Julia Simons's List: 2.4 Industry Terms

• Typography is the soul of design; it lies at the heart of visual literacy. This chapter explores typography for the Web and describes the methods and techniques of composition that bring documents to life and facilitate understanding.

   

  “Typography exists to honor the content”, says Robert Bringhurst, author of the well-known typographic bible The Elements of Typographic Style. Web typography in particular entails the selection, arrangement and setting of type on the Web to enrich the meaning of text and to provide a framework upon which text can come to life. A good starting point but surely not an exhaustive definition.

   

  Typography involves a wide range of topics and applications, even more so now with the digitization of information on the Web. It is not only about choosing the best font family, but about bringing value to communication, improving legibility, defining a brand and corporate image, selling pro- ducts and making information better understood by the audience. Inadequately applying some of the common rules of typography is sometimes enough to make readers turn the other way.
• First page of the first volume of the Gutenberg Bible, printed with an early texture typeface around 1455. The decorative colored initials were hand-lettered separately by a scribe.

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• Typography is essentially the study of how letterforms interact on a surface, directly relating to how the type will be set when it eventually goes to press. One definition is stated as “the style, arrangement or appearance of typeset matter,” and is a product of the movable type printing system that much of the world has used for centuries. It is related to typesetting and can include type design. In our current digitally-driven design world, this means working with fonts on a daily basis for most of us.

   

  Typography is actually a subset of lettering, because it is the study of letters applied to typefaces. Many designers have also taken up letterpress printing as a hobby or side interest, which also utilizes aspects of typography or typesetting, depending on the project.
• Inside a Gutenberg Bible. Note the mixed use of blackletter typography and hand-lettered drop caps, mimicking the contemporary German calligraphic style. (Image: jmwk)

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• Mood boards are an easy way to establish a creative foundation for a project.    What tone and style you want your aesthetic to adhere to, so that you can    communicate them easily with your client. It's an easy way to compile a wide gamut    of appropriate content that defines the visual voice, the personalities.    The style and aesthetic of the business product or service.    It's not about creating the content at this stage.    It's about gathering and collocating found content that reflexes the emotional feel    and mood you want to pursue in the exploratory stage.   

     

      It doesn't matter if the specific imagery directly relates to the genre you're    designing for. Sometimes you'll find mood boards embedded    with finished creative briefs. This is how most projects from agencies    show up in my inbox for identity projects. The purpose of a mood board is to get    people in the correct aesthetic mood for where a project could go.    Whether your mood boards are virtual, in the form of pdf files, or actual poster    boards, with clipped samples from magazines, photos Colo swatches and    patterns affixed to it. It's a great way to encapsulate and    collage a visual language that imbues the feel that you and your client can agree on    before exploratory and development work on the logo and identity begins.

• Why write a creative brief?

   

  Creative briefs help keep projects running smoothly and prevent misunderstandings and delays by:

   
   
  • Connecting objectives with creative strategies
   
  • Building team consensus
   
  • Aligning expectations
   
  • Defining clear, measurable goals

• What’s included in a creative brief?

   

  Key elements of the creative brief can include:

   
   
  • Background information on the company, product or service
   
  • Insight into the target audience
   
  • Brand attributes, promise and mission
   
  • Competitive landscape
   
  • Business objectives
   
  • Compelling offer
   
  • Call to action
   
  • Metrics for measuring success
   
  • Supporting data
   
  • Functional specifications (if applicable)
   
  • Approval process
   
  • Timelines
   
  • Budget

• Do:

   
   
  • Include all stakeholders. Gain input from all of the stakeholders, including those who’ll have final say over the project approval. Having buy-in from everyone up front will help ensure smooth sailing ahead!
   
  • Keep it short. People have a tendency to throw in everything but the kitchen sink when they write a creative brief. It’s better to be discriminating in identifying the most critical points to communicate. A succinct, well-written brief helps the creative team stay focused.
   
  • Have a conversation. A creative brief shouldn’t be written in a vacuum. It should be based on thought-provoking discussion with key contributors to ensure everyone is in agreement on primary goals and messaging.
   
