With the plethora of free typefaces available through platforms like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts (which is only free when you already have a pricey Adobe subscription) and the site all designers love to hate, Dafont dot com, why would anyone – designer or client – choose to shell out the big bucks for a pricey typeface? Here are just a couple reasons that come to mind.

With such a limited selection of free fonts, you’re bound to end up with the same font as a couple thousand other companies. Visual individuality is a key element to separating you (whether “you” are an individual or a Fortune 500 company) from your competitors, and pigeon-holing yourself with a limited font selection is a devastatingly common mistake many people make.

Your typefaces should speak to you, your brand, and your mission. They should look the way your voice sounds. They should be immediately recognizable and own-able. This is best accomplished by putting the time, energy, and money into finding just the right fit for you. It’s worth it – trust me. You don’t want to get caught in a situation like the ones below:

If you want variety and options to choose from, you have to pay up.

When adobe calls their font service “unlimited,” and brags that they have thousands of options, it's tempting to believe that they can satisfy all your typography needs. But when it comes down to it, a couple thousand fonts is nearly nothing. I could eat a couple thousand fonts for breakfast.

If I want to use a condensed, high contrast sans serif, adobe fonts only has three options. (Shoutout to 

.) Google fonts doesn’t seem to have any, although my inability to find a single condensed, high contrast sans serif may be due to their sub-par search function. This is no niche typographic treatment– condensed, high contrast sans serifs should be a dime a dozen! But when you’re limited to free fonts, they instantly become a rare commodity.

If you’re not fluent in the language of typography, see the word “Cafeteria” for an example of a condensed, high contrast sans serif.

Services like MyFonts and Creative Market, where fonts range in price from $$-$$$$, will always offer more options and newer fonts than free type services could ever hope to offer.

The better something is, the more it costs, and typefaces are no exception.

A great typeface is a work of art meeting mathematical precision. It’s fine art and geometry and architecture and software engineering all in one. A typeface takes hours upon hours to craft, sometimes they take years to finish, from sketches to vectors to the software you download.

I tried my hand at making a typeface in celebration of VIA Studio’s rebrand, and let me tell you– it was a real slap dash effort. It took over 50 hours to complete and I still have a laundry list of things I’d like to add, tinker with and perfect. Check out the font below, and download it for free 

Free Font

It is genuinely unimaginable how many things go into making a typeface, never mind a great one. If you’re interested in learning more about the typographic process, I’d recommend this Ted Talk by Matthew Carter, one of the greatest typographers of our time.

Not every project requires a thousand dollar type-family. Even budgeting a modest hundred or so to invest in typography can make a huge difference in the final outcome of your project. 

It's also important to note that when we talk about purchasing typefaces, what we're really talking about is 

, which essentially just means you're paying not only for the font software but also for the individual ways (logo, website, app, digital ad, etc.) you plan on using the font.

It’s hard to put a price tag on great design work, but we’ll sure as hell try ;)

With numerous award-winning designers and creatives on staff and a president dubbed a “visionary” by the AIGA at the helm, we are leaders in the Design community. Our design philosophy: create beautiful work that solves problems and achieves results.

Graphic Design

 at VIA Studio is two components: Brand Strategy and Brand Identity. 

 is a process that helps you find the unique values of your organization and your value to your audience, and defines how you can best communicate that value. 

 is the outward expression of your company, and is crafted from your logo, colors, typography, as well as the rules that govern how they are implemented. A great identity reinforces confidence in and awareness of your brand.

Branding

The best things in life are free… Except for good type.

I’ve always been drawn to the warm, friendly way film captures reality. I found my first analog camera, a Canon AE-1, sitting on a blanket at a flea market at age 14, and I was enamored. I bought the $5, untested, dusty camera and spend the next 3 months figuring out how to fix the film rewind crank, then the shutter release button, and then the film advancer. I was dying to see what she could do by the time I got her working. I was ready for beautifully saturated, high contrast photos, but what I got was a bunch of desaturated, grainy photos, with the lowest contrast I’ve ever seen. It didn’t matter– I was hooked.

Vintage filter application on a new photograph.

Vintage Photoshop Tutorial

Vintage Filter Effect

11 years, thousands of photos, and 28 analog cameras later, I’ve learned just how much I don’t know about film photography. I’ve owned perfect cameras, and barely functioning cameras, and the latter is my favorite to shoot with. The photos I develop are always a surprise– the light leaks and the colors that show up are un-guessable.


Unfortunately, when developing a photography style for a client, the “surprise” of amateur film photography is rarely appealing. In this instance, I like to suggest digital photography that’s been edited to have that vintage “feel”. I successfully pitched the concept of doing 

Nothing could ever replace the real thing, but I think this tutorial will get you pretty close:

Take your digital photo. You can use anything from a DSLR to your phone; depending on the final quality you're looking for, you may not need a very advanced camera. I'll be using this photo taken on a Canon EOS.

