Making it easy to choose fonts for brochure design

admin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:53:02 +0000

One of the most important elements of graphic design is typeface or font. Choosing the right fonts while designing the layout is critical to the look and feel of the brochure or the website. Equally important, if not more so, is the role of typeface in how effectively the brochure design or web design conveys the message to the target audience. Is the heading attracting the viewer’s attention while not completely shadowing the other elements on the page? Does the brochure appear cluttered with text? Or is the text laid out in a way that all important info is available at a glance? A lot of these things are decided by the fonts we choose for that brochure design or website design project.

Given its importance, no designer can take the choice of fonts lightly. And that often means hours spent surfing fonts online or trying various combinations through graphic design applications or perhaps flipping through printed font directories. In case of trying fonts on the computer, well…anyone who has done it, will tell you how cumbersome it is. And in case of the printed font albums, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that there is a limit to the choice of fonts you have. And thats where the folks at Fontplore have come to our rescue.

They have devised an interactive application for searching and exploring font databases. It helps you browse, preview, compare and print fonts on an interactive table using tangible objects. Quite futuristic.

The sad bit is that the interactive tables are still something only the big agencies can afford. Though, given the way technology has made things accessible to people over the last decade or so (remember how expensive the first mobile phone was?!), it won’t be wishful to think that we will soon have an interactive table with Fontplore to vet font choices with clients for their design project. Can’t wait to lay my hands on it, honestly.

Fontplore Showreel from Mphasize on Vimeo.

Google’s Caffeine an answer to Microsoft’s Bing?

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:01:24 +0000

Google unveiled its secret project Caffeine recently. Caffeine is, as Google puts it, the first step in an effort that will raise the bar on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other search dimensions. In other words, it is a marked improvement in terms of the infrastructure behind Google’s search engine. For the user though, there isn’t what one would call a discernible difference. Most of us who tried it have found that the apparent difference in most searches was to do with where the maps, videos and news appeared on the SERPs. In the case of Microsoft’s Bing, on the other hand, the major visible difference was to do with the user-interface.

One which could be called a big difference, though not one that is user-friendlier, was that Local business results were not returned by sandbox for one of the searches I did. Also, the search suggestions that appear at the bottom of the results were fewer and different in case of the page returned by Caffeine. See screen shots of the result pages below.

Google has a web developer preview of Caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com where one can try out the new search engine and provide feedback. One can also perform a local language search and provide feedback in a language other than English by changing the following two values:

hl=language

gl=country

SERP returned by current engine

SERP using Caffeine

Affordable Web Design, Internet Marketing and Programming Services, India » layout design

Making it easy to choose fonts for brochure design

Google’s Caffeine an answer to Microsoft’s Bing?