Skip to content

18 posts tagged with “graphic design”

There are over 1,800 font families in Google Fonts. While as designers, I’m sure were grateful for the trove of free fonts, good typefaces in the library are hard to spot.

Brand identity darlings Smith & Diction dropped a catalog of “Usable Google Fonts.” In a LinkedIn post, they wrote, “Screw it, here’s all of the google fonts that are actually good categorized by ‘vibe’.”

Huzzah! It’s in the form of a public Figma file. Enjoy.

preview-1754632730253.jpg

Usable Google Fonts

Catalog of "usable" Google fonts as curated by Smith & Diction

figma.com iconfigma.com

Kendra Albert, writing in her blog post about Heavyweight, a new tool she built to create “extremely law-firm-looking” letters:

Sometimes, you don’t need a lawyer, you just need to look like you have one.

That’s the idea behind Heavyweight, a project that democratizes the aesthetics of (in lieu of access to) legal representation. Heavyweight is a free, online, and open-source tool that lets you give any complaint you have extremely law-firm-looking formatting and letterhead. Importantly, it does so without ever using any language that would actually claim that the letter was written by a lawyer.

preview-1753379920512.png

Heavyweight: Letters Taken Seriously - Free & Open Legal Letterhead Generator

Generate professional-looking demand letters with style and snootiness

heavyweight.cc iconheavyweight.cc

This is gorgeous work from Collins in their rebrand for Muse Group, developers of music apps like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseClass. Paul Moore, writing in It’s Nice That:

One of the issues, [chief creative officer] Nick [Ace] argues, in the design industry is a fixation on branding tech as “software from the future”, relying on literal representations from the 1980s that have created dull and homogeneous visuals that shy away from the timelessness of creativity. “Instead of showcasing technical specs or outlandish interfaces, we centered the brand around the raw experience of musical creation, itself,” says Nick. “Rather than depicting the tools, we visualized the outcomes—the resonance, the harmony, the creative breakthrough that happens when technical barriers disappear.”

Collins rebrand for Muse Group channels the invisible phenomena of experiencing music

Geometric abstraction, dynamic compositions and a distillation of musical feeling sets Collins new project apart from other software brands.

itsnicethat.com iconitsnicethat.com

Elizabeth Goodspeed contextualizes today’s growing design influencers against designers-cum-artists like April Greiman and Stefan Sagmeister. Along with Tibor Kalman, Jessica Walsh, and Wade and Leta, all of these designers put themselves into their work.

Other designers ran with similar instincts. 40 Days of Dating, a joint project by Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman created in 2013, was presented as a kind of art-directed relationship experiment: two friends, both single, agreed to date each other for 40 days (40 days being the purported time needed to build a habit). The project was presented through highly polished daily updates with lush photography, motion graphics, custom lettering, and a parade of commissioned work from other artists – all accompanied by alarming candid journal entries from both parties about the dates they were going on. It wasn’t exactly a design project in the traditional sense, but it was unmistakably design-led; the relationship itself was the content, but it was design that made it viral.

These self-directed, clientless projects remind me of MFA design theses where design is the medium for self-expression. Bringing it back to 2025, Godspeed writes:

Designers film themselves in their bedrooms and running errands, narrating design decisions and venting about clients along the way. Just as remote work expects us to perform constant busyness, design influencing demands a continuous performance of creative output. …Brands have jumped in on the trend, too. Where once a designer might have been hired to create packaging or campaigns behind the scenes, many are now brought forward as faces of collaborations – they’re photographed in their studios and interviewed about their process as part of launch. The designer’s body, personality, and public profile become a commercial asset.

And of course, like with all content creators, it becomes a job that just might require more work than it seems.

Influencing can seem like a good, low-lift side-hustle at first. Most designers already have tons of unused work and in-progress sketches to share. Why not just post it and see what happens? But anyone who’s ever had to write captions or cut reels knows that making content is, in fact, harder than it looks. The more energy that goes into showcasing work, the less time there is to actually make work, even if you want to. “Influencing” can quickly become a time suck.

preview-1753150717056.png

Elizabeth Goodspeed on the rise of the designer as influencer

As social platforms reward visibility, creatives are increasingly expected to make their practice public. Designers are no longer just making work; they are the work. But what started as promotion now risks swallowing design itself.

itsnicethat.com iconitsnicethat.com

Stephen Heller, writing for PRINT magazine, revisits a long out-of-print book called *Visual Persuasion *by Stephen Baker, a creative director from the Mad Men era of advertising.

