Design Reviews

It’s been a long time since an update to my blog here, mainly because I got a day job that was partly as a blogger! You know what it’s like, if you do a job at work it’s hard to come home and do the same kind of thing in your spare time. Anyway, I’ve had the recent ‘good’ news of being made part-time, so I have much more time and inclination to work on Design Reviews. Please indulge me and have a look at some recent logo designs I have worked on. Of these only one was successfully adopted by a customer, and even that one I preferred an alternative design I’d made.

Starting with that the logo for WebProjectNW (North West). My favoured proposed logo followed by the actually adopted logo.

WebProjectNW, my favourite

WebProjectNW, customer adopted this logo

WebProjectNW is a pretty good site too, it links up web developers and people who want websites in North West England. It’s a bit like MyBuilder which I recently used to find an electrician to work on my house, with excellent results.

Moving onwards, some un-adopted logos that I made recently and think are quite fab;

Navartis

Lawrence Kent Photography

BITS logo and Wild at Heart logo

LuxyBid

Finally, for my good friend Mike over at FileQuake.com, a new logo for his wonderful download archive/reviews site. It might be getting restyled soon using one of the branding ideas below, watch that space!

FileQuake variations

Dear readers, we recently moved office, I’m talking about my day job here. I had to get my desk ready for transportation, so I got the parcel tape and started taping up all the drawers. I’ve been at this job for two months but, while taping up, I found a very thin upper drawer, a little stationery drawer. As you can see below I had uncovered the melancholic stressed-out remains of my predecessor.

chewed pens

What does this picture make you think about? Is it a little wabi sabi?

chewed pens, alternative angle

Please leave a note in the comments! If anyone wants I can upload the 3MPx original images.

A week ago I looked at Wabi-sabi, the beauty in imperfection. That was all about objects, things created by manufacturers, craftsmen and artists. This time I’m looking at people, more specifically; some of the most beautiful faces of the 20th century!

It really is a case of letting the pictures do the talking. But before I insert all the pictures into the post I’d better explain to the less observant and well practiced in ’spot the difference’ that each pair of photos has one difference. Some obviously asymmetric element, an ‘imperfection’ perhaps, of course it’s a beauty spot. You can actually get one for yourself here in the UK, with prices starting at £75!!!

In chronological order let’s look at the beauty spot lineup.

Marlene Dietrich in 'Destry Rides Again'

Anne Francis as 'Honey West'

Singer/songwriter Lynsey De Paul

Now you might be confused looking at these beautiful women whether the beauty spot makes any difference at all, so I’ve thrown in a wild card. This might help you decide whether beauty is enhanced by the mark or not.

Beastly is in the eye of the beholder

Now I really want to encourage readers to make imperfections within their design work, whatever that may be. But never go the easy way of making imperfect things straight off the bat, first you have to achieve something you believe to be perfect and THEN give it some Wabi Sabi Sauce! It’s a sacrifice isn’t it?

Finally, in corporate work where you might need to use a © or a ® you might be able to use it as a beauty spot, but probably not… The next blog post won’t be about wabi-sabi principles, but I am going to re-visit this subject and it’s application in day to day logo and illustration work soon.

Isn’t being perfect a bit weird? Well it is  for us humans, but for the things we covet and buy a lot of the stuff can possibly be ‘perfectly formed’. Shiny new iPod, shiny new BMW etc etc. That is until you get up to the very high end of things, oddly, where ‘hand made’,  ‘craft’ and ‘characterful’ become major selling points. Now words like rustic, antique and crafted replace flawless, pristine and precision made.

