 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, we're an online show, whatever your term you want to use to call us what we are. We're here every Wednesday morning live online at 10 a.m. central time though. We've been doing this show since January 2009 and there's still confusion or indecision about what to call these things. But we are here live online every Wednesday mornings. The show is free and open to watch for anyone, both the live show on Wednesdays and the recordings. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine. You can always go to our website and you find all the recordings going back to the beginning there in our archives. You can watch recordings on YouTube. If there are any presentations included, we include those as well and also links to any websites that may have been mentioned during a show. We do a mixture of things here. Presentations, mini training sessions, book reviews, basically demos of things, basically anything library related we are happy to have on the show and share with you. And we do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on the show and we also bring in guest speakers sometimes as we have this morning. On the line with us is Megan Frost. She is from Paul Smith College of State New York. Hi, Megan. Hello. We actually had a request for something about graphic design. It is something obviously is a very in need librarians. Generally I know I did not receive any training in that kind of thing when I was in studying for my degree. But we have to do it. It is something definitely in need. So I went looking and found actually Megan did this presentation in March just a couple of months ago at the Library Technology Conference, which is in Minneapolis, correct? Yes. I remember that off top my head. And I saw her, I didn't attend the conference. I wasn't able to this time, but I did see her description and I actually had a couple of colleagues, a colleague who had attended and said it was a great session. So I contacted Megan and she's going to, she just agreed to come on the show with us today, which is great. Thank you so much, Megan. Yeah, no problem. And she's going to tell us about doing good graphics design to get all of our promotions out there. So I'll just hand over to you to take it away for your presentation. Yeah, thank you. Well, good morning, everyone. As Christa said, I'm Megan Frost. I'm the public services librarian at Paul Smith College. And as you probably already guessed, the title of my talk today is graphic design for maximum engagement. So I'm going to talk for the next, you know, 40 to 50 minutes about why I think design is so important. I'm going to give you lots of tools and tips to make great designs to engage your communities. And hopefully you'll walk away feeling encouraged and inspired to use some of these tools to take your designs from good to great. So firstly, I'm just going to give you a little bit of context to who I am and the environment in which I work. So I work at Paul Smith College, which is located in very, very upstate New York, like way further north than anyone assumes there is in New York is where we is where we are. In fact, Paul Smith College is located inside the Adirondack State Park, which is six million acres of land that's a set aside for, well, it's kind of a it's kind of a grand experiment in conservation and development. To give you some context of how big six million acres is, that's a land area that's larger than the state of Vermont, which is next door to us. Yeah, and I just want to say I mentioned this to Megan, too. As you said, many people don't even know where that is. I do. I'm actually originally from Saratoga Springs, which you see on the map there south of Paul Smith. But also in upstate New York, we're on the outside edge of the park, not actually in it in Saratoga. Right. Yes. Yeah, kind of the southern southeastern part there. And so the Adirondack State Park, which is a New York State Park, not a national park is actually larger than the national parks of Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier and Smoky Mountains combined. So it is very big. So Paul Smith College is located actually not that far away from from Lake Placid, New York, which many people have probably heard of. It's hosted two Olympics, 1932 and 1980. And the famous Miracle on Ice hockey game actually happened in Lake Placid, which was where the the United States beat the Soviets during the Cold War in hockey, kind of a big deal. The college itself has about 1000 students at four librarians of which I am one and two staff members. And I'm the public services component of the staff, which means I'm in charge of our instruction program and do most of that instruction, design all of it and assess it. I'm in charge of all of the reference kinds of stuff. And I also do a lot of outreach and marketing. So you can see here some really beautiful pictures of where I live and work, the top one being of a sunrise one morning as I was driving into work. And the bottom of our campus at its most beautiful during fall leaf season. You can see we're located on the shores of lower St. Regis Lake. And the second building in that photo, the one that's a little bit behind is actually our library building. So in addition to doing the public services, I'm just really passionate about good design in general. Why do I think design is so important? Well, basically, the future is a visual place. The media is dominated by image based sharing. Carefully designed ads and brands are constantly bombarding us. Everyone shares image that indicates a wealth of nuanced information without words. And if you're anything like me, you've got a cell phone in your pocket with a camera on it. And you use that cell phone to communicate all kinds of stuff visually that before you would have used words to do. You take a picture of the beautiful sunrise on your way to work and send it to people. You know, hey, honey, we're out of milk. Can you can you pick up this this exact milk? Use emojis to to show approval or laughter, other kinds of non verbal communication. Such a visually stimulated world asks really important questions about visual literacy, but it also asks personal questions about how libraries are communicating without words. What do our materials and use of images say about us? How are we engaging our communities with intentional graphic design? What kind of nuanced information are we communicating? So let me give you a visual example of this sea change in visual communication. So here you see two photographs taken from essentially the same place and essentially the same situations, eight years apart. So this top image was taken in 2005 at the introduction of Pope Benedict XVI. And the bottom image was taken in 2013 at the introduction of Pope Francis. In the top image you notice there are a lot of people and like a couple of vague glows of a