I have just been thrust into the world of online design, kicking and screaming. I feel safe and secure with my print world. There are edges, dimensions and, well, substance. But as I feared, the day has come where I needed to step up to the challenge or retreat into the world of out-of-touch designers who tote themselves as having a craft rather than embracing the fact that our world is changing at lightning speeds.
Don't get me wrong. I think it a fundamental necessity to know your craft and the basics before getting dirty in the flashy stuff, but at a certain point we, or I suppose I, as money-making professionals need to be able to deliver the goods or else clients go elsewhere, like to nephews and friends who know the programs but don't know how to design. It's important that if we want to have the right to bitch about bad online design and advertising, that we know what we're talking about. We need to take the skills we've learned and adapt them to the digital world.
The marketing coordinator I work with is keen to jump on any opportunity that might benefit us by reaching an ever narrowing audience. Working for a museum, the next generation is always the ones we need to grab and identify with or else we too will find ourselves as extinct as our specimens. Finding the balance between talking with a fresh and modern voice and still being relevant to our aging audience is tough. You want to appeal on some level to them all but yet not become too much of one or the other, unless of course that is the mandate of your museum.
So, full circle, last week I was presented with the task of designing 3 flash ads in 3 days and having never opened the program. So I took to free online tutorials (most of which were garbage) getting bits and pieces of advice from whomever passed by that knew ANYTHING about flash and losing a lot of hair. One of my tasks was to design an ad for mobile devices in 4 increasingly small formats, all the way down to 120x20 pixels at 72dpi. AND the files couldn't exceed 5KB. 5KB!! I didn't even know you could save that small!
As expected, type falls apart when you only have 10-15 pixels of height to work with. Although its a reality all web and online designers face, I was sure there was something that could be done.
Well, I found a bit of a solution and am sharing with all you type geeks out there:
Simulating sub-pixel rendering
Deke's Techniques | by Deke McClelland
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