I know this is old hat and has been thru all the interwebs a bazillion times. Still, really really cool.
Check out this amazing way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark in Melbourne. The distorted letters on the wall can be read perfectly when standing at the right position. This project won several international design awards and is the brainchild of Axel Peemoeller. Brilliant!
Branding is perhaps one of my favorite design elements to study, dissect, understand. The intellectual challenge of distilling an entire personality and presence into a single image is such a brilliant exercise! This execution has raised a number of eyebrows in the design community. I find it interesting—not necessarily amazing. Jut interesting.
Everyone is talking about the power of The Story. Apparently, it’s always been important—marketers and advertisers are now just folding all their weapons under its umbrella. Makes sense.
The thing about stories is they go both forward and backward—from history into the future. Some stories are about vision, goals, and where we hope to be. Others are about where we’ve come from.
This quick synopsis of Hollywood Studio Logos tells the history of what has been. I loved it. Go read all the logo backhistory here.
About 5 years ago the graphics world saw innovative and creative use of trees (with other natural elements) boom on scene. They’re still there: a jaunt thru Urban Outfitters will reveal probably about 10 t-shirts using trees as a foundational design graphic element.
Recently, we’ve moved thru the graffiti look of wet paint, where dripping ink/paint was a big design element. In other design-related areas, I’ve begun seeing all things melted. Whether this has something to do with political statements about our environment and/or global warming—I’ve no idea.
All I know is melted is the new dripped. Watch for it.
[update] more from the fast-becoming famous KRINK below… his moniker is all about the drips!
I’ve designed and freelanced for over 10 years now. In that amount of time I’ve worked on everything from biz cards to multi-million dollar fundraising campaigns, and the most important phase of each and every project was at the very beginning, when I asked questions, questions, questions of the client to get their thoughts, feelings, likes, dislikes, etc. That info is the most important step in any good design project. Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum and too many designers make things for themselves (I’m at fault here), not for the client. They design for designers.
Anyway, I saw this interview on allgraphicdesign and loved what Lauren Peone said. Quoted here, linked to the full article.
Before I begin any project I require the client to provide some basic art direction (its right in the contract). Who is their target market? Who is their competition (who will they be on shelf next to)? Do they have a specific look/feel/theme in mind? Colors? Typeface styles? Description of café…tell me a little more about you? In the case of large corporations, do they have a style guide I need to follow?
From here I also have the customer send me designs that they like AND dislike along with a detailed description of why. The more details that you obtain from the customer, the easier it will be for you to create a smashing design. Sure, I’ve received push back and comments such as, “you’re the designer so you should have all the creative ideas”, but I’ve found that 9 out of 10 clients are more then willing to provide some basic direction to get the project started on the right foot.
There’s SO much great content over at SmashingMagazine blog. I just re-discovered this listing of tutorials for Photoshop light FX. I’ve cut/pasted here, but there’s more at their site. Check it out!
Lines Tutorial
A super simple tutorial that makes rainbow colored lines. It shows you how to give them an appearance of brightness and depth.
Expressive lighting effects
This tutorial combines both vector and raster based techniques to achieve a glowing floral design. The glows are applied in Photoshop.
Vector Polishing Techniques
This tutorial covers numerous ways to transform your vector illustrations into masterpieces by using Photoshop lighting techniques, glows, and filters.
How to Make the “Flare” Effect As Seen On WPCustomization.com
[Find this tutorial in the left menu on the "writing page"] In this tutorial, the Lens Flare filter is used on the background. Then the lighting is created with brushes and different blending modes.
Sparkling Hot Girl in Photoshop
Utilize an assortment of techniques to achieve a sparkling design. Masks, blurs, brushes, layers styles and other effects are used in this tutorial.
Amazing Photoshop light effect in 10 Steps
“If you know a bit of Layer Styles and the Brush engine in Photoshop you will be able to create amazing effects. It will depend exclusively on your imagination and playing with the tool. Sometimes just changing some settings and you get a totally different effect.” This tutorial applies lighting effects to a coffee cup icon.
Neon lights with Photoshop
Tutorial on how to make glowing lights effects out of vector shapes and brushes.
Electrifying Energy Beams
In this tutorial you start with the pen tool by drawing a line. Then you transform that line into an energy beam with layer effects. This makes it glow white and purple around a microphone.
Add Another Dimension
Use glows and blending modes to “add another dimension” to your Photoshop artwork
Extreme sports branding
This tutorial first covers creating a logo then it gets into the main snowboard illustration. Vector shapes are applied with layer effects and brushes to make the illustration stand out. This is part one in a series.
Chroma Wallpapers
This tutorial explains how to create an energetic design with lines. Utilize blurs, warps, and other effects. Add glowing and vibrating colors to give this image a dynamic feeling.
Advanced Glow Effects
This tutorial teaches how to create glow effects using layer styles, the pen tool, and some color blending effects.
Lighting Effects – Beam Wave
Learn to transform a one pixel lines into a glowing beam. Then add radial balls of light to emulate a pulse explosion.
Add A Sparkle Trail To A Photo
Learn how to add a sparkling trail of stars to your photos using brushes, layer styles, and effects.
Creating light motion trails & glowing sparks
This tutorial covers creating light motion trails by using the pen tool with layer styles. It also covers creating sparkling stars in Illustrator and then importing them into the Photoshop design.
