Get together with Distortedesigners

Hi,

Yesterday we the member of distortedesigners met at Drik Gallery, Dhanmondi, Dhaka. We enjoy the evening and discuss several subject on designing and design environment on Bangladesh. Lets check...

As everyone knows, graphic designers are the reason there are so many wars in this world. They get inside our heads with their subliminal advertising, force us against our will to spend money on the worst pieces of shit, and eventually, drive us to depression and random acts of violence. And of course, most of them arecommunists.

So to do my part to save the world from them, i made a list of things you can do when working with a graphic designer, to assure that they have a burn-out and leave this business FOREVER.

1-Microsoft Office
When you have to send a graphic designer a document, make sure it’s made with a program from Microsoft Office. PC version if possible. If you have to send pictures, you’ll have more success in driving them mad if, instead of just sending a jpeg or a raw camera file, you embed the pictures inside a Microsoft Office document like Word or Powerpoint. Don’t forget to lower the resolution to 72 dpi so that they’ll have to contact you again for a higher quality version. When you send them the ‘higher’ version, make sure the size is at least 50% smaller. And if you’re using email to send the pictures, forget the attatchment once in a while.









2-Fonts
If the graphic designer chooses Helvetica for a font, ask for Arial. If he chooses Arial, ask for Comic Sans. If he chooses Comic Sans, he’s already half-insane, so your job’s half done.











3-More is better
Let’s say you want a newsletter designed. Graphic designers will always try to leave white space everywhere. Large margins, the leading and kerning of text, etc. They will tell you that they do this because it’s easier to read, and leads to a more clean, professional look. But do not believe those lies. The reason they do this is to make the document bigger, with more pages, so that it costs you more at the print shop. Why do they do it? Because graphic designers hate you. They also eat babies. Uncooked, raw baby meat.

So make sure you ask them to put smaller margins and really, really small text. Many different fonts are also suggested (bonus if you ask for Comic Sans, Arial or Sand). Ask for clipart. Ask for many pictures (if you don’t know how to send them, refer to #1). They will try to argument, and defend their choices but don’t worry, in the end the client is always right and they will bow to your many requests.




















4-Logos
If you have to send a graphic designer a logo for a particular project, let’s say of a sponsor or partner, be sure to have it really really small and in a low-res gif or jpeg format. Again, bonus points if you insert it in a Word document before sending it. Now you might think that would be enough but if you really want to be successful in lowering the mental stability of a graphic designer, do your best to send a version of the logo over a hard to cut-out background. Black or white backgrounds should be avoided, as they are easy to cut-out with the darken or lighten layer style in photoshop. Once the graphic designer is done working on that bitmap logo, tell him you need it to be bigger.

If you need a custom made logo, make your own sketches on a napkin. Or better yet, make your 9 year old kid draw it. Your sketch shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to make. You don’t want to make something that’s detailed and easy to understand, because the less the designer understands what you want, the more you can make him change things afterwards. Never accept the first logo. Never accept the 9th, make him do many changes, colors, fonts & clip art. Ask him to add a picture in the logo. Bevels. Gradients. Comic Sans. And when he’s at his 10th attempt, tell him that you like the 2nd one the most. I know, it’s mean but remember: graphic designers are the cause of breast cancer among middle aged women.

5-Chosing your words
When describing what you want in a design, make sure to use terms that don’t really mean anything. Terms like ‘jazz it up a bit’ or ‘can you make it more webbish?’. ‘I would like the design to be beautiful’ or ‘I prefer nice graphics, graphics that, you know, when you look at them you go: Those are nice graphics.’ are other options. Don’t feel bad about it, you’ve got the right. In fact, it’s your duty because we all know that on fullmoons, graphic designers shapeshift into werewolves.

6-Colors
The best way for you to pick colors (because you don’t want to let the graphic designer choose) is to write random colors on pieces of paper, put them in a hat and choose. The graphic designer will suggest to stay with 2-3 main colors at the most, but no. Choose as many as you like, and make sure to do the hat thing in front of him. While doing it, sing a very annoying song.

7-Deadlines
When it’s your turn to approve the design, take your time. There is no rush. Take two days. Take six. Just as long as when the deadline of the project approaches, you get back to the designer with more corrections and changes that he has time to make. After all, graphic designers are responsible for the 911 attacks.

8-Finish him
After you’ve applied this list on your victim, it is part of human nature (although some would argue weather they’re human or not) to get a bit insecure. As he realises that he just can’t satisfy your needs, the graphic designer will most likely abandon all hopes of winning an argument and will just do whatever you tell him to do, without question. You want that in purple? Purple it is. Six different fonts? Sure!

