BAN COMIC SANS!

So for those of you who plan on using this ugly horrific font in your future projects, essays, or whatever… don’t.

Welcome to the Real World

Taking a more… realistic approach to things, I feel it’s necessary to convey the more appropriate image to our world. Instead of flowering our environmental conscience with meager acts of green.

As Morpheus plainly puts it, our society has become oblivious to some of the ever-present issues that are surfacing. Although our world hasn’t been overtaken by an army or Artificial-Intellegence infused machines (at least to our knowing), we are suffering at the hands of a much more destructive force. Ourselves. So, what follows is my cynical approach to what kind of image Earth Day should present to the public.

The Garbage List

Here is a list of sites I’ve come across over the past few months that have accurately depicted the state of our environment:

A great site by Angie Leonard that illustrates the progression of “stuff” as it goes through its life cycle. I’d strongly suggest viewing the video, as it raises some interesting points.

Here are some major issues that are clear in our world. Instead of me re-iterating them here, check out the site, and post a comment below letting us know what you think.

An extensive list by our lovely friends at Wikipedia with links to other pages dealing with environmental problems. A great resource for educating yourself on the present day issues.

So What?

Now that you’re slightly more educated on this issue, is that it? No. One theme that Earth Day does push is action. It’s more than simply sitting back and “knowing” that there are problems with the world. The complacent and apathetic approach to environmental sustainability is quite pathetic, personally. So, with that said, here is a list of things you should do - not only today, on Earth Day, but adapt your way of life to incorporate these good habits.

The Bamboo Take

Bamboo Designs and our designers, make a conscious effort to reduce our carbon footprint. Visit Bamboo Green to see how we consider the environment.

In web design, graphic design, and any application where type is necessary, it is important to ensure the font and typography layout complements the context of the design. If you’re designing a corporate ad for microsoft, you’re probably not going to use a funky, “all the bells and whistles” font with eroded parts and wacky alignment. Similarly, if you’re designing an ad in the newspaper for a car dealership, you probably won’t be using Times New Roman. Oh - and in NO situation whatsoever are you EVER going to have the need to use Comic Sans MS. Never. So here’s a few tips to ensure you are selecting your type properly.

1. Serifs vs Sans

Unclear as to what Serif vs Sans is? Well its a lot easier for me to show you.

So you can kind of see the difference I hope. Serif has a little more “fancy” look to it, with extra elements on the tips of most of the font pieces. (For more information on sans vs serif, check out this site!)

Now that you’re clear on the difference - how do you know which to use and when. Well, there is a lot of debate about this. Some people suggest that sans fonts should be used for body text, while serif should be used for titles and headings (like this site). But this isn’t always the case. Most of the time, it will be up to the designer to choose which looks best, and that comes with experience.  Personally, I find that serif has a more professional look to it - so i tend to use it in more professional applications. Sans, on the other hand, is quite contemporary - so i use it accordingly. My advice to you? Start noticing type in certain areas like signs, magazines, books, websites, etc. and decide for yourself which looks best and where.

Some good sans fonts: GeosansLight, Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Trebuchet, Verdana, Myriad Pro
Some good serif fonts: Cambria, Georgia, Perpetua, Rockwell

2. Readability

Ever seen a website where you struggle to read the title - or a magazine where its a struggle to read the message? Readability plays a key role in the aesthetic appeal of text. When designing something, step back from it, and take a full look at the page to see if the text is easy to read, and immediately clear as to what it is saying. Although groovy fonts are fun, don’t overdo it.

3. Spacing and Layout

Most graphic editing programs have an option of altering the line-height, letter spacing, and word spacing.

Again, the eye for this kind of thing comes with time and experience, but you can start now by looking at websites, books and magazines and seeing what looks good. Normally, i’d suggest leaving the letter spacing at a normal level for body text, but for headings, logos, and graphics, feel free to experiment with these properties. Line height is also a key factor in readability. Brian Cray, typography specialist, says this about these properties:

As a Web developer, you have the option to tweak the letter-spacing, word-spacing, and line-height in your CSS. But you probably don’t.

