Wikipedia Portals Make Discovering Content A Little Simpler

Wikipedia has an underused feature called Portals which guide you through a variety of subjects Some of the very people who write and edit articles have put together guides to help you pick out interesting tidbits of content from the pages of the online encyclopedia.

photo credit: throwthedamnthing
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has more ways of reaching information than just the top search results.

Did you know ... that [[Lil' Pimp]] was the first feature-length film to be created entirely with Macromedia Flash animation? The Visual Arts Portal gets you there. The visual arts portal is a great example of a literary and visual index to the other articles on the site. Did you know ... that in Japan professional [[kimono]] dressers still help women put on kimono, usually for special occasions, and that the dressers must be licensed? That's from the Fashion Portal.

With such a massive amount of information in Wikipedia, the portals can really help readers find select articles on Comedy, Mathematics , Criminal Justice, Politics, etc. There are over 500 portals to get you started on your read, but a hundred or so have been selected as the cream of the crop. Check those out on the Featured Portals page

Defining Graphic Design

I was reading [[Wikipedia]] on graphic design topics. Most of the articles aren't in great shape without basic information on the topics we all use everyday in our profession. The web is big enough that any of the missing information can be found pretty quickly just by a Google search. I don't think that many of us in the profession would turn there for these definitions anyway. We find more focused sites about design that are secluded from the public. Anyway, it's not so great to see the weak points in Wikipedia as a resource and not great that it's where we graphic designers sit.

It's not really a complete encyclopedia, so its probably a mistake that they've defined themselves that way. It's a collection of projects and its graphic design project is underdeveloped. The [[wiki]] concept seems to work great on the small scale. Take a look at the Battlestar Wiki for example.

I gave it a shot and dove in and did a small restructuring of the [[graphic design]] article. Like many graphic designers, I'd rather focus on my own projects than edit over there but I did my part. So here we are back on my site... Like I said, it's as easy as a Google search, but lets make it just a little easier. I've compiled a few resources and articles that give a nice overview of graphic design for further reading. What else should we see when we're giving an overview of graphic design past and present.

The Design from a German stamp. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Definitions

What is graphic design from Design Talkboard. Here's five definitions of graphic design to start with.

What is graphic Design? from Veerle's Blog. Commenters from around the web weigh in to create their own definitions of graphic design.

Trying to explain graphic design to a hall full of ten year olds from Johnson Banks, a London design consultant agency. Michael Johnson talks about his experience with kids and design.

History

A Brief History of Type by Thomas W. Phinney. Type is summed up through four major eras: Gutenberg, the Industrial Revolution, Photocomposition and the Digital era.

A Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation by Wayne E. Carlson.

THe History of Graphic Design and Its Audiences from the AIGA. Michael J. Golec talks about the lack of educational programs that focus on graphic design history. Most education in the field is career or studio driven.

History of Graphic Design by Nancy Stock-Allen. This is an educational site produced to assist in lectures, but it's very visually compelling and touches upon more points than I've seen on other sites I've looked at.

XIXth century advertising poster for the hydrotherapic baths of Bagnoles de l'Orne (France). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Graphic Design Meets Open Source Software

Being a graphic designer can be a pretty pricey thing. We like to have powerful computers and expensive enterprise software. I'm looking at you Adobe Create Suite .... There are alternatives that aim to meet the needs of our profession and products. Graphic design is an art and software is just a tool like a paint brush. Open Source software development has come up with such cool free products as Mozilla Firefox, Apache and Linux. I know they all sound kind of geeky and in that way there's something inaccessible sounding about it, but hopefully what you see here will help you get past your fears, uncertainty and doubt. It's all free to use so there isn't much risk involved. Open Source isn't the solution for everything, but it's as a public service that we can often tap into. We're an adventurous bunch, so let's try something different.

Here are some free graphic design programs that might just bring graphic design to the artists who can't or don't want to spend the money on the insanely priced corporate versions.

