Extra Black

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I recently designed a direct mail piece for Appalachian Hardwood and their campaign for the legal harvesting of Oak through sustainable forestry. Word came yesterday that the piece has been a HUGE success, impressing all of the committee members who were a little skittish about it – so successful, in fact, that they are printing up 3000 more to send out to the remainder of their mailing list! Pretty exciting stuff!

There are many differences between designing for print and web. While there are things about web design that I truly enjoy, my heart will always belong to print. There is nothing like creating something that you can hold, feel and physically interact with….oh, and the texture of paper! The subtle nuances of a lightly textured paper or soft sheen of a smooth paper – the substrate alone can elevate the most simple design from great to extraordinary. Not to come down on web too hard though, there are things about designing for digital delivery that just can’t be matched in print. Depth, for example. The screen allows us to reach levels of depth in our designs that we just can’t mimic with ink. That’s never really meant  much to me, though. I have never been the designer that works with depth so much.

Maybe it’s the fact that it has been a little while since I last designed something for print, but in this moment, I am really missing paper.

Sometimes graphic designers try to get a little too clever. With enough thought, the sign below makes a little sense but signs like this should be taken literally – no thought required. That being the case, the sign should read “No Drowning” not “No Swimming.”

I realized that I haven’t put up a photo of our now happy baby yet. Since here surgery, she has been all smiles. A complete turnaround from the baby in one of my earlier posts.

A few members of my family and I have a constant disagreement about color; particularly what is black and what is not. I’m reminded of this today because I happen to be wearing the pair of pants that often times sparks this debate. I contend that they are navy blue or, more simply, a really dark shade of blue while my family members and the manufacturer of the pants claim they are black.

So here’s my argument. I stand firm in my belief that there is black and there is white – the only variations being grey. There is no such thing as a shade of black because the very meaning of the word shade is a darker version of a color – so how can you get darker than black? Similarly, there is no tint of white as a tint is a lighter version of a color.

So I say black is black and white is white; add any hue to either one and they are, at that point, a tint or a shade.