this project different? I’m working for free but not in the hopes of winning a contest or gaining exposure. And I certainly didn’t do this to claim that my design is better than the original.

I did this simply because I knew how much fun it would be. Nothing more.

Is that different from design contests, working for free, and unsolicited redesigns? I’m not sure. What do you think?

[joshuakrohn]

Acceptance is reuniting for some headlining shows and I got to play a little part in it.

[joshuakrohn]

Process: Acceptance Reunion

Back Story Sometime around 2004 I bought a CD from a pretty small label called The Militia Group. This CD, which featured fairly unknown bands (to me), became one of the only CDs I listened to that summer as I impatiently waited for these bands’ full releases. Releases from these bands (Copeland, The Rocket Summer, Brandtson, Rufio, and Acceptance) still make their way regularly into my rotation. In fact, I would argue that you couldn’t comprise a list of indie rock pop from the early aughts era without mentioning any of these bands.

While all of these bands still have records heavy in my rotation, none is more played than Acceptance’s 2005 major-label release called “Phantoms”. This record is in my Top 10 List of favorite records of all time. Granted, I haven’t made said list but if I were, this record would no doubt be on it.

While not deemed a commercial success (namely because of Sony’s poor execution of its DRM copy protection software), "Phantoms” quickly garnered a cult following in the independent music scene. About a year after its release, Acceptance disbanded much to the dismay of their fans. And of course, that included me.

So when Nick Radovanovic (drums) contacted me earlier this year about working on some designs for Acceptance’s reunion announcement, I didn’t think twice about saying yes.

The Process Since not all of the band members live in the same area, they had their photos taken separately with the intention of having them composited later on. Composite photos are always a challenge but having great photography definitely makes the design process A LOT easier. And I had some great stuff to work with since the band was shot by some talented photographers. Five of the six photos came from Jake Gravbrot, with the sixth photo coming in from Chino Villatoro.

Even though great photography makes the compositing process easier, this was still going to be a challenge since I had three different styles of photos.

The first step was to clip out each of the guys and adjust levels/color to get everyone in about the same tonal range. Because I knew the end result was going to have a lot of extra elements like shadows, flares, and textures, I didn’t have to be as super precise as I was. But it was still helpful to have this step as a strong foundation for the next steps.

The next step was the most time-intensive part of the project. The guys voiced early on that they wanted a low-key style of photography for this announcement. Getting all of the shadows looking realistic was important to pulling this off.

Once I had the workflow down for one band member, it was easier to apply that to everyone else. The GIF below shows the evolution from a colored photo to a black-and-white one. My non-destructive workflow generally consisted of the following steps:

Curves layer mask to darken the face

A layer of 50% gray burned and dodged to create more shadows and highlights

A soft, black brush set to 50% opacity to paint in more shadows

A soft, black brush set to 10% opacity to fine tune the shadows

A black and white adjustment layer (not desaturated) so that I had fine control over the adjustment

A curves adjustment layer set to the “Strong Contrast” preset

After all of the busts were set on a new canvas, minor tweaks were made using Curves and Exposure layer masks.

From there, the process was adding color and texture to create the right mood. Inspiration was taken from the original “Phantoms” artwork done by the imitable Ryan Sims. Here’s a look at how that all layered up to create the final piece.

[joshuakrohn]

2014 Year in Review

This is my first try at doing one of these year-in-review/new goals posts. Here's my attempt at archiving what was the busiest (and most fun) year I’ve had as a designer.

I’ve held a 9-5 desk job over the last decade. What started as a job to save money for getting married and pay for school turned into much more. From customer service to marketing communications to product management, I learned awesome skills that I’ll apply to my next adventure.

While no grand announcement was made, I’m happy to report that as of December 15th, I’ve left the security of a 9-5 job to fulfill my personal goal of designing full-time. And I’m freaking pumped!

While I’ve been freelancing in some capacity for the past five-ish years, I started putting more time in for the past three. I really took it seriously in 2014 to see if I could make the jump to full-time design. Here’s how the last three years looked in terms of clients I worked with:

2012 — 12 2013 — 14 2014 — 24

I really turned it up this past year, which meant a lot of personal sacrifices and a lot of late nights. There were some obstacles and lessons learned but I’ll save those for another post. For now, here’s a look at some of the projects I had a blast designing this year (in chronological order):

Rotunda Software At the end of 2013, Rotunda Software asked if I wanted to work on a couple projects to test out how we’d work together. The relationship worked great and since that time, I’ve helped them on over 60 projects of every size. One that I’m proud of is the redesign of their home page. While they didn’t launch with my favorite iteration, we still improved the existing home page.