cell phone, just a few people interacting with this experience through a piece of technology. And the bottom is just an absolute sea of pieces of technology and people who are experiencing those events while recording them at the same time. In 2005, the people attending this event would have communicated with words or with text about what had happened. And in the bottom, they're communicating primarily through use of pictures and video. What we see, I believe, can profoundly affect our experience. So how things are presented can actually change what we might do in response. And let me give you a couple examples of that as well. And we're going to use wine as an example today. So I have two pictures of wine bottles here. One is the cheap wine. The bottle has a really particular shape. It happens to be a screw top bottle. And you'll notice that the label has, you know, acute illustration on it. The expensive wine has a shape that is reminiscent of a champagne bottle, something that we associate with being like a very high brow expensive item. It has a natural cork, not a screw top. And you'll notice that there's a distinct difference in the approach to the label design between the expensive wine and the cheap wine. The expensive wine uses all kinds of very fancy typography work to communicate what this wine is all about. So science has done some really interesting experiments on how things are presented, how that might affect our experience. So for example, one thing that we as humans are not very good at is telling which one of these wines is expensive. So if you gave us a blind taste test and you said one of these wines is very expensive and one of these wines is cheap, on the whole, there'd be about a 50-50 split. Like we are no better than chance at determining which one of these wines is expensive. Our taste doesn't have a valuation of a monetary valuation for wine. So that's first of all, it's pretty interesting. Secondly, if you were to put the same wine in both of these bottles, so say you put the cheap wine in the expensive looking bottle and you served it to people. People would say that the wine they saw being served from the expensive bottle was clearly an expensive wine. This wine is clearly a cut above because of how they're looking at the bottle, when in fact we know that the wine inside both of the bottles is the exact same wine. Even more interestingly, if you take white wine and put it in two glasses, you pour two glasses of wine and one glass, you leave just white wine. You don't do anything to it. The second glass, if you take some odorless, tasteless red food dye and you dye that white wine red, people who drink that wine will describe that wine as being having notes of plum and raspberry and wood smoke or however it is, people describe red wine. They will essentially describe the red colored wine as being red wine. When they taste that exact same wine that it's its natural color, which is white, they will describe it as being grape fruity with notes of green grass. What they see profoundly expects how they experience something. Although the wines are exactly the same, how they interact with things on a visual level fundamentally changes their experience. As librarians, we work really hard to make our individual interactions with our community as pleasant, clear and helpful as possible. And I argue that we should aim for the same in our materials, especially when those materials have the potential to be shared widely, whether that's on your campus community, as is my case, or whether that's with your larger town community, but also online through social media. The effects of good design and good materials can have very far-reaching benefits. When something is designed well, it makes us want to get closer, take in the information and to engage with that. Design can apply to nearly everything from the layout of materials in our libraries to architecture of building, but today we're going to be talking about graphic design in libraries. Specifically, I'll be touching on some of the practicalities of the design process and highlighting lots of free or freemium resources that you can use to take your designs from good to great. So I've designed my talk in about three parts. So firstly, we're going to cover four, what I believe to be, fundamentals of graphic design, those four considerations that you can use to really up the level of your design thinking. Then I'm going to talk about three shortcuts. So having all the time in the world to make beautiful designs and play around with fonts is great, but sometimes you just really need to get something done. So I'm going to give you three shortcuts on how to get there a little faster, and then a few extras for more resources and extra learning as we get towards the end. So firstly, my first fundamental is layout. Layout is the most basic piece of any design. And this is where you ask all the really important clarifying questions of what you need your design to do and how you're going to go about doing it. This is where you make your plan. And in fact, those of you who are teachers as I am and spend a lot of time writing lesson plans, I actually, I often approach design of things, a similar way to the way I approach a lesson plan. I ask myself, what do I need? What do I want people to know or be able to do as a result of interacting with this design in a similar way that I might ask the same questions about what I want people to know or be able to do as a result of my instruction? So some questions that you might ask, what does this thing need to do? What are your constraints? Are they size constraints? Are they display constraints? Are you going to display this thing in print? Are you going to display it digitally? Is it going to be both? How am I going to organize my information and is there a hierarchy to the information? Are the pieces that are really, really important? Are the pieces that are not so important? Which piece is the most important? And how are you going to show that importance? Are you going to use color, texture, placement, size? Does the flow of information make sense and is it clear? Is there an easy way for people to kind of make their way through the design? Can they get from beginning to end easily? And is there anything here that isn't needed? So I have here my one and only example today of what I consider to be a really bad design and I'm showing it to you because I think that while the intentions of this design were good, this is a classic example of someone not asking the important clarifying and layout questions before sending something out into the world. So on the screen you see an image of a bookmark that was distributed at my college by the athletics department. And what I believe this bookmark was meant to do was to communicate the hours of the fitness center, swimming pool, rock climbing wall, etc. to people. And the way they chose