“Regular readers of my articles know that I have no qualms or fear of offering criticism. Criticism is a vital component in what we do and in how we learn. In fact, critical evaluation is mandatory in design work. Without approaching, or at least finishing, every step of our work with a critical eye the results are likely worthless. And we’ve much to learn from what design criticism can teach us. Yet the more articles and criticism responses I read, the more I’m led to believe that too many designers misunderstand criticism.”

The purpose of the Web Standards Design + Development group is to form a strong network of individuals who have taken the initiative to become craftsmen of their trade. Today it is a list of names, tomorrow it will be a force for good…

As of this moment, there are only five spots left for the VizThink Austin gathering happening April 30!

And you can still sign up for the Dave Gray/Karl Gude workshops happening in Chicago and New York the first week of May.

“I’d like to encourage designers to open their mind and consider using some of the other typefaces that are often pre-installed on computers these days. There really are some great choices that are being completely ignored. Granted, not every user is going to have them, but those who do will get an enhanced experience, and those who don’t will be just fine, so long as you specify appropriate alternates (as in MOSe).

Let us compile a list of useable typefaces that we can count on being installed at least some of the time — as well as good alternates for them that are more reliable. Here’s a few I came up with. I think you’ll notice that there are not only some great faces here, but even some that are considered classics or essentials.”

Just what it says.

A blog dedicated to quality, not quantity… …oh, and title sequences and their respective designers. And maybe some other stuff.

Someday.

Take a stab at identifying 34 different fonts in this online quiz.

“Visually, we wanted to make something that didn’t ape current design tropes - the boring, over-used and essentially art-less ‘web 2.0 look’ of bright palletes, gradient fills and rounded corners - but had a more classical view, as befitting something a little more grown up. Richard Spencer Powell said the magazine design draws from modernism, of course (especially North and Mittel European heritage) but also looks further back into the early 20thC, and beyond the simple serifs and vogue for ornamentation, but look at the engravings, section headers, cartographic styles etc.”

“Grid-based layouts have become really popular among web designers over the last year… However, I ran into a problem when coding grid-based layouts. How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way.

Enter GridFox. GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.”

“We are so excited to be able to announce our next VizThink Conference! This time we’ll be in Berlin, Germany. Berlin is an exciting, vibrant town with an amazing, growing art community. We’ll have lots of opportunities for hands on experiences, learning from industry gurus, and networking with your visual thinking peers. We’ll be bringing a few of your favorite facilitators from San Francisco with all new content, plus a whole lot of new facilitators from Europe.”

Update 10 Apr 2008: He pulled it off his site. Sorry!

“I’ve had a lot of questions recently about my process, how I achieve certain “effects” in my illustrations, what my tools are, etc. I’ve made this page very quickly to answer a lot of the questions I’ve been getting repeatedly.

Firstly: my tools are nothing special. A pencil, a fine-tipped Sharpie, copier paper, and Illustrator. That’s it. It’s good to have nice tools, but that’s not to say you can’t be successful without a $40 paint brush.

Before I begin, I feel obliged to say the following:

• ideas are more important than style.
• all the technical tips in the world won’t make a good illustration
• be honest and be yourself. Your work shouldn’t look like mine. We’d all be missing out if it did.”

“However, the works that caught my eyes was that of Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space. The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“I’m very happy to announce that I have a new essay online: Navigating Comics: Reading Strategies of Page Layouts. This paper reports the findings of an experiment I conducted looking at how people navigate through comic pages. The big finding: people don’t just mimic text going left-to-right and down.”

“It’s been a bit of an open secret for the past few weeks but as of today the official announcement is out. I’m excited to announce that as of May 1st I’ll be joining VizThink as their Chief Community Evangelist.

As the title suggests my new role will have me focusing on growing and developing the community surrounding VizThink and the ideas of Visual Thinking. One could argue I’ve already been doing this job for almost a year now, back to when I started running the VizThink evenings here in Toronto - it some sense I have, but it’s always been something I’ve done when I could steal a few minutes to think about it/do something.”

“In 2005 The Royal Mint announced a competition to design six of the eight kinds of coin in circulation in Britain, the first full redesign of the coins since decimalisation in 1971. Open to everyone and with a top prize of £30,000, they received 4000 designs from 500 people, and I just saw on the news that the final designs have been completed and the first coins ready for issue. Not only that, but the £1 coin is now included in the redesign, and somewhat appropriately becomes the uniting element of the set.

You can tell they were done by a graphic designer; even with the complexity of the Royal Arms, the designs are clean and sparse, with pleasing variation in placement of the inscription…”