Daily Design Slideshow

Check out my set of daily designs; a project where I cre­ate a piece of design every­day. It is a fun and chal­leng­ing project, the fol­low­ing is my set through Octo­ber, let me know what you think.

Check Out My Daily Design Flickr Set

I’ve been cre­at­ing daily designs made in 15 min­utes or so and putting them up on spe­cial flickr set. I am using this as a way to exper­i­ment and hone my craft.  Check them out…

Faking Tilt Shift Photography with a Painting

Design Some­thing Every Day 31 of 365

I saw these amaz­ing images that used a faked ver­sion of tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy on some paint­ings by Vin­cent Van Gogh. These great images were cre­ated by Math­ieu S of theswedishbed.com. I thought it was a cool idea to use a tech­nique that is typ­i­cally used on a pho­to­graph and use it on a tra­di­tional paint­ing instead. Tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy is a style that by using a spe­cial lens, makes a pho­to­graph of  the real world look like it’s a model (see here). When it’s used on a paint­ing,  I think it looks like a pop-up book.

Above is my first attempt at this tech­nique using this paint­ing by the French Impres­sion­ist Camille Pis­sarro. I’ll post some more of my exper­i­ments, lead­ing to an actual tuto­r­ial to give my thoughts.

In the mean time these are good tuto­ri­als about how to achieve this effect. The tech­nique relys on blur­ring parts of the image and tweak­ing the sat­u­ra­tion and lev­els. My quick tip that I’d add is to  keep a non-blurred layer under­neath the blurred layer, then use a layer mask on the blurred layer to to give more con­trol over what you want the viewer to focus on, more on that later.

tiltshiftphotography.net

Visual Pho­togu­ide: how to make a fake miniature

Also here’s a cool video that com­bines tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy and adds in stop motion for a tilt shift video of Dis­ney­world. That’s pretty cool if you ask me.

Here Comes the Sun…

A lit­tle illus­tra­tion I did in prepa­ra­tion for spring. Though in Seat­tle with our rain, spring seems very far away.

Design some­thing every­day 17/365

Survivors get ready to RUMBLE!

Design Some­thing Every­day 16/365

After read­ing the amaz­ing tuto­r­ial “How to Creat a Retro Box­ing Poster in Pho­to­shop” from James Davies I was inspired to give it a whirl. I didn’t get quite as faux-vintage as James did, but went in my own direc­tion. Turn­ing it into a pre­view of some upcom­ing clashes in Sur­vivor. If you’re a fan of the show you’ll get the gags.

Design Something Everyday 15/365

I found a great arti­cle in Esquire wherein book jacket designer extra­or­di­naire Chip Kidd dis­cusses the think­ing and meth­ods that under­lie some of his recent work. One typog­ra­phy trick  that is par­tic­u­larly use­ful is how he cre­ated the dis­tressed text for his cover of Cor­mack McCarthy’s The Road:

The font is one of the old­est tricks in the book. You type­set text in a reg­u­lar font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can dis­tress it and keep it read­able. It’s got­ten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much bet­ter, but if you’ve got a won­der­fully shitty machine it will look all cor­roded and gummy and yucky. It takes a bit of play­ing around, but it’s really not that hard.

With that tip as inspi­ra­tion I used the same tech­nique to make these lit­tle design posters. The type­face is Rock­well Bold and each let­ter was blown up 1600% on a Toshiba pho­to­copier, before being dig­i­tally reduced. The Toshiba was too new to give the type a truly won­der­fully gummy yucky look, but it was a good exer­cise. Even with all of our dig­i­tal tricks, it is pretty fun to get in there with some old school techniques.

Design Something Everyday 13/365

I was at the park with my kids play­ing in the sand box and I recalled this quote from Chip Kidd’s won­der­ful novel The Cheese Mon­keys: A Novel in Two Semes­ters: “Design is pur­pose­ful plan­ning… Graphic design is the form those plans will take.” Between the juice boxes and push­ing kids on the swing I tried to rep­re­sent that with sand, sticks and pebbles.

Any­one who is inter­ested in lit­er­a­ture or good sto­ry­telling would like The Cheese Monkey’s, but for design­ers, I highly rec­om­mend Kidd’s book for many rea­sons, first it is a grip­ping tale of Happy (the pro­tag­o­nist) dis­cov­er­ing him­self and the world he inhab­its. Sec­ond, the host of char­ac­ters that Kidd cre­ates are unfor­get­table, espe­cially Himillsy Dodd and Win­ter Sor­beck. Finally, the book is full of great nuggets about graphic design. That last point is some­thing design­ers should enjoy, or at least pro­voke some food for thought. It isn’t often that graphic design gets so elo­quently dis­cussed, defended and crit­i­cized in any form, let alone a novel. Hav­ing the his­tory, pur­pose and prac­tice of graphic design exam­ined in fic­tion is refreshing.