to do that was on a bookmark with these giant long URLs that I'm guessing they hope people were persistent enough to like pick up the bookmark and log into a computer and you know open a browser window and type in a giant long URL correctly and then get to the hours information. I would argue that this is asking a lot but it's also a good example of not asking good questions before making a design. Not only is it not aesthetically pleasing but it also doesn't do what it's set out to do. It doesn't communicate those venue hours. So here is an example of two of the same information presented two different ways. So Paul Smith College Library puts out a newsletter on a monthly basis called The Thinker. Excuse me. And it's distributed mostly in our restrooms across campus which is why you see the little thinker statue that's contemplating a roll of toilet paper there. And this is something that is something that I do on a monthly basis and on the left hand side of your screen you can see my first attempt. I have some templates that I've developed over the years that I like to use. You know I'm in a rush. I slapped my information into the template that I've already got going. It was just about to hit print when I stepped back for a second and I took a look at it and I asked myself why would anyone read this? Is there anything here that I feel like would cause someone to want to read it? Is it easy? You know I'm sort of retroactively asking myself a lot of these layout questions. And I said to myself I can't see me reading this in the bathroom and that's a real clue right? If I don't see myself reading it how can I expect anyone else to do it? So I went home and I came back the next day and I rearranged things into what you see on the right hand side of the screen. I was always calling it three quick things. Why was I not choosing to display this in a list? You know lists have a lot of advantages to them. One of which is that it offers people a really easy way to make their way through information. To start somewhere and know where they're beginning and know where they're ending. In addition it allowed me to put in a little tiny bit of extra information that could be helpful to students and community members wanting to know about the hours for the spring. And I want to point out that actually the text in this did not change. So all of the little articles are exactly the same. The only thing that changed is the way the layout of that information how that information is presented. And I would argue that the design on the right hand side is just a much better, clearer, more engaging kind of design than the one on the right. And that's all as a result of layout. So we talked about some questions that you can ask yourself about about the thing that you're trying to make before you do it. And so then that raises questions about like how do you even get started. I find staring at a computer screen when I'm trying to design something to be really incredibly paralyzing. I just can't do it with a blank computer screen. And so what I like to do is I just get an eight and a half by 11 size sheet of paper and I start sketching out really rough blocks. You know, I want the image to go here, title is going to go here, there's going to be some text here. I want to make sure I include sponsorship information and that's going to kind of go in this area. And then once I have that really super rough sketch then I go to my computer screen and start translating that into actual imagery. I make my plan before I start essentially. And then you may think this is the end of end of paper in the design process and it certainly is not for me. I constantly check the layout on the screen and also in print. So I'm constantly printing out pieces of paper, taking that you know step back and I'm looking at them, making some tweaks and doing it again. I find I have a hard time with that on a computer screen so I need to use paper. And you can see here an example of my personal design process at work. So this is a really simple poster in the end that was meant to is a request for for proposals for the library sponsored student speaker series. And so there were a couple of basic pieces of information that needed to be communicated and it took quite a bit of paper to get there. So I started with the central graphic. You know, everything looked good on the computer screen. Transparency of those speech bubbles was seemed right on. And then when I printed it out it just didn't translate well. I had to adjust them. So I got that where I wanted. I added, I blocked in where I thought pieces of text were going to go. I tried that and it didn't didn't work. I didn't like the way it looked. So I tweaked a couple of things. For a little while I thought I was going to put white text over the central image. I didn't think that was readable enough. So I tried black text. I thought that was a little harsh. And just to kind of give you an example of how tweaky I can be on the final text is actually very dark gray. But basically this is meant to show the power of looking at something in print. You can print anything on a standard size sheet of paper just by choosing fit size to fit or whatever in your print options. And the little tweaks that you can make about color, about spacing, about I want this piece to be a little bit more visual. I think I need to make this part bold. Can really make the difference between something that contains all the information but is a little bit difficult to muddle your way through to something that is not only visually interesting but also much more communicative. So my second fundamental is color. What colors are you going to use and how are you going to choose them? Obviously you can choose any colors that you like and the colors that you choose will have some effect on that piece, on that fundamental communication that we were talking about. I have two color palettes here. One based on chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream which results in a very natural refined calming kind of color palette. And another based on Superman ice cream which is a very different palette, a very vivid, vibrant and energizing palette. As a kind of best practice, I like to recommend that people choose no more than three colors as a good place to start especially as you're getting started and graphic design. I think choosing a limited color palette is going to help you keep things feeling really cohesive while still providing the interest and contrast that you're looking for. And three colors seems to be a really manageable number or no more than three colors. I don't count black and white to be among that three so if you were to count those then maybe you could sort of have up to five colors. And like I said this will help things feeling feel as though they belong all together. One example of a three color color palette is actually this presentation. I