Random design inspiration post #1 – Currency

I’m always looking for a bit of inspiration, be it color schemes or layouts, and currency provides both.

Pull a bill out of your wallet (if you have one) and look at it really close. The detail is impressive and the layout is very interesting, particularly because it has a lot of limitations/requirements. Currency is very ornate and acts as a representative of the country at large. Cash is like a language: it speaks volumes at home and is typically useless abroad.

I found a few bills that I had been using as decoration and scanned them into my computer (fairly low resolution… is that still illegal?). I put the back and front together, then zoomed in and sampled colors that were representative of that bill. Those are the vertical brush strokes at the bottom. Then, I found a very contrasting color somewhere in the image and cut that across the middle. The result is interesting, to ay the least.

This Indian Rupee has a great combination of purple, light blue/turquoise and a little bit of pink/orange. In person, the colors look almost iridescent. The window is a watermark of a person (someone important I assume). I see an interesting 3 column design buried in there (portfolio?):

Falls under the ever-popular retro category for sure. Calm the ornateness down a bit and cut back on a few colors and that could be a very successful one-page design.

The colors on this one are some of my favorites. The right 4 on the pallet above combined with the pink is very vibrant and appealing. The back of the bill is slightly reminiscent of an American dollar with the building in the middle and the decorations around it. Whatever is extending out underneath the “1″ on the back is a super-superb mesh-type design. For some reason, I really like these symbols from the front of the bill:

Next up…Argentinian:

This one looks really royal and ancient, like it has some Greek influence. Photoshop helped me bring out some great colors on the back because this one is really faded out. The front of the bill has a great layout that I’m struggling to figure out a use for.. maybe a business card? With a cartoon avatar? Maybe a classy handout for a photography or art exhibit? That italic font combined with the small caps on the front is also a great feature of this one.

I like this one particularly because of its bold colors. Like the bill before, the vibrant orange in this one was brought out a bit in Photoshop. The layout is the familiar one from our own currency. I’m really feeling that font on the front though I can imagine that its usage is pretty sensitive (easy to use in the wrong spot or overuse it). There is a lot to see on this one because it’s a big bigger than the other ones (lengthwise). Great decorations surrounding the bust:

I took the end pieces, got rid of the surrounding pixels, rotated, and made a mirror image. Try making that little guy into a pattern… very “oriental rug” style.

Another note from Thailand with a really different color scheme. The two colors on the far right, the dark maroon/purple and the light yellow are a particularly nice combination; I can imagine those being used in a room or something. Lighten up the light colors and I could see this pallet used on, say, an upscale art gallery site or on a nice restaurant menu.

There were quiet a few shapes in this one that I like but, in particular, the corners on the front. The corner of this corner piece looks like an arrow, a shape I’m fond of for no discernible reason.

One more from the same country…

This one really strikes me because of just how ornate it is. The color pallet appears to be very limited but, zoomed in, there is a lot to see. The decoration is completely over-the-top but, because it’s cash, it’s allowed to be garish and distracting.

It might be hard, at first, to see where any usable inspiration could come out of this but it all lies in the details. I found the winged creature in the top left on the front very appealing; tone down the detail and stylize it and you could have a great crest for a logo. There are also several patterns in the framing that could be used, maybe in a more subdued color, as a background.

Finally, one of my favorites…

I got these bills a long time ago (15 years, maybe) from my grandpa and I never really liked this one in the beginning. They got put away for many years and just recently pulled out and this one jumped out as being so unique. Look at the guy on the front, how 50′s Hollywood is that image? The brown color is great (better in person) and the composition as whole feels, to me, very theatrical. The font for the “100″ is perfect and has this old west feeling to it. It’s also very creative how they incorporated the watermark spot into the unused portions of both portraits.

Hope you enjoyed that; I thought it was great to pull this apart a bit and really get up close and personal. I wish I could scan these with more detail but, well, that’s probably not a good idea.

6 steps to easy typography in any document

This is a guide I wrote several months back. I have it posted on my homepage and at Squidoo but my homepage is going away in favor of a much simpler system so I wanted to move this. It’s also a bit more visible here, where I’m getting hits, rather than on the homepage, where I’m getting no hits! FYI, I also added a new, very important step (#5)…

This guide is for anyone and everyone who knows little about fonts, typefaces, and document design. This small primer serves as either an introduction to typography or all the information you’ll ever need to know as a non-designer. Whether you’re a teacher trying to deliver curriculum the best way you can or a CEO writing a formal letter, you should understand what fonts and styles say about your document and how to use them to your advantage.

I’m going to start this guide off with a warning: don’t dig too deep. Take what I say in this guide at face value and proceed no further. The art of typography is a complete mystery until you take that first step, read that first blog post, and fall deep into an obsessive-compulsive well. Before long, you’ll be second-guessing everything you thought was true and wondering if maybe, just maybe, you could try your hand at designing a typeface. Trust me on this one; take the relatively minute but very useful information that I’m giving you and leave it at that. You’ve been warned.

Who cares about typography?

