Memes, glorious memes!

Memes are like thoughts in pictures! They are made up of an image (which could be a drawing, animation, or photograph) put together with type to communicate an entertaining thought.
When designing your meme, your image will be the eye-catching part of your message, and the type (or words) will deliver the punchline. Watch this short clip below to learn about different types of images, and how to change up your image so that it works well in your design.

Here is a small selection of memes to serve as inspiration as you set about designing your very own meme!

Making type beautiful with tracking and kerning

A well-designed graphic design piece has beautiful typography which is well incorporated with an image or illustration. Sometimes, when we position our text on the page, we notice that characters are not spaced well, especially in headlines. When we use a very large point size for our type, it throws off the spacing between the letters. We can use kerning to solve this problem!

What's the difference between tracking and kerning?
Watch this quick YouTube clip to find out!

Take a minute to play the kerning game below, and you can quickly get the hang of it:
http://type.method.ac/

Examples of bad kerning:

Examples of good kerning:

Serif vs. San Serif: What kind of type is that?

The word typography refers to the art of selecting typefaces and positioning words to convey meaning as part of a graphic design piece. We casually speak of type as just one element of design.

A typeface is also known as a font family. A font is a subset of a typeface. For example, Helvetica is a typeface, and Helvetica Light is a font.

Typefaces fall into two broad categories, serif and sans serif. Serif typefaces have little extensions on the characters that look like little feet. These little extensions aid readability because they help your eye move along lines of text, smoothing the way and helping you to make meaning of what you are reading.

Sans serif typefaces have characters that are smooth and rounded, and do not have these little extensions. They are a bit harder to read, but they project a clean, modern look so they are very popular with graphic designers.

Check out the YouTube video below to learn more about typography:

Paper vs. pixels: Understanding the difference between RGB, CMYK and Pantone color models

The effect of light on a computer screen is so different from ink on paper! 

When designing a printed piece, we use the CMYK or Pantone color models; for digital work we use the RGB color model.

Take a look at the short video below to learn what sets them apart:.