Blue Glow Layout
This tutorial reviews the process for creating a simple layout in Photoshop, while revealing techniques for creating an abstract glowing centerpiece design.
Fantasy Art Photoshop tutorial
Learn to create a fantasy image with glowing halos of lights and stars. Notice how you can apply glow directly to a cropped image. The tutorial creates the halos with the Elliptical Marquee tool. It applies a stroke and then a glow to the selection, on its own layer.
Photoshop: Light Beam
This tutorial reviews the basic process of creating a light beam in Photoshop; however, it does refer to other tutorials for some effects. The techniques in this tutorial involve using different brushes to paint the light, and then they are smeared with the Smudge Tool. There are a few filters used as well.
Even fairies have to rest – glow and lightning tutorial
First, the photograph is treated to make it a little darker so that the points of light in the design will stand out. Both a linear wrapping beam and points of radiating light are covered in this tutorial.
Beautiful lighting FX effect in Photoshop
This tutorial will show you how to make a beautiful lighting effect with the scatter brush. This tutorial covers the basics.
High-Tech Swirling Aurora
This tutorial covers how to apply the Wind Filter to a waving light beam to create an aurora effect.
Slow shutter text effect – Photoshop
Layers of blurred elements are used in this tutorial. This blurring technique is worked into glowing linear text and circle shapes.
Seriously Cool Photoshop Explosion Effect
Use layer masks and light effects to creatively break apart an image. Points of bright lights, swirly brushes, and warped lines help bring this design together.
Have I mentioned my ephemera-fascination? Not all things old, just the cool ones.
The New York Public Library just stepped up and delivered an online database of images spanning back thru history. Amazing (especially for designers who like this stuff)! Searching for “cyrillic” gave me this image:
… and searching for 1950 gave me photos of zillions of people I don’t even know!
Check it out next time you need something visually oldschool. Even if it’s way oldschool.
Just a few weeks after the close of the last Olympics it’s already on my mind again, mostly because of the work that the VONOC creative services team has designed. I absolutely love the use of texture, especially the clean illustrations combining natural and man-made elements (like wood textures and forest-themed vectors) inside other shapes, nice vibrant gradients, and edgy splash graphics.
More of the design expressions can be found here with the homepage here, and video explaining the design (in part) here. Enjoy!
Letterhead Fonts specializes in old style custom fonts perfect for signage and vintage applications. I’ve loved their type for a long time and have purchased from them in the past.
Make sure you tip your hat to the porter on the way out and give him a wide grin!
All Graphic Design (the soon-to-be compendium of all things graphics-related) just posted a designer job aggregator from a number of the larger online freelance job sites. If you need work as a designer, check it out. Do notice you have to follow links from the list back to each job—posting on All Graphic Design won’t help you one bit. It may make you feel better, like you did something productive, but that feeling would lead you astray. Probably into a morass of some kind. Plus, you’d never get work.
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See the aggregated list here and a note about it here.
I’m always interested in how the secular world perceives Christians. It’s an emic/etic thing.
I just noticed this new cover designed by Crush Agency for the Bible. Besides being a nice illustration (they chose to highlight The Fall, not God, Salvation, or any of the other redeeming parts of the “story”), the cover is horrible. It lacks any context, doesn’t represent it’s material well, doesn’t speak the the audience who reads is (unless this is a Student Bible), and aims more at glossy trendiness than it does good design.
And all the designers who have commented on it love it.
You’d think after the movie Pleasantville, the world would have embraced color as the new Jesus. It has (it’s got nothin’ on Jesus, fyi).
Resources like iStockphoto.com have worked hard to provide support for designers needing to match a specific color palette (even a specific hex color), for advertising and/or branding considerations. Their color space recognition in the advanced search is pretty sophisticated (read more here).
MultiColr Search Lab from Idee Labs has come up with a way to search Flickr based on color. Totally freaking awesome, they’ve compiled Flickr’s database and sorted by color so you can find photos for yourself.
One can only imagine Flickr becoming the new web 2.0 stock photo repository. Tools like this make it that much more usable.
Most of this meat for this comes from DesignM.ag and their post of over 200 resources for Freelancers (see the blog here). Some of the specific content comes to you, with love, from CMD+SHIFT blog.
Here’s what I liked best (text is theirs):
Twidda: Online brainstorming whiteboards for free.
Screenflow is a screencasting software for Mac. I’ve never used this, but understand you can use this when giving a client instructions (like making a customized tutorial for them to use their CMS) or with collaborating designers to give feedback on projects.
You can purchase it for $99 or try out the 14 day trial here. This program becomes very useful when you need to talk with visual concepts but are not able to meet with the client/designer in person, and it gives them the power to review the feedback at their own pace and on their own time.
Use Write Maps to make information webs to organize information, brainstorm, etc. Share the map and allow others to edit it, export it to a PDF or just print it straight from the site. Information architecture, project scope, branding.
I’ve never used What the Font? but have tried Identifont a number of times (to varying levels of success). Instead of uploading an image you just answer a series of questions about the typeface whose name escapes you.
Just plug in your URL and XML-Sitemap Maker gives you a XML sitemap.
EchoSign
allows you to send clients contract via email, they can virtually sign then and send them right back—for a paper-free office. For your less tech savvy clients, they can also print it out and fax it to your own personal EchoSign fax number. The contract will show up in your Inbox once the fax goes through, and Echosign keeps a log of all your contracts.