By default there’s too much white space between characters, words, and lines if your font-size is greater than 16 for a short headline. As font-sizes get bigger the letters and words seem separate, fragmented. They are lonesome. Unify your text with thinner letter and word spacing and shorter line heights. The general rule-of-thumb I follow is to provide just enough space to allow the reader to read the headline. Doing this also adds weight to your headline for nice contrast over body copy.

Try tweaking your letter-spacing, word-spacing, and line-height. You’ll be amazed at the impact.

So when you’re designing, keep these properties in mind!

4. Pairing Fonts Properly

In most design situations, you’re going to need to use more than one font. A general rule of thumb is to keep the font number to two, but there are always exceptions. For this example, we will assume you are selecting 2 fonts. Here are some “do’s” and “don’t”s

• Don’t select two fonts from the same family, or that look similar. For example, Times New Roman and Garamond
• Don’t use more than one “bold” font. Not bold as in font-weight, but bold as in catchy, attractive, and with a strong personality. Rather, pick one complex font, and one simple font
• Sometimes it’s good to pair modern fonts with older fonts - you choose
• When picking fonts for titles, place a brief excerpt of text below the top font to ensure they flow properly
• Pair a Serif with a Sans!
• Don’t use Comic Sans MS. Period

5. Color and Themes

I don’t wish to get into too much detail about color, as there are entire courses on color theory. The main thing to keep in mind when choosing colors for your fonts, is uniformity and clarity. Ensure that the color you pick, matches the font you choose. How do you know this? Well, there’s no easy way to tell you. Just keep in mind that when designing, you should step back and take a broad look at the design, to ensure that the color of the font has sufficient contrast (but not TOO much) with the background, while ensuring it ties in with the theme.

If you have any questions or comments on the above article, please list them below! Thanks for reading, and be sure to add this article to all your favorite bookmark sites!

If you’re anything of a graphic designer, web designer, or digital artist, these are two sites that you absolutely MUST have in your arsenal. Not only do these sites provide you with unbelievably unique and fresh tutorials, they also offer an extravagant abundance of vector based resources for your personal use.

SPOONgraphics: an extensive blog that offers tutorials about everything from Grid-Based Resume Design, to vector based logos. They also have a wide array of resources for your personal use in projects. I strongly suggest you check out this site, as it will help you advance to a more contemporary design base.

Smashing Magazine: This site is a huge online magazine/blog database that hosts dozens of useful tutorials for designers, as well as provide resources, inspiration, and examples of other people’s work. If you get a chance, read through as many of these articles as possible. You won’t regret it.

Why are we posting these sites? Not only are we trying to help fellow designers, we are also trying to illustrate the all the designers at Bamboo are constantly reseraching and reading online to make sure their design talents are top-notch. By taking other peoples examples and using them as inspiration, we can ensure that our designs will stay contemporary, and ahead of the curve.

Anyone who goes on the site, save a log of your convorsation, and post it in the comments below. I’m sure someone can come up with something crazyyy! (Keep them PG haha)

A big round of applause to our design team for finalizing the new Bamboo Designs Website! While some elements need to be fine tuned, and other pieces need to be adjusted, we felt it was a good time to launch Bamboo 2.0. Now we’re set for diving into some publicity and marketing, now that we have a suitable website to draw people to. Huge thanks to designer Lance Taylor for designing the site from the ground up.

Be sure to look through the site for more information and updates as we go along! Thanks so much for supporting us, and we’re looking forward to the future!

53 CSS Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

This site has some GREAT examples of CSS techniques that will spice up your websites. This site also has a bunch of other neat tutorials an articles, so if you’re considering diving into more graphic design, definitely check out this site and get familiar with it!

We’re approaching the go-live date, as we are consulting with our designers as to work out any bugs. Interactivity will be coming soon, and our portfolio will be uploaded in due time!

Keep following our feed to get more updates on Bamboo Designs!

Thanks,

Lance Taylor
Web Designer, President
Bamboo Designs

Huge thanks goes out to our PR and Marketing Representative, Max Rose, for taking the initiative to register us for this competition.

The competition was sponsored by: