The Danish Designer

Banksy’s nemesis King Robbo launches his first show, including his controversial re-graffiti pieces.

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http://www.notcot.org/post/39437

source: teehanlax.com

Lately, grids have become the ultimate obsession of designers and design writers: hundreds — not to say thousands — of articles, tutorials, books and websites solely dedicated to grids and their application in (web)design have been published in the last few years. A simple search on Google with the terms “grid” and “webdesign” returns almost 5 million results. There is even a movie with characters trapped in what they call “the grid” […] “a final frontier”.

A short historical perspective

However, grids are nothing new and can be traced back to Middle Ages: in the 1220s/1240s, French architect Villard de Honnecourt designed construction canons based on geometry. These principles were later studied by typographers and designers in the beginning of the 20th century to reverse-engineer medieval canons of page construction. Among them, Van de Graaf, Rosarivo, and ultimately Tschichold who popularized his predecessors’ discoveries in his book The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design.

Designing within a grid space is indeed an old tradition that finds its roots in the need for structure and balance.

A lot of the things that surround us are designed following modernistic principles of grid systems. The beauty of these objects — music players, books, magazines, mobile phones, websites, etc. — generally resides in the fact that the grid employed to design them is totally invisible. Order is suggested more than it is made obvious. Users should be left with the impression that things are easy to handle if the order employed at crafting them suggests so.

As Josef Müller Brockmann wrote is his book The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems: “The grid makes it possible to bring all the elements of design — type characters, photography, drawing and colour — into a formal relationship to each other; that is to say, the grid system is a means to introducing order into a design. A deliberately composed design has a clearer, more neatly arranged and more successful effect than an advertisement put together at random.”

The Return of the Grid

Why is it that grid systems have become so popular among digital designers? The answer might be that now, good old print principles have become applicable to the screen(s).

In the early age of Internet, when the computer was the only interactive screen around, graphic design possibilities were extremely limited. Creating an online masterpiece à la Müller Brockmann was close to impossible mainly due to technological restraints. Constant improvements, coupled with both professional maturity among digital designers and an increasing interest for more rational design (Bauhaus, Swiss style, Ulm School), undeniably led to the return of the grid. What had been for ages the canons of print design has become a prerequisite of UI design.

Today it is inconceivable that a UI does not fit into a grid system no matter how complex it is.

A grid has two dimensions (at least)

Plenty of online tutorials, templates and calculators exist to create grids, but not all of them place the emphasis on what makes a grid valuable: typographic rhythm and the baseline grid.Building a horizontal grid is of course a fundamental step, but creating vertical rhythm is equally important. As Robert Bringhurst wrote in The Elements of Typographic Style: “Don’t compose without a scale”. Type should actually be the scale that defines almost everything else.

Positioning or aligning elements on an horizontal grid is fairly simple and borrows a lot from print rules. Typically, a 960px wide page is divided in 12, 16, or 24 columns — synonyms for classicism, complexity… and madness. This division in columns is often determined by business requirements such as advertising placements. For instance, the 12 columns grid system is perfect to accommodate big boxes (300×250px) or half pages (300×600px) that use exactly 4 columns, or one third of the page.

Copy can be easily adjusted along these columns, sometimes close to the border of the column, sometimes not. There is no golden rule and the grid should never be regarded as rigid, but instead used as an assistance to create order. The grid is a means to an end, not an end in itself. To quote Müller Brockmann once again: “The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. […] But one must learn how to use the grid system; it is something that has to be practiced.”

When positioning elements vertically, the designer has to make decisions that never should be left to chance or random. Too often, designers rely on vertical increments made possible in Photoshop by holding shift and arrows keys: “I use 5 or 10px, it depends.” This approach is acceptable horizontally, as columns are multiples of 10, but it doesn’t conform to any typographic reality.

If we go back to the reason why print designers invented grids, it was because they needed to position both texts and images on the space of their page. By adding a vertical grid — or baseline grid — to their horizontal grid, print designers found the way to create complex layouts where chance was eliminated (when followed obsessive-compulsively). Suddenly typography and iconography could sit on a systematic series of horizontal lines called “baseline grid”.

Experimenting with a baseline grid

Coming up with a grid for print requires multiple calculations based on page format, font choice, font size, leading, etc. Hopefully these calculations are not necessary for digital design, and web design in particular: on screen, the baseline grid is essentially determined by leading.

Recently, we’ve been successfully experimenting with a 6px baseline grid coupled with the960px grid system designed by Nathan Smith. This system has three advantages:

• first, it simplifies the design process by removing the “chance” factor (no more questions);
• second, it decreases the time spent at positioning elements;
• third, it increases the feeling of organization in our design by articulating all the graphic elements with type.

Talking about type, we have also chosen to use traditional sizes to go with this baseline (9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 30, 48, 60, 72 points): these sizes prove to be extremely useful when combined with leading derived from 3. For example, body copy can be defined as 14/18 (14pt size and 18pt leading). Small copy can be defined as 9/12. The magic of the grid operates and all these elements suddenly align; same if we choose to create a text block with type set slightly bigger (for example 21/27). Copy aligns itself every six, every four or every nine lines. To paraphrase Robert Bringhurst and his concept of vertical tempo, the baseline helps at adding or removing vertical space to create rhythm.

