Helvetireader is a theme for Google Reader–Google’s RSS reader–created by Jon Hicks.

Using a Greasemonkey script, it calls an additional stylesheet when you load Google Reader. The alternate styles are–of course–helveticentric and tidy up the UI quite a lot. It’s remarkable how much effect just dialing back color a bit can have. The type treatments are also executed exceedingly well.

I’ve burned through a couple thousand articles using Helvetireader and I’m still loving the change. Go get it now.

Excellent work Mr. Hicks. Thanks for making it available.

From the way they source their materials to their approach to retailing, Nau ‘s ambitious approach as an apparel company is revolutionary. (They get bonus points for recognizing the value of unique and well-executed graphic and interactive design too.)

Then came the bad news.

The first part of May, I heard Nau was going out of business. Naturally, I took advantage of 50% off prices across the board. I couldn’t be happier with the items I ordered, but when they arrived I was even more bummed that they were closing up shop. Great quality and style from a company that values unique design and ethical business practices isn’t easy to find.

When you least expect it…great news.

I was excited and happy to read on their blog that Horny Toad has hooked up with the crew at Nau and kicked in some capital to make it possible for Nau to reimagine some aspects of the business and keep things going.

Welcome back and congratulations! Now get back to work. I need some new pants.

Whether it’s settling on salary for a full time gig or your hourly rate as a freelancer, determining what
your time is worth is something every designer has to work out.

Once you’ve been working in the field for a while you’ll have a good sense of what your work and time is worth and what the market will bear.

If you’re new or have expanded into a additional areas of expertise, you need to evaluate what you can and should be paid. Even veteran designers should keep tabs on market trends, though. You might be selling yourself short and be none the wiser.

A couple of great resources for sussing out what a fair hourly rate or salary:

• Coroflot’s annual Design Salary Survey–2007 results were just made available
• Hourly Rate Calculator from Freelance Switch–great for determining how much you need to be making to break even. Includes a lot of things many people forget to take into account.

“What should I be charging/making?” comes up in discussion pretty frequently (online and otherwise). There’s a lot more to write in this area, but we’ll save something for another day.

Have another good source of information the help determine rates? Tell everyone about it in the comments.

About half of the staff at my regular coffee shop is in design school and while some of the questions that come up are new, most of them I’ve heard from my students and young designers before. Jason Tselentis solicited some answers to 10 questions a lot of students ask this morning over at Under Conseration’s Speak Up , so while I was in the right frame of mind, I thought I’d start writing about some of the things that come up in my coffee shop chats here. (Remember, you usually get what you pay for. Take my free advice for what it’s worth.)

A must-have for every designer: some manner of morgue file or aggregated inspiration

“Morgue file” can mean a lot of things. Traditionally, a morgue file would really only contain pieces from your own work…unused concepts from a completed project, sketches, etc. I’m using the term here to refer to really any collection of inspiring examples of design. Flyers, postcards, brochures, business cards, photos, type specimens, etc.

If something speaks to you or inspires you, keep it around to look at occasionally. Everyone has moments when they feel blocked or uninspired. If you have an arsenal of things that spark ideas and fuel your imagination, you can get back into the swing of things pretty easily.

What a morgue file is not

I’d like to emphasize that that this sort of thing is not intended to be a swipe file or things to just crib from. It’s meant to accumulate things that you like, things that you find interesting and inspire you to create.

Quality over quantity

The photo above is just a handful of the stuff I keep near my desk. I tend to keep a lot of neat stuff around, but I have far less than I did a couple of years ago. Moving halfway across the country and making my studio a lot tidier had the side effect of improving the overall quality of the pieces I keep. Paper is heavy and my studio walls and shelves were full. So I pared things down. Like any reference or filing system, It’s a good thing to go through this stuff periodically and pull the bits that don’t speak to you anymore. I make a deliberate effort to cull through things periodically now. It’s a good way to keep it in front of you more often as well–maximizing its intended effect.

What I keep and how I organize it

There are three primary groups or types of things I keep around:

1. smallish printed items
2. books and larger printed items, and
3. digital items

The first two are good for most any design discipline and are pretty straightforward to organize and store. Shelves, folders, binders…whatever suits your organizational style and makes it easy to get at the stuff. I suppose the same could be said regarding organization of digital items as well, but I’ll share how and why I deal with digital items.

A fair amount of my work is interactive design, but something you see online could just as easily inspire you in another medium, so I tend not to segregate “web design” from anything else. A good screen capture tool is essential. On my PC, I like SnagIt. On my Mac, I just use Grab but would like something that has the ability to do a scrolling capture of an entire window. (Let me know in the comments if you know of such an animal.)

When I’m out and about, I have a digital camera (at very least on my phone). Colors, signs, buildings…the strangest things can give you inspiration. Be ready for it.

