I’ve mentioned before that it’s important to choose your typefaces (not “fonts,” which are particular styles, like bold or italic, of a given typeface) carefully and not simply accept the defaults offered by Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. This goes for your business letters and for your advertising, packaging and signage.
When I’m consulting with businesses about the “look” of their corporate communications, one of the hot questions is always, “Which font should we use?” In an earlier Creative Tips post I touched on this subject as far as saying “At least don’t use the defaults” without going into much detail as to how you would decide […]
There are some things you should never do when typing documents in Microsoft Word, Apple Pages or any other word processing app. Some of these avoidables may be deeply-ingrained habits. Some may invoke a cry of, “But I’ve always done it that way and nobody ever complained!” All of them will lead you down a slippery […]
By now, if you read the last post, you’re starting to think that designers seems to place as much importance on the spaces around and between things as on the things themselves. And you’re right. One of the great concert pianists of the 20th Century once remarked that what defines a great performer is not […]
Space: it may well be the Final Frontier, because when it comes to documents it’s clear that it was never taught in high school. I think we were only ever flunked on content, and so we fixated on the text and forgot the page it was sitting on. When you write a letter, a proposal […]
Microsoft Office is everywhere. There’s hardly a company, from enterprise to small business, that doesn’t use it to create letters, proposals, estimates, promotional emails, even flyers and (gasp!) ads for the Yellow Pages. The “desktop publishing revolution” was supposed to put great-looking documents within reach of Everyman and change the world, feed the poor, end […]
I had a fascinating conversation recently with the renowned Danish photographer Thorsten Overgaard. Thorsten shoots almost exclusively with a Leica, the camera that arguably has more claim to the word “classic” than any other, and is one of the most brilliant documentary photographers in the world. Like many in the profession, he uses Adobe Photoshop […]
I’m often asked by friends and associates to teach them this or that about Photoshop, among other graphics applications in Adobe’s massive catalog of industrial-strength software. I’ll spend half an hour or so going over how to solve the particular problem they’re wrestling with at the time. It’s fun, it breaks up my day a […]
If you write business letters or other company documents, there are almost certainly some terms (like your company or product name), that you end up typing a lot. This might not be an issue if your company name is “Acme, Inc.,” but something like “Serious Business Strategies” or “Life Enhancement Supplement” might get a bit […]
Microsoft recently opened official public beta testing of Office 2010. That means you can download it here if you’re feeling adventurous and you want to see what’s coming.