We Shot the Moon It’s always great when another artist appreciates your work so much to keep on requesting to work with you. That’s been the case with Jonathan Jones, the musician behind We Shot the Moon. I reached out to Jonathan on Twitter in 2011 after he put out a cry for help in designing artwork for his solo record. Since that time, we’ve worked on artwork for two WSTM LPs, two WSTM EPs, and artwork for a few side projects. This year we worked on the design for “The Finish Line”, WSTM’s fifth full-length album.

WELS National Worship Conference Illustration is one of the design skills I always mean to try to improve. I used to doodle and color a ton when I was a kid but as I got older, those skills stagnated. This project was a blast because it allowed me the opportunity to hone those skills. Along with the cover illustration, I also did some spot illustrations for use throughout the piece, as well as doing the layout of the entire worship folder.

Ambrosial Crush Out of all the projects I completed this year, this one was probably my favorite due to the sheer volume of work that was required to make it a success. I was a one-stop shop for this client and completed the logo and brand identity, packaging concepts, food styling, food photography, website design, and front-end development including a light e-commerce solution. It was a huge undertaking but the payoff was so sweet.

Branches Band Branches Band is another case of an artist that likes your work so much to keep on requesting to work with you. I’ve worked on a couple albums with them and what I like about their projects is that I get full creative freedom to design something awesome. For this project, I again chose to work on improving my illustration skills. What I wanted to achieve took me way out of my comfort level but the final design is something I’m proud of.

Rebrand and Relaunch of Joshua Krohn Projects done just for myself have the knack of falling to the bottom of my to-do list. I’m not one to change things for the sake of change but my previous logo had become quite outdated. With a huge focus on growing my freelance business this year, I set a goal of relaunching my brand identity and new site by the end of summer. It was a ton of work amidst the other client projects but the juice was definitely worth the squeeze.

Elf Dance One of the big reasons I’m able to go full-time freelance is by working with the amazingly talented team at Focus Lab. Bill and I had been talking on and off for three years about working together but the timing was never right. In October that time was finally right. I worked on my first project with Bill for an iOS app called Elf Dance. Elf Dance is from the hilarious minds of JibJab. I’m beyond excited to show more of what I’ve been working on with JibJab and other fun projects with Focus Lab throughout the year.

––

I want to thank Matt D. Smith, Vin Thomas, Sean Farrell, and Bill Kenney for their help, support, and friendship this year. The jump to full-time freelance would’ve happened eventually, but it wouldn’t have been as easy without their help.

I have some ideas for goals I want to accomplish in 2015 but I’ll save that for a near-future post. Here’s to making 2015 our best year yet!

[joshuakrohn]

WELS Worship Conference

The WELS National Conference on Worship, Music, and the Arts is the largest Lutheran worship conference in North America. I was asked to design a worship folder cover for one of the three major festival services at the conference. I also designed the layout of the interior booklet, which consisted of 30+ pages of music and text for the service. This post discusses the grid system I used in designing the folder.

As a lover of grid systems, I had wanted to incorporate the grid from Elliot Jay Stocks’ Digest magazine for some time. He wrote about it here: http://www.elliotjaystocks.com/blog/digests-typography-and-grids-part-1/

Here’s an image of the grids used in the final layout.

The red lines intersect the pages and are used to construct a text area, which is where the majority of the text will be. The text areas are the two light blue rectangles in the image above. This asymmetrical grid is called the Van de Graaf canon. Because it’s based on the page’s width-to-height ratio, the proportions remain the same regardless of page size. It also lines up with the Golden canon, which splits the page into ninths: nine rectangles wide and nine rectangles high. The Golden canon is represented by the cyan lines.

Now the original Van de Graaf canon text area is six rectangles wide by six rectangles high. But that left too big of a bottom margin for my liking so I adjusted the text area to be seven rectangles high, also allowing for more content per page. It was important to keep page count in mind as this was a project with a finite budget.