Although published in 1961, Visual Persuasion has as much relevance, vitality, insight, vision and spunk as any recently published book (including those that I’ve authored). The truth is this: I wish I had written it. Even though it is nearly 65 years out of print (and contains its share of outdated mores and stereotypes), it easily could still serve (with a minute refresh) to provide ideas to ward off what designers fear is the inevitable AI apocalypse—an end to original thinking and making, visual or otherwise.

One maxim, Heller notes:

Eye movements are based on conditioned reflexes. “Left-to-right habit makes our eyes travel clockwise in exploring a [layout],” Baker notes. The optical center of a page is slightly to the left. The tendency is to focus attention on a person’s eyes more than on any other part of their face. This mirrors one’s emotions with fair accuracy.

preview-1751949320516.jpeg

The Daily Heller: Visual Persuasion Hasn't Changed Since 1961

Steven Heller on the book he wishes he had written.

printmag.com iconprintmag.com
Close-up of bicentennial logo storyboard frames featuring red, white, and blue geometric patterns and star designs in rounded rectangles.

America at 200

When I was younger, I had a sheet of US Bicentennial stamps and I always loved the red, white, and blue star. Little did I know then that I would become a graphic designer.

Sheet of US postage stamps featuring the bicentennial star logo, each stamp showing "AMERICAN REVOLUTION BICENTENNIAL 1776-1976" with 8-cent denomination.

The symbol, designed by Bruce Blackburn at Chermayeff & Geismar is a multilayered stylized five-pointed star. It folds like bunting. Its rounded corners evoke both a flower and a pinwheel at the same time. And finally, the negative space reveals a classic, pointed star.

Official American Revolution Bicentennial logo - red and blue interlocking star design with "AMERICAN REVOLUTION BICENTENNIAL 1776-1976" text in circular border.

A few years ago, Standards Manual reproduced the guidelines and I managed to grab a copy. Here’s a spread featuring storyboards for a motion graphics spot. I love it.

Open guidebook showing American Revolution Bicentennial logo storyboard frames and a Certificate of Official Recognition template from 1776-1976.

In Blackburn’s foreword to the reproduction, he wrote:

My deliberations led to the following conclusions: to begin with, of all the revolutionary “American” symbols I considered as possible elements in a solution, the only one that passed the historical reference test and, at the same time, could be utilized in a contemporary or “modern” way was the five-pointed star from the Betsy Ross flag. But the star is an aggressive and militaristic form, and the event needed something friendlier, more accessible. Why not wrap the star in stripes of red, white and blue “bunting”, rounding the sharp edges of the star and producing a second star surrounding the original? The two stars also refer to the two American centuries being celebrated.

Also little-known fact—Blackburn’s version was not the winner of the competition. Richard Baird, writing for his great Logo Histories newsletter two years ago, tells the story:

The symbol designed by Bruce Blackburn while working at Chermayeff & Geismar Associates is well-known and celebrated as a fine achievement in marque-making. The symbol would go on to be used on the side of the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building, on the Viking Mars lander and used across stamps, patches and all kinds of promotional materials, which accounts for its widespread recognition in the US. However, few know that Blackburn’s design was not the winning entry, that honour went to Lance Wyman.

Honestly, I don’t like Wyman’s version as much. Maybe it’s because I’m so familiar with the Blackburn symbol. The 7 and 6 are too abstracted to be visible, even to a trained designer like me.

Happy 249th birthday, America.

Oh, and Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv is working on the 250th anniversary branding for next year.

Before there was Jessica Hische, there was Jim Parkinson. You might not know his name, but you’ve seen his work. Most famously, he was known for the mastheads for Rolling Stone magazine and the LA Times. Stephen Coles has this remembrance.

preview-1751428433957.jpg

Jim Parkinson, 1941–2025

Jim Parkinson—lettering artist, type designer, and painter—died today at his home in Oakland, California, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s.

typographica.org icontypographica.org

It’s been said that desktop publishing democratized graphic design. For those of you too young to know what the term means, it means the technology that enabled graphic design to go digital. It was an ecosystem, really: the Mac, PostScript, LaserWriter, and PageMaker. But before all that, designers depended on typesetters to set type.

