The world needs beautiful design. But aesthetics are inherently subjective. In Design Currency, authors Jenn and Ken Visocky O’Grady show you how to frame the value of your design work in terms that your business partners will both understand and respect. An actionable resource, Design Currency empowers you to do your job with less pushback on aesthetic decisions, encourages earlier involvement in the creation process, and makes it easier for you to justify your fees. For a designer, understanding how your work creates value is essential to growing your business and building better, more profitable relationships. Those relationships are easier to initiate, establish, and retain when you can clearly explain how your capabilities meet your client’s needs. This book shows you how to do exactly that.

The best information design often goes unnoticed by the viewer because it conveys information so quickly and effectively. The Information Design Handbook celebrates projects that are exemplars of communication and aesthetics, and reveals the thought processes and design skills behind them. This comprehensive guide to creating information graphics is packed with essential design principles, case studies, color palettes, trouble-shooting tips, and much more.

The book features an inspirational gallery of work that illustrate how to communicate at a glance, logically, effectively, and with maximum benefit and includes milestones from the history of information design that illustrate and explain breakthroughs and trends.

Research often the marks difference between a good design and a great design. By engaging in competitive intelligence, customer profiling, color and trend forecasting and other research methodologies, designers demonstrate commercial value for clients in a way a design artifact alone cannot.

Although scientific and analytical in nature, research is the basis of all good design work. This book provides a comprehensive manual for designers on what design research is, why it is necessary, how to do it, and how to apply it to creative work. By embracing research methodologies, designers share a common vernacular with their clients. This not only ensures a viable role for designers in business; it raises the value of the designer, promoting innovators who deliver creative solutions and understand business needs. This is the first book to address this issue with a focus on both student and professional design audiences.

The RGD Access Ability project was undertaken to provide the Canadian design industry with the information, tools and training required to meet Ontario’s Accessible Information and Communications Standard, a component of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), 2005.

The standards proposed in the AODA hold businesses and organizations responsible for providing accessible public information in various formats, such as online, print, and digital.

RGD Ontario, the professional association and accrediting body for graphic designers in the province, understood the urgent need to become an advocate for the design industry and an active participant in the development of best practices for these standards. Access Ability, provides designers with the guidelines, tools and information needed to achieve accessibility in multiple formats, making it a required criteria in every information and communication design project.

Our role was as “Guest Experts,” outlining information design and print design best practices for the Access Ability project (pgs 3–10).