The only people, ultimately, who care about the typography you present are the readers that are subjected to your work. I realized this after receiving a TERRIBLY designed assignment in class and wondered what that woman was thinking. I have seen the gamut of documents over the years and it’s more often than not that someone goes outside of the “safe zone” of Arial and Times and pulls it off well.

Am I implying that there is no hope for the design challenged? Not in the slightest! That’s what I’m here for… Josh can, after all, help.

We’ll walk through the (very) basic vocabulary of type and show you a few ways to add some personality to your documents without going overboard. I’ll show you some simple ways to make that PowerPoint presentation shine without losing control. I’ll also show you a few places where I get my fonts and a great link for taking that next step.

Step 1 – Write your document

There are people who write, there are people who design and then there are people who do both. If you are on one side of the fence or the other, you have somewhat of an advantage. By focusing on just one aspect of document creation and functionally ignoring the other, you can put all of your energy into that one task and really make it shine. If you do both, however, you might feel pulled in two directions at once and end up stuck and frustrated. It’s an ancient battle: content versus design.

In order to counter the tendency to multi-task, restrict yourself to one task or the other. Instead of writing your content in the design program (whether it be Word, PowerPoint, or your HTML editor), write your content in the simplest form possible. In Windows, try Notepad, the stripped-down text editor typically found under Start Menu > Programs > Accessories.

As you write, keep an outline format in your mind. If the project is a simple paper or letter, there is not too much to be concerned with (header, footer, salutation, sign-off). If, however, you’re constructing a how-to document or a multi-section presentation, you want to make sure you indicate headings, sub-headings, and/or sections. You’re not allowed to determine the look (yet) but you can make notes (say, labeling the headings with “h1,” subheadings with “h2,” etc) that will help you construct the document in the next step.

** Of course, make sure you save your document in this format. Not only do you want to keep all of your hard work thus far but this will also make it easy to move the text into several different programs and/or formats in the future**

You might wonder why I called Word a design program. Word is there to make your text look good and format it to the nth degree. I’ve been using Word for many years and I’m STILL figuring out how to use half of its functions. When I write in Word, I’m always futzing with the settings and the look of the document as I’m writing the document. When I write in Notepad, I’m not allowed to do any visual modifications during the creation so I stay in one train of thought.

Write first, design later. Your final product will reflect your focus segregation.

Step 2 – Add to your design program and choose an outline format

Once all of your text is written down and edited as best you can in whatever program you’re using, now it’s time to place it in the program you will use to modify the design of the document. Notepad or any other text program that does not format your content is great for this step because you won’t be adding text embellishments to baseline formatting. When you copy from Word back into another Word document, there are two sets of formatting that the program can use. When you copy from notepad, there is only one.

The easiest way to do this step is just to copy the original text from your text-editing program and paste it into the design program. This is actually an interesting step for those who are unfamiliar with the difference between formatted and unformatted text. Take note of what changes were made after you have added your text into the new program; you might be surprised.

The first thing to do now that your text has been added is to take the notes regarding sections and divisions and start thinking about what you want to do with them. Don’t make any alterations quite yet; you want to make sure you keep a holistic mindset as you go about this task. You want to preserve the flow of your document and use divisions to move it along. Each section is not a separate document with different formatting; they will each be a different idea building towards your main point. We’re not talking about fonts and bolds and italics just yet, only the structure.

If you’re writing a document for a website or a blog, the end product will not be a “Word document” or a “PowerPoint presentation.” Whether you write your websites directly in text or you use a different program like Dreamweaver or Nvu, I still recommend formatting your document in a word processing program. You want your final product to look polished and it is much easier to quickly edit the style in a word processor than it is in HTML. Write your doc, format and style it in a different program, then add the unformatted text to your web design program and make the appropriate changes there. It is a few extra steps but your document will look better and, in the end, you will save time. Oh, and the spell check is pretty handy too.

Step 3 – Choose and add section styles and list elements.

For this step, you’re just going to concentrate only on the headers of the document (the titles for your PowerPoint slides or the names of the different sections for your how-to guide, for example). Change the whole document to a basic font (I recommend Arial) and make sure your headings are separated from the rest of your text (meaning a line/break in between them so you can differentiate it visually). Also, make sure that the page dimensions you are working with match the final product. Set the margins of your document to give you the correct width of your final product (this is more important for web documents where there may be width constraints on the page).

Now, start playing with sizes and weights starting with the main headline. For this document, my main heading is the title, “6 steps to effective typography in any document” so I changed this to 18 point first to see what it looked like. Once that size looks about right for the rest of the document (meaning that it stands out but doesn’t dwarf the rest of the text), I’ll start working on the next headline, in this case “Who cares about fonts?” I changed it to 16 point but it looked too similar to the main headline so I changed the main to 20 point. Now, the differentiation between the heading, subheading and main text looks right. Another option would be to drop both sizes down one step and add bold to both.

If you’re working with sub headers, sub-sub headers, and sub-sub-sub headers, you may find that your main heading has to be enormous to differentiate itself from the rest. This might be a case of over-organization on your part and it might be time to look at how your document was built. Ask yourself: are all these headers necessary? Can some groups come together? Are the triple-sub-headings coming before 2 or 3 sentences? Sometimes visual styling a document can call attention to possible shortcomings.