have a navy blue background. I have a medium blue as my sort of imagery accent. And then the text is actually not white but a cream color. Another example of a limited color palette is this poster which is a poster that I designed to communicate to our campus community the results of the LibQual survey that they took a couple of years ago. And I had a really difficult time designing this poster for a number of reasons but one of them had to do with color. And I found that things really opened up to me once I found that LibQual icon in the top left hand of the screen. And you'll notice that there's actually three colors at play there. There's yellow, purple, and kind of teal color. And I only used two in my design. I used teal and I used purple. And what I think this does is really help things feel like the whole poster is working together towards the same end. It's all of a piece. When you have lots of big blocks of color or you have words bolded in a whole rainbow of things it can feel really, really disjointed. And so, of course, rules are meant to be broken but as a best practice and a suggestion for starting out I recommend no more than three colors. Let me give you some suggestions of places you can go to help you out with color. My first suggestion is a website called or it's not a website, it's a browser add-on called Colorzilla. So you can install this in Chrome and Firefox and what this allows you to do is pick up colors on the web. So this is really great if you, for instance, find a color or some color combinations that you really like already being used on a particular web page or for me or maybe for your communities picking up the colors that are being used on the college web pages to make things feel as though they are all working together as though they all belong together. And it's just as easy as clicking on the add-on using that little color dropper and then it allows you to copy to your computer's clipboard and RGB or hex code or whatever it is that you prefer which you can then paste into whatever piece of software you happen to be using. It's really easy to use. D Grave is a color palette generation service. So this is how I made the ice cream color palettes a couple of slides ago. And what this does is you enter the URL of an image into the box there. You hit Color Paletteify and it will give you a color palette of both a dull color palette and a vibrant color palette based on the colors at play in that image. You know, if you love an image part of probably part of the way the reason that you love it is the interplay of colors available in the image. And particularly if you're trying to evoke a certain feeling like a beachy kind of feeling as in this example using a color palette generator can be really helpful. And once again, you just take those hex codes you put them into your software of choice and off you go with your customized color palette. Now, if you're not quite sure where to start you're having a hard time you just, you know, decisions are not your strong point you don't have an inspiration image. Design seeds might be a place to help you out. So this website gives you both an image and the color palette generated on that image in the same place. So you don't have to have an inspiration image you don't have to have a particular color in mind. You can simply scroll through and pick something that sort of strikes your fancy. My third fundamental is images. Where do you go to find images that you can legally reuse and remix? So this is a book talk poster that I designed for an author who came to speak on campus. And obviously since the book talk poster the book cover was prominently featured but Philip Ackerman Leist is also a homesteader and a huge proponent of working working land with draft animals and specifically teams of oxen. So I wanted to make sure that I included I included a little sort of nod to that in the form of a cow which you can see in the bottom of the screen on the bottom of the poster and so where might you go to find something like that? Well a couple of suggestions for you that you probably already heard of but bear repeating one would be Flickr Creative Commons where you can go to search for Creative Commons licensed images. A lot of non-professional photography a lot of vintage images. Google now in its image search also has a search tool that will allow you to filter those results based on licensing and reuse which has made that a lot more attractive for my use personally. But let me give you some suggestions of places you probably haven't heard of. One would be Morgfile. Morgfile is an aggregator of stock images so it searches a bunch of different websites and returns all of their available stock images. You can see I searched Moose here got tons of results and these are all available free for your use. You don't have to pay for them at all. Pixabay is a similar service to Moorgfile in that it aggregates stock images but it also includes illustrations and vector images as well as just straight up photography. So vector images if you aren't aware are images that can be enlarged or shrunk to any size without losing the image quality. So if you've ever had the experience of wanting to use a particular image and then needing to blow it up a little bit to fit your poster or whatever it is and then printing it out and finding that image has gone very grainy and the quality is really bad now vector images won't do that. They will both expand and contract without losing the structural integrity of the image. And also just as a side note I recommend that people pay attention to the size of the image that they're trying to use because graininess can be an issue. Whenever possible choose something that's larger than the space that you have so you can shrink it down and avoid grainy images. But also vector images come often with transparent backgrounds which you can see here behind this Moose silhouette in the gray and white check. That is an indicator of a transparent background and what that means is when I put if I was to pull this Moose onto the navy blue background of my slide all you would see would be the Moose silhouette and not kind of the larger rectangle of the image around it. So this is great for colored backgrounds that's great for photoshopping things into images. Let me give you another suggestion particularly if you're looking for icons. The Noun Project is a great website that will give you an icon to represent just about any concept or idea you can think of. Really truly if you have a concept that you're trying to communicate and you're looking for a very sort of pared down way to do it the Noun Project probably has an icon for that. You can see here all kinds of different ways of representing the idea of a Moose. The Mountain Dweller in me would like to point out that some of these are not actually Moose but caribou but beside the point large horned