4TH ANNIVERSARY CONTEST! FREE iPOD TOUCH

ANNIVERSARY CONTEST: On May 5th my wife and I will celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary. In celebration of this event, if Radiance Graphic Design can get $1500 worth of sales between now and then. The person who gives us the most references for sales will receive a GENERATION 4 8GB iPOD TOUCH! See rules below. www.radiancedesign.us

All references must have paid for their items before 12:00am May 6, 2011. The person with the references who have spent the most money by the end of the contest will win the contest and receive a brand new 8GB iPod Touch. If the total amount of sales does not reach the desired amount of $1500, the offer of the iPod will be considered null or void. However if the amount of sales exceeds $200 a prize of a $25 gift card to the retailer of your choice will be awarded. All those who you refer to us must put your name as the referral in their request for work from us, if they do not let us know that you were the referral, this will not be counted as your reference. Any questions may be directed to Radiance Graphic Design at radiancegraphics@gmail.com.

Wordless Book T-shirt Video

A few weeks ago I entered a t-shirt contest with my Wordless Book T-shirt at ArmourUp.com. I won the contest and received $100 for doing so. The owner asked if I would be willing to put together a short video devotion explaining the meaning behind the Wordless book. You can view that video here.

Where to Find Free Fonts

After covering our topic of "The Art of Font Selection" I thought it was important to point you to some sites to find free fonts! So here I will do my best to direct you to sites that will be a help to you. One of the things that I look for when I go to sites with free fonts is the selection choice that they have. I also look to make sure that the license of use are well explained in the fonts that I choose to download.

There are probably thousands of sites that say they will give you free fonts but once you get in to the site you will quickly find out that their fonts are not truly free. They may give you a free preview of what the fonts look like, but then after you have seen and fallen in love with the particular font you find out they want you to buy it. Now I am not advising you to stray away from buying fonts, but for the most part you will be able to find most of the font styles for which you are looking on one of these free sites. I will list the sites in order that I have found most helpful in my own search for fonts. (For the most part you will find the same fonts at each of the sites, however there will be a few that are unique to that particular site.)

#1 Dafont.com

#2 Abstractfonts.com

#3 1001freefonts.com

#4 Fontstock.net

There are other sites that we use from time to time, but the above four sites are the sources that we use most often. The fonts are fairly easy to install. The way that I install the fonts is the following:

First download the file (most likely it will be in a .zip file)

Once it is done downloading I usually extract the file to my desktop.

After the file or files are done extracting go to your start menu and click the control panel option. 

Once you are in control panel find the Font folder and open it.

Now that your Font folder is opened simply highlight the font or fonts on your desktop that you wish to install.

Drag the highlighted font/fonts and drop them in the font folder. You will be prompted by windows to allow permission to install the font files. Approve the font to be installed. It will take just a few seconds at the most to install and you are finished.

Once installed I usually delete the files on my desktop as they are already installed in my font folder.

That is it for my "Where to Find Free Fonts" section.

One last suggestion for those of you who are just learning adobe photoshop or any other adobe design program I highly recommend the following books.

 

The Art of Font Selection Part 2

    Last time I gave you just a brief view of how I do my font selection. I always start with my art work first before every playing with my fonts. Now I will take time to show you how I play around with picking a font to fit my artwork.

First let’s start with the completed work of art with no text whatsoever.As you can see we have a wide open canvas to work with here. This was a flyer that we being design for a church. The wonderful thing about a blank canvas like this is the ability to place text on that reads clearly and does not get lost in the background. What we will do is work our way from the top of the flyer to the bottom showing how we lay out the text.

Understand that font selection is different for different items. You will see when we take a close look at the top of the flyer that that it will already have the church logo on it. The church logo was one that we also designed, but picking font for a logo that is largely text includes an entirely different approach to font selection that we will look at a later time.

Here you can see the Logo at the top of the page. In the text tool box you will see that the font that we chose to use is Baskerville Old Face. This was actually the font that I actually chose for the logo with the exception of the E. I wanted to make the fonts for this particular part something uniform but that also stood out. When I pick my font, most times I know what direction I want to go as far as font styles I want to use. (Styles would be things like: Serif, San Serif, Script, Block Lettering, ECT.) I will show you an example of this on the bottom half of the flyer.

The main theme of this flyer is obviously an invitation to come and be part of a church that is growing. You will notice that by using different sizes of the same font we have developed a smooth flowing design that grabs your attention. We have where question asked first in the Eastern Hills logo. We have the who in the understood YOU found in the statement, “Come grow with us”. There is a third question also answered and that is what. We want YOU to come GROW with us. Lastly there is a subtle forth question answer and that is how we want you to grow. We want you to grow in faith, as a family, and in fellowship. So now you get a basic feel of the importance of answering basic question and using a proper font style to implement it.

