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Building a Font Library

Fonts are to printing what specialty accessories are to car enthusiasts. If used properly, they can really add a touch of class. When used in excess, however, they can turn into fuzzy dice and gaudy chrome hubcaps. From the days of the monks and their elaborate manuscripts to the thousands of font styles available today,… Continue Reading →

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Developing Effective Logos

Sharing Your Vision Logos have a unique way of catching attention and lodging themselves into our subconscious. As a business owner or the head of an organization, that’s exactly where you want to be — inside your customer’s head. A good logo design should reflect the universal feeling of your company. Ask yourself, what is… Continue Reading →

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Fonts & Typesetting

The advent of desktop publishing has provided graphic artists with a seemingly endless collection of digital fonts to work with. Designers can also manipulate these fonts to create additional typographic forms. They can be layered, extended, overlapped or condensed, just to name a few. Although this is a dream for designers, these advanced typographic fonts… Continue Reading →

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Guidelines for Font Usage

Presentation is crucial to all forms of communication — most of all when dealing with written communication. Unlike information conveyed personally, a written message is static. It must speak for itself. To achieve truly effective communication, one must pay equal attention to content and presentation. In written communication, the fundamental presentation element is the font…. Continue Reading →

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Preflight Preparation

Preflight preparation is the process of collecting, updating and sending files or applications to a printer for production. Preflight preparation uncovers missing data or fonts, misplaced illustrations, trapping errors, incorrect sizing and other important details. The first thing to include is the primary document, whether in Illustrator, PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Photoshop. Check with your printer… Continue Reading →

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Raster Images vs. Vector Graphics

Computer graphics can be created as either raster or vector images. Raster graphics are bitmaps. A bitmap is a grid of individual pixels that collectively compose an image. Raster graphics render images as a collection of countless tiny squares. Each square, or pixel, is coded in a specific hue or shade. Individually, these pixels are… Continue Reading →

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