mammal there is an icon for that. So this is an example of a design done by Elena Vermincki of St. Mary's College of Maryland who used iconography to communicate a piece of information that was really important for faculty to know but the kind of thing that they would sort of probably ignore. So this was meant to communicate the journal selection process to faculty members and this is the kind of thing that could easily be communicated with an email, a bulleted list, PowerPoint slide, just chalk a block full of text and understanding that that is a communication that's really easy to ignore, really easy to not pay attention to. Elena created this design to counteract that and I would argue that the use of this just not looking like the standard that this design would cause people to stop for a second and actually look at it rather than just saying, oh blah, another list and move on. And when you cause someone to stop and take a look, they have taken in some of that information and in fact they've probably read bits of it because as literate adults we don't really think about reading, it just happens when we look at words and so if they've read a little bit, chances are that they're much more inclined to read all of it than they were than they were in a list format and I argue that this is just a much more effective way of communicating some of that important but not as sexy information to people and not only is this a better way of communicating it but it's probably a lot more effective as well. So my last fundamental is fonts. Fonts are great, they're really easy to install on your computer and you can get loads of great ones for free. The right combination of fonts can almost even stand in for an image. For example, this art show poster here that I designed for a student art show that we hosted in the library doesn't use any images at all. At all, it just uses fonts. One of my favorite resources for free fonts is a thousand and one font. This is a website and one of the reasons I love it is because you can preview your word or phrase in the font. An alphabetical list of characters is certainly shows you what you can expect a font to look like in theory but in practice, things can look a lot different. So being able to preview a font in those crucial words or phrases can really help cut down on your decision-making process. DAFONT is another website that does similar things to a thousand and one font. I like DAFONT if I'm trying to match a particular feel of a font, I find their filtering and browsing options to be really useful. You can search for Western fonts or retro fonts or Mexican fonts or handwritten fonts, all kinds of stuff. This also has a preview feature which I find really helpful. In addition, DAFONT also has lots of dingbats. Now, you probably discovered dingbats on your first computer and said to yourself, wow, that's super cool and never actually used them. Well, here is your opportunity. Dingbats are so useful in designs, particularly, and I'm not sure that a real paid graphic designer wouldn't necessarily choose to use dingbats, but for a self-educated off-the-cuff kind of graphic design, dingbats can really help bridge the gap. You don't need to know how to make perfect little curly cues or nice curly arrows or how do you represent music or different shapes or whatever. There's a dingbat for that and it'll save you a ton of time. And DAFONT has lots of different dingbats. One last suggestion for you on the font front, and this is a real typography nerd suggestion. So this is a website called TypeWolf and if you've ever had that experience of seeing a design and saying to yourself, oh my gosh, I love that font. I want it for my very own. Unless you're a typography professional, chances are good that you are never going to be able to find out exactly what that font is. Now, you might get close, but your powers of being able to exactly match that font are limited and TypeWolf is a website that helps bridge that gap. It gives examples of sort of design in the wild, if you will, and it tells you exactly what fonts are being used. So not only will this help you say, I love that font, what is it, but it will also help you get an understanding of how different fonts might work together when you're trying to make decisions about which fonts you might use. So this is an example from Solvig Lund of Concordia College of another one of those pieces of information that is really important for people to know, but they're very susceptible to just kind of ignore or not pay attention to. This is a problem that we all face is getting people to return their materials, and particularly for us in academic libraries, getting people to return their materials at the end of a semester. And so the way that she communicated this rather than just, you know, throwing a sign up on the front door or sending out an email to people to remind them that they needed to return their books for a certain time is through this really gorgeous design. And she did it in that, you know, very popular chalkboard style that is popular these days, and she used a bunch of different fonts, and she also used dingbats. So the little banner, the curly arrow, all of those little swirls, those are actually dingbats that she has used just to kind of show you what can be done with font and typography. And once again, I would argue that choosing to communicate this very basic information in this way would cause people to actually stop and take a look. And when they stop and take a look, you force them to kind of engage with the information. And not only is it a better communication tool, but I think that it also, you know, makes people remember. They remember not only the design, but the information within it. So those are my four fundamentals of graphic design that was layout, color, images, and fonts. So now let's talk about some shortcuts that you can take when you don't have a lot of time to mess around with, you know, trying out a lot of different things. You just really need to get from point A to point B. You're on a time deadline. You know, the bathroom is all backed up and your work studies are MIA. My first suggestion for you is a website called PicMonkey. It's a very robust photo editor. So it'll do all kinds of stuff that, you know, your average lay person doesn't necessarily need Photoshop to do because they have PicMonkey. It'll do collages. It'll do all kinds of image adjusting. But they also have some really cool themes for adjustment. So their themes are things like Winterland and Comic Heroes and Zombies that will allow you to take an image and transform it into those themes. So to give you an example, this is a picture of me just kind of messing, you know, I was cheesing for the camera with a cherry pie. And I took that into PicMonkey and chose their vampire editing theme. And I made myself into a cherry pie vampire. So I really lightened my