You would think that at this point you have won, but don’t forget the goal of this: he has to quit this business. So be ready for the final blow: When making final decisions on colors, shapes, fonts, etc, tell him that you are disappointed by his lack of initiative. Tell him that after all, he is the designer and that he should be the one to put his expertise and talent at work, not you. That you were expecting more output and advices about design from him.









Tell him you’ve had enough with his lack of creativity and that you would rather do your own layouts on Publisher instead of paying for his services. And there you go. You should have graphic designer all tucked into a straight jacket in no time!

Source: http://ghislainroy.com/blog/2007/03/06/8-ways-to-drive-a-graphic-designer-mad/

Finding Inspiration from Nature

Finding Inspiration From Environment

View more presentations from ndesign.

Litmus - The advanced testing tool for web professionals

Test your designs on all browsers

Litmus shows you screenshots of your websites as they look across all major web browsers.

Super-fast, iterative compatibility testing is now easy, reliable and affordable.

There's a huge array of browsers you'll have access to 24 hours a day:
Windows browsers

* Explorer 8.0 (Beta 2)
* Explorer 7.0
* Explorer 6.0
* Explorer 5.5
* Explorer 5.0
* Firefox 3.0
* Firefox 2.0
* Firefox 1.5
* Firefox 1.0
* Flock 1.1
* Google Chrome 0.2
* Netscape 9.0
* Netscape 7.2
* Opera 9.5
* Opera 8.1
* Opera 7.5
* Safari 3.1
* Sea Monkey 1.1

Mac OS X browsers

* Camino 1.6
* Camino 1.0
* Safari 3.1
* Safari 2.0

Linux browsers

* Firefox 3.0
* Firefox 2.0
* Konqueror 3.5

I am using this tools myself and found its great... check yourself @ http://litmusapp.com/

Some web tools which help you to grow

Check the web tools for growing yourself...

Explore, create and share color themes with KULER
Discover Adobe® Kuler™ — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you're creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

http://kuler.adobe.com/

Pixenate is the photo editor
Pixenate is the photo editor of choice for photo printing and photo sharing businesses.

http://pixenate.com/

Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool.
Font Tester is a free online font comparison tool. It allows you to easily preview and compare different fonts side by side with various CSS font styles applied to them. It is very useful for web developers who are looking for just the right font/style/color to use in their pages. To use it all you have to do is simply enter the text you would like to preview, modify the various CSS properties until you find a style you like, and then click on the Get CSS Code button to generate all the necassary CSS code to reproduce those styles in your webpage.

http://www.fonttester.com/

Zamzar - Free online file conversion
Have you ever wanted to convert files without the need to download software? Check ZAMAR.

http://www.zamzar.com/

Enjoy using stripe generator!
Unleash your personal style, experiment and download the tile. You can use it directly in your css file or as pattern in Photoshop®!

If you like our tool, feel free to credit stripegenerator.com by linking us with our banner :)

http://www.stripegenerator.com/

Want to check cross browser solution for your site?
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

http://browsershots.org/

Convert your psd file into DIV based W3 validate HTML within a minute

Another one cool site which can help you to grow...

http://psd2cssonline.com/ which will help you to convert your psd file into DIV based W3 validate HTML within a minute.. :)

Image Galleries
Create Drupal Themes
Create Joomla Templates
Dynamic Menu Systems
Live Social Networking Feeds
User Comments Systems
Form Design and Code Generation
Create an Entire Website from one PSD File
Fully Commented Source Code
Fantastic Way to Learn CSS/HTML
CSS/XHTML Valid Code Always

Conversion Done in Seconds

All with Little or No Coding!

Hope you love them..

Thanks

Common questions for Web/Graphic Designer interview

A reader had to go through the interview for Web Designer / Graphic Designer position and sent in his set of questions.

1. Whats is the difference between cellspacing and cellpadding?
2. If a page has to be loaded over all frames in window, what should be the value of TARGET attributes?
3. Which one of the following settlement is correct?
1. A table cannot contain another table
2. A Form can ve nested inside another form
3. Which element are table cells
4. List out tags that are support exclusively by IE and Netscape.
5. What tags are used to embed one html page inside another html page (without using frames)?
6. In dreamweaver what is used to apply same layout to my pages.
7. Which HTML tag is used to define an internal style sheet?
8. How do you define an inline style?

Source: Internet.