  • Use insights to inspire. Think about the motivating insights that drive the audience. Such nuggets of data are precious to your creative team—helping to inspire original ideas.

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• This Creative Briefing Guide will help you get the most out of any graphic designer or creative team you might work with. Even though reasons like lack of time, shortage of information or the perception that graphic designers know as much about your business as you do, may discourage the idea of you putting time and effort into the briefing process, nevertheless, writing a complete and accurate brief is a great investment you can make towards the quality of the design product you will receive and consequently the potential of your business to succeed. Just follow the next 8 easy steps and make the most out of your money when hiring a creative professional.

• So, as a designer, you don't exist unless you don't have a portfolio. Now, one of the hardest things to do is to figure out what even goes into your portfolio.

  • Remember the TYPO!
• So you want to make sure that you can get as much real work as you can, in your portfolio and show how you did it. Show the concept.
• So one of the things you can do too, even in the front, is show what you're good at, show the table of contents, show that "This is what I'm going to show you", explain it and then make sure to always provide a way to be contacted, which sometimes we forget to do. So, in my case, I had Facebook, Twitter, call me, visit my website, check out my blog, email me. All in all, I put my personality in it and is also showed it in a way that was clean, that wasn't too overbearing, that didn't show too much work or too little, but then also provided enough information for them to know what type of style I had and how diverse I was in my skill set.

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• While demographics show your subscribers’ hard data (age, location, marital status, ethnicity, etc), psychographics slice across your list from a different angle, looking at lifestyles, behaviors and attitudes.
• Psychographics give you a much deeper look into the market you’re dealing with. If you know what’ll grab their attention and what’ll turn them off, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.

• Once you have you’ve collected your subscribers’ psychographics, use them to put together customer profiles – “example” customers that you keep in mind when writing your messages. Name them, give them a backstory, make them as real as possible.

   

  If you have a single definitive strain of thinking throughout the majority your readership, you’ll end up with just one profile, and you can write exclusively to that audience.

• Finding psychometrics takes some work on the front end. You have to get yourself organized, carry out the research and then update your reader profiles periodically.

   

  But with solid reader profiles in place customers, you’ll be surprised at how focused your offers become. And with more focused offers, you’ll be looking at more sales.
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• Demographics are the characteristics of a human population. This information is often used by small business owners to conduct research into where opportunities exist within their market and in developing appropriate business and marketing strategies to target customers.

• At its core, hierarchy supports legibility by providing clear visual clues about the structure and organization of the text. Hierarchy defines how content is to be read through. It shows the user where to start reading and where to break. It differentiates headers from body text. Although text box color can be used to give headers and body text contrast, hierarchy shows the difference in size between these elements. Hierarchy plays a huge part in making a layout scannable and is an important technique for making Web typography readable.
• AIGA achieves a beautiful, clean and intuitive hierarchy through a subtle use of color, font size and leading.

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• Winston Churchill once said: “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” Regardless of where you work or who you work for, being able to take criticism is part of the job description. Whether you’re getting feedback from your boss or a client, having a proper perspective on criticism and a sound understanding of how to use it effectively is important.
• Unfortunately, not many people enjoy criticism. In fact, many have developed a thick skin and take pride in their ability to brush it off and move on. However, despite its negative connotation, criticism often presents an excellent opportunity to grow as a designer. Before you can respond effectively, you need to understand what those opportunities are.

• When a designer sits down to create any type of project, they have one goal in mind. Communicate a message to my target audience. But if you’ve ever wondered why design elements end up where they do, whether it be a picture, a graphic or some letters, then this course is for you. We’ll break down eight core principles of composition and how they relate to graphic designers. We will begin with movement, but continue on and learn about contrast, proximity, rhythm, emphasis, balance, variety, and unity.

  To wrap this course up, we will put together a simple layout inside InDesign to put some of these principles into practice. After completing this course, you’ll be equipped with a wealth of knowledge that will allow you to immediately begin improving the compositions of your design projects.

• Many businesses say they target “anyone interested in my services.” Some may say they target small business owners, homeowners or stay-at-home moms. All of these targets are too general.