Links:

• The Cheese Mon­keys by Chip Kidd
• The Learn­ers by Chip Kidd (his fol­low up novel, con­tin­u­ing the adven­tures of Happy)
• Good is Dead, Chip Kidd’s Blog

Here are some great interviews/talks by and with Chip Kidd:

Polyphemus Gives Odysseus’s Men a Hand

Design Some­thing Every­day: 12/365

Here’s a lit­tle sketch for my design some­thing every day project. Imag­ine your­self as one of clever Odysseus’ men in the cave of the Cyclops, and one-eyed Polyphe­mus, son of Posei­don, reaches down to devour you, or as Samuel But­ler grue­somely put it in his translation:

The cruel wretch vouch­safed me not one word of answer, but with a sud­den clutch he gripped up two of my men at once and dashed them down upon the ground as though they had been pup­pies. Their brains were shed upon the ground, and the earth was wet with their blood. Then he tore them limb from limb and supped upon them. He gob­bled them up like a lion in the wilder­ness, flesh, bones, mar­row, and entrails, with­out leav­ing any­thing uneaten.” — Homer, The Odyssey Book 9, trans. Samuel Butler.

Links:

The Odyssey, by Homer Trans­lated by Samuel But­ler via the Clas­sics Archive at MIT.
Free online audio ver­sion of the But­ler trans­la­tion of They Odyssey at Lib­rivox. Although it is great to read Homer, one should lis­ten to a good read­ing of his epics. Con­sid­er­ing that’s how most in the ancient world were exposed to them, I find it fun to lis­ten to them being read. It makes me feel like I am walk­ing in their shoes, er sandals.

A Map of the Underworld according Virgil’s Aeneid Rendered as a Subway Map

Design Some­thing Every­day 11/365: In honor of my love of maps, infor­ma­tion graph­ics and Vir­gil, I decided to imag­ine Aeneas jour­ney as if it were a sub­way map. So enjoy. Don’t for­get your sub­way token’s for Charon!

I have always loved maps, as a child I would look at our world atlas and pon­der the far flung reaches of the globe. Then I dis­cov­ered a his­tor­i­cal atlas at my school and real­ized that maps could not only take you hor­i­zon­tally across the globe but also ver­ti­cally in to the dis­tant past.

A period I found par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing was the Roman Empire. I’d gaze at the maps show­ing the roads stretch­ing out from Rome like a web unit­ing the dis­parate cor­ners west­ern world under the the ban­ner of The Sen­ate and Peo­ple of Rome — SPQR.

The great poet Pub­lius Vergilius Maro, bet­ter known to us today as Vir­gil wrote his mas­ter­piece the Aeneid at the same time Rome was near­ing the apex of it’s power and con­fi­dence. This mag­nif­i­cent poem was writ­ten to, amongst other things, cre­ate a mythol­o­gized past for the Romans of the first cen­tury CE, par­tic­u­larly for Virgil’s patron, the Emperor Augus­tus. As such, the poem depicts the Romans  as a peo­ple not great at skill in art, des­tined to rule.

Let oth­ers bet­ter mold the run­ning mass
Of met­als, and inform the breath­ing brass,
And soften into flesh a mar­ble face;
Plead bet­ter at the bar; describe the skies,
And when the stars descend, and when they rise.
But, Rome, ‘t is thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
Dis­pos­ing peace and war by thy own majes­tic way;
To tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free:
These are impe­r­ial arts, and wor­thy thee.“
–The Aeneid, Book 6 Trans­lated by John Dryden

This pas­sage takes place dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion between Aeneas and his dead father Ancheises in the under­world. This is direct allu­sion to Homer and The Odyssey. In Homer’s work must his hero Odysseus must visit a cave where he will sum­mon the dead seer Tire­sias (amongst other dead celebs). By doing this he will gain the knowl­edge to com­pete his quest and finally reach the far shores of Ithica.

In the Aeneid, Aeneas has the same quest but he actu­ally has to travel through the land of the dead, instead of just wait­ing at the gate like Odysseus. This is one of the most impor­tant and vivid parts of the poem. His jour­ney has inspired artists and poets for cen­turies, now it has inspired a daily design and under­world sub­way map!

Links & Sources:

• The basic out­line of the map was taken from Alice K. Turner’s truly amaz­ing book A His­tory of Hell. It would be dev­il­ish of me not to rec­om­mend it.
• The Aeneid trans­lated by John Dry­den via The Inter­net Clas­sics Archive at MIT. The recent Robert Fagels trans­la­tion looks really good too.
• Free Audio Ver­sion of  The  Aeneid via Libravox.org (also the Dry­den ver­sion… yeah Pub­lic Domain!)
• Under­world & the After­life: A good arti­cle about Greco-Roman ideas of, well the under­world & the after­life via Car­los Parada of Greek Mythol­ogy Link. I used a lit­tle of this for the sub­way of the under­world map.

Design Something Everyday 10/365

Another “CD Cover Design Game” In hind­sight it prob­a­bly didn’t work as well as I would of liked, but blogs are for exper­i­men­ta­tion. Though I must admit I am rather fond of the type­face, Caflisch Script Pro. It is a very beau­ti­ful type­face based on Designer Max Caflisch’s hand­writ­ing! That is great pen control.

Caflisch Script is based on the hand­writ­ing of Max Caflisch, one of the fore­most graphic design­ers of this cen­tury. Caflisch, a teacher of graphic arts for over three decades in Zurich, is author of sev­eral books on typog­ra­phy and designer of the 1952 Columna typeface.

Caflisch´s hand­writ­ing has a free flow­ing yet dis­ci­plined char­ac­ter, the result of years of prac­tice and devo­tion to the cal­li­graphic arts. Slim­bach retained the sub­tleties and nat­ural let­ter joins of Caflisch´s orig­i­nal hand­writ­ing while adapt­ing it into a typo­graph­i­cally sound and highly prac­ti­cal script type­face. — From MyFonts.com