When you’re given the task to write a report or an essay, do you just stick to the defaults? (You know, like sticking with Calibri, 11-pt. font?) If you’re like most regular folks (meaning, you don’t have a background in design), the chances are you do. Of course, you do some formatting, right?
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Read these five words out loud: “rough,” “cough,” “bough,” “dough,” and “through.” Now ask yourself, does the pronunciation of those words and their spelling make any logical sense whatsoever? Has it ever occurred to you that we, English speakers, are the only ones in the world that actually have spelling bees? Why
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In a recent course I was teaching, and in what turned into a somewhat off-topic, lighthearted discussion on punctuation (these are the kinds of conversations that may occur in a college business writing course), some students marveled aloud that you could place three punctuation marks in a row–like when you
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When most people think about evaluating the effectiveness of a design, they think in terms of aesthetics. They will scrutinize color schemes and layouts and typography and photographic acuity. And they will look for creative approaches to old ideas (like how awesome this cool Martin Luther King mural is, made entirely
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I still remember when I moved away to college and, for the first time in my life, I was in charge of choosing my own shampoo. It was a purchase decision I had never thought about (or cared about, for that matter) and I didn’t have a clue where to
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There’s an old saying in industrial design (the field of engineering where designers make day-to-day stuff, like potato peelers and hedge trimmers): “form follows function.” This basic idea suggests that the design of stuff should be built around precisely what it is used for and how people use it. Chairs,
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Don’t ever design blue text on a red background. Ever. And don’t put green on red, either. If the image below doesn’t give you reason enough not to, I don’t know what will. A visual phenomenon, called chromostereopsis, makes our eyes want to turn a 2D image into something 3D.
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Document design theories these days (whether from experts or novices) seem to have a running theme: keep it simple and keep it clean. Steve Jobs made a career out of this idea, literally living by the old adage coined by the master Leonardo Da Vinci: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
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Have you ever looked at a paper that your teacher handed you back, with her scribbles in red ink all over the page asking you to revise, and you didn’t have a clue what she meant? You’re seeing brackets and squigglies and letters with circles around them–it’s obvious she has a
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Maybe it goes without saying, but every color has a place and purpose. There are times when you want bright, flashy colors and there are times when you should avoid them at all costs. As you begin working and designing with color, one of the first things you’ll want to
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