It’s important to note something here… especially before we get into picking fonts. Aesthetics is a study of relativity. For example, I find myself perpetually confounded by the direction that fashion trends take. I also find it hard to believe some of the ways people decorate their homes. This does not, necessarily, make them aesthetically challenged; it speaks more to how relative taste is. Good typography, in its most basic state, is making something readable and inoffensive. In its most complicated, exciting state, typography is making words come alive and making them say something beyond their tacit definition.

If you are working on a classroom presentation, a business proposal for executives, or any other document that might reach a broad audience, concentrate on readability and organization. A document that no one wants to read (or can’t read) is not a great trade-off for expressing your creativity. I’m sorry to break it to you, but that’s the truth. I’ll let you take a minute.

After headings, play around with numbered or bulleted lists if you have any. My rule is this: if you’re going to call attention to the amount of items on the list or they are in some kind of order (importance, chronological), make them numbers. If it is just a list, go with bullets. As for lettered lists, I don’t use them too often but, when I do, the list usually falls between numbers and bullets – the items are in some kind of order but their rank is not important.

(Can you tell which one of these I would recommend NOT using?)

At this point, your document should look almost completely presentable, if potentially boring (remember: boring looks for a document is not always a bad thing). Next, we’re going to chose a font and line spacing. Yay!

Step 4 – Pick a font and line spacing

Ok, here’s the tricky part, picking a font that works. Here are the basic rules:

-> No more than 2 fonts on a page for your main content. Using 3 or 4 different fonts can quickly lead to a cluttered, ugly feeling to your document or web page. Please, however, experiment to your hearts delight; rules are made to be broken. The more you play around, the better you will understand the K.I.S.S. mentality.

-> Serif fonts (fonts like Times and Georgia that have the lines at the ends of the arms and stems of the letters) are generally easier to read for long periods than sans serif (fonts like Arial and Verdana that do not have these marks). Pick up a novel and you’ll see why. Be careful when mixing serif fonts with sans serif font; it can be VERY dangerous. It can also, however, set them both off. Again, mess around to find the balance.

-> If you’re not sure a particular feature you added looks right and there’s no one else to check with, try something different. Typography just feels/looks right when it’s right. Trust your gut.

-> Keep your final product in mind. If you’re designing for the web, you have a very limited number of choices. I check this list at Codestyle.org out before I start picking fonts to make sure that what I’m using is common. Remember, web documents can have a whole list of fonts to pick from so pick two or three that you can live with.

If you will be sending the document to other people electronically for them to edit, they will need to have the same font you are using or else their computer will pick something else completely. If you are printing the document out or intend to distribute a final copy electronically, you probably want to convert your document to a PDF to retain the styling you worked so hard to achieve. My favorite PDF convertor is CutePDF and can be found here at Cutepdf.com for free. Very simple to use and consistently makes great documents.

In your document designing program, start with the fonts you have installed on your computer and see if any of them tickle your fancy. Look through that whole list and try a few of them out. Make sure you are applying to all of your text at once, including the headers. For all possible choices, look at the document a few different ways: try zooming in and out or changing the line spacing. Also, some fonts can be a bit bigger or smaller so you may need to change the size by a point or two.

what you want to look for is a font that not only stays legible but also one that communicates a particular message. Technical documents and how-to guides look great in Arial and Verdana but also try Arial Narrow or Trebuchet MS. Letters or stories look good in basic Times New Roman but experiment with Palatino Linotype or Bookman. If you’re not finding exactly what you want and the final version of your document will be set (meaning a PDF or printed out), check out some of the fonts on the following websites:

Biggest and best of the font sites. Try out their font search!

Lots of great, free fonts for you to choose from

John at ilovetypography.com chooses his favorite fonts and posts them in the black bar on the right. This is a great place to start if you’re interested to see what great type can do.

Just recently found this great font resource. More free fonts than you can handle! Be careful about installing too many fonts – it could slow down some of your applications (especially paint.net).

I encourage you to experiment, try new and different things, and find out for yourself what works and what does not. Picking a “symbolic” font for yourself or for your business can be a great way to lend a unique solidarity to all of your documents – something for all of your marketing, stationary, letters, and other communications.

If you can’t find the perfect font to fit the tone you’re trying for and you’re unsure what to use, better safe than sorry. Stick with Arial or Verdana for sans serif fonts or Times or Georgia for sans serif. It’s much better to pick an uninspired font that communicates your message than to go out on a limb and end up looking unprofessional.

Once you settle on a particular font for your document, work with your line spacing. Documents are much easier to read and look more appealing when they are spaced somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 times the size of the font. This can be done with your word processing program (typically you’ll find the option by itself as “line spacing” or under the “Paragraph” formatting option). Try 1.2 and 1.5 and see what you think. Your document will span an extra page or two but the presentation will be much better.

Added: Step 5 – Watch your alignment

Here is something I picked up from reading a great, very simple book about design, Robin William’s (no, not that one) The Non-Designer’s Design & Type Books.This is a great start for anyone without design experience that either want to get their feet wet in what design means or want nothing to do with design but want their documents/webpages/anything printed to look better.

