Graphic Design

Visual communication, art direction. Web layouts and typography. Graphic design, interface design, user experience design, illustration, photography, artwork. Creative, strategic, and technical approaches to crafting great interfaces. Visual styles, influences, and trends.

Brand Identity :

Your logo is not your brand. Brand is a nexus of consumer perceptions and emotions about your company and its products. Logo design, identity design, branding, content strategy, copywriting, customer relations, and the actual quality of your product work together to create your brand. Where does the web design team fit in? Brand identity development as it relates to the web. Identity systems and brand development.

Graphic Design:

Visual design. Art direction, visual communication, creative direction, illustration, photography, visual art. Using color, symbol, and type to communicate ideas, brands, emotions, styles, and expressions. Arranging image and text to communicate a message. Developing an appropriate look and feel. How people respond to design. Style versus design. Design is not something you paste on at the end.

Layout & Grids:

Web page layouts: ways and means and meaning. Grids and rules; columns fixed, flexible, fluid, liquid, and elastic. Ponder the 500 “standard” viewports your user’s Android device may support. Size, color, and contrast. To center or not to center. Scaling text and columns. Beyond pixels. Layout and genre. Print paradigms and viewport-agnostic approaches. A new aesthetic. Let the web be the web.

Mobile/Multidevice:

Each week, new devices appear with varying screen sizes, pixel densities, input types, and more. Creating great mobile (and immobile) experiences. Constraints, challenges, and new opportunities. Mobile-first. Content-first. Responsive workflow. Responsive Design + Server Side Components (RESS). JavaScript, APIs, and progressive enhancement. Designing for hand, lap, and desk.

Responsive Design:

The concept that launched a thousand site redesigns. For years, web designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Responsive design advocates that we shift our design thinking to make a virtue of these constraints. Using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to embrace the ebb and flow of the web.

Typography & Web Fonts:

Communicating via typefaces. Fonts and layout. Designing for readers. Legibility. Web Fonts: there’s life after Georgia and Verdana. Using CSS @font-face to embed licensed fonts on your site. Typekit and other solutions. Controlling web typography: size, font, color. CSS methods, browser problems, user problems, and workarounds. Typographically correct punctuation. Unicode. Scaling text.