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aeasthetic which embraces objects of art with imperfections, roughness and asymmetry. It’s a kind of art I liked without even knowing there was a name for it, until now… More than once the Design Reviews blog has discussed eroded, aged, worn, haltoned and other ‘lo-fi’ effects in illustrator and vector graphics in general.

distressed, worn and reliced vs brand spanking new

Guitar enthusiasts have been buying into hand-made and artificially aged or ‘reliced’ guitars for quite a while now, look at the picture above. A relic will have quite a premium on the price tag! Just think of how many years you would have to own and play a guitar to make it look that used. Quote: “Fender’s Relic line accounts for more than 12% of its $5 million annual sales.” Another very popular market for aged and worn appearance is clothing; think of faded stonewashed jeans and distressed leather jackets. Of course don’t forget antiques either.

As I noted earlier the Wabi-Sabi idea can be put into your illustration and logo work quite easily now with the modern versions of illustrator which are less about pure lines and shapes than before. There’s a lot of vector tools that can cross over into areas that were once Photoshop only avenues.

I have a couple of other articles planned about Wabi-Sabi style graphics, beauty and design coming up which I think will be very interesting. And I hope to put up some polls for feedback too. Come back next week!

I’ve always liked pop art. And you can see some Roy Lichtenstein influenced enjoyment of halftone patterns used in illustrator in one of the previous posts here at Design Reviews. This post about pop art though is a bit of an accident. I wanted to create a logo originally, for a cafe. As everyone knows a logo should only contain very simple, minimal art or graphic symbols. It’s also best to make it work in single color or posterised. Pop art is often low in colour and detail so it can be a good inspiration for shapes in creating logotypes with the illustrator pen tool.

I wanted a great cup symbol or shape within my logo so I thought I’d take a look around the web for some simple graphical representations of cups. Looking at these I thought I would spot some shapes to complement the letter forms in the logo. But I didn’t really. I did come across a great resource site though.

Pop Art Machine is the place, I’d never been to this site before. To quote the site’s description “…collects, curates and creates pop art. Our focus is painting and printmaking using public image sources as inspiration. Here you will find over one million free source images and finished pop art posters & prints.”

Sounds good and it is good. The image on the left below is my interpretation of one of the cup images on the site. Using a not too far removed technique I drew the image on the right from an actual photograph. The technique I’m talking about it that once you’ve drawn a clear crisp precise vector shape to your liking you then use the pencil tool to ‘lasso’ the shape roughly. Then you make it the same color as the surface, changed with the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) sliders in lightness/darkness only. Also on the cup on the right I sliced up the saucer with Beziers and the ‘divide objects below’ command. Of course anyone who’s used illustrator knows I’ve finished it off by using one of the ink brushes for the strokes around the shapes. It’s quite pleasing to the eye but would only work as a simple icon sized graphic I think.

two cups yesterday

Above is the result of this work and inspiration. The illustrator source file is here for anyone to download and use as they wish. The logo didn’t really work though…

Technorati Profile

I have in front of me the latest 3×3 Annual No. 5, published January 2009, it’s not even on their own website yet! The cover, as you can see is a splendid illustration of Björk.

3x3 Illustration Annual Number 5

Inside the book starts with an interview of Henning Wagenbreth, Artists/Educator of the year, who appears to be sitting in his back garden on a deck chair wearing a beach towel. I haven’t read it because I got the book for the pictures! The book has section of illustration in the following categories; advertising, animation, books, editorial, institutional, self promotion, sequential, 3D and unpublished. Finally there is a section of student submissions.

It’s all great stuff, nicely printed on decent paper and inspirational, sometimes. There is such a massive range of techniques and styles on show in the book and it’s all quite new so it’s a good indicator of up and coming or current fashionable illustration types. Next time I find myself with a blank document and a blank mind I’ll be dipping into this book for some kind of inspiration. I bought this at ‘Borders’ but you can probably get it lots of places; UK people can get it at Central Books. If you know where to get it on-line feel free to post a link!

To commemorate the inauguration of the new president, Design Reviews has produced a special edition T-shirt with the bloke’s face on it. We probably should have done this a few months ago when people were making loads of money from Obamamania, but we clearly aren’t entrepreneurs here, we are designers & reviewers.