David Langton writing for UX Collective:

A lot was lost when the Macintosh wiped out the traditional typesetting industry. From the art of typography to the craft of typesetting, many essential elements were lost. Typesetters were part of a tradition that stretched back more than 500 years to Gutenberg’s printing press. They understood the basics of type: kerning (spacing between the letters), leading (the space between lines of text), and line breaks (how to avoid widows — those solo words abandoned at the end of a paragraph). They knew about readability (like how to avoid setting type that was too wide to read). There were classic yet limited fonts, with standards for size and leading that assured that everyone working within common ranges maintained a threshold for quality. Yet it was in the craft or business side of typesetting that these services were most under appreciated. Typesetters provided overnight service. They worked overnight, so graphic designers did not have to. We would finish our days specifying the type, and the typesetters would keystroke the manuscripts, proofread, stylize the type, and set up columns following our instructions.

Designers would then pick up the galleys from the typesetters in the morning. The black type was photographically printed on white photo paper. You’d have to cut them up and paste them onto boards, assembling your layout.

Because this was such a physical process, we had to slow down. Langton says:

But since the Macintosh became an in-house tool, the process was reversed. Now, designers design first, then think about it. This shift in process has contributed to a trivialization of the role of graphic designer because anyone can noodle around with the Mac’s sophisticated type tools and make layouts. The design process has been trivialized while the thinking, the evaluation, and the strategic part of the process are often abandoned.

One small thing I’ll point out is that desktop publishing wasn’t popularized until 1985.

  • PostScript was released by Adobe in 1984.
  • The LaserWriter printer was released by Apple in 1985.
  • PageMaker was released by Aldus—later bought by Adobe—in 1985.
preview-1750050186871.jpeg

What the 1984 Macintosh revolution teaches designers about the 2025 AI revolution

Upheaval and disruption are nothing new for graphic designers.

uxdesign.cc iconuxdesign.cc

“Beating AI” is an interesting framing, but OK. There is a lot of concern out there about how AI will affect the entire design industry, from graphic design to UX. Understandably, designers are worried about their careers.

Georgia Coggan writing for Creative Bloq:

“So are we just cooked?” asks a recent Reddit thread from a designer who is four years out of college. ” Any other jobs i can get with such a degree now that design is kind of becoming obsolete?”

Hundreds of responses poured in from designers with strong and diverse opinions on what AI is doing to the graphic design industry – and it isn’t all as doom and gloom as you might fear. Ranging from advice around what humans can do that AI can’t, to how nothing has really changed regarding what the industry needs from its designers, there’s lots for the OP to feel positive about – as long as they’re happy to stay agile. Head over to the Reddit thread to garner more wisdom from those in the field.

preview-1749704661180.jpg

"Are we cooked?" Designers debate how to beat AI

From staying agile to what to do if you're laid off.

creativebloq.com iconcreativebloq.com

Apologies for linking to a lot of Christopher Butler recently, but I really love his thinking about design. This time, Butler reminds us about the importance of structure and how the proto-graphic designers we studied in art history, like Piet Mondrian, mastered it.

A well-composed photograph communicates something essential even before we register its subject. A thoughtfully designed page layout feels right before we read a single word. There’s something happening in that first moment of perception that transcends the individual elements being composed.

My favorite passage in his essay begins here:

Perhaps we “read” composition the way we read text — our brains processing visual structure as a kind of fundamental grammar that exists beneath conscious recognition. Just as we don’t typically think about parsing sentences into subjects and predicates while reading, we don’t consciously deconstruct the golden ratio or rule of thirds while looking at an image. Yet in both cases, our minds are translating structure into meaning.

The next eight short paragraphs build on this idea and crescendo with this banger:

In recognizing composition as this fundamental visual language, we begin to understand why good design works at such a deep level. It’s not just about making things look nice — it’s about speaking fluently in a language that predates words, tapping into patterns of perception that feel as natural as breathing.

Composition is a fundamental visual language. I had never thought of it that way and yet it feels right.

