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A Study Break, for Gazing Forward
May 10, 2008 - 11:38pmAlright people. It’s time for me to confess a dirty little secret. I am a Capricorn… no, not a casual Capricorn— a hard core, anal retentive, pica wielding, algebra-double-checking, relationship-controlling Capricorn. During this stressful time in the life of Cornellians we call “finals week”, I please my anal desires (tehehehe) by making a detailed study schedule.
When a page designer makes a schedule, it of course has to reflect all his design fetishes. For me, it’s neat, clean cut boxes, with gentle shades of green, punctuated by rich bloody red. My font of choice? California FB— light and springy, like the weather that beckons from beyond the library walls.
CMYK Presents "The TypeOff"
April 30, 2008 - 8:01pmIt takes alkynes to make a world. While we in the Sun Design Department are definitely not nerdy enough to crack such a crude chemistry joke, we do have our own “geek sessions”. One such event took place this past Saturday when Design Editor Carol Zou, Assistant Design Editors Deb Tan and I, sat down for an informal conversation about some Daily Sun fonts, moderated by Arts & Entertainment Editor Julie Block.
Type-Off: The Prelude
April 29, 2008 - 8:43amWanted: A Venetian masculine type with a strong chin and distinct ligatures for an open-type relationship. Must be an ambitious ascender who can raise my baselines. No light weights or aliasing, please.
While the above may seem like a corny set-up for a “That’s what she said” joke, serious requests for certain typefaces run rampant on graphic designer forums. (Yes, those exist.) Every day, a graphic designer sits down at his or her computer, makes a text box and proceeds to contemplate the holy grail of designer life: the font type.
Sun Silliness
April 19, 2008 - 9:59pmSome say that graphic design is basically “selling out to the man”. To these critics, I say… you’re probably right. But in the meanwhile, I’m enjoying page design.
One thing I don’t enjoy are carry pages. You know when you finish a front page article and it says “See DEBATE page 8”? Yup, page 8 is a “carry” page, since the article carries over onto it. We tend to do these pages late at night, under-caffeinated and over deadline. These pages tend to have a lot of ads on them, and fitting the articles is tough, since they have exact word counts (on the front page, articles can spill over).
Deconstructing Milstein
April 10, 2008 - 12:00amYou can find a link to the audio slideshow "Deconstructing Milstein" by clicking on the image.
Dramatis Design-ae
April 7, 2008 - 4:17pmOK. In the words of my father, no more ‘hanky-panky’. Enough talking the talk and waxing poetic about design philosophy; it’s time to walk the design walk (more like a sidestep, really) for all you design aficionados out there. An introductory paragraph this dramatic can only introduce one subject: white space*.
As Assistant Design Editor Deborah Tan pointed out in her previous post,what you don’t see is just as important as what you do see in a newspaper.
What's in a Design?
March 30, 2008 - 9:51pmMy first encounter with design was when my first-grade teacher told me to draw a design across a faded sheet of construction paper. As I sat there, a fat, violet Crayola marker resting in my fingers, I felt a looming sense of uncertainty concerning the instructions at hand. A design? Did that really mean we could draw anything?
Of Mice, Men and Enginerds
March 12, 2008 - 12:00amEvery day, millions of scissors take to the pages of local papers as avid readers rescue interesting content from the eventual fate of their morning paper. The provocative article favorite astrology clipping or picture of Jimmy’s last soccer goal are saved from the recycling bin and forever immortalized on the kitchen fridge or the office bulletin board.
Confessions of a Design Editor
February 25, 2008 - 7:06amConfession: I buy but never read The Economist, because I know the mere act of carrying it around will make me seem more intelligent than I actually am. Nothing screams a well-informed interest in Cuban politics quite like sans-serif fonts cleanly juxtaposed against the photo du jour on The Economist’s front cover. If you’ve ever judged a book, magazine, or newspaper by its cover, then you know that the design of a publication speaks volumes about its intended demographic.
A Full Color Press
February 19, 2008 - 4:17amAt one point or another in high school English class, a project comes along where the teacher asks you to make a fake newspaper; you know...where the headlines read something along like "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Found Dead" or "Hobbit Finds Gold, Magic Ring." If you’re any sort of ambitious student, you probably tried to make the project actually look like a newspaper with columns, headlines, bylines, tiny type...that distinct, tight, unmistakable look of newsprint, that always made current events that much more intimidating to read.