She talks about a very important piece of the design puzzle: alignment. Watching your alignment means that everything on the page is lined up with something else. Why do properly-formatted outlines look so good? Each level is aligned with all the other elements at that level. Why does a well-built spreadsheet look so good? Because Excel forces your information into a grid so it is easy to read. Robin’s Principle of Alignment goes like this:

Nothing on the place should be placed on the page arbitrarily. Every item should have a visual connection with something else on the page.

This is easy in Word because it formats the text and, for the most part (ahem) keeps it pretty. If you’re putting text together in a visual program, like Photoshop, it gets a bit harder. Use guides and rulers to make sure that left text edges line up with each other and try to make sure you can draw a clear mental line from the edge of everything to something else.

Step 6 – Try something new

So your document is basically finished! It sounds great, it looks great, it’s the whole enchilada. Now save it. Save it again. OK, now let’s try something fun.

Let’s play around a little bit with your headers and body text. Change your headings to a different font, maybe a serif one if your body is sans serif. Add a horizontal line after your subheadings. Try adding italics to key points for emphasis or bold weight to key sentences (go easy). Try placing relevant icons to headings or specific paragraphs (free, high-quality icons can be found here, at IconArchive.com). Use indentation to move the main text inwards or try moving your subheadings more towards the center. Play around with centering and right-aligning different page elements.

Most often, the times when I found something that worked really well in a document were when I was just messing around. It would usually look terrible after the first 5 changes and then I would do something different and come up with an idea. After a while of messing around with the text formatting and changing some of the existing styles, I would end up with a unique look that I really liked.

Another technique is to just leave it alone for a day. Try something new, save it as a different file name, then come back to it the next day. You may like it more, less or not at all. You also might come up with another little tweak to go along with your first one that really ties things together. Give it time, let it marinate, and you may just end up with something you can be really excited about.

Step 7 – Follow the rules

For the detail-orientated, I’ll direct you to a great list of typography rules to follow. There are quite a few of them but if you want that professional look, you would be wise to glance through and make sure you’re not including some glaring errors. The list was be found here, at About.com.

Blogging 101: How to Write a Great Blog Post… a Reader’s Perspective

This is a guide I wrote a few months back. I have it posted on my homepage and at Squidoo but my homepage is going away in favor of a much simpler system so I wanted to move this. It’s also a bit more visible here, where I’m getting hits, rather than on the homepage, where I’m getting no hits!

If you’re considering whether or not you want to start a blog, ponder this:

By posting a great piece of advice or a guide for someone or your professional insight, you contribute to the incredible equalizing power of the internet. By making once-obscure and restricted information public, you engender a sense of community, a virtual, digital community that pulls people together across geographic and cultural barriers.

Want to be a part of something great? Put yourself out there! But how?

There are many different guides out there offering the best way to write or the easiest way to start or the quickest way to 10K subscribers. You might find some excellent information out there (I have, no doubt) but none of them really tell you how to find and connect with your readers in the most organic, benevolent way possible.

In this post, I offer 6 steps to write a great blog entry for any type of blog you could imagine. These will help you appear more often when real people search, garner more attention from those that matter, and, generally, be more successful as an RSS author. I’m writing these not from the position of a famous blogger (I’m not one of those) but from a chair in front of a monitor that has seen countless posts pass by.

I’m your audience. You better listen up!

1. Understand the format and write to it

While it’s really your blog’s content that determines whether or not I will return, the reach of your blog (meaning the amount of people that see it) makes a big difference in whether I find you in the first place or not. Want me to find you in the seemingly endless ocean of information out there? Then understand and practice the format that makes you findable. Keep these concepts in the forefront of your mind as you write so they start to become second nature. Thinking in terms of a blog post will cut down on the editing time and make it easier in the future to efficiently put out quality material for me to read. The following are a few things to keep in mind.

Your Title Speaks Volumes

The title of your blog post is a very crucial piece of the blog puzzle. With so many aggregators, search engines, and browsers, it’s the only thing that I’ll see and the big decider as to whether I’m going to click it or not. Keep it short, state your purpose, and tell me why I should go there. Great titles reel me in, just don’t disappoint me with a lame post!

It’s All About the First Impression

A great blog post starts with a great introduction. You want me to finish the article and spend as much time on the page as possible, right. Hook me with a great anecdote or a reason why this post will benefit me right now. Help me along to each section and you’ll make a real audience member out of me.

You’re Nothing without your Head

You’ll notice in this article that there is a title at the top, 6 sub-headings, and sub-sub-headings beneath those; this was not an accident. All three of these headers are critical to being seen by the search engines out there (what you want to happen if you want me to find you). Before you write, plan out your main title, your introduction, and all of your sub-headers. This will help you keep on task and make your article as useful as possible. At the end, make sure all of your headers match the information underneath and incorporate the key words you want to be associated with.

2. Consistency: Keep Me Coming Back for More

Think of your blog as your own personal publication, like a magazine or a newspaper. When I subscribe to Time or Newsweek or The Economist I’m not giving them money to send me an issue when they feel like it or when they get around to it. I receive one issue every month/week of a certain size and on a certain set of subjects.