After the grid was chosen, the next step was choosing a baseline grid. Once this grid is in place, almost everything aligns to it in some fashion: headlines, body copy, images, and music. Adhering to the grid allows for a beautiful rhythm and page harmony throughout the folder.

I originally went with a font size of 7.5pt and leading of 11pt. A font-size-to-leading ratio of 1.4 to 1.6 is touted as a good rule of thumb for legibility (1.46 being the ratio in this case). For large passages of text, whether it be print or web, I always start with a 1.4 ratio and adjust as needed. The 11pt baseline grid also lined up with the Golden canon: 8 lines of text for every vertical rectangle.

But after the first review, it became quite clear that the text size was too small. I adjusted the font size to 10pt and the leading to 14.664pt (1.46 ratio). I try to stick with full or half sizes for leading. But in the case of this folder, it was important to me that the baseline grid line up with the Golden canon. Using such a precise baseline grid allowed it to still line up with the Golden canon: 6 lines of text for every vertical rectangle.

With all the grids in place, the final layout could begin.

For large blocks of text, I adjusted the width of the text area to be five rectangles wide. This allowed the line length to fall in the 50-to-75 character range (including spaces), which is a good rule of thumb for optimal line length. If line length is too wide, it’s difficult for the reader’s eyes to focus on the text from line to line. If it’s too narrow, you break the reader’s rhythm from too much back-and-forth.

I treated the musical passages I was given as images. These images are always lined up with the baseline grid. Some of the hymns had many verses. Because it’s difficult to adjust the musical staves and verses, many of the text lines didn’t stick to the baseline grid. It could have been done but with the time constraints given, it wasn’t possible.

Here’s an animated gif showing the final grids layered on top of each other with other elements on the page. Let me know if you have any questions about my process in picking out these grids!

[joshuakrohn]

Week 13, 2014

Sharpy, a hand-drawn display font is being given away for FREE(!) for a limited time by Kyle Steed.

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"When they said they're insecure about things, those were things that made them different. But the things that made them different, made them unique...and that made them beautiful."

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Jonathan Moore recently updated his home office and it's gorgeous!

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A stunning unused cover for Underoath's final record by Jordan Butcher.

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Font Men - SXSW 2014 Official Selection on Vimeo.

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You don’t need nice people.

You need good people.

Good and nice are not the same thing. The opposite of good is bad. The opposite of nice is unlikeable.

–From How to hire good people instead of nice people by Brooke Allen.

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The lovely folks at Sputnik launched a new site. Lots of fun little details sprinkled throughout. Oh yeah, and the work is pretty great, too.

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iOS 7 icon designers: this looks to be your complete solution when mocking up your icons. Design one icon and this PSD shows you how the icon will look in multiple places. iosicontemplate.com

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Fonts In Use is a public archive of typography indexed by typeface, format, and industry. They currently have over 3000 typefaces identified across a myriad of industries.

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WORKER: It’s 6:37 AM, let’s begin hammering.

SECOND WORKER: Are we nailing anything in today?

WORKER: No, we’re just striking the bare, wooden floor with our hammers.

SECOND WORKER: I’ll turn on the handsaw as well.

WORKER: Great. Let it run by itself against that wall.

SECOND WORKER: How hard are we hammering today?

WORKER: Boss wants us to alternate between hammering with great force and exceptionally great force. We take breaks when the man living downstairs leaves the building.

You have to read this entire entertaining, yet slightly hyperbolic, anecdote by Ben Jurney.

[joshuakrohn]

Week 12, 2014

"Did we put a baby in here?" from Dissolve's Generic Brand Video.

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There's so much good stuff in here. Tons of beautiful vintage matchbook and stamp designs by Flickr user Shailesh Chavda.

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There is a selflessness needed to be a good designer – knowing that you’ll do whatever is necessary to get the message across, no matter how much or how little work that may take.

Wise words from Brandon Rike in his article Opinions on a Career in Graphic Design.

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Hack poster by Tim Belonax

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Moran has come up with a formal list, first conceptualized at his law firm, of 13 characteristics that every Chipotle hire should possess. It’s now a checklist given to hiring managers, and says Chipotle employees should be:

conscientious

respectful

hospitable

high energy

infectiously enthusiastic

happy

presentable

smart

polite

motivated

ambitious

curious

honest

The idea was to come up with a list of traits you can pick up on in a relatively short meeting. Inexperienced managers tend to look for the person who can help right away rather than indicators of long term success, Moran says.