When I see something on the web that wows me, I take screenshot and save it in a folder I’ve creatively named “morguefile”. The method to this madness comes in filenames. I name by date with a sequence number tagged on the end. For example, the first thing I capture today would be named, 20080219_001.png or 20080219_001.jpg. The next, 20080219_002…and so on. I do it this way for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that it provides an automatic chronology letting the newest stuff float to the top or bottom as needed. You can refer to these things in all sorts of ways; a slideshow application, in Bridge, or simply on Finder or Explorer.

Why not just bookmark a noteworthy site or image rather than capturing it? Short answer: things change. Don’t assume something will be the same tomorrow as it is today. This is especially true on the web.

The bottom line

If something inspires you, hang onto that inspiration and make it accessible. Your imagination and creativity are your best tools.

For monster brands like Pepsi and Coke, diversification of their lines are really the only way to see a sales increase. The beverage market worldwide is enormous and continues to see increases in sales among premium brands in general, but especially those with a more natural or healthful appeal.

Ziggurat Brands (London) has unveiled their design for a new Pepsi International brand, Pepsi RAW. The new take on Pepsi with more natural ingredients in place of artificial uses cane sugar instead of corn syrup, apple extract as a flavoring, etc.

Their trademark application filed last spring included a much rougher, more rock-n-roll take on a logo. They smartly took it in a very different direction. Beyond trend, consumers that find natural products appealing also tend to be attracted to clean, spare design. Ziggurat nailed the design with less emphasis on the ubiquitous Pepsi logo and more on the short, iconic RAW type that reads vertically. They smartly avoided an overly organic or rough look that would deviate too far from existing design across the rest of the line and and appeal to a smaller market segment. Being simple, clean and modern conveys that the product inside is also less complicated and artificial.

I haven’t seen anything that confirms whether or not Ziggurat’s package design will be carried over to a US version, but I wouldn’t expect to see it hit markets here for at least another year.

I stumbled across a project that Wacom put together called Power of the Pens.

This is the story of 12 leading artists each tasked with creating a piece of calendar art in their own unique style. Meet the artists, explore their work, and watch them create digital magic. For the next 12 days, a new work by one of the artists will be revealed highlighting the process and experience of its creation.

There are wallpapers for each month of the year available to download. It apparently didn’t take the prize, but my favorite turned out to be drawn by Portland’s CUT+PASTE 2007 winner Tim May. Derek Welch of my studio-neighbor big-giant also gave a nice performance. Portland is heavily represented since Wacom’s in the backyard, but it’s all nice work from a good bunch of people. Nice one, gang.

There’s sexy new slab serif hotness out from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. It’s no secret that HF&J have produced almost all of my favorite typefaces. The latest addition to the list is Archer. Originally developed for Martha Stewart Living, it’s now available to anyone regardless of your felony record. I have a huge crush on this slab serif and it’ll be in my bag of tricks…and fast.

I can’t describe it better than HF&J, so I won’t. Their words:

Sweet but not saccharine, earnest but not grave, Archer is designed to hit just the right notes of forthrightness, credibility, and charm.

Perfect.

How much?

The value you get from their stuff is worth pointing out. The quality of their work is incredible and they have something suitable for nearly every application. Besides, you have plenty of options pricewise on this one. $199 buys a single seat license for a core set of 10 styles. (Light, Book, Medium, Semibold and Bold, each in Roman and Italic.) The complete family of 40 styles (what?!) only runs $399.

Seriously, they leave nothing out in their full families. You get indices, fractions, the whole shebang. You may not use those little extras very often, but if you have them when you need them you’ll be a very happy camper.

I’m taking some of my own advice–to stop ignoring my websites and start making more frequent content additions. You’re looking at step one. The other is my business site that lives over here.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done much to update to this site. Up until now, its only purpose was to be a place to park my portfolio and CV. I hadn’t given a thought to rebuilding it around a blog until I started working out the architecture and content for the new DROPKICK site. A weblog is one of the central features there, but I’d like to target the topics there to current and potential clients.

Since I needed to bring my portfolio site up to date anyway, I realized it would be a good place to park those topics that wouldn’t necessarily be of interest to my current or potential clients but relate to graphic design, web development, software, etc.

I went back and forth between Expression Engine and WordPress a few times before I made a decision on the platform I was going to build from. They both have advantages, but ultimately it came down to WordPress. Not because I feel it’s necessarily better than EE, but because I wanted to see how well it’d serve as a complete CMS for the site with a bare minimum of hacking. My spec for the site required the following: a portfolio section, a separate–but linked–blog, and a home page that pulls in data from both portfolio and blog posts dynamically.

It’s turned out to be a relatively quick and painless process. I still have some bits to fiddle with and features to implement as the amount of content increases, but I’m calling it 95% complete.

I haven’t done anything super complicated, but if there’s any interest I’d be happy to write a short tutorial series on exactly what I’ve done behind the scenes. Send me an email or post in the comments if you’re interested.