Just like the New York Times can’t skip a few days here or there, your blog must be consistent in how often the posts are being made. This doesn’t mean you need to post twice a day but if you want to post twice a day, make sure you can keep that pace up ad infinitum. I’m more likely to return if you find a schedule that works for you and keep to it; it’s nice knowing that I have something to read on specific days, regardless of what those days are.

Before you start, come to an agreement with yourself and your co-authors (if there are any) on a frequency and stick to it. If you can write six days a week then go for it. If, however, you think you will only have the time or where-with-all or content for twice a week, then pick two days of the week and make sure those days get a post. You will be more successful by posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday than you will by writing 7 times one week and once the next.

3. Make Your Content Unique

The internet is a very descriptive name that gives you a good idea of what is going on behind the scenes. It’s a giant network of interconnected information and benefits greatly from layered information on many different topics. For every topic there exists countless different descriptions, opinions, definitions, and alternatives. How can anything be unique when everything already has a website?

It’s certainly daunting to face a blank page and wonder if your thoughts are already out there so don’t. Unless you wrote them, your thoughts haven’t been published so write away.

Unique content comes from the heart and it comes from experience. Maybe one or two (or ten) people already wrote an article about marriage or family relations or earning trust. Maybe there is a whole network of people who write about it all the time but that doesn’t make me more likely to read theirs and less likely to read yours. You might only write a page or two about your topic but it came from YOUR mind and YOUR experience and, as such, is far more important to your audience.

Where people fall into a trap is when they look to other bodies of work to create their own. Referencing other blogs, articles, and web pages is fine but don’t make other people’s work your own (even if you give credit). With so many ways of receiving and filtering information, I certainly don’t need another middle man feeding me other people’s information. Bloggers who fall into the habit of parroting others fall quickly into irrelevancy.

If you write about a book, news article, or blog post that you read, tell me what you think about it. If you agree, tell me why and vice versa. Quote a small piece of the work and tell me what was right or wrong about that passage. Also: always give credit where credit is due.

4. What’s the Point? Ask Often

Most of us like to keep up with family and friends and colleagues to make sure everything is going well. If my mom wrote a blog about her day-to-day activities, I would probably check it out every now and then in between phone calls. But would my friends? Would my co-workers? Would anyone else?

Ask yourself over and over: why am I writing this? If you can’t come up with one or two reasons why, maybe you should re-think the topic. Every post doesn’t have to be a home run and change my life but each post should speak to me and what I want. You are writing for me, not for yourself.

In that vein, it’s important to understand what is important to you and what is important to me. Your experience and your knowledge is why you have the subscribers you do but unless that knowledge is consistently helping me in my life, chances are that I won’t be around for the long haul.

Problogger.com speaks to this point::

Stop writing about yourself. Start solving problems – Surfers become readers when a blog provides something that is wanted. A casual visitor may read your blog because they find training, answers to problems, entertainment, or something else they want. This more than likely will mean that they won’t want to read about you, your girlfriend, your cats, your kids, or your catastrophes (unless you have a personal blog that your friends read). Discontinuing the off-topic posts will help you to develop more repeat traffic and takes exactly 0 minutes to implement.

5. Simple and To-The-Point Language

Ok, here’s the tricky part, picking a font that works. Here are the basic rules:

This particular point is important for those with an extensive vocabulary or those who write about a particular topic with which they are very knowledgeable. It is important to keep jargon and unnecessarily arcane or obscure words from damaging the accessibility of your blog. If you want to appeal to me and all the other me’s out there, it is important that you don’t make me feel uneducated or uninformed. I’m not an idiot but when I fire up Google Reader on my phone and catch a few blog posts on the trolley, I don’t want to have to hunt for a dictionary (that’s what Infinite Jest is for).

Additionally, by using commonplace words (even if you sound a bit repetitive) you are increasing the likelihood that I’ll will find your post through a search engine. Once you’ve had just a bit of experience using a search engine, you realize that being specific is key to finding what you want efficiently.

When you are writing, don’t change what you want to say to fit into a set of words but keep your post direct and avoid unnecessary words. Use short, direct sentences and clear and concise language (this should start to resemble a Strunk & White flashback from your school days). Avoid long tangents that can lose me and make the difference between a returning customer and a bounce.

With a blog post, shorter is better. I have many different blogs I subscribe to and tying up my time with a long-winded post is inconsiderate to say the least. If a particular topic requires more analysis or additional information on your part, consider a multi-part post; you can be sure I’ll come back if I liked the first one. Make sure to plan the series out and tell me what I’m in for.

6. Back It Up

At their best, blogs are charged with providing clear, concise, and CORRECT information. Getting your news from CNN.com is a viable option but I would rather read it from people who were there and saw it happen. Similarly, I would rather read about counseling from a 30 year veteran than just a simple definition on Wikipedia.

The problem with blogs, however, is that each blog has its own reputation to build and maintain. The blog community (called the blogosphere) has done a great job of raising the overall opinion of blogs as information disseminators over the last few years. Your blog will benefit from this but you also have your own work to do.