Now we come to the bottom of the flyer. The schedule of services is just your standard Times New Romans. Just as a side not I do not recommend using any more than three font types on a single design (obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, but usually you are safest to us only 2 or 3 font types). The reason I used Times New Romans as apposed to Baskerville Old Face is because I wanted a font that could be a little bolder while still holding to the serif style of font. This was important because the Baskerville font does not have the ability to be as bold as the Times font, however, I needed a bolder font so that the service names and times as well as the church address and phone number could be seen and read clearly.

Here is where we will get to the way that I make a font selection for a text I have direction for but really have no ideal which one of that particular font style I want to use. In this case for the words Sunday, Wednesday, Seth Shipman, Pastor, and the web address, we ended up using a font called spinwerad. I knew in this case I still wanted to stick with a serif style of font. I also knew I wanted the font to have a bit more size to the bulk of it. As you can see in our above picture I have a large selection presented on the pull down menu for the font selection screen. While I knew what I was looking for in my font, I was not sure which one would fit best. I have at least a dozen if not more of the type of characteristics I was looking for in my font. When I don’t know which one I want I will start at the very top of the pull down menu with the A fonts and work my way all the way through the Z fonts. I will look at each one that meets what I am picturing in my mind and see how well they fit into my particular artwork. Sometimes I will get stuck with three font types that differ from each other by just a little bit and I will have to look at each one closely from as little as a single look to as many as three or four times before I settle on one. Even then before I make my final decision between the few fonts I narrow my selection down to I will get someone else to look at the options and get an opinion from their view point. Once I have weighed the options and the opinion of the options I can get to a place where I am settled on my final font choice. Below you see our final product.

Font selection is not always the easiest thing, but as we said in the first part of this subject, a good font can make good artwork stand out and look awesome, while a poor selection can make good artwork look dull or even make the good artwork worthless. We will visit more of font selection at a later date as font selection is not only important for print design but also logo design. We will also give you a list of websites where you can get free fonts to be used with your design work!

To see more of our artwork please visit our webpage www.radiancedesign.us. Radiance Graphic Design is a company that is built on Christian values and integrity. It is our desire as a company to make Christ the center of all or our graphics and promise to put our all into all the work we do. Our business is catered to Christian Ministries and Businesses. We have been doing graphic work for churches, pastors, and missionaries for over 8 years, and would love to services your graphic needs.

The Art of Font Selection Part 1

     Mastering the art of font selection is something that takes year of practice. Having been in the Graphic Art industry for the past seven years this is one of the areas that I still work on every project I get. There are certain fonts that I have come to favor as an artist and at times it is hard to pull myself away from using the same fonts on all my art. However, in order to make things stand out and make a customer’s product uniquely theirs it is imperative to not only produce a stunning layout but to mix up the fonts you use. There are probably a hundred ways to figure out the font that you want to use but I will begin sharing with you how I work with choosing the right font for my artwork. First I will show you how I begin the process of chose the font types. In the coming days we will build on this until you have a complete picture of my process.

Here you see a picture of a 4x6 post card being used as a prayer card. Before I ever choose a font for this work I had put the entire arangment of pictures together. Once everything came together it was time to begin working with font. Two questions I asked myself before beginning the font picking process were the following: “Who are they” and “Where are they going?”

     Obviously I knew the answers to those questions since I was the designer, but these would be the questions that people would have in their minds when they met this family and it was important that these questions be answered as soon as they see the card. One of the ways to make the distinction of who and where was by selecting two font types. We first answer the question of who by using a strong serif font to give the family's name. If you aren’t familiar with the difference between serif and san serif it can be explained this way. A serif font looks like this Here and a san serif font looks like this Here.
     The way we answered the second question of where they were going was by using a script font with a color overlay that coordinates with the German flag. What we have done is established a relationship with who and where in the minds of people simply by picking out fonts that correlated well with the project. This gives you an over all picture of how using different fonts for different purposes can accomplish the objective and distinguishing between two or more subjects. We will discuss more detail of font selection at another time, but in the mean time go create and image and play with your fonts some, practice makes perfect even in the design world.

Welcome

Well here we are another way to help promote my business of Radiance Graphic Design. This blog will be used to help share tips with other designers as well as highlight some of the new work that we have done. The tips will come from a variety of sources both from myself and other designer tip sites. Also let me know if there is a particular subject that you would like me to cover as a graphic designer. I hope you will make yourself a regular visitor to our both our website and our blog!