New York magazine recently ran a story for its Spring Fashion 2008 series called “One Is the Loveliest Color.” It features interviews with five different New York residents, each of whom wears only one signature color… all the time.

There’s a shoe designer in blue, musician Stephin Merritt in brown, and my personal favorite, “The Green Lady.”

New York magazine’s interviewees in “One Is the Loveliest Color” might inspire you to find your signature hue.

I always referred to Elizabeth Sweetheart as The Green Lady when I lived in the city. I’d see her often in my Brooklyn neighborhood and on the train. I was always amused and impressed by all of the ways she folded green into her wardrobe. I recall the green barrettes in her green hair, atop a face with green tinted glasses. The green shoes, green socks, and of course, green overalls.

I never had the nerve to ask her about her unique look, so until I stumbled upon this article, I didn’t really “get” it. Reading the other interviews, this idea of a signature color, and how it evolved for these creative people, it suddenly made sense.

First, the color seems to find you, not the other way around. It trickles in initially, but quickly takes over. And it does so because it reflects the wearer’s personality. It immediately feels tied to the wearer, and vice versa. It’s like a brand. Tiffany & Co wouldn’t be the same without its “Tiffany blue” boxes, just as Elizabeth Sweetheart wouldn’t be the same without her green. She can’t sleep if she’s not wearing her green.

Sure, it’s unlikely that this notion of dressing monochromatically in a signature shade every day (more…)

Nicholas Felton is a freelance graphic designer living and working in New York City. His editorial works have appeared in PRINT, Wired, Good, Metropolis and numerous other big name publications. And his personal annual reports are a certified internet phenomenon. The reports can be found on his personal site, feltron.com, and they’re really worth checking out. Nicholas also maintains a professional site associated with his studio, megafone.

In this interview, Nicholas expounds upon both his personal and professional work. He also offers advice to upcoming freelancers, and shares his thoughts on humor’s role in design. Thanks again to Nicholas for chatting with us.

How do projects like the Feltron Annual Reports and Hello China, Goodbye Nepal relate to your professional pieces? Do you use your personal projects to test ideas and designs?

Well I’d like to think that I’m constantly testing new ideas and designs, whether it be for personal or professional assignments, but with the personal projects the luxury is that I get to be the “decider” as well as the “maker”. What is really important about these projects is that they showcase my strengths, which I hope stirs up assignments which are a natural fit for my interests & abilities.

You’ve produced editorial artwork for several magazines, including PRINT, Metropolis and Wired. How are those projects different from say, designing a logo or a typeface?

In a lot of ways, they’re actually very similar. I approach every project systematically, and develop a set of rules that will help me make something consistent and interesting. With a typeface I’m considering all the angles, lines and transitions which will create a kit of guiding principles that direct every decision. The same is true in a logotype or a diagram or a publication, I try to develop a system that is robust and interesting enough to carry all the parts of the design in a successful manner.

The Obsessives layout for Print Magazine ldescribes a week of consumption through metrics including food, drink, utilities, media and more.

As a freelance illustrator and designer whose enjoyed quite a bit of success, what advice do you have for others who are hoping to follow a similar career path?

You have to stay busy. If you’ve got a day job and you’re not doing freelance or personal projects at night, you’re not doing enough. If you’re working for yourself, and not working on the weekends, then you’re basically standing still. Experience and a solid body of work takes time to accumulate, and there’s only one way to get there.

Infographic for Metropolis displaying all of the LEED certified buildings in the United States and throughout the world.

You seem to like working with charts, graphs, maps and the like. What is it about those things that you find visually interesting?

I do love working with information graphics. They are these remarkable constructions that can be widely understood and, at the same time, rapidly communicate reams of information.

How did you get to where you are now? What did you study in school? Have you always been a freelancer? What skills have served you best?

I studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduation, I worked for a few years in advertising, learning some valuable lessons about branding and marketing that the typography classes in school didn’t prepare me for. Eventually I built a small portfolio of my own work and began collecting enough clients to support my practice. In hindsight, my advertising years were (more…)

HOW magazine’s In-HOWse Design Awards issue arrived last month and I was excited to see what’s been happening in other corporate design departments. The award competitions initiated by publications such as HOW and GDUSA that specifically showcase in-house work are evidence that there is a growing interest in what this segment of the design community is creating. These awards honor some great design talent that has been traditionally overlooked and even dismissed. They also address the challenges in-house designers face, some of which I would like to examine further.

As a creative director for a national real estate company, I have a responsibility to uphold corporate design standards and consistent branding messaging for consumers throughout the New England region. The national headquarters and its ad agency dictate our brand’s image, but we still have a little room to customize pieces for our regional markets. To some degree, I need to “police” printed materials created by marketing coordinators in several local offices to make sure they conform to the brand…not an easy task. But, just the idea having to conform illustrates my challenge. How do I keep my design staff inspired when we need to primarily stay “in the box”? How do I personally stay in the game?

