Design Reviews

Archive for the ‘design’ Category

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!

Do you use Adobe Illustrator for all your vector artwork? I must say that I do, but I don’t always start by using Adobe Illustrator, nor Adobe anything at all.

Have you ever heard of or tried Serif Drawplus? Don’t worry, you can get a couple of earlier than current versions for FREE. But why would you look at it if you Adobe Illustrator on your machine? There are a number of reasons but the biggest reason for me is in roughing out an idea, putting your first ideas onto the screen. DrawPlus can do this very very quickly because of the number of basic shapes in it’s fly-out menu, and then also because these basic ‘primitives’ are intuitively customisable using the ‘node’ editing method. These aren’t like regular vector nodes at all (though you can edit in that way too). Just check out the screen cam video below to see how shapes are created and modified. Many of these shapes would take many many stages to make in Illustrator using the transform and pathfinder tools…

Now you can get these versions of Drawplus for FREE v4. and v6. v4 is free on the website and v6 is very frequently included on Magazine cover CDs here in the UK.

Other advantages of Serif DrawPlus; font selection/preview, colour schemes, gradient types & presets, interactive fill, transparency & perspective tools.

Then why choose Illustrator at all? For me, compared to these free versions of DrawPlus, Illustrator has;

1. Dependable/predictable output files. I’ve worked in the printing industry for years and no-glitch postscript output is a must, Illustrator has always proved to be most compliant/reliable.
2. Pantone colours. And correctly producing one or two colour and spot colour artwork.
3. Accuracy. (and the smart guides)
4. I like the pen tool better (long-term experience).
5. Other tools not available in DrawPlus; scatter brushes, symbol sprayer, plugin filters

Looking at things another way; For me Illustrator is the best but that doesn’t mean other tools are not useful. A new art program can provide a little bit of inspiration in itself. In music it’s the same: So I have a selection of guitars!  Specifically I have two electrics and two acoustics. All of them are great in their own way. (Les Paul, Strat, Acoustic & Spanish style). Picking up one or another gets your fingers working in a different way and, with the electric, using the amplifier in a different way.

If I can get my hands on a newer or the newest version I will be updating this blog with a review. The newest version at the time of writing is Serif DrawPlus X2. DrawPlus X2 from Serif, the vector-drawing and graphics software that puts the power of a professional design studio on your PC

Have you tried DrawPlus, what do you think? Leave a comment or two.

The song ‘Russian Skidoo’ has been recorded since summer 2005, now I’ve only just got around to making the CD cover for it. I drew all the trees and snow textures on a background layer in Illustrator. Also in separate layers I drew the guy and the skidoo. That look a while, balancing the amount of detail to be sketched with what I wanted the finished article to be like.

Illustrating the shapes of the skidoo was no problem but it took three revisions to draw the helmet! The picture I was looking at had a guy with lots and lots of stickers on the helmet and I got too involved working close up and made something far too detailed, twice. This picture is of a guy speeding through the night in a snow storm so it’s not necessary at all to have that detail. Then when I finished I fired up Photoshop and used a combination of the motion blur and the wind tools. The snow wasn’t so tricky, inserting a new layer in Photoshop using the noise filter and distort filters to make it wavy, then altering the opacity of that layer.

The Ebbs (UK) - Russian Skidoo

I’m quite happy with the result, from the ingredients I started with. If I were to do it again I would focus on a detail of the skidoo, coming almost straight towards the viewer, perhaps looking like it’s about to run into the camera. Could do that for the back cover though… If it’s better it can be swapped with the front image! Sound clip here; The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo.

Cheers, Mark

The streets of Taiwan are teeming with businesses, it’s very rare to see a residential only area. Commonly the houses have 3 or 4 floors with the ground floor used as some kind of shop, all the shops are open to at least 10pm. In quieter cities you might go in to a store and the family is there watching TV or eating so you feel intrusive.

Anyway all these shops have many kinds of logos, some don’t, they just have some Chinese writing. Last week on my way to Taichung City (pop. 1,064,440) I shot these logos with my phone-cam, an old Sony K800i. Partly because of my inspiration from LogoDesignLove and partly because some of the logos are cool, stylish or funny. Take a look below, 15 logos in 15 minutes…

Traveling to Taichung city centre, I shot these logos with my cameraphone

Have you every ventured into Pants Kingdom or La Fatte? Everyone must recognise Domino’s Pizza. Now I wish I’d spent more time taking some more/better shots.

Cheers, Mark

Is 3D in the non-interactive and non-animated design side of things a bit stale and shopworn?

It seems so, even clients have asked “no 3D effects”, not that I wanted to do any… So it seems like it’s a thing to avoid, a furry dice of the graphic design world now. In fact there has been a consciously flat movement for many years, flat colours, no gradients, no shadows and no 3D. However it seems perspective effects are still quite popular and isometric effects have been cool for a few years. What do you think, is 3D often used to put lipstick on a pig?

I had call to make a logo for a client today, but rather than wanting a nice shiny new logo this client requested something that looked aged, corroded and distressed – a little!

What to do? Illustrator has a couple of likely tools – roughen and scribble. They don’t really provide any kind of corrosion. In the old days this is what we would have done to age some text; print it on the laser and blow it up on the photocopier a few times at max magnification. Between copies you could rough up the sheets of paper a bit, crinkle it a bit, depends what you wanted.

3000 Recordings

Anyway that was a long time ago. Now it’s easier to use Photoshop and some spatter brushing, the photocopy and stamp and threshold controls, a bit of the dodge tool perhaps. Then you can bring that into Illustrator and vectorise it if you wish to use it in a logo. That’s what I did and I’m pleased with the subtle and realistic results. What do you think?

If I’ve got the time and inclination/inspiration I like to design CD covers for the space-rock band “The Ebbs (UK)”. If you go to the main Ebbs Studio site, then go to the music section there are 3 CD covers there with an accompanying MP3; a sample from the CD. I’ve designed several Ebbs CDs but not got music samples prepared for the webpage so they aren’t uploaded yet. On the other hand there are a few Ebbs songs without any CD cover yet. The music section is a bit bare so it needs updating, but so does everything, all the time in this digital age…

The Ebbs music CD covers currently available

If you are interested in CD and LP covers there is a great resource on the web which you might not know about – lpcoverlover.com. This is a great site with some of the most bizarre LP covers you have ever seen.

Today I had to make a web banner, animated GIF, and it needed to be done in half an hour. That’s OK if you’ve got all the “ingredients” and know what you want to do, or have been told what the animation should do or say. I had a problem though, the client wanted a logo on a blue background but they only had a JPG of the logo, it was therefore in a white square because JPG doesn’t support transparent regions. The white background can be erased in photoshop but it’s not always a quick job. Anyway we settled on having the logo on the far left in it’s white space seperate from the rest of the blue backgrounded banner.

The best kind of logo for the studio to have is usually an “.EPS“, it can be scaled to any size and have transparent regions if necessary. Whoever created your logo originally should have supplied an “.EPS”, it’s also essential for print jobs where you might want to scale up the logo to fit the side of a bus, for example…

Various format images of logos placed on a background

In the example above you can see the nasty results in full of an inappropriate file format for a logo! If you work in the design industry you’ve probably been supplied a logo as a JPG someone has pulled off a webpage somewhere. Then the client requires it placing on a complex photo background or enlarging to be printed on the side of a skyscraper. Two other side-effects you can see; washed out colours and rough clipping in Quark (or most programs that can auto-clip images/backgrounds).