Make sure that your facts can be backed up and include links wherever possible. Your information is doubly powerful if it is corroborated by a quote from someone or even another blog post. Link out to other site when you can and include short quotes when appropriate.

There is one thing that you won’t be able to source: your own experience. Anecdotes are important in building trust and respect but they must be accurate. A simple exaggeration of a particular experience might seem minor when you write it but if you are ever called out it could be disastrous. Building my trust is paramount to being the most interesting blog writer ever. If the story needs modification to fit the post, you don’t need the story (or the post).

Bonus: Ask yourself these questions as you write

• What am I trying to say? What should the reader be getting out of this?
• Why should the reader care about what I’m writing?
• Am I validating what I’m saying? Are my facts straight?
• Am I including too much personal information?
• Could this be split into several different parts? Am I going on too long?
• Is my title strong enough? Does it accurately explain what I’ve written?
• Do my sub-headings make sense? Do they correctly label what follows?
• Am I considering Seth’s 3 U’s: unique, useful, up-to-date?

New new business card design: the process + feedback

My last business card ordeal was such a cluster that I’m not even going to link back to that post. Besides, it seems to be getting an inordinate amount of p0rn spam comments and I’d rather NOT help those garner any more attention.

I digress…

I also need a business card and have not been giving this important piece of a business that relies on word-of-mouth enough attention. I was pondering new designs when I came across an artist who does letterpress artwork. I posted his work on a forum I frequent and got offered an excellent deal on letter pressed business cards. I immediately went to work on the design and came up with this:

I was digging it but the printer said that each extra color was an extra plate and would cost more. The printing was already more than I wanted to spend so I went with all-black:

I was really enjoying the design and loved the “old design for new techology” meme. I liked it so much, I posted it on the forum where I met the printer. It didn’t meet with quite the same approval as it had in my brain. Here’s what was said (verbatim):

My eyes are drawn all over the card and can’t find any focus. The font/italics aren’t very good and seem amateurish.

I like the card, but it makes you look like a lion tamer or animal trainer not a tech guy. Maybe have him using the chair and a whip on a PC? That is if you are going to stick with the original idea… And the accents that are on the corners, I would change it to one continuous border, have it just on the top and bottom make it look a little busy.

it’s just hard on the eyes. One more thing… you do look like a lion tamer. My suggestion is to go with the motion of the wheel and not try to reinvent it.

As for the 1920′s circus theme.. It can be done, however I think you missed the mark. To me, frilly script fonts, and borders don’t say “circus” to me. I’m also not making the connection between circus and technology. I’ll also add that your message “Josh Can Help” also does not fit with a circus style theme.

Ouch! I was convinced that no-one really understood where I was coming from with the design but I knew that these people had piles more experience than I do and there was very little that they were liking about it.

I was taking it personally and that is the worst way to try and learn anything. So I read and re-read everything and came up with a few more toned-down versions. For the record, I still like the first one the best.

These look cleaner and more toned down but, in my opinion, they were starting to lose character. I realized that the “look” I was going for was, more or less, only in my head.

Well, the wolves liked these much better…

If “Josh Can Help” is your company name, it should be the most important element on the card, and your tag line should be secondary. I’m still not feeling the overall style / idea, but I figured I’d point that out.

The simple ones are an improvement. I agree with the above poster, the company name should stand out the most. I’d also make the tamer bigger since there is so much room in the middle.

Try Vertical. Take the logo, or graphic, put in on top of the card with the ornate corners top and bottom. then imprint the rest below the graphic. seriously, try vertical. see how it looks.

Hmmmm…. then, a little more encouragement (the only reason I didn’t scrap this and start over):

I think that most people on this board don’t quite get letterpress printing… I personally like the approach you’re taking, talking high tech with low tech works for me…. and the lion tamer graphic works too. Letterpress with the right stock is a really nice tactile thing… and a classic serif font is a must for it. Sans serif with letterpress would be a waste of the extra money for print. You might as well print them thermographic instead if you go that way. The only change I would suggest is to have the graphic in the top half of the card and all the text below it. The script font was ok, but not great, given the context you’re aiming at for the design, you likely wouldn’t have seen a single word in-line in a script in a sentence, a true italic, yes, but not a script. Now if you were to take the card vertical and do one word per line stacked and larger with tighter leading, some caps as well, then it would work. I hope this helps.

With this new information, an idea to rotate it to vertical, and a few kind words, I came up with this:

I was REALLY liking this, much more than my original design, and it was very “letterpressy.” The forums went wild!

That one looks very good. I like the changed orientation and the subtle ornate borders. I would work on the font for Josh Can Help. Something a bit more exciting and antique.

my thoughts exactly. looking much better!

I was thinking about a different font as well and also wanted the text to be aligned on both sides (justified). It also needed to be in a vector format (Illustrator). I was scared to work in Illustrator (I’ve opened it five times since I bought it) but I found a few tutorials that helped and came up with the final version minus decorative elements:

The dimensions are a bit off and it’s not perfectly centered but the font, leading (space between lines), tracking (space between letters), and text are all finished.

What do you think?

