Mr. Jackson has done it again

[Bob Sauls]

Mike, I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your up coming article in SignCraft. For those of us who have learned sign-making in almost isolation.
Learning things is not always intuitive. The ignorant (in the true sense) do not know what they do not know.
Some of the basics and I emphasize very basic things often are not noticed until the eye and mind are trained and concepts actually are given names.
Discovery by trial and error is hard fought for, and while the most highly valued of all of our progress, it can be painfully slow with out an advocate.
It was good to see your examples of design situations and the tweaked out solutions.
Your Manipulation of the super scripted caps at each end of a line of text was very enlightening to me. I've been at this over 30 years and not even seeing all of the problems with how it is typically not handled. I thought slightly stretching the end caps taller without causing the vertical strokes to fatten up was quite cleaver of me.
I bring this up not only to praise you, but to encourage you. What you share has helped.

I appreciate all of the information that you have shared and how you have raised the bar.

[Mike Jackson]

Hi Bob,
Thanks for the kind comments. While I showed quite a few examples to go with the article, to me the value of the article is the message in the body text. Many people assume a person is a good artist because they were blessed with the talent from birth, but in reality, the better artists are the ones who worked harder to excell or improve. I touched on it quickly in the article, but many designers are now willing to assume the computer has the talent and we don't have to work as hard anymore. Visual centering, visual kerning and spacing are not often included in the programs, so those skills still need to be manually introduced, usually towards the end, when we are giving the design the final inspection.

Mike Stevens spent the latter part of his life trying to illustrate and articulate how to improve design and layout. He continually pounded home the point that design skills were not inherited—but hard earned. It doesn't take much effort to find examples of sign and designs on the street that were obviously created by someone without the necessary training. In most cases, the customers don't have the training either, so they get away with sloppy skills. It seems to me a large portion of the sign trade or craft is spiraling into a homoginized mess. At the other end of the same spectrum, there are some incredible signs and designs being made.

If the article is successful in getting only a few people in the habit of looking for common (computer) design errors, I'm quite happy. You could wrap that up in a different wrapper and at least suggest some are just plain lazy. Without a teacher, professor, or colleague critiquing their work, most are content to make the same mistakes over and over. Tyler brought home a few of his design projects from college and I read over some of his reviews and critiques. To be honest, they inspired the article. It highlighted the concept that some skills needed to be taught—or more accurately that they can be learned.

[Bob Sauls]

Mike,
I am also grateful for Mike Stevens and his classic. I had been at this for about a decade with constant improvement in my control and dexterity yet some thing was lacking. Grasping his formula on natural layout and other concepts literally rocked my world, changing my career forever. It is one of two things that I recommend to anyone who is new to this field. The other is of course practice.