Previously Smashing Magazine’s Typography editor, and currently on the Experts Panel, Alex Charchar has had his writing published and referenced in some pretty cool places around the web and in print. He’s fanatical about design, letterpress, espresso, and podcasting. Most of all, he likes helping designers and creatives hone their craft. You can visit Retinart to find more of his writing..
Most of us carry the dead weight of an undefined process. We’re too passive, or ignorant, or foolish, or dismissive, or proud when it comes to our workflow. And that’s where we lose. Being ignorant of our process is to be ignorant of how long things really take, or where opportunities for improvement, in skill or outcome, are hidden. In all this we lose control of our intellectual and creative growth, letting too many opportunities slip to become the designers (or developers or writers) we aspire to be. In this article, Alexander Charchar will show you how to master your time and schedule, and how to have more control to make more (and better) choices.
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Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues. We’ve all experienced that burnout moment. It’s that moment when we’ve got nothing left to give but keep trying anyway, when we’re left without much more than a shell to live in and motions to go through.
In such moments all we want is for our work to feel like our work and not like torture.
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Didn’t fresh ideas arrive without being asked for? Why did I have to wait until the last moment to even notice, wait until moments before these old dented ideas have to be presented? Now it’s none of these things. Now it’s different. Now it’s quiet with muted color. Now it’s something I just do. No, it’s worse. Now it’s a job. It’s not my work, it’s my job. It’s a job, and the ideas don’t arrive like they used to. I keep designing what I know.
Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues.
Read more…
In this industry, there’s so much to learn, that falling behind is easy. So, you tell yourselves you’ll come back to it later. But later never shows up. What if you did just one small thing a day to expand your knowledge and skill set, every day, for 30 days straight? This challenge of stacking knowledge daily will enable you not only to learn 30 things, but to learn 30 things that will increase in complexity and fit together as a whole new branch of working knowledge for you.
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Khajag Apelian not only is a talented type and graphic designer, unsurprisingly, but also counts Disney as a client, as well as a number of local and not-for-profit organizations throughout the Middle East. Designing a quality typeface is a daunting task when it’s only in the Latin alphabet. Khajag goes deeper still, having designed a Latin-Armenian dual-script typeface in four weights, named “Arek”, as well as an Arabic adaptation of Typotheque’s Fedra Display.
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Adobe’s InDesign page-layout application has been made faster and more feature-rich with each iteration. But even the best applications lack some features. Luckily, Adobe realized this and opened the doors to allow designers to expand this set of tools through plugins. In this article, we’ve put together a small collection to show a bit of what InDesign can do.
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