• Targeting a specific market does not mean that you have to exclude people that do not fit your criteria from buying from you. Rather, target marketing allows you to focus your marketing dollars and brand message on a specific market that is more likely to buy from you than other markets. This is a much more affordable, efficient and effective way to reach potential clients and generate business.

   

  For example, an interior design company could choose to market to homeowners between the ages of 35-65 with incomes of $150,000+ in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana market. To define the market even further, the company could choose to target only those interested in kitchen and bath remodeling and traditional styles. This market could be broken down into two niches—parents on the go and retiring baby boomers.

• Now the theory of rigging is to make the character easier to manipulate for the animator.    A character is basically composed of a number of pieces of geometry that are    connected together via a skeleton, and then that skeleton is organized using a    rig. So this way the animator doesn't have to dig down and actually animate the    character's skeletal bones, or find blend shapes to animate, that sort of thing.    So basically what we're trying to do is present an interface to the character    that makes it easy to manipulate.
• Now not only does it have to be easy to manipulate in the viewports, it also has    to kind of look nice and neat in the outliners.    So if we go into Window > Outliner, you can see that I have all of my rigging    parts under this Master node.    We have the Skeleton here, in fact, I can highlight it here in the layers, so    I have a skeleton and also I have the character's geometry, and those are all separate nodes.

• In this section we look at how to do key framed animation.  What exactly is keyframe animation?  In simple terms, you define a few (*cough* key *cough*) frames of animation ( by posing or positioning your model ) and then the computer fills in the missing animation.  It’s exceedingly handy as it greatly simplifies the animation process ( it would really suck if you had to update every single movement on every single frame! ) and it also reduces the amount of data you need to store.  Fortunately, except for a few gotchas, keyframe animation is pretty simple in Blender.
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• A shader is a program that is run for every shading sample on the surface (simplistically, every visible point on a surface).
   
   The shader is given a bunch of parameters by the renderer (point position, surface normal, light positions and colours etc.), and a bunch of parameters by the user (surface colour, shininess, texture filenames etc). Given these parameters, the shader calculates what the final surface colour and opacity should be. That colour is put into the final rendered frame at that point.
   
   That's the basic idea from a shader writer's point of view.
   
   All the "materials" in Maya or 3dsmax are shaders. The concept of material properties is designed to make playing with the shaders easier for an artist. Ever wonder why the "specular power" slider on a phong shader seems to have the opposite of the expected effect? It makes a lot more sense when you code it...
   
   Basically a shader is what you make it. You don't have to do anything. You can just set the colour to white and drop out. Or you could do something complex like calculating subsurface transmission and scattering.

• Baking, in general, is the act of pre-computing something in order to speed up some other process later down the line. Rendering from scratch takes a lot of time depending on the options you choose. Therefore, Blender allows you to "bake" some parts of the render ahead of time, for select objects. Then, when you press Render, the entire scene is rendered much faster, since the colors of those objects do not have to be recomputed.

• Much of this textural detail is thanks to the texture artist, also known as a texture painter, whose graphic art is used to define the surface qualities of a 3-D computer model. Most of the textures created by texture artists are used in video games, films, and television shows.
• The texture artist’s main duty is to create photorealistic textures for mapping onto 3-D objects used in video games, films, television, music videos, or commercials—like wrapping a gift box in patterned paper. These textures will often be created from scratch, but may also be created from existing materials. Familiarity with the requisite software is required, as well as familiarity with the process of UV mapping. To create the appropriate finishes, a texture artist may scan photographs and then digitally apply the textures to objects and environments previously created by other members of the effects team, or they may create custom textures that go far beyond what appears in nature. As members of the visual effects team, texture artists must maintain a high level of photorealism in whatever surfaces they choose so as to enhance the 3-D environment and fit the requirements of the model pipeline and shading setup. Keeping textures diverse helps avoid repetitive and boring contributions to the video game, film, or television show on which they are working. Texture artists are just one element of the VFX team, and work closely with a variety of people, from modelers and shading/lighting technical directors to VFX supervisors.
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