When you're crafting anything, you need good ingredients — and you need the right tools for the job. If you're making a five-star meal, you need fresh produce and the finest meats — and knives sharp enough to cut through the toughest meat. If you're making a table, you need the straightest grained, knot-free wood and an assortment of hand and/or power tools. If you're making a couture dress, you need the finest cloth, notions, a dress form and a sewing machine up for the task... The need for quality raw materials and proper tools holds true for graphic design as well.
It's rare that you can download free fonts and free photos from the Internet and come up with a successful design. Downloading free fonts and photographs is like grocery shopping at 7-11. Bad, bad idea. As a designer, you're not expected to create everything yourself, but you are expected to shop wisely.
Tools
The cost of tools for a graphic designer has plummeted. My first workstation cost more than a new Honda at the time (and an 11X17 dye-sub color print cost $20 at my local output bureau). Today, you can get a workstation for the price of the tires on that Honda and an 11X17 color print for $2. What used to be a barrier-of-entry into the profession is now a gateway-drug, so having the latest hardware and software — and knowing how to use each — is essential for any emerging professional.
Adobe want's you to love their software so much that they give away training. Lynda.com is also a great resource. There are many great books and web-resources on the subject as well. Take a look. There's a whole separate post on the types of equipment, etc, so we'll leave it at this: you need good tools and equipment -- and you need to know how to use them.
In addition to tools, the ingredients that go into the final product are also worthy of note...
Photography
While many designers are handy with a camera, designers are not expected to be professional shutterbugs. They are, however, responsible for knowing the difference between good and bad photography based on fundamental principles of design and notions of aesthetic taste.
If you "shop" on Flickr, please make the effort to begin a dialogue with the photographer. While much of your work falls under "academic fair use", you don't want to be a jerk about lifting photos from the internet. Many students have begun robust and positive dialogues with Flickr photographers. Other low-cost resources are even more legitimate. Shutterstock.com, iStockphoto.com and other low-cost image resources have popped up recently and are worth a look. Even folks in the school of Photography here at AAU are interested in working with you to generate custom imagery (in exchange for your stellar design talents, perhaps). Each semester, they host a get-together in an attempt to connect photography, illustration and design students.
While original photography (whether taken by designers themselves or commissioned from a photographer) is best, there are other considerations. When it comes to using photographs, aside from the question of whether the image is good or not, there are a few other pieces of information to note about an image. In particular, there are a few types of images that are generally off-limits:
Images too low in resolution for your needs: Because of digital photography, the world is flooded with a new generation of easy-to-access images. However, many of these images are only 72 dpi — simply too small for print designers to use. While a number of techniques, including blurring and adding noise, can help to compensate, there's only so much soy sauce you can add to cover up the taste of fish that's gone bad. Reach for good, fresh, high-quality ingredients. (Note: Images with "jaggies" (or JPEG artifacts — the distorted bits between high-contrast areas and areas of flat tone) are never accepted as legitimate, high-quality photography.)
[Jaggies and JPG artifacts are bad... sometimes, though, the resolution isn't the worst of your problems. (i.e.: this is a questionable photo in general).]
Images of famous things (or of famous people): Unless you intend to use the baggage associated with an image of John Lennon or the Brooklyn Bridge, it's best to use a photograph that isn't loaded with cultural or symbolic associations. If you're looking for a picture of a nun, use an image of Mother Theresa ("the" nun) only if your intention is to leverage her fame in some way. Otherwise, if your intent is to simply represent "faith", you'd be best served to look for another photo.
[When is an image of a rock band more than just an image of a rock band?]
Images by famous people: If you are looking for an image to show romance, you'd do well to stay away from Robert Doisneau's image The Kiss, which we've probably all seen on college dorm room walls. Again, these famous images take on a greater significance than you likely intend, and it's not fair, really, to tread so heavily on the success of another artist's work — your designs need to stand on their own merit rather than on your skill at swiping images. Look for less loaded (and less famous) images.
[Robert Doisneau's The Kiss is likely one of the most iconic romantic shots out there... and falls under some suspicion of being set-up (not the mention hanging in every college dorm in America).]