The whole thing is great. Please go read it.

preview-1749010527393.png

The Art Secret Behind All Great Design

When I was a young child, I would often pull books off of my father’s shelf and stare at their pages. In a clip from a 1987 home video that has

chrbutler.com iconchrbutler.com

A lot of young designers love to look at what’s contemporary, what’s trending on Dribbble or Instagram. But I think to look forward, we must always study our past. I spent the week in New York City, on vacation. My wife and I attended a bunch of Broadway shows and went to the Museum of Broadway, where I became enamored with a lot of the poster art. (’Natch.) I may write about that soon.

Coincidentally, Matthew Strom wrote about the history of album art, featuring the first album cover ever, which uses a photo of the Broadway theater, the Imperial, where I saw Smash earlier this week.

preview-1746385689679.jpg

The history of album art

Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music per side. Sometimes, only one side of the record was used. One of the most popular records of 1910, for example, was “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine”: it clocked in at two minutes and 39 seconds.

matthewstrom.com iconmatthewstrom.com

Remember the Nineties?

In the 1980s and ’90s, Emigre was a prolific powerhouse. The company started out as a magazine in the mid-1980s, but quickly became a type foundry as the Mac enabled desktop publishing. As a young designer in San Francisco who started out in the ’90s, Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans were local heroes (they were based across the Bay in Berkeley). From 1990–1999 they churned out 37 typefaces for a total of 157 fonts. And in that decade, they expanded their influence by getting into music, artists book publishing, and apparel. More than any other design brand, they celebrated art and artists.

Here is a page from a just-released booklet (with a free downloadable PDF) showcasing their fonts from the Nineties.

Two-page yellow spread featuring bold black typography samples. Left page shows “NINE INCH NAILS” in Platelet Heavy, “majorly” in Venus Dioxide Outlined, both dated 1993. Right page shows “Reality Bites” in Venus Dioxide, a black abstract shape below labeled Fellaparts, also from 1993.

Elizabeth Goodspeed, writing for It’s Nice That:

The cynicism our current moment inspires appears to be, regrettably, universal. For millennials, who watched the better-world-by-design ship go down in real time, it’s hard-earned. We saw the idealist fantasy of creative autonomy, social impact, and purpose-driven work slowly unravel over the past decade, and are now left holding the bag. Gen Z designers have the same pessimism, but arrived at it from a different angle. They’re entering the field already skeptical, shaped by a job market in freefall and constant warnings of their own obsolescence. But the result is the same: an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down.

Sounds very similar to what Gen X-ers are facing in their careers too. I think it’s universal for nearly all creative careers today.

preview-1744176795240.png

Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs

Designers are burnt out, disillusioned, and constantly joking that design ruined their life – but underneath the memes lies a deeper reckoning. Our US editor-at-large explores how irony became the industry’s dominant tone, and what it might mean to care again.

itsnicethat.com iconitsnicethat.com

Retro Safety

I was visiting a customer of ours in Denver this week. They’re an HVAC contractor and we were camped out in one of their conference rooms where they teach their service technicians. On the walls, among posters of air conditioning diagrams were a couple of safety posters. At first glance they look like they’re from the 1950s and ’60s, but upon closer inspection, they’re from 2016! The only credit I can find on the internet is the copywriter, John Wrend.

Sadly, the original microsite where Grainger had these posters is gone, but I managed to track down the full set.

Illustration of a padlock shaped like a human eye with text that reads “give the lock… A SECOND LOOK,” promoting safety awareness from Grainger.

Illustration of an injured construction worker emerging from unstable scaffolding, with text reading “Make sure it’s SECURE” and “Scaffolding safety starts with you!” promoting workplace safety from Grainger.

Silhouette of a hard hat filled with workers using ladders, accompanied by the text “KEEP LADDER SAFETY TOP OF MIND,” promoting safe ladder practices from Grainger.

Cartoon-style illustration of a person getting their arm caught in a machine with the guard removed, alongside the text “DON’T LET YOUR MACHINE GUARD DOWN,” promoting machine safety from Grainger.

Worker in full arc flash protective gear stands in front of a red-orange explosion graphic, with bold text reading “Arc flashes kill” and a warning to stay prepared, promoting electrical safety from Grainger.

