You are most welcome. I would love to get time to update this and add some more to it.

Thank You, you are most welcome. I hope I can find some time to add more items, lke how to do a Table of Contents, Index, Object attributes, etc, but time is always pressing.

You might enjoy this example of Type on Paths: [link]

I love Typography and see it as a real art form. It is a powerful tool in graphic Design, as I am sure you know. It can affect mood, pacing, ease of reading, control of the eye, and lend beauty. I did the typesetting for some obscure books. It was really enjoyable and a much larger task than you might imagine.

Remember that communication is typically easiest when simplified. I like the challenge of finding creative ways to simplify a message, idea, or concept across in as elegant a way as possible. Anyone can slap together a project, so what sets your work aside from the others? In Graphic Design, you also have to sell yourself too, through how your work offers something better than the competition.

Sometimes you need to research a client's target audience to know how best to connect to them, and then test it with that audience. For example, I designed the cover for my mother's book [link], but it had some criticisms that did not take into consideration who the target audience was, which was primarily mature women and secondarily younger women (the book is about young women working in Washington DC in the War Department, during WWII). I did a lot of questioning and testing. I also wanted to use a restored photo of my Mother, from that very period of time, on the cover.

I did not particularly want the pilot on the cover, but you also have to negotiate with your client and make your client happy. As artists, we have our own aesthetics and how we would like something to look, but we cannot afford to ignore either our client's aesthetics, or our target audience's aesthetics. To do so would be both foolish and arrogant, and you would not last long in the business. Of course, if you become famous enough, you can do whatever you please and still do well.

I had my own Graphic Design business, Sandpiper Graphics, but became too disabled to continue. I still do odd jobs for old clients and some maintenance work, like a quarterly catalog. Some of the business was drudgery and boring, and some really exciting and fulfilling, which i think is true of any career. Designing and laying out can be a lot of fun, but not the setting of thousand of elements to make it come-out perfect.

I have a central Design Philosophy:

Always start with who and what you are designing the project for, and then set your primary goal. In Web Design, it is how fast and efficiently can I get site visitors to where they want to go, or to find what they need to find. In a poster to announce a new Theater production, it is to get viewers of the poster to run out and buy tickets to the show. In an Information brochure, it is to control the reader's eye through the information pathways to get them what they are looking for as easily as possible. In a full page magazine Ad to sell a product, you want to grab the customer's attention and quickly feed them enough information to persuade them to buy, buy, buy. In a political Ad…

Central to my design philosophy is that the viewer's eyes should be led and guided in as easy a fashion as possible. In Graphic Design, you have less than 0.5 second to get noticed, less than 1 second to capture attention, and about 2 seconds to deliver the most important part of your message, and hopefully holding attention long enough to get them to read the rest.

Readability is crucial. There are many ways to do this, but very often designer get caught up in a fancy text design that is not very readable, or making a personal artistic statement, or making it especially beautiful, but in doing so, lose track of the goal and of their client's needs. THEN, the job is to do it as creatively and artistically as possible.

How many web sites have you gone to that are gorgeous or totally COOL, but try to find what you are looking for and you are cursing the designer. Always start with the primary mission of getting customers or reader what they need fast and efficiently, then integrate you wow, bling, etc.

Many companies do their Graphic Arts in-house. To be independent requires a speciality, or something you can offer to bring clients to you.

I started out doing Print Media and worked in a print shop for my High School skills classes. But then I went to a Maritime Academy and then to sea for a living, working on supertanker ships. I retired at age 34 and went into art and volunteer work. I got Photoshop when it first came out in 1990, then PageMaker (which later became InDesign), and then started my own business. Back then, I had to sell people on was a Digital workflow. Being in on the ground floor has advantages and disadvantages. There were not very many people doing it back int he early years, and the technology and software was changing so rapidly it was difficult and expensive to keep-up.

Competition got stiffer rapidly. Clients were coming to me by word-of-mouth, and many times because they were out of time and needed a job done yesterday. If you do well, they come back. I got to charge a lot more in those cases, but it is challenging to create under pressure of time. I have the ability to stay awake for up to 4 days straight of working, although it thankfully rarely went that long.

I also diversified a lot. I loved doing original or commissioned digital art, but those opportunities were not as common as I wished. I did a lot of advertising, catalogs, corporate brochures, marketing materials, book covers, doctor/dentist/chiropractor treatment forms, flyers, corporate packages (logo, stationary, envelopes, business cards, etc), and lots of odds and ends. I also diversified with Photo restoration (which was actually rather lucrative work), photo manipulation and enhancement, etc. Repairing blow-out on photos that are valuable cannot be done well by just anyone. Large missing areas have to be created from nothing. There is no digital information to be manipulated. Sometimes you hand paint in what you need, or you can take digital information form other photos in a shoot. In the case of a Kindergarten class photo from the 1950s, entire faces were missing from cracks and water damage. So I used other photos of the kids to hand paint them in. When done, the entire thing looked original.

I wish you all the best in your career. Try to stay close to what you enjoy doing the most.

Matthew