skin. I darkened my eyes and made them red. I gave myself fangs with dripping with, you know, cherry juice blood. I put all kinds of interesting creepy overlays in the background. And frankly, this was a really fun way to spend an hour. So even if it's not something that you necessarily use for your library, although maybe that comic book heroes theme might be useful, maybe, maybe not. It's definitely something to know about. And you can have lots of fun with your friends or nieces and nephews or whatever. So speaking of comic book heroes, this is Morty the Tiny Paper Skeleton. He's a little papercraft skeleton that I use on our Facebook page to do some outreach with the community around Halloween time. So he comes out of his graveyard, he makes all kinds of trouble around the library and then goes back into his graveyard after Halloween is over. So this past summer, we had gotten a grant to do some digitizing of photos and I wanted to make sure to use, to highlight those collections and I used Morty to do it. So on the left-hand side of the screen, you can see I photoshopped Morty into an old-timey image of, on the right-hand side, you see Phelps Smith, who was the founder of Paul Smith College. And then on the left-hand side, that's actually President Calvin Coolidge who spent a summer running the White House out of White Pine Camp, which at the time was owned by Paul Smith's College. Plus, I always like to give Morty a Halloween costume and this year he went as a superhero, courtesy of Pick Monkey. Another suggestion for you is Canva, which is a design templating website. So Canva has all kinds of templates from posters, presentations, business cards, social media headers and icons for things like Facebook and Pinterest. It's a freemium service, so most of their stuff, or about 50% of their stuff is available for free and then other pieces, if you want a specific element would cost 99 cents. I have never had to pay for anything. I've always been very satisfied with what's available for free. So one example of a Canva design is actually this presentation. So I designed the presentation template for this presentation in Canva. Really easy to do, very editable. You can choose all kinds of different elements and colors and all sorts of stuff. I want to give you two suggestions of infographic generators to use because I know that they're something that not only are we using to communicate with our communities, but actually that are in the example of myself in higher education are being used in the classroom actually. I think easily is a great of the multitude of infographic generators out there. Easily offers a lot of different templates, a lot of different kinds of templates, while still retaining all of the highly editable, uploadable, customizable elements that you might need. PictoChart is another infographic generator that is similar to easily. Lots of different designs of templates, but they also allow you to choose the format that you might like. So you can choose an infographic format, a report, banner, or presentation format, which I think extends the utility of this tool. So here's a design by Courtney Seymour of Union College who once again is communicating some pretty basic you should know this kind of information to her community and she used PictoChart to create this really great infographic that just is a lot more engaging for people who are interacting with it than your typical list. So we've talked a lot today, or I have talked in a very one-sided way, a lot today about basic principles of design, tools that you might use, but I haven't addressed that one crucial question that people ask, which is where does your inspiration come from? Where do you get the ideas to do these things? So I work in a very rural area at a very rural school and needless to say, we do not have an on-campus graphic designer, much less a person with a graphic design training that works for our library. So if a design is going to get done, it needs to be me that does it. And so I spend some time like intentionally saving things that I find to be, that I think are good design. I'll even go out onto Google and start googling poster designs. And then when I find stuff that I like, I put it on my Pinterest board. Now, I'm a female, I'm on Pinterest anyway, which is why I choose to use Pinterest. You can certainly use whatever it is that you prefer for saving stuff that you find on the web. It doesn't have to be Pinterest. But the point is when it comes time for me to do a design, I have this inspiration board where I've kept things that I think are great ideas, interesting ways of representing information, and then I can pull from there. So you may notice in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, the EuroPython 2014 icon with overlapping speech bubbles. Now that may look familiar because earlier in this presentation, I showed you a poster for the Student Speaker Series, which also included a graphic of overlapping speech bubbles. That was the direct inspiration for my generation of the Student Speaker Series icon. Pinterest is also, whether you have an account or not, a good place to look for color palettes, a good place to look for font combinations, software tips and tricks and that kind of stuff. It's a pretty good pointer out to other kinds of design-y information. I would also be hiding something from you if I didn't tell you about Librarian Design Share, which is a blog and a website run by two fantastic librarians, Veronica Ariano Douglas and April Altman Becker, who started this blog for libraries and librarians to share the designs that they make. So the idea is that you or librarians submit designs and they are featured on the website with the understanding that those designs are available as a template for under Creative Commons licensing for other libraries to reuse, remix and adopt for their own uses. Not only is this just a really great community with lots of inspiration and templates that you can use, but it's also great to kind of get an idea of how other people are communicating, the kinds of stuff they're communicating, the kinds of events and services that they provide. And it's a wonderful website. I highly recommend that you add this to your blog role and check in regularly. So also today, I didn't really talk about software. I talked about tools, I talked about design principles, and I didn't tell you that you have to use a particular kind of software or that you need to go out and purchase the kind of software in order to make good design. And that is because I believe that people make design, software doesn't. I think that you can create great design with whatever piece of software it is that you feel comfortable in, whether that's a PowerPoint or a publisher or that's, you know, a Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. Really, it's all about the ideas and enacting a vision and more than