Illustration of a shocked electrical outlet with a zigzagging yellow wire above it and the text “Using the wrong wires can be SHOCKING,” promoting electrical wiring safety from Grainger.

Painterly illustration of a confident construction worker wearing a full-body safety harness with the text “Don it Properly!” promoting proper fall protection from Grainger.

Cartoon-style illustration of a distracted forklift driver on a phone causing falling boxes and a spilled drink, with the text “FOCUSED DRIVERS ARE SAFE DRIVERS,” promoting powered truck safety from Grainger.

Stylized illustration of a person wearing a yellow respirator mask with the text “WEAR YOUR RESPIRATOR! AND BREATHE EASY,” promoting respiratory safety from Grainger.

Retro-style poster featuring a surprised man’s face with the text “IGNORE HAZARDS, INVITE HAZCOM” above various hazardous chemical containers, promoting hazard communication safety from Grainger.

Smartest Time to Buy Infographic

Smart Data Needs Smart Design

Infographics have exploded over the past few years. It’s a great way to visually and simply explain sometimes complex data to a general audience. My own personal brand of infographics is more on the data visualization side, and thankfully coincides with TrueCar, my employer. I believe that data should be presented in a beautiful and sophisticated way. It should be easy to grok and doesn’t have to be cutesy.

When the latest epic infographic™ project landed on my desk, I started where I always start—I looked at the data. What inspired me was seeing this color-scaled chart of the smartest day of the year to buy. Just by looking at the color I quickly understood the patterns: end of the month, December is the best month, and January 1 is the best day.

Color-coded spreadsheet showing percentage values by day of the month across all twelve months, labeled “Day of transaction” on the left and “Day of Month Average” on the right. Cells are heatmapped from red (lower values) to green (higher values), visualizing performance trends or rates by calendar date.

Best Day Excel

From there I looked for inspiration on cool calendar designs. The notion of color scaling was present in a few examples, and I also really appreciated the circular format in some. Years are cycles, plus a circle is an inherent shape in cars (tires, steering wheel, speedometer, knobs). My search led me to this lovely piece by Martin Oberhaeuser. With much respect to his design, I used it as a jumping-off point to transform the above table from Excel into something hopefully more elegant.

Radial infographic by TrueCar showing the average percentage off MSRP for each day of the year, based on 2010–2014 data. Each ring represents a month, with darker blue indicating better car discounts. January 1st is marked as the best day to buy a new car, with the highest average discount.

Using TrueCar’s color palette of a couple of blues, I made a color scale—lighter being better, and orange being the best—and inserted the actual percentage value within each cell.

For the chart to show the best month to buy, I combined a calendar and a column graph. And it validates the long-held belief that December is the best month of the year to buy a new car.

Bar chart comparing average percentage savings off MSRP by month. December is the best month to buy a car with 7.72% average savings, followed by September and October (both at 7.63%). January has the lowest average savings at 6.80%.

The most helpful data I thought we had was the one about the smartest month to buy a particular kind of car. While December remains the best overall month, if you’re looking to buy a subcompact, you should buy in June. Since I had a circular table already I decided to leave this one pretty straightforward.

Matrix showing average discount percentages by month for different vehicle categories. December is best for large cars, premium cars, and midsize utilities, while May is best for small utility vehicles and subcompact cars. The data reveals variation by vehicle type and seasonal sales strategies.

Last, but not least, is the best day of the week to buy a car. There’s really only seven data points here so presenting the data simply seemed the way to go.

Bar chart showing average savings off MSRP by day of the week. Wednesday offers the highest average discount at 7.40%, followed by Monday (7.36%) and Friday (7.33%). Saturday and Sunday have the lowest savings, with Saturday at 6.98%.

I actually designed the infographic as one long piece first, and then broke it into smaller graphics for social media sharing. As a whole piece I think it works really well. There’s a story that weaves it all together. I hope you enjoy it!

Comprehensive infographic from TrueCar analyzing the best time to buy a car by day, week, month, and vehicle segment. Includes a circular heatmap of daily savings, bar charts for best months and weekdays, and a matrix showing savings by vehicle type across months. December and Wednesday are highlighted as offering the highest discounts.