I keep reminding my staff and myself that we only have one client and the very nature of our job is to support that client and its associates (the company that pays our salary). We have some creative flexibility with a few choice projects like corporate event invitations, logo designs and new development brochures, but our primary responsibilities are to pump out large volumes of pre-designed or template-based marketing materials. Hey, at least we get to design the templates! When we do get a custom design assignment, we usually provide three comps for client approval. I’ll say to the designers “let’s give them two ideas that stick with the formula and one that is just ‘out there’…whatever you want to do”. I try to inspire them to create something crazy that will at least get the client’s attention and maybe help them consider choosing a design that takes some chances. This allows the designers to stretch a little and also helps the client see that the company’s own design staff is capable of much more than just average work. It seems that our best designs are the ones that never get approved, but on several occasions we are able to persuade the client to take a risk and a really cool design actually gets printed. That’s enough to keep us all going.

Another challenge is to convince our “non-designer” colleagues that the department is not just an “arts and crafts” shop where all the fun people hang out. Our design staff was recognized three years in a row by winning in several categories of the GDUSA American Inhouse Awards. These accomplishments did not go unnoticed by our top management, who honored us with national press releases and local recognition. I am very thankful that these types of competitions are growing in popularity because they give in-house designers a chance to compete in their own arena. (more…)

Given how ubiquitous Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver have become, it can be easy to forget that Adobe has other offerings. If you create live presentations of your work, interactive training pieces, knowledge bases for your colleagues, or if you conduct web conferences with clients, some of these lesser-known tools are worth a look. Here’s a peek at what each one does.

Acrobat Connect Professional combines what was formerly the Macromedia Breeze product with VoIP and other features to create a web conferencing application. With Connect Professional, a user can easily create a conference room with video, audio, chat and polling capabilities. There’s also a large content area in which one can present slides and images created in other applications including Adobe Presenter, which comes with the package. Conferences are available via the Flash Player, so no additional software is required for playback. Compared to the rather complex Microsoft LiveMeeting, preparing a conference with Connect Professional is a no brainer, especially if you use the templates.

The demo at the Adobe site will to give you a sense of how the Connect web conferences look both and operate.

Captivate, another former Macromedia product, can be used to create interactive online learning tools such as quizzes, simulations and scenarios, even podcasts. Educational modules can be built using simple templates, and you can also record screen movements if a visual demonstration is necessary. This app is probably is probably more than you need if you’re just teaching some basic tasks to a few people, but if you’re e-learning needs are extensive or complex, Captivate can help you create some pretty robust interactive features.

RoboHelp is a bizarre name for a program that is used to build searchable, indexed knowledge bases, and most small-time and freelance designers will have little use for this app. But web developers and technical teams will appreciate its time saving capabilities (more…)

Earlier this week, I began my final installment of this series about Google’s Webmaster Tools with a discussion of the robot.txt file, geographic targeting and the enhanced image search capability. Today, we’ll delve even deeper into the Tools Section. I’ll talk about site verification, crawl rates and preferred domains, and I’ll also tell you how to remove URLs from the Google search index. Enjoy!

Manage Site Verification

Anyone with a Google account and FTP access to your site can verify the site and view its stats using Google’s Webmaster Tools. Here you can see who has verified the sits, so at least you’ll know who’s checking up on you.

Set Crawl Rate

There are two reasons why you might want to adjust Google’s crawl rate: either it’s crawling your site too often and eating up your bandwidth, or it isn’t crawling often enough, meaning your updates aren’t accurately reflected in the current search results.

On this page you can request that Google adjust the rate at which it crawls your site. The change isn’t guaranteed, but at least you’ve done all you can.

Set Preferred Domain

Most sites can be reached via URLs with or without the www prefix. For example, www.tridivas.com and tridivas.com both take you to the same place. If you prefer one address (more…)

While I firmly believe that words and pictures are in most cases all you to need to explain a concept, assuming you know it well, I’ll admit that video tutorials do serve a certain purpose. Some ideas and techniques, like layers and use of the Clone Stamp, just make more sense when you see the action unfold on a screen.

The overall quality of most Photoshop video tutorials has improved dramatically over the years, and it’s now pretty easy to find a lesson that speaks to your specific needs. Below are a few tutorials that I found both interesting and useful. It should be enough to get you started.

ScreenFrog has videos about Photoshop as well as other imaging apps. Most of the programs focus on either interesting effects or often avoided tools. I really like this tutorial, which explains the Pen tool. The Pen tool scares a lot of people, but if you follow along and work with the floral download, you’ll quickly get the hang of it. And as an added bonus, you get to see the video’s creator work in the German Photoshop interface!

Master the Pen tool with help from this ScreenFrog video.

One should expect good things from a site called TutorialChamp, and thankfully, it delivers. Most of the site’s tutorials explain really useful techniques, like removing wrinkles or coloring comic art. You can even learn how to place someone’s head convincingly on someone else’s body. Personally, I love the tutorial about flyers, because unlike most Photoshop videos, it delves into design as well as technique.

TutorialChamp’s videos are captioned so you can read along rather than listen, which is great if you’re at work.

