The Picky Type

Typography is so vital to an identity. I spent some time on the weekend researching various fonts and reading articles on the practice.

Its hard enough choosing a font to use, let alone finding one that is viewable by others. The limiting factor of web fonts motivated me to seek out another means of displaying them. With some advice from my web technologies teacher, he told me about Sifr (http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/). It allows you to display a font independent of the users system. Awesome little development tool. Now I have to select what font to make part of the identity for michaelcbreuer.com

I read the article “My Type Design Philosophy” by Martin Majoor (http://www.typotheque.com/articles/my_type_design_philosophy/) and found it very interesting. Majoor designed the Scala and Scala Sans font families. He discusses mixing two completely opposite fonts and using that to create “headaches”, which I think means, to get the viewer thinking or simply to make an impact. ie. placing garamod text beside univers.

But in essence, it means that I still have lots of reading to do.

Re-Everything

Time to redesign and redo

Opening up Firefox and watching my preferences load is my usual morning routine. There is nothing quite as refreshing as getting news of interest in a double click. Now if only I could get my coffee machine to do the same.

My personal site, michaelcbreuer.com, is one that opens upon starting my web browser. I haven’t updated it in months.  I created it as away to promote myself as an illustrator, but after signing up with portfolios.com there was no need for it (at least from my perspective several months ago).

My personal site has become one of the many dead sites in the online graveyard. I’ve decided to do a major overhaul. RE- everything – redo, research, redesign, reinvent, and remove.

I want it to become a portal where I can share and express with graphics and design. I sketch and draw on a regular basis, so I think I should create something that expresses my personal growth as an artist and designer.

It’s another one of those, “back to the drawing board moments.”

Marking Up and Writing Down

Web programming is an interesting language. I’ve recently gotten into marking up text for web pages and I find it fascinating. Its the ability to create something that can possibly be viewed on all devices and can be shared on a network of tens to millions of people. The beauty of the entire thing is that the information shared can be anything from a document, a picture, movie, or an application.

I’ve recently been working on the site for my videographer client. The design work is finished and now I’ve started “writing up” the site in a text editor. I like to start the document from scratch, so I that I know every line that is in there. Mark, my web technology teacher, put it best when he compared

“…making a website with Dreamweaver is like processed food, but when you make it from scratch, it’s like homecooking.”

I find the method that works best for me is approaching the project like life drawing. (Life drawing is an excellent method to improving your drawing skills. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to rapidly improve their drawing abilities. ) During the design process, I create rough pencil sketches of web pages. When I begin to start writing up the code for site, I have the sketches placed right in front of me. It’s reassuring to have a quick reference for the site layout nearby, instead of trying to remember it all.

Having a visual aid helps me.  It may take a  little more effort, but like a fresh home cooked meal, its always worth the time put into it.