There are a ton of great nuggets in here on the success of Chipotle that apply to more fields than just the restaurant business.

From How Chipotle transformed itself by upending its approach to management via Quartz

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What 200 calories looks like for different foods

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Homeland Vintage Jazz Record Covers by Ty Mattson

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The leader must have infectious optimism, and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties. They must also radiate confidence, even then they are not too certain of the outcome.

The final test of a leader is the feeling you have when you leave their presence after a conference. Have you a feeling of uplift and confidence?

–Field Marshall Montgomery, via facebook.com/ogilvy

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Really Good Emails by Matthew Smith is a site showing off other people's great design work relative to Email Design.

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A smile on my face the entire time.

[joshuakrohn]

Week 11, 2014

Sometimes you don't want to listen to music but want some white noise in the background while you work. Mix and match different sounds to create an ambiance just for you. www.noisli.com/

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Tab Dump is the work of Stefan Constantinescu. Every morning he posts 40-60 "tabs", which are little bite-sized news bits covering stories from technology, advertising, social media, and international news, sometimes with his personal commentary. It's a fantastic start to the day.

For instance, today's Tab 37: A letter written by Lewis Carroll, author of "Alice in Wonderland", was sold at auction for $19,600. Ironically, the letter was essentially Carroll complaining about becoming famous.

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–By Bryan Patrick Todd

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"Web design always seemed like this, too: finding convoluted, “dirty” solutions to often simple problems, using a very limited set of tools. Because no, there isn’t a simple way to tell your browser to just give you the link underlines you want. But yes, perhaps we can figure out some roundabout way."

–By Marcin Wichary, a designer at Medium on how he spent over a month crafting the perfect underline for links.

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This is absolutely stunning. What you're viewing above is population and demographics for New York City. Each dot represents one person according to 2010 Census Data. Zoom in, move around, and check out the whole map.

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Why placement of typography is important (via Ryan Rushing)

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A List Apart blogs about The Latest in Web Font Trends. Shown here are the three most favorited fonts on Typekit. ALA's list goes on to show favorite fonts from many hosts including Google, Font Squirrel, Fonts.com.

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Cerebus is a small collection of solid patterns for responsive HTML emails. Yes, even in Outlook, Android, and mobile Gmail.

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Even as a HUGE Star Wars fan, I had never heard of watching the series in machete order. This version strips out Jar Jar Episode I, leaving you to watch IV, V, II, III, and VI. There are some complications with this order but I think this order outweighs them.

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Incredible.

[joshuakrohn]

Why I stopped using the word "obviously"

Using the word "obviously" in conversation has rapidly crept to the top of my pet-peeves list. I've tried to eliminate it from my daily vocabulary. Here are a couple reasons why:

If the point you're trying to make is so obvious, then it's likely that other people have also come to the same conclusion. Example: "This month we made $1000, which was $500 more than last month. Obviously, we did a lot better this month." Removing the word "obviously" makes your point more succinct and communicates clearer. Heck, you could even remove the last sentence if you think the point is so obvious. Brevity is king.

What's obvious to you might not be so obvious to the other people in the conversation. If the point you're trying to make isn't so obvious, then it's likely that you've offended them. Most minds don't think the same as yours and you "obviously" thinking that they do is a huge assumption. Why risk offending someone over a single word that doesn't add any true value to the conversation?

Be more succinct and offend less. Sounds good to me.

[joshuakrohn]

Week 10, 2014

The honest folks at Grain & Mortar recently launched their new site. There's a ton of great work coming out of this group. Really, really great stuff.

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by J Fletcher Design

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"Interactions aren’t jokes though. An interaction like scrolling least of all. This is the walking of the internet, and clicking like a door or window opening. When you scrolljack you are taking the memory of how a customer’s (most of you call these people users) legs work. They mean to walk down the page, but instead they are interrupted and taken to a new place, and unexpected place."

–On scroll hijacking by Matthew Smith, via Medium

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"The model for personal development is antithetical to the model of professional success."

Milton Glaser – on the fear of failure.

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by Invisible Creature

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A deep-dive tutorial from AGSC on creating a hand-lettered logotype from beginning to end.