Edit: final design getting printed:

Want to self-publish? Here’s my review of Lulu.com

I posted a while back with my armchair analysis (no experience) of a few of the many self-publishing outfits available. I liked Lulu the best from my initial look and, as such, went with them to publish my client’s book. Here are my impressions about the whole writing, publishing, and uploading experience.

Why Lulu?

My review post tells a bit more about why I picked this route but, to sum it all up:

• Low cost to get an ISBN and listed on books-in-print
• Great support material
• Seemed simple and straight forward

There is something to be said about a company that just puts it all out there. Between all of their FAQs and their user community, it seemed hard to go wrong with them. The most important, however, was the price. My client didn’t have any intention of building a marketing campaign behind his book besides what he could conjure up himself. Consequently, extra services, add-ons, and packages were simply of no interest. Lulu is bare-bones: you get an ISBN and you get listed everywhere important. That’s all we wanted and, for $100, that’s what we got.

How does it work?

Lulu lists out all the steps in their help section and it really didn’t stray from that (so far).

1. Purchase Published by Lulu or Published by You service and receive an ISBN.
   “Published by Lulu” ISBN’s are assigned immediately.
   “Published by You” ISBN’s take up to 3 business days to be assigned. This is because extra information needs to be processed with the ISBN Agency.
2. Revise the book to contain the ISBN number in the copyright page and add a bar code to the back cover (for one-piece covers).
3. Purchase a proof copy of this newest version of the book.
4. After receiving and carefully reviewing the book, either:
   a. Approve the book on Lulu. Go to Step 6.
   b. Deny the book and make changes. Go to Step 5.
5. Make revisions and upload this new manuscript. Go back to Step 3.
6. The book is uploaded to the distribution center within:
   3-5 business days for “Published by Lulu” distribution
   2 to 3 weeks for “Published by You” distribution.
7. Printer reviews the book to ensure it is up to standards. This can take up to 2 weeks.
   Once accepted for printing, it can take another 6 to 8 weeks before the book is available through online retailers.
   If rejected for not meeting requirements, you will be notified via e-mail that the book must be revised. Go back to Step 2.
8. The book becomes available for listing with online booksellers.
9. Online booksellers like Amazon decide whether or not they would like to list the book. (In our experience, they almost always list it.
   Once a month, online booksellers update their databases with new books. When they update (if the booksellers choose to list your book), you will see the book listed as “currently available.” This can take 6-8 weeks.

How did it go?

Step 1: “Purchase Published by Lulu or Published by You service and receive an ISBN.”

Sure enough, walk through the straight-forward form they provide, buy the publishing option (we chose “published by Lulu”), and you’re published. Wait, what?

Here was one of the few minor problems I had with this process. You’re asked for a title and an author right off the bat. Make DAMN sure that this is the title and author you want to use. The ISBN is tied to the title of the book so if you put in a title now and want to change it later, you have to buy a new ISBN. This wasn’t terribly clear and, in the end, we wanted to change the title a bit but couldn’t for fear of messing up the ISBN tie. So, word to the wise, your book content, cover, and description can change over and over but the author and title cannot.

Speaking of which, this information was in the FAQ (it was not terribly clear that the title would be finalized as soon as your get an ISBN). READ THE FAQ. Which FAQ? EVERY FAQ, READ EVERY ONE THAT PERTAINS TO YOU. I probably would have made a million more mistakes if I didn’t read that thing over and over. Pretty much every question you could have is contained in there. Don’t skip over this just because you think you know what you’re doing.

After entering in your author and title, it asks you to pick the size, binding, and color. We chose 6″ x 9″ (an odd size but it worked out in the end), perfect binding, and black and white. It doesn’t seem like it on the site but perfect binding is your typical paperback binding.

Next you need to upload the file. That came fast. This is my second minor gripe with this service. Lulu calls books “projects” which, to me, says “work in progress.” Instead, “project” means the finished product (kinda). Keep in mind, you can make revisions to the cover and text as much as you want before everything is finalized. Still, for the project to be created, you have to have SOMETHING to upload – same goes for the cover. If your book/cover isn’t complete, upload anything and come back and revise the content.

At this point, I was a bit freaked out because everything was not finalized and I was scared that I might not be able to edit. So I read the FAQs and it said that I would be able to make revisions. I’ll talk about the formatting and layout later.

Upload your book file (text, no cover) and Lulu coverts it to a print-ready file. You can take a look at the file or just move on (I never looked at their version of the file, assuming it was the same as the PDF I uploaded [it was]). Next, they ask for your cover to be uploaded, then the pricing and description. At the end you get a submit button which, honestly, was a bit difficult to press. Keep in mind, this submit button locks in your author and title but not your content and cover. Press the button and you get a the fairly exhilarating message, “You’re published!”

The work has only just begun.

Step 2: “Revise the book to contain the ISBN number in the copyright page and add a bar code to the back cover (for one-piece covers).”

We chose the one-piece cover (you design it from scratch as one big piece) so that’s what I’ll talk about.

