Design Reviews

Archive for the ‘technique’ Category

The wife and I have just enjoyed a little excursion down to Devon and Somerset but mainly Somerset. We saw some great places and scenes and tasted some fantastic local brews. We highly recommend a tipple at Sheppy’s Cider Farm, which has been churning out lovely cider since 1817. I’ve just noticed you can buy their cider online too, nice…

Somerset sunset, April 2010

On the way back from the seaside one evening we managed to shoot some lovely sunset photos. My wife particularly likes these, and she took them all. Her ideal sunset scene has a skeletal tree or two in front of the sunset scene. This time of year is the last chance to get these shots before the trees are all full and covered in leaves.

I’ve chosen the best six and hosted them here, you can open the large versions by clicking on the composite scene below.

Six gorgeous Somerset sunsets, April 2010

The six pictures are all approximately 2Mpix images, they have just been cropped down a little but not too much, so they might be useful for various bits of design work, please feel free to borrow them. The pictures were taken with a Canon camcorder with a good lens, the pictures look nice and crisp in their full size pixel preview.

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!

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!

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

I’ve been away for the last month in the far east, Taiwan. Whilst over there, the home of many of the tech companies that provide the gadgets we love to use, I was tempted beyond my resistance limits to buy some computer hardware. Today I will try and answer the question;  “Lightscribe – is it worth the effort?”

Disc labeling is useful, so most people will keep a CD marker pen next to their disc box for the scrawling of disc name (if you’re organized enough to use a disc cataloging software program) or a contents list of sorts, onto the surface of the disc. For a graphic designer, rather than a calligrapher, this isn’t very satisfactory. So ever since the average computer user has been able to make their own CDs there have been ways to make more professional/designed on CD labels.

I remember using something called ‘PressIt’ about 15 years ago, an awful contraption that was just a plastic spindle with a disc to transfer a printed sticky paper label onto the disc surface. The disc labels came two up on an A4 sheet. I found the paper a bit too thin and poorly surfaced to make a good job. Also the plunger contraption didn’t facilitate perfectly centred and ripple free labeling, so that kit got used about 3 times.

I’ve skipped a generation perhaps, because I’ve never had an inkjet printer that was capable of printing onto the surface of a CD/DVD. But now I have a brand new LG Lightscribe DVD writer and a pack of HP Colour Lightscribe DVD+R.

The first thing I noticed, I knew nothing of the technology before buying this drive, was that colour is just monochrome shades. The 10 pack has 5 shades, you can see in the picture below on the HP top sheet from the pack. Also you can see two of the discs I’ve used. I was in Taiwan using a new computer so I only had a few photos on the computer I could use for a label. I quickly made up these labels in Photoshop as 300dpi images at a size of 12cm x 12cm. On screen I used a circular masking layer so I could see what bits would be cut off during the printing onto disc.

HP Colour Lightscribe discs printed with 300dpi images

The discs look pretty nice on the main picture, but you might have an impression of the slight soft focus on the discs by looking at them and the HP label in comparison.

Scan of disc 1

Let’s look at the quality closer up. This is from my scanner. You can definitely see the softness here, especially in contrast to the plastic/foil markings on the inner ring. It’s a bit like a motion blur or mis-registration from multiple laser passes. Below you can see the original photo section at approximately the same size and rotation. It’s quite a lot sharper.

Original photo detail

For another comparison I’ve changed the pic to similar tones to the green of the disc. Compared to the scan, the colours and tonal range have been matched but it’s not so blurry, the text is much more legible.

Original photo detail colourised

I’ll be using and trying these discs some more, I used the ‘best’ setting in the Cyberlink imaging software and the media is ‘version 1.2‘. The DVDs both took about 19 minutes to etch the images upon.

One thing I might test is to incorporate lines of various weights in an illustrator drawing and print it onto a light scribe disc to test the resolution of the process. The Lightscribe website suggests “When using images from your digital camera or scanner, use the highest resolution possible to yield the best label quality.” From my results I’m guessing that 150dpi would be the most efficient res, my 300dpi image was not necessary – it didn’t benefit with extra sharpness.

Now I might have sounded a bit negative in the review but weighing everything up I think it’s worth having a Lightscribe drive. The discs look nice, the drives are not expensive, the media isn’t much more expensive if you shop around. If you want to add an extra drive or replace an old slow one I’d definitely go for a Lightscribe or Labelflash capable drive.

Cheers, Mark

The Design Reviews logo + 'Raster'

My first review here on Design Reviews is of a FREE graphics utility (for Windows only, sorry Mac users). It might be free but it’s fantastic and fills a gap not addressed in any of the Adobe suite such as Flash, Illustrator or Photoshop.

Do you like sometimes to use halftone patterns as fills? It’s quite easy to do solid colour (same size dot) patterns but what about variable dot sizes corresponding to lightness and darkness of the images you want to create.

New Jordanian Bridge

The program in question is called Raster, it creates dot or square halftone patterns in a vector format which can then be used in your favourite design programs with all the advantages of a vector file (mainly scalability and editability). Now I know there is a Halftone Pattern filter in Photoshop but it’s not at all the same as this. The Photoshop filter doesn’t create vector output, also the dot or line styles are uniform. In Raster the dots size vary with intensity or depth of colour. So for instance with a simple linear gradient the dots will fade from large to small where the gradient would fade from dark to light. Before this program I used to try and do the effect ‘by hand’ which was neither convenient or satisfactory.

Try it for yourself, if you’ve read this and made some Pop Art using Raster and your favourite vector editor please leave a link in the comments below.

Raster Screen Grab

Cheers, Mark

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).