Welcome
Thanks for checking out our brand new, hot off the press, website/blog. We’re excited about sharing our thoughts on design and what it means to have your own design practice.
Unfortunately, it’s not all design. Running a small business is often equal parts stress and reward. The trick is to keep the two in balance. Hopefully, by following us, and this site, you may learn something to improve your skills as a designer and small business owner. Better yet, by commenting and joining the discussion, we can help each other out.
Who, you ask, is going to write this content? To start, Matt Falco and David Pohlmeier. Matt is a licensed architect and David is a graphic designer. Both of us live in the great state of Illinois fairly close to Chicago. We’ve worked together on a variety of projects and levels and have been friends for many years. We’re hoping that combining each of our different design disciplinesalong with our business expertise we can contribute some great content.
Design is a funny thing. If done well, you don’t notice it. If done poorly, you can’t stop talking about it. As the saying goes: “Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan.”
Here at Blueprint for Design, we are intent on creating community. A place where we can share ideas about design, good or bad, and discuss the issues related to being an entrepreneur.
One of our main objectives for this blog is to create a community of like minded professionals. Having guest articles from different professional backgrounds would be awesome. If you would like to contribute, please visit our Become an Author page to find out more. We want to learn from your experience and find out what makes you successful in design and small business.
Please give us your thoughts, there is a community of us that will appreciate it.
Creating a Favicon
Have you ever wondered how websites show their logo next to the URL at the top of browser windows? It’s quite simple to do in little time. Favorite icons show up in other places too. Bookmarked pages, on tabs in tabbed browsers, and as icons on your desktop for saved sites.
What You Need
You’ll need a few tools to get started. Adobe Photoshop or another type of design software is needed. You’ll also need the ability to save files as an Icon File (ICO). I found a great FREE plug-in for Photoshop at Telegraphics. Download and follow installation instructions.
Tutorial
Favorite Icons are small images. The actual size of the finished file will be 16×16. Because of the difficulty in drawing at such a small scale I’ll typically start off by creating a canvas in Photoshop at 64×64.
Next, start designing. Remember, it’s going to be smaller than what you see if you have scaled up for ease of drawing. I’ve found that simple graphics and one to three colors work the best. It needs to be a simple design.
When you’re done designing go to Image>Image size and change to 16×16. Make sure that Resample Image is checked and in the pulldown menu select Bicubic Sharper.
At this point you can see what your icon will look like. If it needs some more tweaking or the image doesn’t hold up at a small size, now would be the time to go back and correct it. To make sure that you are viewing the icon in it’s actual size go to View>Actual Pixels.
With the Icon completed it’s time to save. Go to File>Save as and name it favicon. This is important! It has to be named favicon.ico to work properly and for browsers to find the file. You will then select Windows Icon (ICO) from the file format menu and save to your desired location.
Now, it’s time to upload the image. Connect to your website’s server and upload the image in the main directory. This is the root folder of your website. It can’t be in any folder. It should be where your home page (index.html) is located.
For some browsers, you’re done. Because of it’s name and location on your server, the browser knows what to do and how to view the image. Some browsers can be difficult so you may want to add a small amount of code to your site to be sure it’s seen. In the <head> section of your index.html add this bit of code -
<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
Finally, save your modified page and upload the new files.
Viewing
Open up your desired browser and check out your site. If you don’t see the icon appear right away don’t worry. You may need to clear the cache in your web browser to “renew” the look of you site. Other browsers simply need you to hit “refresh” while others may want you to add the site to your bookmarks/favorites folder to actually see the icon appear.
Something Extra
If you’d like a little inspiration, check out this gallery of favicons.
A favicon generator.
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Thumbnail photo courtesy of rob5408 on Flickr.
Thoughts on Printing – Part 1
As a graphic designer I get a lot of questions from clients about printing. There are terms that are probably unfamiliar to most people like, bleeds, offsets, 4-color, 2-color, etc. What does it all mean? What do you as the client, or designer need to know to get a print job done professionally?
First off, there are two things that make for a great print job. A good design and a good printer. A combination of both will get the best results. Make sure that you see actual samples of printed materials from both the designer and the printer. Select a printer based on quality of work and experience. Most clients always want to use the cheapest printer. I like to stick with one printer that does good work and refer them to all my clients. I know the project will look good and it will reflect good on me. To any designers reading this, I’ve come to realize that a client usually associates a poor quality printed piece with the designer. Not with the printer. If you want repeat customers, create good designs and get it printed well.
Here are a few common questions I get asked.
WILL IT LOOK THE SAME ON MY SCREEN AS IT DOES PRINTED?
Probably the hardest thing for most clients to understand is that the printed piece will NOT look like it does on the monitor. Scanners, digital cameras, and computer monitors process images using three colors: Red, Green and Blue. This is often referred to as RGB. A printing press prints full color with four colors: Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black. This is referred to as CMYK. Because of the different process, there will be a level of difference in the way a job looks on the screen and the way it looks when printed. There isn’t much else to explain, the colors just won’t look the same most of the time.
WHAT IS 4-COLOR (CMYK) , 2-COLOR ETC?
As the name implies, this is how many colors are used for printed materials. CMYK or full color printing is sometimes referred to as 4-color. This means that your project will need to be printed four times with four different inks to create the final materials. When you look at a print quote, you’ll see right away that most of the price is in the setup. Four plates need to be made, four inks need to be mixed, and the machines need to be set up and cleaned four times. Often times, to save money, a client may not wish to print with 4 colors. (I’ll talk more about pricing later.) It may be suitable for the design to use less. In my experience most clients tend to use 1 or 2 colors. The ‘colors’ I refer to when not CMYK are typically PMS or Pantone colors.
WHAT ARE PANTONE COLORS?
These are standard colors that all printers can create. Paint samples at the local hardware or paint store would be an accurate comparison. I keep a Pantone color chart on hand at all times and so do most printers. A benefit to selecting the color in this manner is that it should be ‘what you see is what you get’ since you are seeing an actual printed sample of the color. Note: Paper can dramatically affect a color. Paper color and paper weight can affect how the ink looks. Keep in mind also that the chart shows the ink on both glossy and matte paper. The same color may look different so make sure you know the paper stock when choosing the color.
You can find more info on Pantone colors at their website by clicking here.
Stay tuned for Thoughts on Printing – Part 2.