I did all the design and layout in Photoshop CS3. It worked great for me and that’s what I would use again for the same task. You also need access to Adobe Acrobat to make the PDF file. There are free PDF making programs but Acrobat has all the document control you need (quality, size, etc). If you have neither one of these tools but want a quality cover, contact me at josh@joshcanhelp.com and I’ll help you with design and PDF-creation (or just PDF-creation if you have an appropriate file).

What you need, in the end, is a very high-quality PDF file that conforms to their size requirements. I looked to their Book Covers FAQ for information and found what I needed. Here’s the deal:

• Find your size on the chart from the link above (ours, for reference, was 6×9)
• Use their spine width calculator to find how big your spine is based on the number of pages (you’ll need to know how many pages your final version will be – if you’re one or two off, it won’t make a big difference but if you can, be exact)
• Make your new document in Photoshop or whatever program you are using. Set your resolution to 300 or higher (I used 600 and it looked perfectly clean) and enter in the dimensions (height is listed on the site, width includes the spine. For our 6×9 with 120 pages it was 9.25″ [9" + bleed, as listed] by 12.52″ [6" x 2 + 0.27" spine + bleed]).
• First thing, set guides to indicate the spine (for our 6×9, the vertical guides were set at 6.125″ [back cover + 1/2 bleed] and 6.395″ [spine]).
• Go crazy! Remember that there will be about 0.125″ cut off from every edge. If you have a picture/pattern that goes to the edges, you’re going to lose a bit.
• Now, you’ll need to add a space for the barcode and, if you want, the product number from Lulu (just makes it easy for people to find). Here is the information on how/where to place the barcode and here is where you go to generate the barcode (product code is the ISBN, I did add the auxiliary barcode [value = 90000],  I left the color settings the same, I did include the “>,” I left the font as-is and downloaded it from here, and I left the rest the same]. The barcode comes in EPS format (standard vector graphic, readable by Photoshop and Illustrator) and must be placed in the space you left. All of this seems really scary at first but it all comes together if you follow the directions.
• Saving the file was bit difficult. Make sure that the final size is correct and the resolution is what you set in the beginning. I set everything to the highest quality settings (highest quality for JPEG, reduce images to 600 DPI) and in the simplest format possible (do not retain Photoshop editing capabilities, PDF 1.5 format). The final file was 5.3MB, for reference.

The cover was a bit unnerving because I don’t have tons of print experience and this wasn’t my book! Using the information above along with the FAQs, I ended up with exactly what I wanted printed in very high quality.

Step 3: “Purchase a proof copy of this newest version of the book.”

$10.36 for ours, not too bad. I was VERY pleased with the quality:

The cover print quality was immaculate and the inside looked great. The paper is off-white (so is the cover but it has a background color) and super-smooth. The pages are not very thick but nothing about it feels cheap; it’s the real-deal. Black print was perfect but gray, because the printing is true black & white (not monochrome but “black ink or no ink”), is not smooth (see the fourth pic above). The binding is high-quality and exactly what I wanted. I was completely satisfied with the print quality… to be honest, I was taken aback by it. When I gave it to my client, he was speechless for a minute or so (this is his first real, published book).

What I wasn’t pleased about (which is entirely my fault) was the page numbers. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re making your content:

• Use their templates. That will eliminate a lot of problems.
• Be careful with your page numbers. If you have a title page and an introduction and other pages before the content, you’re not going to want page numbers on them. I made a total of 6 different Word files: one for the title page, copyright info, and dedication, one for the foreword and intro, one for a second title page I wanted, one for the first half of the book, one for the second, and one for the last couple pages. I compiled them all together in Adobe Acrobat. Page numbers in Word can be difficult to work with so make sure everything looks good when you’re done.
• Remember that you’re laying out the book from the VERY FIRST PAGE after the cover to the VERY LAST PAGE before the back cover. Leave two blank pages in the beginning (one page front and back) and one blank page on the end if you want it to be widely available (distribution services require a certain layout).
• When you read through your final PDF manuscript, pay very close attention to which side the page number shows up on (if you choose the Word option to have them switch sides). The first page in the PDF will be the absolute first page in the book. Look at that page and say out loud “right.” The next page falls on the left so look at that one and say out loud “left.” Do this through the WHOLE MANUSCRIPT, paying attention to how the pages line up and which pages are grouped together. If it isn’t right, insert/delete a page. Make sure your title page is the third page (“right”) and the copyright page is the fourth (“left”).
• I used another published book to lay out my pages and to make sure my copyright page had the right information. This was very helpful.

Step 4: “After receiving and carefully reviewing the book, either: approve the book on Lulu or deny the book and make changes”

We made a total of 3 revisions (putting us on the 4th revision edition) before approving the book. Make sure everything is golden and that you followed all of the distribution rules before you approve the book. Approving the book just consists of pressing a button and reading another satisfying message:

Anything else to know?

I just approved the book before writing this article so there might be more to say about the publishing process. All-in-all, I’m very pleased with how this came out and I look forward to doing business with them in the future.

If you’re thinking about publishing on your own, as long as you’re somewhat computer/graphics savvy, I would recommend Lulu. If you’re not, you can always hire me to help out!

Stay tuned for my review of Blurb.com (spoiler: interesting but not as good) coming soon.