Posts by Joe Farquharson

With the upcoming release of Apple’s iPad (April 3rd, 2010), there has been an increasing amount of buzz recently around the change in the way we will consume media. With an estimated 40-50 tablet devices set for release by early 2011, Wired Magazine, in partnership with Adobe, has seen this as an opportunity to rethink the way we connect with magazine brands, leading to a fundamental shift in the way Wired is produced with it’s new digital app. At the SXSW panel After Magazines: Wired’s Digital Rebirth, panelists Scott Dadich (Creative Director, Wired Magazine) and Jeremy Clark (Senior Experience Design Manager, Adobe) explained the production methods of the app using Adobe Air, and showcased…



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In all likelihood you probably read the first five (or perhaps only two) words of the first paragraph before skipping down to here. Many of you can probably recite the first line off by heart, but most likely all of you know what the text's name and primary usage is. Used as placeholder…

Typographic literacy is on the decline, and subsequently a whole host of errors are now accepted as ‘the norm’. Below is an exploration of some of the biggest typographic faux pas, and the ways each should be corrected.

Double Spacing This convention harks back to the days of monospaced typewriters where it was common practice to insert a double space to distinguish the beginning of a sentence from the surrounding single word spaces. When using proportional fonts this really isn’t necessary, and is, to be brutally honest, just plain ugly.

‘Dumb’ Quotes Typewriters are also responsible for the introduction of ‘straight quotes’, non-specific quote marks designed as a space-saving measure for…

Can you see what’s wrong with the statement above? Bad typography is everywhere. It can be found in magazine articles, outdoor signage, restaurant menus, billboards, newspaper and TV advertisements and all over the internet. Spend just 30 seconds looking it’s easy to find a whole host of typographic faux pas—incorrect hyphenation, ‘dumb’ quotes, double-spacing, widows, orphans, poor kerning… the list goes on. Typography is something every designer should deeply care about, which is why it pains me to see it abused so profusely. Typographic literacy seems to be on the decline, and as many designers who are not well-versed in typography move into teaching, they pass on little typographic knowledge to their students…

In the last few months here at Kristian Andersen + Associates, we have become increasingly more involved in iPhone application user experience/user interface design. Our existing experience with UX/UI design for the web was a great jumping-off point, plus we're all day-one iPhone users and are virtually tethered to them right throughout the day.

Our most recent app engagement began in the usual way, collaborating with the client on multiple rounds of wireframes and process maps, dialing in the inner workings and structure of the app itself. When we started to move forward into the initial visual prototypes the ideas for the navigation and overall aesthetic came fast, but we quickly realized something just didn't 'feel' right. It didn't take long before we realized why and just…

Recently I was fortunate enough to become certified in Landing Page Optimization (LPO) after attending a one-day course presented by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MarketingExperiments, an internet-based research lab that conducts experiments in optimizing sales and marketing processes. The primary goal of LPO is to optimize the content and appearance of landing pages to make them more appealing to a target audience, in order improve the conversion rate of website visitors that become sales leads or customers.

Having been a designer for nearly 12 years I’ve designed my fair share of websites and landing pages, and I was skeptical about how much I could really learn from this course. However, as we dug deeper into the science of LPO I…

When I last blogged about webfonts back in March 2009 there was no clear-cut direction that type foundries or browser developers were headed with regards to using real fonts on the web. Designers were fed up with using the same short list of system fonts on their websites, and the only options at the time that allowed the use of non-system fonts were using images or Flash/JavaScript-based workarounds. In the last few months there have been many interesting developments, with two options currently leading the race.

@font-face and WOFF
The @font-face rule has been around for over 10 years, first making an appearance with CSS2. It has remained largely under-used due to differences in each browser’s font…

The last several weeks here at Kristian Andersen + Associates have been a very busy time indeed. Last week, as we wrapped up our work for ExactTarget’s Connections User Conference, we decided to treat ourselves to a new office toy – a Nintendo Wii and a copy of Rock Band 2. Perfect for unwinding after a hard day’s work, or simply to make complete fools of ourselves when the mood takes us.

I’d already been playing Rock Band for a couple of months, the guitar being my instrument of choice. I’ve managed to work my way up to playing on Hard level, and even on Expert on a few of the more simple songs. Late Saturday night I had the…

A couple of weeks ago I was scanning my way through several hundred missed Tweets when I stumbled across this link to a 1920s Coca-Cola Logo Wall Painting guidelines document. It fascinated me to think that even back then, so much time and effort had gone into standardizing the drawing of the Coca-Cola logo, and other details such as brand color consistency. From the four pages on display it was clear that the basic structure of a brand guidelines document hasn’t changed all that much in the 80 years since this one was put together, and it reminded me of parts of the brand guidelines (graphic standards) documents we offer at KA+A as a key part of our brand

Before the dust has even settled on the Crispin Porter + Bogusky/Brammo crowdsourcing debacle, another controversy has reared its ugly head and is setting the design community’s heads spinning once again.

The release of the 2010 Ikea Catalog revealed a significant shift in the company’s brand identity: the introduction of a new corporate typeface – Verdana. For decades, Ikea has used a variant of the Futura typeface, Ikea Sans, designed by Robin Nicholas. The abandonment of Ikea Sans for Verdana has drawn outrage from the design community, and has been even dubbed ‘Verdanagate.’ An online petition, set up to plead Ikea to reverse their typeface choice, has collected almost 4,500…