Go to "adjustments," and select "color balance." Generally, you should be increasing the red and yellow in your highlights and mid-tones, and the blue in your shadows. You can see the exact numbers I went with in the screenshots below.

Vintage Photography Photoshop Tutorial

The changes I made were pretty subtle, and the color adjustments can certainly be pushed harder. For this client, we were aiming for vintage inspired, more than a realistic vintage photo. To push your photo to look even more vintage, go on to step 3 and 4.

Here are some examples of the photos we created for Louisville Parks Foundation:

Blow out your highlights and wash out your shadows.

And you're done! Don't forget to compare the adjustments you made to the original photo.

VIA Studio's design team walks you through a simple tutorial on how to edit a photo to make it look vintage.

Photo Edit Before & After

High-quality, impactful photography makes all the difference to most projects. We provide both in-house and trusted third-party photography resources to fit the needs of any project or budget.

Photography

How to Make Your New Photos Look Vintage

I keep it pretty simple. Tracing paper, Sketchbook paper, pencils, Sakura Pigma Micron pens in sizes 005, 01, 03, and 05, and two Sakura Pigma Brush pens.

Before I begin an illustration, I almost always find a ton of reference photos. I start by poking around Pinterest and Flickr looking for vintage copyright-free photos and illustrations in the theme I’m looking for. My latest Illustration a Valentine’s Day-themed poster for the Great VIA Speling Bee. I knew I was going to deep dive into some really cute vintage valentines cards, like these:

Three vintage valentines day cards featuring a puppy, kitten, and cowboy.

Inspirational vintage Valentine's Day cards.

Vintage Valentine's Day Cards

I loved the cute animal cards, but I was especially drawn to the cowboy valentines so I found a few more.

Colored Vintage Valentine's Day Card

At this point, I had a clear image in my head of two cowboy kiddos riding on a heart-spotted horse with some kewpie babies dancing around them. I dug a little deeper and ended up with some vintage illustrations that were so perfect I used them as direct references.

Vintage Valentine's Day cards with baby and rocking horse.

Vintage Valentine's Day card designs inspired our charity event posters.

Vintage Design Inspiration

The first art phase is all done completely by hand. I collage together my sketches and my direct references, draw on top of them with pencil, and then pen, and then I have a piece of crinkled up tracing paper ready to scan.

Sketches of children riding a rocking horse.

Behind-the-scenes look on how we turn a hand drawn sketch into a poster.

Poster Design Sketches

The second phase is all digital. I make slight alterations to the drawing (Cleaning up ink smudges, moving elements around to slightly alter the composition, etc.), I color it, and then I add texture. Let’s start with the scan:

Here is my artwork after I cleaned it up and played with the curves and levels to get it nice and crisp.

Next, I isolated the black using Select > Color Range and deleted the white background.

Sketches of a cowboy and girl sitting on a rocking chair above babies dancing.

Sketches for a Louisville, KY charity event poster.

Preliminary Valentine's Day Sketches

Then I pasted the black artwork in a new file, colorized it, and started playing with different background colors. I went with the first one so I could build more pink tones on top of it.

I selectively colored the illustration with two more colors. I always try to use one “paper color” and no more than three “print colors” to mimic the vintage printing processes I’m being inspired by.

Textured Pattern

The last step is texture. I always use something like this, either one that I made myself or something I find for free online, and I select > color range and choose either white or black, and with that selected, I delete the selection from the color layers I just painted, so it looks like this:

Vintage illustration of children on a rocking horse printed on a pink background.

Promotional event poster design tutorial.

Valentine's Day Poster

I’ll also take this time to make the color layers slightly off register, and I’ll play with their hue/saturation a bit too. I felt like this poster needed a little differentiation between foreground and background, so I added in another layer of color:

Vintage illustration of kids on a Valentine's Day rocking horse.

Vintage poster design for Louisville, Kentucky charity event.

Vintage Valentine's Day Poster

And that’s it! Illustration complete. All in all, it took about 10 hours. Here are a few close-ups to really see that texture:

Vintage illustration of a cowboy and girl riding a horse covered in hearts.

Vintage-inspired illustration created for a charity event.

Vintage Valentine's Day Illustration

Vintage style illustration of two babies dancing.

Promotional Valentine's Day-inspired illustration for a charity event.

Vintage Cupid Illustration

Poster Illustration Process

Hand lettering: One of the oldest art forms is also one of the trendiest.

From Mesopotamian Cuneiform and Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to the guy wearing a beanie in the middle of summer, drawing tall swooping letters on an iPad in the corner of your local cool-coffee-shop, this art form has existed for thousands of years and will likely exist for thousands more. I won’t bore you with some long, colorful history of how glyph-based alphabets carved into stone became Gutenberg’s calligraphy-inspired blackletter type, which became me crying in aisle 5 of a Michael’s arts & crafts because my mom wouldn’t buy me a set of expensive brush pens at age 8-and-a-half. Maybe I’ll tell that story another time. Today, I’m just going to give you a short list of hand letterers who inspire the hell out of me, and will hopefully inspire the hell out of you.

