An archive of our thoughts on design

Sep 18

Three Influential Books

Tyler Tate writes about design

There is occasionally a book you read that contributes so greatly to your understanding that you can’t remember how you ever got by without it. For me, three such books are Information Architecture for Designers, Grid Systems, and The Elements of Typographic Style.
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Jul 30

Identity and Print Miscellanea

Tyler Tate writes about design

Paradigm Reborn focuses on websites. Because of this, our portfolio only features web work. But there is the occasional identity or print piece that we design, send off to the client, and then add to the archives, without anyone getting to see it.

This is the remedy to that. Below are a few of the non-web pieces we’ve worked on over the past month or two.

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Jul 7

When I upgraded from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, Google’s website looked horrible. The spacing between letters was completely jumbled—some letters were crammed in much too close to one another, others had huge gaps between them.

I tried everything from running Firefox in safe mode to deleting every preference file and reinstalling the application, all to no avail. After an entire afternoon of frustration, I finally nailed down the problem: Arial.

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Apr 30

Visualizing Color

Tyler Tate writes about design

As designers, having a proper understanding of how colors relate to one another has a tremendous impact on our work. Here is a quick history of how our predecessors thought about color, and how we should think about it today.

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Feb 7

Tired of that plain text e-mail signature that I’ve been using for years, I recently endeavored to create something a bit more professional and refined for my e-mails.

Apple Mail allows you to control the font, color, and even insert images (which are included as attachments) into a signature. But it doesn’t give you direct control of the HTML and CSS, nor does it provide a solution for including images in your e-mail without them being attachments.

These limitations meant that I first had to design the HTML and CSS of my new signature outside of Mail, and then save that HTML file as a Mail signature. Here’s how it’s done.
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Jan 17

A Green Revolution on Your Desktop

Tyler Tate writes about design

Over the last few months we’ve been at work tweaking our identity and relaunching our website. The most central visual elements in our new look are the green flourishes that emanate from every page of the website. I have taken those same figures and created a full desktop wallpaper from them for your viewing pleasure.
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