GIMP

GIMP is the most widely known Photoshop alternative. Most of the functions that you might use in Photoshop are implemented; you can crop, adjust colors, save as different file formats, use various filters and brushes. CMYK support is there but fairly weak and difficult to handle which may be completely unacceptable for most of us in the print industry. However for web design this won't be a problem since it natively supports the RGB color space. Photoshop users may want to look into GIMPshop, a modification package which is intended to help GIMP mimic the Photoshop user interface. GIMP is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

GIMP Screenshot. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers

PDFCreator

This handy program adds itself to your Windows printer menu. Anything you print can be converted to PDF format or various other graphics formats for you to manipulate. Very handy to have on any system.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector editor similar to Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. It uses the standard [[SVG]] format which makes it compatible with other graphics programs. The interface is streamlined and familiar since they focus on usability. It includes tutorials and tooltips too to ease your transition. They've reduced the number of palettes and all palette options are available as keyboard shortcuts. The interactive tutorials and simple interface make it very easy to start using, especially if you are familiar with other drawing programs. It's definitely a good one to look into. Inkscape is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Screenshot of the Inkscape 0.46 user interface. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Book of Inkscape: The Definitive Guide to the Free Graphics Editor

Scribus

I'm a heavy InDesign user and since it's what I use at work, that's not likely to change. It is good to know that there is an open source alternative for InDesign, Pagemaker, QuarkXPress or even the unfortunate Microsoft Publisher. It's designed to be print ready and runs on Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows. If your printer accepts PDFs or any of the other formats supported by the program, you're pretty much set. It's designed to work with professional equipment in a prepress environment. If you're interested in designing books, brochures, business cards this seems like a great idea. A lot of designers have Photoshop and/or Illustrator and attempt to use them for publication layout.

Scribus. Screenshot courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Scribus: Open-Source Desktop Publishing

KompoZer

KompoZer is a WYSIWYG html and css editor, think FrontPage or Dreamweaver. It's based on the same rendering platform as Firefox. It's meant to be easy to use for newcomers and non-technical users. Advanced users of Dreamweaver will miss some features, but everyone else can do well with the free alternative and save some serious money. It even creates nice and valid html adhering to the standard of your choice.

Kompozer screenshot provided by Wikimedia Commons

Wordpress

Wordpress gives designers an easy to manage system for implementing hugely complicated websites. It's community creates many plugins, templates and widgets that give it a lot of weight. So I couldn't leave it off of this list!

WordPress Theme Design: A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes

FontForge

FontForge is a nifty font editor that supports the very common TrueType, PostScript, OpenType formats among others. Besides allowing you to edit your fonts, it supports automatic format conversion and transformations. The documentation seems straightforward to follow so you can dive into developing your font project.

FontForge screenshot courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Open Source Fonts

Fonts are software too. And not too cheap either. Luckily Open Source efforts have stepped in to provide some relief. Typeforge is a project that aims to use Fontforge to create new fonts and provide support in helping designers of various levels create typefaces. You can help them out by simply using their fonts and providing feedback. DejaVu and Linux Libtertine are open source fonts that are freely distributable and free to use in your projects. Junicode is an open source Medieval style font that looks pretty versatile. Free UCS Outline Fonts collects a variety of open fonts of this type. Open Font Library collects public domain fonts.

A few endnotes

I still love the commercial design software out there. Open Source software is still in its infancy compared to commercial software that has been developed over decades. In many ways, these programs just can't compete with that right now but in any case still serve an important niche market in our industry as an entry point for new designers, experiments for those of us who want to escape to something a little different and a as playground for innovation.

No one ever thought Quark would ever go away, now we have InDesign. While those are commercial products, Firefox is an open source project that is now a major player in the web browser world. There is also a ton of little open source programs that make my life easier, but aren't necessarily design related. It's kind of a cutting edge and fringe kind of thing sometimes and on the productivity side at other times.

One last thought, damn does the open source community really need to recruit some designers or what ... These things too often have ugly programmer created technical looking skins that is just the biggest turn off in the world... Someone get on that!

Flashers

Glyphobet's Why your Flash website sucks article presents a few reasons why a Flash presentation may not be the best idea for your content. Flash has its place, but keep it there. Especially now with the rise of [[AJAX]].

I have now installed the Wikipedia-link plugin which allows me to link to [[Wikipedia]] using [[brackets]]. You can also do this in the comments!