Design Reviews T-shirt Obama edition

The quality of the design is only matched by the quality of the material! The shirt is made of 100% certified combed organic cotton, with twin needle stitching at the neck, sleeves and hem. AND it’s not produced in a sweat shop in a third world country either.

The design was lovingly created with a paid for commercial full copy of Adobe Illustrator, thereby keeping workers in the USA in employment. The fetching background Obama was realised with the help of the wonderful little program I have reviewed previously, Raster.

These shirts are a limited edition with no more than 500 being produced. One shirt costs 25UKP or 35USD, go to our merchandise page and order lots NOW!

I recently took a vacation in Tunisia, over Christmas actually. There were many beautiful sights to see, most of them belonging to mother nature. What caught me eye though, wandering around the town of Hammamet, in contrast to the bright white walls in the illuminating sun were the brightly coloured arched doors. By far, blue doors were the favourite of the people it seems.

Twelve Tunisian doors

What an inspirational image on which to base some pop art or arches based illustration using your favourite graphics package. I’m working on some imagery based upon the above, but I’m not sure if it’s best to concentrate on just one door, they’re all so interesting!

There are lots of reasons people might want to look for an image on the web based upon similarity with other images. For me, I had created a new logo and wanted to make sure it was 100% original.  Sometimes when I’ve made a logo in the past it has an air of familiarity and look of an established brand, even though it’s just been born on the Illustrator artboard.  But you’ve really got to check, because you don’t want to give a client a logo which they will later, no doubt, find out looks just like some other company’s.

Sonoran logo, it's so good, can it be original?!?!

There are lots of design web pages illustrating this error, or plagiarism. Look at this one for example. So what do you do? I heard about an interesting new technology recently on a more geeky website. It described a new kind of search engine, not just a normal image search but you could search for ’similar images’. A few weeks ago I’d already tried a web page that harnessed Flikr to find images of similar colours; the Flikr Color Selectr. This is a cool web page to browse but not useful for the purpose I set out at the beginning of this article.

There are a few alternatives I have found to address the wish for searching through images for similarity, unfortunately some of them are just previews and presentations about what they are going to do in the future;

• Imprezzeo
  
• GazoPa – needs someone to invite you!?! You can use it from ‘facebook’, which I’ve never looked at, according to a Reuters story
• Microsoft live search (couldn’t find this feature, but it’s been touted)
• Typhoon images similarity search – only works for typhoons!

All the above were basically useless to me! But there was one that worked and showed promise, though by their own admission the image database held was relatively small. The winner is;

• TinEye

Yes, exactly what I wanted! I had to make an account though, which was really easy. Then you upload the image and click the search similar button… In the case of the logo I’d designed(above) it came up with no matches! So I feel like it must be quite original. When I uploaded it I just uploaded the symbol from the logo, just to make it easier for the algorithm.

If you know any different, or if you know of better ’similar image search’ engines please let me know in the comments section. Thanks, Mark.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 &  2008. What a great film with 1951 version was (is), and what a great soundtrack. I’ve not got around to seeing the 2008 version, will probably wait until it’s on TV. Big problem – it’s got Kanue in it, but the front page review on imdb says his wooden acting ’style’ suits the alien persona of Klaatu. Also the trailer is uninspiring.

What has that got to do with Design Reviews? Well the huge robot Gort is a very cool robot design and I was sidetracked last night while designing a logo to do a version of Gort in Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s pretty nice and you can see it below.

Gort

Also out of huge generosity and Christmas spirit I have uploaded some ‘Gort wallpaper’ for your desktop. It’s available in lots of sizes to match your screen 1024×768, 1280×800, 1280×960, 1280×1024 and a big one at 1365×1024. Also even more incredibly I’ve uploaded the Adobe Illustrator (v8 for compatibility) file for you to download, to see how it’s drawn or so you can modify it, such as move the ‘klaatu barada nikto’ text around to suit your own desktop. Please if you do anything like that write a little comment on my page, or DIGG it or something!