a mediabistro site

DTP may have made designers’ lives easier, but it also set us up for the ripple effect.

First to go (in my time) were the phototypesetters.
Next the film strippers and darkroom camera operators.
Next...us?
After us, the printers? Is Kindle just the tip of the iceberg?

We need to learn how to adapt in this new work environment. And we need to learn how to PDQ.

In this lesson you will learn how to set the basics up on your new Drupal site.

All settings for your Drupal site can be set within the Administer menu that can be accessed from the menu in the left. When you click Administer you will get a large menu with many options. These menu points are broken down to 5 parts:

1. Content Management - Manage your site's content.
2. User Management - Manage your site's users, groups and access to site features.
3. Reports - View reports from system logs and other status information.
4. Site building - Control how your site looks and feels.
5. Site configuration - Adjust basic site configuration options.

When I design logos for clients I present many options. By the time I come up with the ideas, sketch them out on paper and then design them on the screen I get attached to them. As a friend of mine once said your logos become your kids. We want to see them grow, become successful and famous. When the client asks me which logo among the presented I like most I feel as if I'm asked which child of mine I like the most. I can't decide, I love them all.

Yet, if I'm lucky client chooses only one from the many. The rest of the kids don't get any love, they are tossed away as if they weren't good enough to represent a business, not fit enough for the world. This is unfair. These abandoned ideas deserve better.

If you're having troubles with text jumbled together when copy pasting documents the issue is most likely caused by incorrect use of line breaks and paragraph breaks. This is usually a problem with MS Word documents.

To fix such documents, open them in Pages before copying. Select Edit/ Find/ Find.../ Advanced. From the drop down options select Line break for Find and Paragraph break for Replace. Once you complete the replace operation you copy the text and it will work correctly.

I'm starting a course with a lesson a week for non-programmers who wish to learn Drupal. Here is the first lesson.

Before we start with your first lesson, let me give you a very short background about running Drupal.

Drupal is a content management system designed to run on a web server which is accessible through the internet to anyone interested. To run your Drupal site you will need a hosting provider which can run your website for you. There are many to choose from. One of the biggest and cheapest ones that offer easy Drupal installation is Dreamhost.

Did you know you can move the file back from trash to the folder it was originally trashed from?

The simplest way to do this is to select the file in the trash and use the same shortcut used to trash files Apple-Backspace (Cmd-Backspace). Alternatively you can Ctrl-Click the file and select the put back command from the contextual menu.

This can be particularly useful if you deleted multiple files from many folders and you need to move them all back at once.

Now that the iPad is out let's think about whether it is a useful tool for us designers. Sure it can serve all the business and entertainment needs we have, but does it have the ability to help us professionally? Can the iPad makes us more creative, more efficient and can it help us with our everyday design tasks? Let's take each activity we do as designers and see if iPad has a place in it.

Check out more work by Dale Stephanos

Excerpted from Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities (New Riders)
By David Airey

Design inspiration is a bit of a cliché. I’m asked time and again where I find the inspiration to do my job, or how I stay inspired, but it’s important to remember that what we do, as designers, doesn’t need inspiration in the true sense of the word. The ability to successfully complete the identity design process comes from the result of years of study, practice, and experience, as well as following a clearly defined set of steps.

However, motivation, not inspiration, can sometimes be an issue. You’d be naive to think that at some point during a long career in design, your motivation won’t wane. A seemingly never-ending project; overly harsh criticism from your peers; the discovery that, after weeks of work, your favorite design concept has already been created by someone else for a different company; or simply being stuck at your computer for hours on end every day — all or any one of these factors can suck the motivation right out of you.

The following provides a range of motivational tips — some from me, and some from other designers — on how to keep your spirits up and the creative juices flowing during tough projects.

Never Stop Learning

You will never know all there is to know about design.

Our profession is constantly evolving, so to stay in the game you need to evolve with it. To get a sense of where our industry is headed, you need to look at where it’s been. There’s an incredible amount we can learn from the great iconic designers that came before us: people like Paul Rand (IBM logo), Paula Scher (Citi logo), and Tom Geismar (Mobil Oil logo). Those who have worked through a lifetime of design have amassed an incredible amount of experience, and I never tire of listening to their stories and anecdotes.

New-York-based Ivan Chermayeff has this to say about design: “To be effective over a reasonably long lifetime, all identities must be simple and appropriate. However, if they are not original or in any way provocative, thought-provoking, and noticeable, they will not accomplish their task.”

Read the full article on Graphics.com