Holiday Gift & Entertaining Guide 2008 is a design project I’ve just completed at work—Patuxent Publishing, the Baltimore Sun Media Group’s community targetted print division. It contains product recommendations and seasonal tips targeted at Baltimore County, MD and Howard County, MD residents to be distributed in papers such as The Howard County Times and Towson Times with four distinct and customized editions with targeted editorial content.

Cover for the Holiday Gift Guide, a newspaper supplement

Outside of the cover, there is intentionally limited holiday graphics. The cover had to be approved by the higher ups and they wanted it to clearly reflect the holiday focus.

“Coffee Lovers Delight” is a photo heavy style page. Some photos were acquired from the manufcaturers, but for others we had a photo shoot

The project contains four types of stories. Photo heavy stories have large images of the product with a description right with the product. Hybrid stories have a few large photos tagged with an item name and a text block discussing the items pictured and a few others mentioned but not shown. The regular stories have one or two photos and a magazine style stories and for some of these I did original computer illustrations.

"Teacher Gifts" is a story by our staff writer with a file photo. (This photo originally appeared in Maryland Family Magazine). It’s a prime example of the story format used in conjunction with photo heavy gift pages.

The inside pages were given brackets on each side for several reasons. Since a bleed was not an option, the brackets gave a place to cut off the edges of images and give the illusion of bleeds. They also are intended to unify the piece, give a distinct separation between advertising and editorial and help clearly define the color of the piece. The headlines reuse the typeface (Meridien) of the cover logo with the second font (News Gothic) being the body text font.

This stories were from our syndicated feed along with an original computer illustration I created

The 2008 editions can be found in The Howard County Times, Columbia Flier, Northeast Booster, Northeast Reporter, The View from Ellicott City, and The View from West Howard the week of November 20.

Design is done in Adobe InDesign CS in a Apple Mac OSX environment since that is what our corporate environment currently supports. Actual size is 11.5″ high by 11″ wide printed on premium 80 paper

Take a look at the gallery page view all of the designs online.

The new edition of Patuxent Publishing Company’s Home & Garden is out. The Spring Edition which I also designed was a lot more conservative. In the same tradition as that issue, it’s very colorful, fun and literal. I did custom illustrations for the pages and was even allowed to do a full illustrative cover, possibly the first in the publication’s history.

Fall Home & Garden Cover

“Front Porch” is the feature story by our staff writer. The design has a kind of free element along with the necessary product shots that go along with the text. The inside pages adopted the character of the cover illustration into the editorial space.

“Front Porch”

“Lawn & Order”

“Fall for Flavor”, a story about window herb gardens with a fun and literal interpretation of the text.

“Clean Sweep”, about proper fireplace care.

Fall Home & Garden is a supplement to the Howard County Times, Columbia Flier, Catonsville Times, Arbutus Times and Laurel Leader.

Wikipedia has an underused feature called Portals which guide you through a variety of subjects Some of the very people who write and edit articles have put together guides to help you pick out interesting tidbits of content from the pages of the online encyclopedia.

photo credit: throwthedamnthing
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has more ways of reaching information than just the top search results.

Did you know … that Lil' Pimp was the first feature-length film to be created entirely with Macromedia Flash animation? The Visual Arts Portal gets you there. The visual arts portal is a great example of a literary and visual index to the other articles on the site. Did you know … that in Japan professional kimono dressers still help women put on kimono, usually for special occasions, and that the dressers must be licensed? That’s from the Fashion Portal.

With such a massive amount of information in Wikipedia, the portals can really help readers find select articles on Comedy, Mathematics , Criminal Justice, Politics, etc. There are over 500 portals to get you started on your read, but a hundred or so have been selected as the cream of the crop. Check those out on the Featured Portals page

Some upcoming cover options for camp guide 2009. Its about summer camps for kids.

Google Chrome, a new web browser has been released in Beta. So far in my testing, it seems pretty fast although understandably unstable at times. It’s based on Webkit, the open source rendering engine that Apple uses in it’s Safari browser with some code adapted from the open source Firefox project. I love that there is a great amount of competition and innovation in the browser space.

Remember the old days, when web pages were basic text layouts? They were book-like. The infrastructure behind most modern browsers was designed to deal with the old web 1.0. In the era of the web 2.0 buzzword, we more often think of the web as an environment rich in applications. Google says that Chrome was built with that in mind

Features of the browser

The url bar and search bar are combined similar to the Firefox 3 “Awesome Bar”. Google calls this the Omnibar. They also have a new tab page that appears to guess what you might want to look at next.