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Visit brandcolors.net, a very thorough list of brand colors by Galen Gidman. Pick and choose which brands you want colors for, then download that collection as an Adobe Color file, CSS, and more.

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Showcase, a beautiful handmade font with four unique styles. It's on sale for a limited time of $25.20.

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Not feeling the 'flat' design trend? Texture still has its place in design. Check out this free resource for adding a subtle touch of (tileable) texture to your digital designs: subtlepatterns.com

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by David Wardle

[joshuakrohn]

Week 9, 2014

–Night Shifts by Karolis Strautniekas

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"Headlines are often the most prominent, so people are very likely to read them. And interactive elements like buttons, links, and form labels get read, too. These are the most important words on the screen, and they deserve the most attention. Smaller screens (on phones and tablets) have room for fewer words, so the stakes are even higher--people will read the copy in your products, so take the time to get it right."

by John Zeratsky, 5 Rules For Writing Great Interface Copy

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A Boeing 777 model airplane made completely from manila folders. –via Mashable

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"At Google[x], we wondered if miniaturized electronics—think: chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair—might be a way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy."

–Smart Contact Lens Project from Google's official blog

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How the Amazon Warehouse Works

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The Saul Bass Poster Archive

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"For everyone who has ever opened Photoshop or Illustrator you are most likely familiar with blend modes. Multiply, screen, overlay and soft light, to name a few can turn boring opaque layers into beautiful pieces of stained glass. However, what awesome “blend modes” do web designers have at their disposal for making websites beautiful? Opacity. Yep, that’s it."

–Bennett Feely on the future of CSS Blend Modes

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–via Minimal Mac

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Make sure you watch this one in HD.

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–by Device Creative Collaborative via The Dieline

[joshuakrohn]

Week 8, 2014

Download over 1600 vector icons for $70 from Streamline. Designed to mimic the aesthetic of iOS 7, I don't know how you would need to purchase another set. There are a ton of great icons in here.

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Here's What San Francisco Would Look Like Without Cars or People

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Toy Story fans: be prepared to have your mind blown as you learn the identity of Andy's mom.

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Ty Matton's office at SND CYN.

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"The consequences of thinking about content after the design process is completed can be pretty embarrassing."

–from "Lorem Ipsum Gone Wrong" by Rian van der Merwe

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How DHL got its competitors to advertise for them. Brilliant.

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"Daniel Sabino’s concept for Haltrix was to head in the exact opposite direction of most script fonts, purposefully making a ‘masculine’ script face..."

Not applicable to most design projects but when you need it, you'll need it.

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The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"

The tourist replied, "15 to 20 years."

"But what then?" asked the Mexican.

The tourist laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions?...Then what?"

Then what? Then what? Then what? When is enough, enough?

Matt D. Smith provides a great commentary on being content with what you have.

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"I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares." –Saul Bass: On Making Money versus Doing Quality Work

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"No one will ever know exactly what went through the mind of Letikiros in the moments that followed. What is known, is that she somehow slipped and fell, smashing her clay pot full of water into small pieces. She must have watched in horror as the water spilled out on the dusty ground and abruptly considered the harsh reality of her situation. More than 10 hours of walking and waiting had been undone through a simple misstep."

From "The Last Walk for Water" by Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of charity: water.

(I've been a staunch supporter of charity: water for the past three years. Reading this story only strengthens my convictions for their mission. 100% of your donations are sent directly to the field to fund clean water projects.)

[joshuakrohn]

Week 7, 2014

Sometimes you want an iPad iOS7 GUI kit for Illustrator, not Photoshop. Well, pixelpixelpixel.com hooks you up with a free one. Lots of other great Illustrator and Photoshop resources here, too.

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Check out Hemingway, a slick web app to help make your writing clear and concise.

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Arguments against NOT using trendy sliders or carousels on your home page (via shouldiuseacarousel.com).

1% clicked a feature. Of those, 89% were the first position. 1% of clicks for the most significant object on the home page? (by Erik Runyon, talking about nd.edu, Notre Dame)

The target was the biggest item on the homepage - the first carousel item. “Nonetheless, the user failed the task.” (by Nielsen Norman Group, UX research and consulting group)

“We have tested rotating offers many times and have found it to be a poor way of presenting home page content.”  (by Chris Goward, Wider Funnel)

“...banner blindness means that the moderately experienced web user tunes out from such content because of the similarity to adverts.” (by Adam Fellowes, UX designer)

" Carousels are seemingly an easy fix to two universal design problems: how do I fit so much content into so little space, and how do I decide what content is the most important? It's easy to justify away the usability issues of a carousel when you consider the benefits of presenting multiple content pieces in such little real estate." (by Jared Smith)

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GoPro camera falls from airplane. Lands in pig pen. 'Nough said.

