10/25/07 D.C., SND Design Quickcourse #1

I apologize to my readers (hopefully you) for not posting in a while. I’ve been away at the D.C. ACP/CMA Convention the past couple of days. On Wednesday following newspaper production, it was straight up to NOVA, then to the Hilton Washington the next day for basically nine hours of design workshops. Totally, my kind of day. No, really. I got super excited. Especially the hour on type. If any of you thought it would be difficult to get excited about x-height and descenders at 8:30 a.m.–it’s not. Yeah, I know, super nerdy. The good news is I’m planning on publishing a series of posts on all the ingenious information I’ve learned or re-learned at the convention for three days, so be on the lookout.

Enough introduction. Let’s get to the good stuff.

DESIGN TIPS, as told by Tracy Collins, The Arizona Republic, and Ron Johnson, Kansas State Univeristy, and retold by me.

 

1. Content drives the design.

2. Tell the story the best way, whether that be words, illustrations, graphics, infographics, etc.

3. Typography is your navigation tool and should be kept simple for good communication with the reader.

4. Be conservative with type, remembering special effects are usually unecessary noise.

5. Keep body text at an optimum size (9-10.5 pt) and stick to serif. Avoid wide text lines, optimum 14-18 picas.

6. Infographics won’t help your design. They’re just an additional layer of information.

7. Be a reader advocate!

8. Have “big, honkin’ dominance,” a large lead package with lead information in a dominant rectangle with lots of white space.

9. Don’t mislead the reader by presenting unrelated information as related.

10.    Play off your dominant visual with a much smaller, differing shape. Don’t let secondary visuals compete with the dominant photo.

11.    Don’t overdesign. Keep it simple.

12.    Color has power. Don’t abuse it. Color should be used as a navigational tool for the reader.

13.    White space empowers adjacent elements and improves ease of readability.