Now it is easy to align various blocks of text (headings, body copy, etc.) with UI elements such as buttons and textfields as they all sit on the baseline grid. The ultimate purpose of this experimental grid is to facilitate the whole design process, particularly for designers but also to help integrators and developers in their work with CSS and HTML.

We hope that you’ll find this grid useful, not just as another trend to follow, but rather as a holistic strategy to envision and execute simple, clear and balanced design projects.

Download our grid here.

“We’re human, mistakes happen.”
That’s what my business coach IM’d to me, when I went wailing to her after I failed to make a Skype appointment with an important prospect.
Sure, freelancers are human too. And we all make mistakes.
But I still felt awful. I felt like a failure. I’d let my prospect down. I was a terrible freelancer.
So I turned to my freelancing community and found that, indeed, other freelancers make mistakes too. Today, I’m sharing those mistakes with you.

Thirteen Bad Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

Here are the 13 worst mistakes a freelancer could make:

1. Working without a contract–This seems to be pretty common. Sometimes, freelancers start out while they’re still in school. Or just doing it on the side. So they don’t treat it as a serious business. Or sometimes, we just trust our clients too much. We can’t believe they could stiff us… until they do.
2. Working with just any client–Here’s another biggie. Often, we get a bad feeling about a client. We see lots of red flags popping up, but we ignore them. We need the money. We need this client on our portfolio. We need this! And then things fall apart. We look back and kick ourselves, because we knew all along this was a bad idea.
3. Missing deadlines and appointments–This is what I hear the most from people who hire freelancers. I’ve got plenty of clients who find me after being burned by freelancers who flake out on them, miss deadline after deadline while never running out of excuses, or simply disappear.
4. Starting work without getting paid first–This is another common mistake, especially by freelancers who are just starting out. Again, it stems from trusting the client too much. The solution is simple: ask for a down payment first, before starting to do ANY work.
5. Charging too little–Freelancers’ insecurities are most evident in our fees. We charge too little, because we don’t really believe in what we’re worth. Or we base our fees on the salary we used to make was employees. Or we ask for what we can live with. So we end up getting paid way less than the value we actually bring to our clients.
6. Taking on too much work–This is a natural consequence of charging too little. If you don’t get paid much for each project, then you need to complete more projects to reach your income goals. Big mistake! Over-extend yourself and you end up missing deadlines, delivering poor quality work, burning yourself out, and thinking “freelancing sucks!”
7. Neglecting your marketing when times are good–Sometimes we get in a groove, a good one. We’ve got lots of projects lined up. We’re working in a state of flow doing things we enjoy doing. The money’s pouring in. So who cares about marketing, right? Wrong! Freelancers need to be constantly marketing, getting leads, and keeping them “warm.” Because if not, one day, we’ll wake up and there isn’t a new project waiting for us. There’s no new check to deposit and yet the bills continue to arrive in the mail.
8. Not having clear deliverables–You may have a contract, but is it a good one? Does it clearly state what outputs you’re going to provide, and when? And how you’re going to get paid, and when? And what your clients’ role is in the completion of the project? I’ve heard of freelancers proceeding to do certain tasks, only to find out the client hadn’t wanted them to do it. Don’t even think about getting paid. Ouch!
9. Not having a “kill fee” in the contract–Here’s another mistake I myself have made. I forgot to include my kill fee, or how much my client has to pay if he/she discontinues the project after I’ve begun work on it. Once again, sometimes a shabby contract is as bad as not having one.
10. Submitting completed work and client files without getting paid first–Here’s another mistake made by overly trusting freelancers. Remember that, once you’ve turned over the finished product to the client, you don’t have a hold on them any more.
11. Not following up on proposals–This is a mistake we may not even realize is causing us to lose clients. I’m guilty of this myself, because I’m quite a shy person. I don’t like pestering people. Following up feels like pestering. But it’s a big mistake to assume your clients have received the proposal you sent, much less read them. If you’re like me and feel nervous about following up, read this step-by-step guide to a smarter follow-up.
12. Not upselling clients–Here’s another mistake many freelancers don’t even realize they’re making. Freelancers who don’t “upsell”–offer to do more services than what their clients asked for–are leaving money on the table. Upselling may feel slimy and used-car-salesman-y to you. But in fact, it’s a sign of a remarkable freelancer. When you upsell, you have to anticipate your clients’ needs and be there to help meet them. When you offer an effective upsell, you’re showing your client that you fully understand what they’re trying to achieve, and you know how to help them get there.
13. Neglecting your finances–Freelancers are usually a creative lot, which means many of us are not comfortable dealing with numbers and money. It’s too easy to sweep finances under the rug, until tax time comes. This is another big mistake. You can’t manage what you don’t see.

Source: freelancefolder.com

Price 1498 in Illum