Chip Kidd Interviews Neil Gaiman!

Be still my beat­ing geeky heart! Look what I found! One of my favorite graphic design­ers inter­view­ing one of my favorite authors! Don’t call me for about an hour and a half, I’ll be busy!

10 Great Examples of Kinetic Typography

I love Kinetic Typog­ra­phy, I can’t wait to show my exper­i­ments, but for the time being I’d share ten of my favorite pieces of kenetic type.

Typo­lu­tion

Tipografia

The 8 rules of Fight Club — Kinetic Typog­ra­phy

Fight Club — Chem­i­cal Burn — Kinetic Typog­ra­phy

I Have a Dream — Motion Typog­ra­phy

Star Wars Kinetic Type

Kinetic Type / Motion Graph­ics — Sein­feld — The Marine Biol­o­gist

V for Vendetta in Kinetic Typog­ra­phy

Full Metal Jacket — Kinetic Typog­ra­phy

Joker — Why So Seri­ous? — The Dark Knight –Typog­ra­phy

Happy New Year

L’Shana Tovah!

To my many Jew­ish friends I would like to wish a very happy new year. May the sacred hol­i­day of Rosh HaShana give us time for reflec­tion, peace and pur­pose in for the com­ing new year.

Communications and Graphics Daily

Don’t for­get to check out my daily paper.… Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Design Daily.
–via  Paper.li

Case Study: The Revenger’s Tragedy Initial Design

This is another case study posts fea­tur­ing some of my recent work. The pur­pose of these posts is to share my design phi­los­o­phy and method­ol­ogy.

I have been work­ing on the mar­ket­ing col­lat­eral for the upcom­ing Green­Stage pro­duc­tion of The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Mid­dle­ton and directed by Sarah E. Budge. The play is “…a vivid and often vio­lent por­trayal of lust and ambi­tion in an Ital­ian court, the play typ­i­fies the satiric tone and cyn­i­cism of much Jacobean tragedy. The play fell out of favor at some point before the restora­tion of the the­aters in 1660; how­ever, it expe­ri­enced a revival in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury among direc­tors and play­go­ers who appre­ci­ated its affin­ity with the tem­per of mod­ern times.” -wikipedia

Mus­ing on the theme I decided to use a wood cut from the fan­tas­tic Ger­man artist Hans Hol­bein (1497–1543) as the basis for the design. The wood cut is enti­tled “The Duke” from his Dance of Death (1538) series. These wood­cuts are an artis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of death impos­ing its will on the liv­ing and the hor­ror and the tragedy that ensues. It is for that rea­son, as well as the stark beauty of the art, that I felt these images would work for the design, since they per­fectly summed up the theme of Middleton’s play.

Another major decid­ing fac­tor in the design’s look and feel was the the unique style of the pro­duc­tion that Green­Stage is putting together. It is a style that they call “Hard Bard,” which is the per­for­mance of a clas­sic play (often times Shake­speare) with the orig­i­nal script and dia­log, but per­formed in a campy, bloody style. They are very funny, raunchy and often times the audi­ence ends up being sprayed with fake blood. Think of the clas­sic black knight sequence from Monty Python & the Holy Grail.

The design is crafted to a somber and clas­sic piece with beau­ti­ful tex­tures, illus­tra­tions, color and typog­ra­phy and then be jux­ta­posed with real­is­tic and grue­some blood splat­ters fore­shad­ow­img that, while this is a clas­sic play, there is some­thing very dif­fer­ent about what you can expect. Finally, hav­ing the fig­ure of death being the only char­ac­ter col­ored is meant to high­light the role that death will be play­ing dur­ing the play.

This was the ini­tial con­cept I devel­oped, thought it wasn’t the final ver­sion. As the pro­duc­tion con­tin­ued the play took a dif­fer­ent, more mod­ern tact, in terms of set and cos­tume design. To show that, we rad­i­cally changed the final design, which I will share in the upcom­ing days. In the mean­time let me know what you think of this design. For a closer look, check out the high resoul­tion PDF.

Also, if you are inter­ested in the play check it out, it is free!

The Revenger’s Tragedy
Octo­ber 21 through Novem­ber 12, 2011
Shows Thurs­day through Sun­day at 7:30pm.
Cen­ter House The­atre – Seat­tle Cen­ter
Free, but reser­va­tions rec­om­mended. Click here for more details…

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-09-25

• “Design is as much an act of spac­ing as an act of mark­ing.” — Ellen Lup­ton #
• “Good design is a lot like clear think­ing made visual.” — Edward Tufte #
• “Con­tent pre­cedes design. Design in the absence of con­tent is not design, it’s dec­o­ra­tion.” — Jef­frey Zeld­man # Read more »

How to Make Star Fields in PhotoShop

This is a great tuto­r­ial from the ever help­ful Deke Mcclel­land that I thought I’d pass along. His whole Deke’s Tech­nique series is well worth a gan­der. This is a very use­ful tuto­r­ial, where you get to learn how to cre­ate a fake star field from scratch in PhotoShop.

Cell Phone Infographic

Thought I’d share a lit­tle info­graphic that I cre­ated for fun using some of the great data that you can find on the rootmetrics.com web­site. If you are think­ing about get­ting a new data/phone plan, you should check out their impres­sive set of data. They can steer you in the right direction.

Using their data, I tried to visu­al­ize in an iconic way. You can say I was mon­key­ing around with data! Ha!

Some Great PhotoShop & Illustrator Resources for Halloween

If you are look­ing for some great Pho­to­Shop and Illus­tra­tor resources for Hal­loween you should stop by the superb web­sites www.vecteezy.com and www.brusheezy.com. These sites are a fan­tas­tic resource for any designer. They have some good stuff to get you in the Hal­loween Spirit includ­ing these ghostly goodies:

 

 

Really Quick PowerPoint Tip: Selecting Hidden Objects

So you’re work­ing on a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion and you have two objects on top of each other and you can’t fig­ure out how to select the bot­tom object with­out mov­ing the top object. It is a very frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence, but there is an easy solu­tion. This sim­ple tip that will save you lots of time and frustration:

1. First make sure that no objects are selected.
2. Hit­ting the  tab key will cycle through the objects on the slide, includ­ing objects cov­ered by other objects.

That’s it! I went through some frus­tra­tion before I fig­ured that one out! I hope it helps some­one else.