Happy Friday! It’s been a long, hard week, hasn’t it? We definitely need the weekend and some, well, inspiration and beautiful things. Design might not solve all the world’s problems, but it can help and sometimes that is the best we can do. So today, I’m just sharing some things I’ve found inspiring that might give you a needed break and some needed pretty things (because yes, sometimes we just need a break to remember there is beauty).

Check out this long post of July Design Inspiration from Smashing Magazine. These monthly posts are great for getting new ideas, especially for colors and styles that you might not have considered in your designs. I can see some translating beautifully for library design projects.

For more semi-library related design inspiration, click through to see the 2015 Book Cover Winners and 2015 Book Winners from the AIGA competition. I’m amazed at how gorgeous the covers are and how well-designed the books are. And, now, I want to go buy more books!

Do you like flags? Does your city have a flag? Is it well-designed? You’ll be asking yourself these questions as you watch Roman Mars’ TED Talk, “Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed” and read Rebekah Barnett’s TED article, “Doing pennants: How to fix an ugly flag“. After, check out if your city has a flag and use the rules discussed by Mars as an exercise to redesign your flag. You never know, it might help if your library ever wants to create some new branding or even a library flag!

Finally, although sometimes the images get all the attention in design, we have to pay attention to our words, too. So if you are writing up copy, you might want to check out Words to Use instead of Very. If nothing else, there’s an adorable cat on the infographic. 🙂

I hope you have a relaxing and renewing weekend. I’ll be back soon with more news and notes. Allons-y!

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your week has gone well and you have a lovely weekend planned. Before we run headlong into the weekend, I wanted to talk a bit about design and drawing today: how drawing can help with projects in the library and how it is a fun skill that we too often overlook once we leave behind our grade school days. So let’s talk drawing, design, and libraries!

Did you draw when you were a child? Do you still draw now? If not, when did you stop? And, more importantly, why did you stop?

I’d wager that everyone drew at least something as a child. Children love to pick up crayons and draw bold squiggles that spark imaginative stories. We love to dip our fingers in paint and swirl it on paper to see what we could create. There was a wonder about having a blank page of paper and a new box of markers that made us want to draw forever (or at least until it was snack time). But then we put away our crayons when we got older. We didn’t draw with abandon anymore. We moved on to computers and spreadsheets and “real” work and forgot our childlike wonder in creating just to create things (even if no one could figure out what they were without commentary from us).

But, since we’re talking about design in libraries, why should we care whether we still draw or not? Most of our finished designs for flyers, floorplans, and bookmarks are going to be made on the computer anyway, right?

Well, yes, but as the illustrator Von Glitschka would say, “Ideas are still best developed in analog form.” And if we can’t draw, if we can’t take the design idea that is in our head and convert it to marks on a paper, we’re going to have a hard time developing those great ideas into designs to help our libraries. So we need to get back to drawing, sketching, and doodling in order to become better librarian designers.

Everyone can draw, but somewhere along the line a lot of us got scared to draw, scared that we’d fail because someone (maybe even ourselves) told us we weren’t good enough or creative enough to draw. That drawing was a waste of time and we needed to get down to “real” work.

So, today, what I’m saying is that if you want to do the real work of designing great things for your library, you need to draw. You need to get back into the habit of drawing so you can move more easily from idea to design. Is it hard at first? Of course, but a lot of things that are worthwhile are hard at first. Is it fun? Oh, yes. So much that it almost can seem wrong, but it will help with your designing.

I’ve always loved to draw, but couldn’t seem to find the time (in reality, I just didn’t make enough time) in the first years I was working at my current job. But I slowly started drawing again and my designs got better and this year I’ve really committed to making time for drawing (it helps that it goes hand-in-hand with my research) and has been wonderful. I love it. I’m lucky that my university has a subscription to Lynda.com as it has a number of drawing challenges (taught by Von Glitschka, the illustrator I quoted above). They’ve been a great jump start to drawing every day.

So what to do if you don’t have a subscription? Challenge yourself to draw for five days straight. It doesn’t have to be anything big, just a new drawing every day. At the end of the five days, pick up your pencil and tackle a drawing project for your library. Maybe it’s signage that needs to be redesigned, maybe its a bookmark with your summer hours, or maybe its a handout for your next workshop. See how much easier it is to come up with ideas and solutions and how much more fun it is to create them. Drawing helps us unlock our creativity. And the great thing is, you never have to show any of your rough sketches to anyone. They are just for you.

I hope you’ll take up a drawing challenge and rediscover how wonderful drawing can be along with discovering how helpful it can be for brainstorming and refining your next library graphic design project.

Finally, if you need to perk up your desktop wallpaper, check out this lovely bunch this month from Smashing Magazine.

I hope you have a lovely weekend filled with laughter, creativity, and some relaxation. I’ll be back soon with more news and design notes. Allons-y!