Not surprisingly, a search on YouTube for Photoshop videos returned loads of content, but most of it is, at least to my mind, best avoided. Still, there are some diamonds in the rough. For example, YouTube user tutvid has created a few videos that are definitely (more…)

Stefan Sagmeister has created a blog in support of his new book, Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far. The site wholeheartedly encourages members of the public to share the lessons they’ve learned in their lives so far, but of course, there’s a catch. (C’mon, it’s Sagmeister.)

Laziness is Bad for the Soul by Kristina Critchlow

Messages can be presented using almost any medium, just as long as they are “written down beautifully.” So far, advice, such as “Sometimes believe what you read.”, and opinions, like “Laziness is bad for the soul.”, has been transmitted using everything from yarn to body hair to fish. I’m willing to bet this project is only going to get more interesting as time marches on. Stay tuned.

via the HOW blog

While I was in school, and for a few years after graduation, I carried a digital camera with me pretty much everywhere I went. If I saw something interesting, odd or inspiring, I’d snap a photo, and because of this habit, I eventually came to possess a pretty extensive catalog of visual references.

I don’t carry a camera with me anymore, for a couple of reasons. For starters, I already lug around a laptop, a phone, keys, my wallet, sunglasses and sometimes an iPod. It’s a ridiculous amount of gear, and frankly, the camera just isn’t making the cut these days. But the real reason why I stopped taking pictures is because, more often than not, the images just weren’t all that compelling after the fact. Taking a photo was too easy, and as a result, I grew lazy.

And so I appreciate UNphotographable, a website created by Michael David Murphy. The pages of UNphotographable contain written descriptions of images that, for one reason or another, could not be captured on film. The great majority of the accounts are provided by Murphy, but I believe a few were produced by others. Here’s an example:

This is a picture I did not take of a woman standing on an overgrown median of the Van Wyck Expressway early on a Saturday morning, early enough that there was one sliver of sunlight making its way across the road, and she was caught in both the light and tall grass, bent at the waist, picking herbs or salad greens from between discarded fast food containers and old tires, incorporating a wild, pinwheeling movement with each pick, her arms swinging up like scythes, alternatively holding a fistful of greens high in the air, as if each leaf were a triumph, as her opposite arm swung down to pick anew.

In a world where images, especially bad images, seem destined to proliferate, I find this (more…)

We’re finally nearing the end of our series about Google’s Webmaster Tools. We’ve covered almost every aspect of the service, everything from diagnostics to statistics, links to sitemaps. All that’s left to examine are a few handy functions buried within the Tools Section. We’ll discuss a few of theses items today, and the rest in a post later this week. Let’s get going.

Analyze Robots.txt

I mentioned the robots.txt file before, but only in passing. Today, I’ll provide a more complete explanation.

The robots.txt file is a text file that tells the Google robot, when it crawls your web site and adds pages to the Google index, which files and directories are open and available and which aren’t. And it’s not just for the Google robot; all search engine crawlers should read and follow its directives.

While robot.txt files can certainly be complicated, their basic format is very simple. Here’s an example of an exceedingly simple robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /family/

Suppose you have a directory on your web site that contains some pages for and about your family that you don’t want others to find via a random Google search. Well, the above robots.txt file would tell all robots to stay out of that family directory.

The Analyze Robots.txt function you test your robots.txt file, so you can be sure it’s telling Google exactly what you want it to. Simply put a URL in the box at the bottom of the page, then click the button. Note: You need to input in the complete URL if you want to check a blocked page.

Set Geographic Target

Did you know that you can actually target your site geographically, and that if you do, Google will provide the code (more…)

Remember when designers had to choose between Illustrator and Freehand, or Dreamweaver and GoLive? That was before Adobe acquired Macromedia. Today, there are fewer options. But Apple is trying to change that, at least in one category.

Currently, there are currently two pro-level, post-production applications for digital photographers: Apple Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Aperture was first released in late 2005. Lightroom hit the shelves in 2007. From the start, both programs offered complete raw support, non-destructive image editing and high-end printing features, and both included a wide range of image adjustment tools that helped photographers produce top quality shots. Both programs also had image management capabilities that far surpassed anything found in iPhoto or Adobe Bridge. So, for the most part, it was all about which interface you preferred. (Unless, of course, you were a Windows user; Aperture is only available for the Mac.)

That is until now. Aperture 2, released last week, includes a wide range of innovations not found in Lightroom. By Apple’s count, there are “100+ new features” in the latest version of the app. You can view a full list of those capabilities here, but there are a few obvious standouts that I think are worth noting.

Integration. When you’re married to a specific brand of products, you hope and pray that they’ll work well with the other apps you use. Aperture has always supported native PSD files, which is about all you can ask for with regards to Adobe integration. But Aperture 2 also works seamlessly with iPhoto. I’ve never been totally comfortable managing my images with Adobe Bridge, so if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate this new built-in compatibility.

Speed. High-quality images can quickly bog down a system, and users have often complained about the sluggishness of both Aperture 1 and Lightroom. But Aperture 2 is supposed to be a lot faster, (more…)