My brother, B, walks into the room where I am sitting. A football game is on TV.

B: Who’s winning?

Me: I don’t know.

B: What quarter is it?

Me: I’m not sure.

B: Are you even watching this game?

Me: I was, but I got too distracted by the numbers on the Ravens’ uniform. Look at them — they’re hideous! They’re all bad, but the 3 and the 5 are the absolute worst! I almost had to change the channel!

B: Are you kidding?

Me: Of course not! Bad typography isn’t funny.

Pause.

B: You need a vacation.

Have I mentioned my enduring love of letterpress printing? Oh, I have?

If you love it, too (or even if you want to be just friends), buy this 2008 calendar from Paper Source. Gorgeousness for less than $17!

The other day I was flipping through Elle Decor when this ad stopped me in my tracks. Elle Decor is a glossy magazine so filled with gorgeous images of interiors and products (editorial) and furniture, home goods, clothing and jewelry (ads) that I sometimes have trouble finding the articles, but this ad totally grabbed me.

Why?

This is the power of a great image. What’s going on here? I thought. Why is that girl holding that rooster, and who dressed her? What’s with the devil in the background? Are those broccoli heads on that table? And what kind of weird torture chamber room is this, anyway? What could this possibly be advertising?

The only answer I have is the name Dos Gallos means “two roosters,” hence the bird in arms. Otherwise, as far as I know, it’s just a really strange and compelling image that includes some antiques. One of my favorite things about it is the similarity between the faces of the girl figure on the floor and the actual living girl. What an odd, and slightly disturbing, echo.

This is why commissioned photography will never be replaced completely by stock photography. Even if you could get an image of this quality from stock (and I consider this to be fine art quality photography), you could never get all of the elements together.

Visit the Dos Gallos site for more ads from this series (click on publications and interiors). All cool, but I consider this one the best.

I find I can’t look away from George Lange’s video flipbook. The stop frame animation is really cool and synced up nicely to the music, but mostly he’s a pretty amazing photographer. 95% of these pictures totally blow me away.

#5 Let your software decide the settings for your document.

When you open a new document to work in, whether it is in QuarkXpress, Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, or Microsoft Word or Publisher, there will be defaults in place for everything, including font size and font face, leading, or space between the lines of text (if you’re using some of the more “design-y” software), and margin width. Well, you think to yourself, if these are in here already, they must be OK. Those fine folks at Quark (or Adobe or Microsoft) wouldn’t steer me wrong.

Wrong.

The default type size in most programs is 12 points. While that may be OK for some uses (kids books, posters, a brochure for a retirement home), it’s pretty honking big. A newspaper typically uses type at 9 to 10 points for its body copy, and if you can’t read that, the newspaper designer is really missing the point. When you add in the typical default .5″ margins and 14 point leading, what you get is a document that looks really type heavy, dense and clunky.

Try this. Do your design the way you think it should be. Print it out (this is an important step that too many people omit. If the final result is for the printed page, you should ALWAYS print it out to see what it looks like. Your screen lies.) Then shrink down your type 2-3 points and increase your margin width and leading (if you can).

9 times out of 10, the reduced size version will look MUCH better and still be perfectly legible. An easy fix, and my, don’t you look like the design pro!