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Sweet font hack by Cory Schmitz:

"Couldn’t find a font in the style I had in mind, so I drew what I wanted in Illustrator, fed it to WhatTheFont & the top result was perfect.

Drew this: 

Got this:

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The fine folks at Go Media run through how they create their custom apparel mock-up templates in great detail.

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The inimitable Matt Yow created Leksico, a free icon font, just for you.

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Jeremiah Shoaf of typeandgrids.com shares the 10 most popular web fonts he's noticed from analyzing font usage on Typewolf, a site where he categorizes the latest website designs by the web fonts they use.

Proxima Nova

Gotham

Roboto

Inconsolata

Avenir

Futura

Montserrat

Brandon Grotesque

Apercu

Open Sans

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Web nerds, keep this link handy: caniuse.com. Type in an element name (HTML, CSS, JS) and this will tell you what browsers support that element.

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by Curtis Jinkins

[joshuakrohn]

Week 6, 2014

This rebranding by Studio MPLS is so on point. 

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Technology in the span of 20 years.

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Brandon Grotesque gets an aged and textured treatment in this updated typeface from HVD Fonts. The whole set is on sale for $29 until March 1st.

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"Sometimes I’ll be walking her through some sort of interface over the phone and I’ll tell her to delete a file, only to realize that “Delete” is an icon. I’ll have to tell her at that point to search for some icon that looks like a trash can or an “X” or something. I’ve heard her say something genius after finding it like “Why doesn’t it just say ‘Delete’?”."

From "Designing User Interfaces for Your Mother" by Tony Gines

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Patron Saint Illustration Process by Bob Case

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Sometimes the client brief asks for way more than their budget. (via @AshHumby)

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One line of CSS to make your blog typography good enough via @fchimero.

p { font: 1em/1.4em Georgia, serif; color: #333; max-width: 30em; }

And this is what it looks like: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/kHIuE

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What Earth looks like from the surface of Mars. We're so small.

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This is a little nerdy but if you're into some light code writing, this solution for pulling in feeds from Pinterest, Instagram, Dribbble (any feed that uses JSNOP) to use on your website is pretty freaking sweet. Designed by the talented Rogie King.

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New Logo and Identity for La Brea Bakery by Hornall Anderson

[joshuakrohn]

Week 5, 2014

Industry Inc is a vintage-style display font with a bunch of styles that layer together to create fantastic results. On sale for a limited time for $29.

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Gerren Lamson shares some tips on how to use scatter brushes to add texture and dimension to your flat illustrations.

– via Method and Craft

Gerren mentions that the brushes he's using in his video are Ryan Clark's, which are available on Creative Market. However, it's much more fun to create your own. Ryan Clark teaches you how he makes his own brushes.

– also via Method and Craft

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I love reading through style guides. Here's a good one from Jody Worthington, who created it for a recent Skillshare class. Check out the whole thing on designworklife.

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"Talented creatives often end up working for someone else, often at a company or studio. There’s nothing wrong with a j-o-b, of course—if that’s what you want. But if my inbox is any indicator, for every happily employed designer or artist, there are a dozen who desperately long for something different."

The whole article by Chris Guillebeau is an encouraging look at going out on your own.

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A Guide to American Football by Fraser Davidson. This is great motion work.

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I'm a sucker for a good condensed, gothic typeface. Bebas Neue only ever had one weight, which was sad. But what could you expect from a free font? They released four new weights for the same price as the original version: FREE. Donations also accepted.

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via The Type Hunter

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"You can’t step back to clarify what your Most Important Tasks are unless you realize you’re procrastinating in the first place. You can’t break a task into small steps unless you realize you’re dreading the task. You can’t clear away distractions unless you realize you’ve been following the urge to go to these distractions.

Awareness is everything with procrastination."

There are nuggets of gold in this article on procrastination by Leo Babauta.

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The office of Ubiquitous is gorgeous.