Thank you to all of our friends and clients for being creative with us. We are so grateful for the really great client partnerships we have formed, the interesting and challenging projects work on, and the fact that we get to basically do arts and crafts all day long!
PS: bonus points go to whoever figures out what project we recycled for our hand turkeys.
Things can get downright spooky here in the graphic design world... from creepy kearning to scary page bleeds, haunted hairlines, screaming serifs, hair-raising hyphenation, ghostly grids, alarming alignment, and zombie clients. All we can say is eeeek! (Wait, we don't have any zombie clients, do we?).
Happy Halloween to our clients and friends!
Our design work traveled to Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, courtesy of our wonderful clients at Agency 3 and Copley Focus Centers. We were thrilled to get a digital photo from our client to show us how the actual box booth looked when set up.
We love how this design came out. The project surprised us by being more challenging than one might think at first glance... We worked hard to balance two different locations (one urban and one suburban - with two different logos) and still make sure the entire booth had a strong Boston identification from a distance. This booth is eye catching from afar and has useful information about the services when you get close.
We hope this gets lots of usage beyond Vegas!
We've had quite a busy week here in the Studio... lots of wonderful projects keeping us out of trouble. We've been tied to the Studio until this afternoon when we glanced out of the window and to our delight discovered a giant excavator sitting on the side lawn.
Hmmmm.... time for a little work break?
Yes, sitting in the bucket is kind of dirty... but worth it for giggles. It is settled: if the design business fails us we are going to become "J Sherman Earth Movers." Jenny will be the lead excavator.
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Dear clients: we are on a mission to save your margins and preserve white-space. Why? Because our designs look better that way! No seriously, it is because we care about your content and want your audiences to be able to read and digest what you have to say.
We understand the desire to try to fit as much as possible on one page. We know you have lots of great information to share and you want to get it all in there. However, you hired us to make your content look great: to showcase it, make it easy to read, and help communicate whatever your story is. So it is our job to help you understand what kind of impact these requests have on the overall piece.
We are often asked to make the margins smaller so that we can fit more words per line. Yes, that can often bring the page count down but usually at the expense of legibility and we'd love to explain why. Many of our design decisions are intuitive and aesthetic... however there is some logic and science behind these decisions:
In general, the average number of characters (which means letters) per line of text that readers prefer to read falls between 35-55. For 9-12 point type this generally creates a column width of three to five inches.* Longer lines are more difficult for the eye to 1) stay on the line and 2) find the next line of text when it finishes reading a row. In addition, leading (otherwise known as line spacing) also plays a critical role in allowing your eye to get to that next line and not lose its place on the current line.
Sometimes our work is just so sweet... literally! We are thrilled to share images of the stickers we designed for Shelterbelt Farm's honey. These simple oval stickers are easy to print internally and fit perfectly on the bottles. Yum. We'll work for honey anytime.
What a fun day! We trecked all the way to Charlestown this morning to attend a special event that Alphagraphics Boston hosted for their clients. We got to hang out with Kelly Mastracchio (our beloved alumna who has recently moved back to Boston), with dear friend Abby Rischin, the founder of Step Into Art, and we got to see some really lovely clients of ours from Root Cause and Kor Floral.
We learned all sorts of fun new marketing things (QR codes galore), meet members of the U.S. Sailing Team, see a real life Olympic gold medal (and medalist), AND Jenny managed to win the iPad!
Was it worth being away from the Studio all morning? Just ask Jenny.
Thank you Alphagraphics Boston.
Why haven't we been blogging much lately? An image tells a thousand words, right? Well check these photos out...
We have wanted to blog, but we have a lot going on right now with our physical workspace.
For the past three weeks we have been temporarily set up on card tables downstairs with most of the office packed up in boxes and scattered all over the house. Why? Because sweating through the summer and shivering through the winter just isn't fun. We had air conditioning installed and insulation blown in. Now the Studio looks like it has a case of the chicken pox: it is polka dotted with holes that are punched every foot for the insulation. And we have these very lovely silver air conditioning tubes in the back where we plan on creating a wall and then a floor to ceiling bookcase to cover up.
We hopefully move back in this weekend after we fill in and patch the holes, then repaint the whole Studio. Then the fun begins with trying to figure out where to unpack things! Never a dull moment in this small business (and we admit to feeling jealous of larger businesses who contract out for support on stuff like this as we lug boxes all over the place). But we are very excited for a more climate controlled workspace.
This page was printed from: http://www.jshermanstudio.com. For more information, visit us on the web or call us at 617.527.2495.