 â a Portland based artist, illustrator and author, known for her colorful paintings and hand lettering.

 â The lettering, illustration, & design studio of Spencer Charles and Kelly Thorn. This Philly based duo is known for their lettering, illustration and type design. 

 â a Salty Lake City based letterer and stop-motion animator, known for her ability to craft letters out of food and food out of letters. 

 â a Philly based illustrator and lettering artist, known for her quirky and whimsical work. 

 â a San Francisco based lettering artist and author, known for her expertly crafted letterforms, letterpress prints, editorial works, and children’s books. 

 â a Milan & New York City based designer and letterer, known for his “fauxsaics,” a series of typographic mosaic illustrations. 

 â a Philly based designer and hand letter, she’s brand new to the hand lettering game but is certainly carving out a space for herself in the community.

 â is a New York City and Philly based contemporary artist and muralist, known for his typographic murals and screenprints. 

Custom illustration creates a unique, ownable look and feel to your brand - and helps to tell stories and express values that a photograph or block of copy just can’t.  We’re highly capable of creating styles and concepts that engage your audience. We have a number of highly talented artists on our staff that can draw out the best in your brand with inspired illustration.

Illustration

Handlettering

Breaking the grid: a fresh face for web design

At a time when web templates and squarespace sites are increasingly more common, and websites are all starting to look the same, it’s so refreshing to see websites breaking the grid in ways that were traditionally only seen in print design.

Sideways type, overlapping photos, unusual layouts, purposeful white space and color blocks are all popping up on screen due to new and constantly improving web capabilities. Grids provide order, rules, and other essential elements of user friendly, practical websites, but they can also hinder creativity and forward thinking.

These sites are all expertly using their grid systems to keep things cohesive and organized, while simultaneously allowing type and photos to break out of those grids in ways that keep their sites fresh, interesting and fun to look at.

Libratone Site Design

Microinteractions: New ways to use an old staple

Microinteractions have been gaining popularity for years, and designers are constantly working to create new, unique examples of microinteractions. Many common microinteractions have become so ubiquitous with good web design that if they’re doing their job right, they’ll go completely unnoticed.

Picture the heart icon on Instagram turning red after you’ve “liked” an image, or a wheel spinning while you download a file. Essentially, a microinteraction is a change in the state of a website that helps people see the results of their actions. They make websites feel more friendly, and their purpose, beyond delighting and engaging the user, is to make a website feel more (dare I say it) human.

They may be small, but they make a huge difference; they make interactions with a site feel more natural, more gratifying, and more fun, while simultaneously rewarding the user for interacting with the site. They send a clear message to the user that the site they’re using cares about them.

Animation of checkmark, arrow and exclamation point buttons.

Micro-interactions are a popular design trend in web design.

Arrow Micro-interactions

Brutalism: My architectural nightmare is becoming my favorite web trend

Brutalist websites are bold, excessively straightforward, and at times painfully simple.

They point a cheeky finger at “overly” designed websites. Brutalist sites are a devil’s playground of anti-design, with little to no visuals, white space, or other frivolities. They rely on huge type, bold type, outlined type, unique type, and, you guessed it– more type; they revel in their rejection of optimism, light and user-friendliness.

Images and other ornamental aesthetics have no home on these sites, which are brutal and rugged in their dissemination of information.

Your guess is as good as mine, but here are a few things I think you’ll be seeing a lot more of in 2020.

 – Look for sites to be responsive to users wants and needs through better collaboration of strategy and design. More personalized interfaces that create a custom and catered vibe will be the result of companies finding ways to be better aware of who their audience is. User-experience will continue to push it’s way to the forefront of product design by leveraging personalized and curated content.

– Think PokÃ©mon Go. AR and VR have already taken the app world by storm, but look for sites to start catching on. Plugins/site integrations/open source resources will also begin to roll out features that make AR more accessible, attainable and affordable.

– Animated gifs and video integrations remains hugely popular, but site loading times and bandwidth continue to be an unresolved issue. So, how do we retain motion graphics, while keeping our sites functional and responsive? Look for After Effects plugins/solutions to bridge this gap between design and development. The need for designers to create beautiful animations without a developer having to painstakingly recreate it in code is there. It’s a problem that will begin to be solved.

People are beginning to prefer voice over text, and it’s happening fast. Think Siri, Alexa, Echo. Expediency and convenience are two massive factors that play a role in the popularity of voice-capable devices and interfaces, and I think that’s only going to continue to grow. Look for companies to cater to busy audiences by levering voice-powered products.

 a cohesive, mobile-friendly website takes a talented team with diverse skill sets. Our team delivers the strategy, design, and development talent needed to execute outstanding work. We build from the ground up with a focus on accessibility and mobile devices.

Mitch Wiesen

Journal Entries

The best things in life are free… Except for good type.

How to Make Your New Photos Look Vintage

Poster Illustration Process

Handlettering

Top Web Design Trends 2019