Another nice feature is that you can drag tabs out of the browser and make a new window. All of the tabs are separate processes, meaning that if a tab crashes you won’t loose everything you have open in other tabs. Closing a tab frees up memory and even surfing to a new page releases the previous pages memory use. An internal task manager allows you to see what plugins and tabs are using the most of your computers energy. There is an “incognito mode” that allows you to prevent sites including Google from viewing your information. Pretty nifty.

Design

The design interface is minimalist. Especially when you maximize the window as the tabs will touch right against the top of your screen. It’s a very nice way to see just the webpage and forget the interface you’re seeing through. As it’s based on webkit, the rendering engine is quite pretty. It takes a bit of getting used to, like most new programs, but I find the interface fairly intuitive and pleasant. It’s all about viewing what’s on the web (aka the cloud) and not the application, which is pretty much in Google’s best interests of course. One good tip is that putting a question mark (?) in the omnibar before typing ensures a search. You can get the question mark to appear from anywhere by hitting ctrl-K.

Update September 6, 2008. I’ve seen many users complain about the lack of a home page button with the other navigation buttons. This is the default, but did you know you can just change this in the Google Chrome Options dialog? Just click the wrench icon for a menu, go to Options and in the Basics tab that opens check off the “Show homepage button in the toolbar” box. Simple!

Episode 20 of Sketcheebook: The Creativity & Productivity Podcast is out. It’s filled to the brim with listener feedback. If you need help listening and don’t have iTunes or an iPod, make sure to check out the article How to listen to podcasts without iTunes or an iPod

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Also, check out the shownotes.

Why should graphic designers care about the world of fashion design? Innovation in graphic design can’t come from the bubble of self reference. While we can still get a few new and fresh ideas from looking at other graphic designers, we really have to look elsewhere for inspiration. While other arts like photography and painting have a special place in our hearts dating back to our college days, fashion is a major area of design that most graphic designers didn’t get any play with in art school.

photo credit: sheilaellen

The world of fashion design is one of the most innovative, colorful and accessible design professions. Everyone wears clothes. An understanding of fashion and following the fast moving trends of clothing really can help a graphic designer appeal to it’s audience. If I want to reach people in Baltimore, looking at what colors and styles are happening in fashion there could give a huge edge in understanding.

Uploaded my lastest designs, this time they’re of the Back to School publication. It’s a newspaper insert to several Maryland newspapers in association with Maryland Family which is produced by the same company and department as where I work, Patuxent Publishing. There were several original illustrations created as well as stock and submitted photos. The final designs were done in InDesign CS.

Cover to back to school

Original illustrations I did for Back to School

With the launch of Zazzle’s custom Keds print-on-demand shoe line, it seems like a good opportunity to talk about all of the different custom shoe options online. In addition to Zazzle, companies including Converse, Vans, Nike and others offer configurable customized shoes.

Zazzle has teamed up with Keds to provide a fully custom printed shoe . Every surface of the shoe’s fabric can be printed so you can use your creative spirit to make all kinds of designs, patterns and effects. They only have kids and women’s shoes right now. If and when they introduce men’s shoes, I’ll definitely want a pair for myself! They currently cost between $50 and $60, not bad at all.

Zazzle’s custom shoes allow for printing on all sides of the fabric.

As blogger Sam Woodfin mentions, it’s not 100% clear how the design changes with different sizes. On their t-shirts, the design stays at a fixed size for different shirt sizes. That wouldn’t work with shoes. The product images seem to update with the different sizes, so I hope they are accurate. The FAQ seems incomplete; I’m left with questions answered like if they have plans for men’s shoes. Still it looks like an exciting announcement and hopefully these questions will be answered in time.

Converse has customized shoes with a number of options and shoe styles. While it’s not as fully customizable as you might want, they offer enough options to give you more unique looks than their off the shelf shoes. You can select different sections including the stitch color. Select colors/patterns to make unique combinations in the end. Some parts have more options than others with the fabric pieces having the most options. You can also have text stitched into part of the shoe. I have leather shoes in a customized brown and yellow with the back sitched with “SKETCHEE”. Canvas shoes are $60 and leather styles are $75.

Custom Vans‘ are similar to the Converse customizations, but with fewer color options and with fewer pieces to customize. There are currently only two choices to pick from.

NikeID also gives a few custom color areas and allows you to search their database by color for preselected combos. Depending on the style of shoe, you can print a laser engraved repeating pattern of text or even switch out some fabric parts for leather although not a full leather shoe like converse.

A fairly ugly custom shoe I came up wth to illustrate the NikeID shoe.

Check to see if your favorite shoes have online customization options by visiting their website. More and more brands are doing it.