Category — Design

[Ed. Note - Sorry for not posting in forever. Clients get priority over blogging, obviously. I'm not going to fight being busy with projects, though!]

Speaking of writers learning about graphic design, here’s a nice resource for learning about typography – “Type 101″ on Fonts.com

I admit that I know enough about typography to be dangerous. However, as I get into it, I find it more and more fascinating. In the competitive world of freelance writing and design, it’s a valuable skill to acquire. As I discovered with search engine optimization, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn’t know. It’s humbling, but constantly learning new things is what makes writing fun.

Most of the time when you submit work for publication in some market, they don’t care one wit about what you think the font should be. They have their own standards, and you should follow them, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an instance where they didn’t require submissions to be in a generic font like Courier or Times New Roman. I know the former seems antiquated, but it’s the default for many story manuscript submissions.

If you are writing a brochure, web site, or something similar for a client, your suggestions often will be somewhere between useful and essential. If you do any amount of this kind of work, start learning.

Make sure you look under “About Fonts” and “Useful Links” (in the top menu bar at Fonts.com). You’ll find much more information worth reading. I don’t know a thing about the quality of their products and services, but I found the information they provide very helpful. So check it out!

I’ve read a lot of advice over the years that writers should focus on getting the words right and leave the graphic designers to deal with fonts and the other pretty stuff. Employed writers often work as part of a diverse team where everyone has a specific role. Writers who work at ‘non-writing jobs’ and write stories and poems in between the nooks and crannies of their day often don’t have time to worry about anything else.

With the proliferation of self-employment and self-publishing, it’s getting harder and harder for writers to just write copy or stories. Competition for freelance work can be fierce. The more writing and design services you can (legitimately) offer, the more likely you are to get work. The more design work you can do on your book, the better it’s going to sell. If you rely on self-publishing houses to do your design work for you, expect much more often than not to be disappointed.

What I find fascinating is that graphic designers are typically much more willing to write copy for the pieces they create – such as brochures – than copywriters are to offer a design to go with their copy. Traditionally, these have been two separate fields and remain so in many places. A great designer who can write adequate copy or a great writer who can at least do adequate design are instantly more marketable.

Does this mean you should punt outside help from anyone? Of course not. But if you seek outside design help, you should know enough to know the right questions to ask and to evaluate how good that help is.

I feel that the days of just providing straight copy to a client are quickly waning. In talking with prospective clients, I discover that many of them have received bids for just writing the text for their project leaving them to wonder, “you mean I have to find somebody else to do the design and printing?”

I think if you bid on a job to produce an e-mail newsletter, you ought to know how to actually create and lay one out in HTML as well as how to use a couple of online services who help companies distribute those newsletters. The copy in those newsletters is still the most important part, but most clients I’ve talked to or worked with want more than a Word document with the copy in it. They want the project done so all they have to do is click Send.

That said, there are still plenty of places that want the copy and then want you to go away. That’s fine. They’re set up for that kind of process. I think, though, that there are ten orders of magnitude more places that would hire you if you could take them from beginning to “click Send”.

If you dread learning the skills needed to do that, then don’t. Aim for places that just want the copy. I’ve just found that I have a lot more options if I can provide more services. It helps tremendously that I love learning this stuff, and it gives me a place to express my creativity in those areas.

It feels good when talking to clients to say, “I write and…” Your “and” should be something you love, or are at least fascinated by, that also adds value to your writing services. That “and” will get you work.

So, what’s your “and”?

Most writers call anything over 150,000 words an epic novel. Right now, I call it a software help library.

(Intrepid souls can go here to see it.)

One of the things I do is write help/support libraries for software. I use this documentation development software called Flare, which is essentially the half-sibling of RoboHelp. Flare lets you compose help resources of just about any size and export them to a variety of formats. In my case, that’s XHTML on a web site.

A word count on a project of that nature is not a conventional tool available in that sort of software. We just kept writing until we felt we were done for a given release. Little did I know how much we actually had written.

I downloaded a trial of Analyzer, Flare’s companion application for doing all sorts of quality control checks on your documentation. I didn’t have time to play with it much since it took two hours to complete the analysis of the help library. In the end, all I needed to see was the Statistics panel.

Total word count: 161,029

I think the actual number is a bit lower because it appears to have included a few sections I excluded from the final, compiled version. Still, the true word count has to be over 150,000.

In comparison, according to what I think are the statistics from Scholastic…

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s total word count: 168,923

Excuse me while I go ice my hands.

Having a good color palette for your web site makes it a lot easier to read. You don’t have to go overboard like a lot of people do, but you should create an environment that enhances the ability of your visitors to take in what you have to say. Content is still key, but your design should make your content more enjoyable rather than distract from it.

There are a handful of really nice tools out there to help you select a complimentary color palette for your site. Talking up the paint mixer at your local hardware store is a great idea, but here’s one that’s open all hours.

I have no idea who Big Huge Labs is, but their Palette Generator is great. You can tell it what image you want to analyze by uploading it, entering the image’s URL, or linking to your Flickr or Photobucket account. It then gives you a bunch of colors – complete with the hexadecimal codes for use on your web site – that compliment the colors used in the picture.

Brilliant stuff! I guess you could use it for picking colors to paint a room in your home, but I’m hopeless with painting. Enjoy!