Images on white backgrounds: When you separate an object from its surroundings, you're putting it on a conceptual pedestal — saying that this is more than a photo of a thing, but of special significance that often is symbolizing something else. Generally, this is not your goal — and the photo, when used, looks staged and awkward. Often, too, the set-up is outlandish. How many times have you seen a pile of money sitting on a white background when you visit your friend's house?.[When was the last time your buddy had a pile of Benjamins on a white background just sitting around?]
Overly Art-directed: When you spend too much time setting something up (and on a white background), it often looses its naturalistic feeling and, again, starts to look "symbolic" in some way... and generally comes off as "cheesy".
[Both of the above images are overly art directed resulting in something that is far from realistic. The bottom photo is also barely high-enough resolution to pass muster.]
Illustrated Photos: Photos which are actually photo-illustrations are not realistic and again, fall into the "symbolic" trap. As a designer, you generally don't what the photo to do all of the work (but instead leverage text and graphic elements instead of using an overly conceptualized photo).
[Like the above images, this photo illustration looks very fake and unnatural.]
The good stuff: If you're looking for an image, imagine your eyes as the camera. Could you take that shot?
[If you're looking for an image of money, this is a good one. It's high-enough resolution and is completely realistic. It also has decent composition, lighting and depth-of-field.]
Fonts
If I have another student turn in bad type with the explanation that he or she looked online only for free fonts, I'm sending you all back to your Typography 1 teachers, so you can tell that story to them (and don't expect to come back unbruised). You know better. You're in design school. You are expected to pony up for decent materials, including fonts.
Start with Adobe Type Classics for Learning or the AIGA/Adobe Font Education Essentials, $100-$150 collections of some great fonts. Or instead of that $80 Diesel T-shirt, buy a single license of your favorite front from Adobe, Monotype, Linotype or HFJ.
When selecting type for a project, also do your homework. When was the face designed? By whom? When was it first used and how? If your chosen typeface was originally designed to use for printed telephone books, is it appropriate for your piece championing folks canceling their telephone "land lines" and using only their cell phones? Learning about the history of the face might also you to pick a corresponding typeface. Adrian Frutiger designed both Serifa and Avenir — and while they're two of my favorite faces because of their wide-range of usability, they also make a great pair. An old friend really liked to use Gill Sans and Perpetua together — both designed by Eric Gill.
[Gill Sans Condensed]
Also, reaching past the "top ten" will also prove useful if only so that your project doesn't look like everyone else's. There are more sans-serif faces than Helvetica and Univers... find them. Adobe Garamond is not the only serif face you and use -- and to be honest, I think there are many more faces more suitable for body copy (check out New Caledonia, for instance). Get creative.
While we’re on the topic of fonts, throw away all handwriting fonts and all fonts that end in “-o-rama.” Handwriting fonts try to mimic something that would be better illustrated by simply writing something and scanning that in. There are few uses for handwriting fonts — the same with many of today's "grunge" fonts. If you have a font that looks like it was printed out , rubbed on the sidewalk and scanned in, then print out a font, rub it on the sidewalk and scan it in. Fonts that end in “-o-rama” are likely way too funky for legitimate use. As a designer, using a font too funky for its surroundings is like eating gobs of Cool Whip on instant pudding — sure, it hits the spot for a short while, but it’s not a quality product and has little lasting power. As designers, we need to be careful of buying too heavily into trends and to aim instead for more lasting design solutions. Avoid the acid-washed, peg-legged jeans and go for the 501s.
Materials
When you buy something and appropriate it for use, it's often called an "off the shelf" solution. While designers cannot make everything, the intention is to use materials carefully and to shop wisely. If the housing for your project screams IKEA (and I happen to actually know the Swedish name — Slugis — for that plastic box), you should look for something a little less recognizable. At the same time, when people look at your project, the first thing out of their mouths should not be "Hey! Great box. Where'd you get it?" but should be instead "Wow, what an interesting and unique use of format!" Your design solution will be judged on its own merit, and the overt use of off-the-shelf materials can damage your objectives. That Slugis box might be used by any number of designers for any number of projects — what is it about the soul of Slugis that makes it imperative for use in this project? And more importantly, how can you as a designer make it your plastic box and not something that you simply picked up at IKEA?
Again, as designers, everything we touch, everything we do, and everything we produce is ultimately an act of design — make that act count. Catching a designer using bad photography and free fonts is like catching Martha Stewart in line at McDonald's.... not a good thing.
// by Hunter Wimmer
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