it's about a particular kind of software. Having said that, let me give you some suggestions of places that you can go to learn more about software or more about design in general. I have greatly benefited from a consortium subscription to lynda.com, which is how I learned to get beyond the very most basics in Adobe InDesign which is where I do most of my design work. This is available free to me through a consortium and if you are interested in learning about design software, I suggest that you take a look and see where you might also have access to lynda.com. Canva, the Design Templating Service, also has a design school blog and short tutorials. They cover a lot of different design principles, some of which I have talked about today but a lot of which I haven't and all of that is freely available on their design school website. Creative Live and Skillshare are two online class platforms that are based toward creatives. They aren't free classes, you have to pay for them but if you get on their mailing list, they're often running promotions or they'll be giving away free classes every now and then and if you're interested in learning more, it's worth signing up for those kind of notifications. I know a lot of people, actually professional designers who use Creative Live and Skillshare not only to brush up on things that they may already know but also to just learn from people who are real masters of a particular kind of design or creative pursuit. So they're both really great websites. So today I have shared a lot of my best tips and resources for designing materials that cause our communities to step closer and engage. Design can cause both positive and negative experiences and we really want to make sure that we're doing our best that our communities have more positive than negative interactions with us. I hope you have lots of great new ideas and resources for how to take your library's graphic designs from good to great and I would be more than happy to answer your questions at this time. Okay, thank you very much Megan. That was really cool, yes. I don't hear the commission a lot of flyers and things, just a few different things. I do a lot of PowerPoints though, so I may be borrowing, stealing some of the ideas for how I do my presentations now. Yeah, for sure. Getting more creative and not just taking what are the standard templates that are offered out there and saying, ah, it's the best I can do. Well, and you know, to design a template for this website really didn't, or this presentation really didn't take very long and it just makes things feel so much more personal, you know? It does, yeah. It doesn't look like anybody else's. Like I said, you remember it, yeah. Which is your attention, being unique. Let's see, we didn't have any questions throughout the show. We do have some coming in. If anyone does have questions, go ahead and type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface and I will grab them from there. Let's see, we do have, ah, any suggestions on fonts to avoid or use or considerations with this part of design. So, you know, what would you like, maybe, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's the classic joke about comic sans. Which is true. I think it has its place. Depends on what you're thinking. Yeah, another font that real typography nerds will look down upon would be Impact, which is what's often used in memes. I, frankly, I like Impact because it has a lot of impact. Right, it's a nice strong font, but once again used in the right places at the right time. Exactly. There are a couple of fonts I've found to translate really well to poster design that I use a lot. One is Nevis, which is free. And all the fonts I use are free or either come, you know, with my Microsoft software. Nevis and Junction, Oswald, are all really interesting fonts that are just a little bit different from Times New Roman or Cambria or Calibri, but function in similar ways and are very, very readable, either small or large. I think readability is a big concern something to be aware of as well. I've seen some people use some fonts and things and I've just had to stare at it and say, like some of the more scrolly and complex, kind of, I don't know how you want to describe it. I kind of have to look at the word and say, I'm not sure what word that's supposed to be. It's like that font is so, you know, complex and, yeah, can be a little much, yeah. Okay, next, if someone says, you mentioned limiting colors. What about fonts? And I think that a lot of those suggestions kind of apply, although with fonts, I think a standard practice is two, maximum three different fonts and similar to color, sort of only if they're demonstrably different from each other. You have a header font, you have a body font. You may have a main color and a contrasting color. You don't want to use two serif fonts that look similar to each other together because it's going to kind of look like you copied and pasted and forgot to change your fonts to be all the same thing. So when you're picking fonts, make sure that you have, you're understanding what function they're going to play and that you understand that they, you need them to do different things. True, okay. Next, I have a question about alignment. Decades ago, I was told to pay attention to this with text and avoid center alignment as it's hard to follow, but you used it all the time and many of your examples, could you explain that choice? Yeah, so I think a center alignment is hard to follow when you're looking at large blocks of text. I definitely, if I'm, for instance, if we go back to the, gosh, back for this poster here. This is a good example of both centered and specifically aligned text. So all of this information about what the book is about, I wouldn't recommend center alignment on that because it is going to be really hard to find the end of your line. Now, if you're trying to communicate titles or taglines or something that's just really short and is meant to be sort of a punch, that kind of thing, I think, is easier to read when it's centered on a poster. It's easier to grab onto and to follow. And so it kind of comes back to that. Is it easy to follow? Do you allow people to find their way through things in a way that is both logical and also readable? Well, it's like many of these things it's going to be, depend on the situation, it's going to vary case by case, depending on what you're doing, what the project is for. Yeah, let's see. Okay, here's another question. How do you decide whether or not to include a border for a poster? It may appear to be straightforward, but sometimes I struggle with whether or not to include one. Any suggestions? Yeah, I tend to not usually. And that's a personal choice. You know, you do you. I tend to not because I worry about alignment in printers, especially if I'm printing something really big on a large format printer. Like