The Monthly Miscellany: Printing & Design Roundup – Best of September 2012

The Internet is full of great resources for people who love to create and print beautiful things. This week we’ve collated the best design and printing resources of recent weeks for your enjoyment. Have fun!

Art and Design Inspiration

• 37+ Beautiful Typography Designs in Print Advertisements – Advertisements can be a great source of inspiration especially when it comes to Typography.
• The Ultimate Guide to Designing with Black – Black can overpower your designs, but using it effectively is an essential part of creating great work.
• 30 Enjoyable Out Of Bounds Photos – Some great out-of-bound effects achieved with imaginative editing.
• Print Inspiration from 55 Splendid Brochure Designs – I know some of you sometimes end in a point where you feel you have no inspiration but here are 55 brochure design examples to draw inspiration from them. To be a professional, you must learn from the professionals.
• Photoshop vintage effect – Letting photos shine by adding some subtle effects is something you learn to do by trial and error. Some photos will work perfectly for certain effects and others won’t, but it’s something we creatives love to experiment with. One of the more popular effects is creating some kind of a vintage color effect.
• Found Things – Rich in apparent retro-style, there’s no stripped back Helveticapseudomodernism. There is, on the other hand, page after page after page of hand-crafted beauty
• 5 Places to Download Free and Cheap Images to Use on Your Blog – Some great resources for finding images to use in documents or the web.
• Hydro-Fold by Christophe Guberan – This inkjet printer has been adapted by Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne student Christophe Guberan to print patterns that contort pieces of paper into specific 3D forms.
• Wait, We Still Like Paper! – When Walter Benjamin penned The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he bemoaned the loss of authenticity and aura in mass-produced printed works. What he couldn’t foresee was the rise of digital reproduction and how that would give letterpress-printed works an aura of their own.
• 300+ Free Textures For Your Design Work – Textures are something that every graphic designer and digital artist knows how to put to good use. Usually used as a background to merge with the overall design and complement the look and feel of the art design, textures add a little something extra, a little oomph, a little wow factor
• Design Nerds Flash Cards – Now design geek-hipster-interwebbers can teach their kids their ABC’s with more culture-relevant examples.
• Call to Action in Print Design – Print design is not all about colours and graphics. With the fierce competition in the market, more than ever before, a call to action in print design is needed.
• Good Print Design Inspiration That Must Be Seen – Good print design inspiration is not easy to find but when you do, be sure to bookmark it. Take this article, for example; you have here really neat posters, typography examples, identity packages, invitations, a package design print and even a really cool letterpress business card.
• 26 Creative Typography Graphic Designs and Illustrations for your inspiration – Typography is one of the most fascinating elements of graphic design. If it’s web design, album art, posters, or any other type of graphic design, typographical inspiration can be a great resource for designers. Here we have added 22 most beautiful examples of creative typography designs for your inspiration.
• Why do People Care about Design? – There are always two sides to every argument. The argument of design is the same – one side states that a book should not be judged by its cover while the other states that unless the cover is attractive, no one will pick it up to read it.

Typography and Page Layout

• Print Styles Are Responsive Design – Print styles are the original responsive designs. Using media queries we pare down the content, focus on readability, and design with different device capabilities in mind but when was the last time you took a good look at your print styles?
• How Print Design is the Future of Interaction –  I’m not interested in the literal transfer of printed media on to screen, like we see in some applications which try to recreate the exact textures and layouts of newspapers, for example. What’s interesting for me is the broader practice of designing for print over the last few hundred years,
• A Life in Letters – Elegantissima by Louise Fili  is the first monograph on her work, covering the breadth of her nearly forty-year design career.
• Should Dyslexics Unite on a Typeface? – Can better type design help those with dyslexia?

Printing Tips and News

• 10 Questions & Answers About Duplexing Print Jobs – Auto duplexing your print jobs is a fast and easy way to get your double sided print job done faster. While it’s a feature many printers have, there are still some commonly asked questions about duplexing your own print jobs.
• Choosing the Right Paper – The paper you choose for printing has a big effect on the final result.
• Google Cloud Print – great tool with great features – If you’re not familiar with Google’s web-based print service, take a look at this excellent explanation.
• Inkjet Innovations – EFI is featuring its VUTEk, EFI Wide Format, and Jetrion lines of inkjet presses, together with the high-performance EFI Fiery proServer at SGIA.
• Succession Planning Overview For Owners Of Print And Graphics Communications Companies – Family-owned small businesses dominate the landscape of the printing and graphics communications industry. Many were founded by veterans in the post World War II era or by their baby boomer children. The next generation can be found in numerous companies that have been reinvented as the industry is being “redefined”.
• Business Card Trends You Should Know About – Are you still giving out boring business cards that look like something your accountant designed for you?  If so, maybe you should get with the times and create a new business card for your business.

The Birth Of A Book

Hopefully we’ve sated your appetite for modern printing and design, so we’ll round off with a fascinating video showing how printing was done back in the day.

Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.