Design Police Directives

This is a bit dry. But, perhaps because I work for the police department and I am the designer, and have been calling myself the Design Police... it seemed like it was my duty to post this.

The Design Police Directives

Imagine you're Art Directing a new piece and are reviewing the draft. You could use these red tags to markup the doc. Not that you would. But do you ever think that sometimes a strict voice of authority is what you need to keep your design on track?

(Clicking gets multiple downloads of a PDF version of what you see when you click through the pages. That's a bit annoying. Stay with Next and Previous. Who knows what the address form is for.)

Ever want to wear XRAY specs?

What would you see if you looked at your web page? Its skeleton? In this case, its CSS backbone.

If you edit or create your own style sheet, study other style sheets, or just wish you had started knowing what that was all about already, you must check this out.

XRAY

There's info about browser compatibility, but I can tell you it's seamless on today's Safari for the Mac.

See that XRAY button in the middle of the page? Drag it into your Bookmarks Bar. Yeah. Really. Then go to a page you want to XRAY. Pick any page, it really doesn't matter. Then click on that Bookmark Bar XRAY link.

A window appears. Follow the instructions. Suddenly you're in a world where code talks to you while showing you what it does.

Click the x in the upper right hand corner of the dialog box to come back to the world of the living.

A4 papercut

via popurls

It’s amazing what you can do with one sheet of A4 paper.

Scratch that. It’s amazing what Peter Callesen can do with one sheet of A4 paper.

I really can’t say anything more than, “Take a look at Peter Callesen’s A4 papercut online.”

Damn.

Tech Company Logos

via popurls

Some of you may remember what the original Adobe logo looked like, but how many of us could pick Canon's circa 1934 logo out of a lineup? (Considering the company’s name was Kwanon at the time, not many, I’d wager.)

For your tech logo edification, click over to Neatorama’s The Evolution of Tech Companies’ Logos. You might be surprised at the early corporate identities of many (now-)familiar names.

Wrangle Type Design for a Style Sheet

Found a handy dynamic interactive type renderer to help you see what those various standard OS typefaces are capable of if given the right leading, tracking, word space and decoration treatments.

Visit Typetester to quickly see and compare on screen.

Neat-o.