this book talk poster was actually like a conference size, so it was really big. And I wanted to make sure that if the alignment of the printer wasn't exactly right, that everything was still going to look okay. So I often choose to not include a border. And once again, that's a personal choice. I think you can certainly do it, although I might choose instead to use a frame around a particular image or around some particular text to highlight something rather than highlighting the whole poster, if that makes sense. Yeah, I said thank you very much, yeah. Okay, that's the last question that came in. Anybody have any other questions you want to type? Oops, something just popped up here, okay. Is it important to have house fonts or colors for brand identity and consistency? Or is it okay to have signage and flyers posted nearby with the design elements that vary a lot? Yeah, I think that that has, as a question I'm wrestling with from my own library. I have been moving us towards some brand identity, not necessarily to separate us hugely from the college, but something that feels like not only the library, but the library at Paul Smith's College. And which is where I've kind of landed on these fonts that I really like, Nevis and Junction and Oswald, that feel unique, but are still very functional kinds of fonts. I try to use the college colors a lot in my communications. We're out in the woods, so there's a lot of greens and browns and yellows and that kind of stuff. And trusting that as the central person who's doing design for the library, things are going to kind of feel like they came from one place. I understand that's a more difficult question to do when you are either designing by committee, or there's a lot of different people in your organization who are responsible for design. And if that is the case, if there are a bunch of people who are trying to create a design voice for an institution, you may choose to have some best practices or things that you know have worked really well in the past available in terms of fonts and colors. I think also in some cases, well, depending on what you're doing, it may not be under your control at all. There may be some sort of dictated as anything you're going to do for the college, for the university, is going to have this header on it. You must have this kind of footer on something, and you must use these colors for your main, so you may have some things that are dictated to you that you've got to then work within. Yes, and that's certainly a good tip. I'm lucky enough that there's a limited amount of red tape in general. I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've read tape in general in my institution, so I'm able to cast on that freedom, but you are totally 100% correct that a lot of places already have their own sort of style guide, if you will. So you might have to do that, and so is this also still okay to have different things that may vary depending on the thing that you're trying to promote? Yeah, absolutely. And so I did say, would you mind repeating your favorite fonts again? Yeah, so actually in this poster that I still have up, I believe that it's Nevis injunction that I used here, so Nevis is the header font, the sans serif font, and Junction is the one that's got a really, that's the text font, it's got a really, it's not quite a serif font, but it sort of functions similarly. Another one I really like is a font called Oswald, and those are all available on either 1001 fonts or DeFont for free. Cool, all right. So we're about at the, still after 11, sort of about the end of our full hour here. Does anybody have any last minute urgent questions? Get them typed in there. There's just a few thank yous that came through as well, Megan. Thank you, enjoyed it, found useful ideas, and someone said, just comparing this presentation to others I've seen recently makes the importance of good design clear to me. I'm not sure if they mean your content or that you designed something better than someone, other ones, but we'll just... Well, thank you very much for the one. Yeah, let's see. All right, now it looks like just a whole bunch of thank yous, good presentation. Thanks so much for being here, coming through. So I think that we will wrap it up then from that. Yes, thank you very much, Megan. This is yet, like I said, we had a request for this, and it's definitely some good ideas here that I think we'll be using. I'll be borrowing, as I said, for my work that I do. So I'm going to pull back, present your control to my screen now. And there we go. Waiting for it to pop up. Okay, cool. All right, yes. Thank you very much, Megan. Thank you, everyone, for attending this morning. As usual, the show has been recorded, so we'll be available maybe later this afternoon, depending on how long it takes to process and get everything together. Megan, will you be sending me your slides or post it somewhere? Okay, yep. We'll have the slides. I have also grabbed all of the links that she mentioned, all the different websites and resources to the Library Commission's delicious account here. So you can see them all in here, and so we will have this included as well in the show notes afterwards. We always post our recordings on the Encompass Live website, down here under Archive Sessions. So let's see, does this one have the... Recordings go on YouTube, presentations go on in our slide share, and the links in are delicious. So this one will be there as well with all those resources for you. So that will wrap it up for this morning's show. Thank you very much for attending. I hope you'll join us next week when we have an exciting guest. We have Courtney Young, current ALA president. We'll be on the line with us to talk about the strategic planning process that ALA is in the midst of going through right now. Working on redoing how ALA is handling some things. So she's going to be with us next Wednesday to talk about that. So please do sign up and join us for that. And for any of our other shows, you can see here our topics that are listed on our website. Also, if you are a Facebook user, if you're big on Facebook, Encompass Live also has a Facebook page. Go ahead and like us over there. It gets loaded up here. I post reminders of when you can log in to the show that's happening right now. I announce when our recordings are available, reminders of upcoming shows. So if you are big on Facebook, this would be a good place to keep reminding, getting reminders of when the new shows are coming up. Other than that, that wraps it up for this show. Thank you very much for attending. And we will see you. Just want to double check and see. Just double checking my questions and look at anything else came in. Just a lot of great presentation. Thank you very much, Megan. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, everyone. And we'll see you next time at Encompass Live. Bye-bye.