Need design inspiration? Look around you! - desktop publishing - tutorial

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1991 by Steve Moregenstern

Need Design Inspiration? Look Around You!

There are wonderful designers in the world - folks with years of graphic-arts schooling, a real flair for composition, and an original eye. I'm not a trained designer; the odds are good that you aren't, either. But when it comes to producing a desktop-publishing project, we often want what those design professionals possess: the ability to capture the reader's attention and generate excitement through layout and design.

So how are we going to get this elusive talent? You could buy it, of course - I know some really good designers who could use an extra client or two in the middle of a recession. Ah, but that involves a budget for art direction, a budget that's often lacking in the world of one-person-does-it-all desktop publishing. So we'll do the next best thing - we'll borrow it.

The fact is, borrowing design ideas is a practice that goes on all the time, and professional designers are the biggest culprits. So now it's time to try borrowing ideas for yourself.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

There are only two absolutely essential tools for the budding borrower - a plastic type gauge and a supply of type catalogs.

The type gauge is available for a few dollars at most art-supply stores. It's transparent, with separate areas for measuring the type size and line leading (the vertical distance between lines of type). There is usually a pica or inch ruler along the edge as well.

By aligning the plastic gauge over a layout you find attractive, you can read off the vital statistics of the type used. Pulling a nice, airy newsletter from my samples file and analyzing it with a type gauge, I find there are three columns, each 15 picas wide, with two picas in the gutters (the space between the columns). The body text is set in 10-point type with 12-point leading, the main headlines in 36-point type, and the subheads in 18-point.

Ah, but what kind of type is it? That's where type catalogs come in handy. Many type publishers provide free catalogs; others charge a nominal sum. In either case it's a small price to pay to build a reference library of raw materials for design. If you're willing to spend a bit more, there are several reference books that provide a sampling of type offerings from various publishers. The LaserJet Font Book and The Macintosh Font Book, both published by Peachpit Press, are two collections I find handy.

How do you identify the type used in a printed sample from literally thousands of suspects? Focus on the letters that are most distinctly different from typeface to typeface. For example, look at the letter k - do the two short lines meet in a V-shape at the vertical bar, or do they intersect to the right of the bar? Similarly, look at the way the center point is formed in the letter w. The shape of the lowercase a is often a good typeface fingerprint, and so is g, in both upper- and lowercase.

If the typeface has serifs, examine them carefully and note their shapes. Whether or not there are serifs, check out the thickness of the lines that make up the letters and, very important, note the difference between the thickest parts of the letters and the thinnest parts.

You may hit a perfect match by going through this kind of analytical exercise. Then again, you might not. In fact, even with thousands of typefaces now available in computer-ready form, there are still thousands more that simply are not available for personal-computer use. However, in virtually any design, you can come up with a match that is close enough to reproduce the effect you're after.

If you're planning to recreate some of the fancy headline type treatments you'll see in professional graphic layouts, you'll need an additional item in your set of tools - type-manipulation software (aka font stylers or type processors). These programs let you distort and rearrange standard type styles to make a graphic statement: adding perspective, squashing or stretching letter shapes, adding screened backgrounds or colors, and so on. At the moment my favorites for this purpose are TypeStyler (Broderbund Software) on the Macintosh and CorelDraw (Corel Systems) on the PC. TypeStyler is a specialty tool that makes type manipulation very easy and absolutely fun. CorelDraw is actually a full-featured illustration program with particularly strong type-manipulation capabilities and an extraordinarily diverse collection of typefaces included with the program.

One final tool - a photocopying machine. On one hand this has an obvious use: to keep copies of attractive layouts for your file. Its other important use is sizing up the effectiveness of color layouts when rendered in black and white. Sometimes it's tough knowing what element of a layout is drawing your attention - successful use of color or interesting typography and layout. If you're working on a black-and-white project, you can separate the elements by making a photocopy of a color layout you're considering as source material and evaluating the copy.

CASING THE JOINT

Before you can grab the graphic loot and scoot, you have to figure out what's worth borrowing. This will depend on the type of project you're undertaking.