Design Reviews

My previous article about Lightscribe has proved very popular, so here is an update with more information about the real practical use of Lightscribe labeling technology. In this test I’ve looked at the printing of fine detail (lines) at various angles (star shapes) and printed a grayscale test using swatches of gray from 10% to 100% in 10% increments. What more do you need? Let’s get a picture onto the stage and have a look at what results we have…

'Melody' branded gold Lightscribe disc

There you can see the result of the test. As it says, these are 96dpi images that should be on your screen at approximately life size for most people, except perhaps netbook users. If you are very interested in the quality and want a close up look of the print source file (300dpi TIF) and a scan of the disc done at 300dpi, then click the obvious links in this sentence!

What does it all mean? Looking at the picture above gives you a thousand words of meaning! But I must tell you how I created the source image and Lightscribed it so you know that it is a valid and useful test. I created the lines and shades test in Adobe Illustrator, obviously as vector/postscript data. The lines weights are measured in ‘points’ rather than something more commonplace like millimetres, just out of tradition, just as many programs use ‘points’ for type size nearly everyone is familiar with. The file set up as a 12cm square and I exported a greyscale TIF at 300dpi. This TIF was placed in the Lightscribe labelling program with no scaling/stretching applied, set to just crop off any bits that went over the edges. The disc image was burned using ‘Best’ mode.

The greyscale (or grayscale) test is very useful for getting images ready for print to Lightscribe. It maps the colours you see on screen, and would expect on paper if you printed to a decent postscript printer using the source greyscale or CMYK file in Illustrator, to what you get on the disc. I’d say the dynamic range from 0% to 100% in your graphics program is compressed to approximately 25% to 75%. The 0.5pt lines are printed very well but the 0.25pt lines show a bit of break up so I would use a minimum line width of 0.4pt on future Lightscribe disc projects. Also I’m quite pleased that although the tonal range is quite compressed the shades are quite distinct between every 10%, especially at the lighter end of the scale.

What do you think? Be my guest and post a comment.

Cheers, Mark

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

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

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).