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope your week has been filled with good work, good fun, and some good memories. Before we all ride out of the library and into the weekend, I wanted to share some thoughts about graphic design from my library’s latest exhibit. Specifically, I want to talk about collaboration and creation of the logo and titles for the posters. Although this may sound a bit tedious, looking behind the curtain of a final design at the process is really useful as you are learning (as we know from teaching information literacy, right?).  It may help if you are considering mounting some posters for your next exhibit and want a coherent look. So let’s dive into to some graphic design work.

First, you can check out the whole web exhibit here. I’m rather proud of this exhibit on the history of young adult (YA) literature, both for how it turned out visually and how the team worked collaboratively. For context, in my library there is an exhibit team that works together on exhibit conception and creation. We split the work amongst ourselves. For the posters, after the initial concept meeting, our team member who leads the design of the posters (Dick Apple) does some mock-ups and then the rounds of critique and revision begin.

Usually, the poster work falls mostly to Dick and me. I’m lucky that he is very open to collaboration and working in an iterative way, which is basically the only way that collaboration in graphic design can work. If you are working with someone who doesn’t have their heart in collaboration, try to get a new team member as soon as possible or your work (and your sanity) will suffer.

What I want to focus on is just the logo and the titles of the posters. You can see an example of one of the logo/title combinations below:

While this logo and title combination is simple, it took rounds of discussion to get to this final version. How many rounds of email (which we use because our team works different hours and often in different locations)? I counted around 20 emails and about four major revisions and a host of minor tweaks. So how does this work?

After Dick did the initial mock-up of the logo (the YA, horizontal line, and the phrase “young adult literature”), he sent it out to us for review. I asked about font choice, font size (the original had the YA much larger than the phrase), and colors, as well as issues of alignment. We discussed each and after some rounds came up with the above. While not perfect (because very few things are in design), it works really well for our exhibit.

Why?

First, you can see we used two different fonts. The YA is in a serif font (Book Antiqua Bold). We chose this deliberately because the serif font family is older than san serif and has an “old timey” feel. This is good because our exhibit is a look at the history of the YA genre, so we need something that invokes history. The phrase, young adult literature, meanwhile is set in a san serif font (Myriad Pro Regular), which looks and feels more modern–great for linking the logo to the current YA literature we are talking about.

Second, after we fixed the font size issue so that it didn’t feel as top heavy, we worked on tracking and kerning. The top letters in YA had to be kerned so they looked right. The tracking was changed on the phrase so that it aligned with the horizontal line. This makes the spacing and placement look deliberate, which it is. Also, having the phrase in all caps makes this tracking and alignment easier. It also creates breathing room so that we have some quiet in the logo. This is useful since the posters, which you can see in their entirety via the first link, are very colorful due to the book covers used to illustrated each poster.

Next, we played with colors. We settled on these complementary colors after a number of different options. These colors work both with the rest of the graphics on the posters and make the logo pop against the dark grey of the background. We also lost an initial white box around the logo that only served to visual separate the logo from everything else on the poster and all special effects on the letters (e.g. drop shadows, outlines, etc.). Sometimes (often in my experience) simpler really is better and stronger for design.

Finally, we worked on the headlines. Unlike the logo, the headline titles are white. This links them to the text blocks, which are also white, and allows them to stand out and apart from the logo and dark background. They are set in the same typeface as the “young adult literature” in the logo, again for coherence. They were then hand-aligned to the slant of the “A” in YA. This allows the logo and title to work together, instead of appearing as separate elements on the poster. It also eliminates visual boxes around the logo and title that can be caused by just using a left alignment because that is what the software program defaults to.

So, that is the condensed, but basic steps we went through in creating the logo and headline titles for this exhibit. As you can see the results are quite nice–legible, readable, and eye-catching. The same logo is used on all the posters for visual branding and the headline titles are aligned the same.

I hope this helps you go under the hood of how a collaborative design process can work for creating exhibit posters in a library. It is work, but creative, fun work that I love. If you have any questions, or any designs you have for your library that you’d like to share, please leave a comment.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend full with reading, napping, and relaxing fun. I’ll be back soon with more news and notes. Allons-y!

Happy Thursday, dear readers! It has been a busy few weeks here, but wanted to share some design resources to help make your Thursday a bit more beautiful and fun. I’m still working on a post about my library’s latest exhibit and hopefully will post about that soon. Until then, check out some fun design resources.

Part of designing is knowing when to use something that’s already been created so you don’t have to recreate the wheel. Free font and icon sets are awesome in this regard. Smashing Magazine is one of my favorite resources for icon sets and, occasionally, for fonts. Check out this release of Yrsa and Rasa. Lovely and inspiring.

Also, not sure about where you are, but caffeine consumption always seems to rise as we get into the quarter at my university. Therefore this barista and coffee lovers icon set seems rather appropriate to share. I love super-clean icon sets, especially that can be used in black and white. So versatile.

Finally, here’s a link from The Well-Appointed Desk on books to check out on sketching and painting. Perhaps it will inspire you to do some doodling this weekend.

I hope you have a lovely, creative rest of your day, dear readers. I’ll be back soon with more news and notes.