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

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1991 by Steve Moregenstern

For books and newsletters, we're generally talking about structural issues - the basic type combination; the column layout; the size and placement of subhead, pull quotes, and graphics; and the treatment of running headers and footers. In addition, you may find distinctive graphic devices that strike your fancy. I'm currently writing and designing a book on desktop publishing, and that means I'm looking for design elements I can steal from books I admire. I'm looking at the ways they handle chapter openings - a good opportunity to add a little graphic pizzazz without gimmicking up a book layout. A nice treatment of the running footer might work, too - perhaps using a distinctive ornamental device (called a dingbat) to accompany the page number. I'm also checking out books that set the body text in a column significantly narrower than full-page width and leave a second, separate column for subheads, callouts, summaries, thumbnail illustrations, and parenthetical asides.

When it comes to magazine layouts, handbills and fliers, I often go hunting for interesting display type treatments. Let's face it, unless I have the budget to hire a top-notch illustrator or photographer, there's no way I can borrow the style or concept of a picture used in a professional layout. The display type is a different story, though. With the right software and a little trial and error, I can successfully emulate many of the dramatic effects I find in print.

My favorite hunting ground for great display type is glossy magazines, both the editorial spreads and the ads. Certain magazines are especially useful in this regard. I think the folks at Premiere, a popular movie magazine, get a tremendous amount of mileage out of their typography. Rolling Stone is another good source for me, and so is The New York Times Magazine.

Note that I rarely look for handbill and flier ideas in other people's handbills and fliers. One reason is I don't get that many samples in my day-to-day existence, while I'm swamped with magazines of every size and description. More to the point, though, most of the fliers I do see look crummy.

As a sample exercise, I sat down with a pile of magazines and a concept I've been toying with. Mr writing business has not been as busy as it might be lately, so it's probably a good time to remind my past and prospective clients that I'm here. In the figure that accompanies this article, you'll see a version of one possible flier to serve that purpose, drawn from graphic concepts I found in an ad for Olympus cameras (which, incidentally, picks up on a particularly trendy layout idea - very similar designs have recently been used by a variety of advertisers).

LEARN TO READ DESIGN

The underlying strategy in learning to borrow designs effectively is to start reading everything that comes into your hands on two levels - what the words say and what graphic means were used to convey and enhance that message. That way, you can identify graphic concepts that may come in handy down the road and stow them away in an idea file.