Design Practice

[elfs]

Palin/Beck attempt

One of the nice things about being at home is that I get to practice skills I haven't been using recently. In this case, a bit of graphic design and typography. Important lessons in this one:

The font is a strong choice, but I could have done better. I was impatient and just took the first masculine serif font I came across in the 'A's, rather than scroll through the whole list.

"Palin" has a riser in the middle of it and "Beck" doesn't. This makes it hard to balance them when trying to do a vertical arrangement. It would probably be better to string them out horizontally, maybe with Beck's name on the lower line in a proportionately smaller typeface.

There needs to be more whitespace around the edges. I need both the standard white border, and more blue between the edge and the actual content box. I tried to figure out how to work red or a traditional flag into the image, but decided to go with something soothing for the moment. The campaign is early yet.

The toolkit for doing graphic design with Linux is somewhat discordant. I did the layout using Scribus, which is an ideal tool for typographic design, and designed the star in Gimp using a template. Gimp and Scribus disagree, apparently, on how big a pixel is, and when I tell it I want the star to be 1.8" x 1.1", Gimp and Scribus agree on the width, but not the height.

Working with a higher pixel count monitor means a corresponding drop in the resolution of the Wacom pad. To compensate, this comes with more real estate on which to zoom in and get finer control. An inevitable trade-off, but one that must be mastered.

Comments

[solarbird]

Try rotating both "Sarah" and "Glen" 90 degrees anticlockwise and put them in front of their large last names, like pillars. You need that top margin back. Make the quote attribution smaller, throw it over to the right side (aheh), move the dash down onto the same line as the name. The you can write out Senator if you want, but that's not a big deal. You need more spacing between "Palen * Beck" and the quote, though.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I think the phrase you're looking for is 'Backmann-Palin Overdrive'.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Er, I think, that's 'Bachmann'

actually...

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Edited to spell the danged URL correctly

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of the way the font makes "Palin" look somewhat like it was chopped off at the bottom. The a looks fine, but the other letters just sort of end, so it looks strange. A font with serifs on the bottom as well seems like it would be better.

Palin Beck Beck

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

Beck has fat letters and Palin has thin letters so if all letters are the same font size, Beck will stand out more. I expect the only solution is to make them different sizes.

Yay Palin, anyway!

[codeamazon.livejournal.com]

PRECISELY what I hit 'comment' to say!

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

GlenN, no?