Airside, a creative agency, has posted a synopsis of their process for designing the Airplot identity (announcement here). It’s a fantastic example of a typical and successful (in my opinion) design process. They hit the nail right on the head with the following statement:

“On the occasions Airside has presented its process talk ‘I Don’t Like It’, [we] were puzzled by the audience’s surprise at just how many sketches and worksheets contributed to a finished design.

We hope that by presenting the ‘scrappier’ parts of a project that most agencies would seek to hide, a lot of the mystery behind the design process can be swept away and reveal the work that goes into such an undertaking.”

Design, at its best, is an amalgam of very directed, purposeful thinking and editing, combined with creative, brave, and insightful exploration. Their post gives a hint of what that looks like from the inside.

I encourage those in decision-making positions at any organization, the typical clients for designers, to appraise a given designer’s work against examples such as this one. There’s a dash of black magic in any creative process, but graphic design is not a wishy-washy thing whose fruits are determined by whimsy and arbitrary flights of fancy. Your designer should be able to articulate, either in writing or in person, the reason(s) for any given decision. If not, consider rethinking the relationship.

However, it’s also important to keep in mind the less-apparent but crucial lesson of Airside’s post: a bulk of the design process is laying out all of the ideas you don’t use, and deciding which ideas those are. This is one of the many reasons I rarely present more than one logo or layout concept to my clients. It’s my job to determine which ones are worth consideration, and to have the foresight to select those that will best achieve their goals. Logo presentations that contain more than one solution often reflect ambiguity in the project goals or client’s directions, rather than an abundance of ideal solutions.

(This story came to my attention via Brand New.)

When promising your friends and family that you’ll blog every day about TypeCon, it’s easy to overlook the fact that to do so you’ll need to stop having fun and immersing yourself in type and actually sit down and write the damn thing.

I promise, very soon, stuff on my experience at TypeCon in Buffalo. I was up until about 4am last night, so I predict a bit more sedentary activity for me today.

Logos can be the simplest visual end-products that a designer works on, but they are often also the most complicated projects. A logo is typically a spearhead or a flagship for an organization’s branding, so most people have seen thousands of them. They know what they like and they know what they don’t like. They know what brands are powerful and which aren’t. For this reason, it feels very easy to the average non-designer to critique, poke fun at, and speak about logo design. In many ways, this is great. Sometimes the biggest hurdle in a project is a clammed-up client who is fearful of speaking their mind in front of a design professional. In other ways, it can be the designer’s bane, because most people have a skewed view of logo design.

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Ever wanted to make a quick font? Well, now you’ve got your chance. FontShop just opened up their modular web-based font building tool, FontStruct.

I got a chance to play around with the closed pre-launch version and I can attest to its robustness. I was skeptical when I got the invite, but it does everything it needs to and exports a functional font file to boot.

My only public “fontstruction”, Faketur, is a work in progress containing what I’d call a first shot at the lowercase letters for a blackletter font. It has big spacing issues and some characters in need of intervention, but I plan to keep on adding and tweaking. I’ll likely post when it’s in better shape.

Check out FontStruct. The team did an impressive job for this handy little free web tool. Congrats, guys.

One of my favorite type families, Kent Lew’s Whitman, is just about to make the transition from beautiful specialized book face to full-fledged modern workhorse. This is music to my ears.

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