Verstyl
An ex-colleague of mine is setting up his own photography studio and asked me to help with a logo for the burgeoning business. I find it very useful to inspect what others have done when it comes to logos. Often I’m both surprised and impressed with how clever and intelligent the final products can be.
As it turns out, photography logos seem to lean greatly toward graphical representations of shutters, tripods, and lenses. Go figure. When it comes to obvious (some might say “cliché”) solutions to design problems, I used to avoid them at all costs. Now I believe that even the clichés have value if they’re done right.
That said, the identity solution I came up with for Verstyl includes, yes, a shutter– however it also integrates the main letter of the company name and can easily be diced up into its parts and still look both complete and stylish. Looking forward to seeing some good things from Verstyl Photography.
Jewelry branch II
I finally found an adequate branch to fasten to my bedroom wall/use as a jewelry hanger. It’s being held in place by one very stalwart nail. I hope the little guy hangs on, cause otherwise I’ll have a lovely mess of earrings on my floor.
Key/ring
This sort of marriage of form & function should happen more often. Very cool. Via PSFK.
Illusions in Design
When one thinks of optical illusions, I’m willing to bet that crazy moving circles and walls that appear curved come to mind. I studied illusions in undergrad and had a great time researching how the mind can play tricks on the eye. But I quickly learned that regardless of how many garish, in-your-face examples of illusions are out there, there are much more elegant and real-world-applicable examples in one’s own work.
Graphic design is all about perception. If your design for a beverage campaign doesn’t make people thirsty for the product, you haven’t succeeded in achieving your goal, regardless of how good your intentions were. Or, if your poster design does not make your audience want to continue examining the information presented, your design is not effective. Distilling this down to the most basic concept: regardless of your intention, audience perception of your work is paramount.
Applied in the most basic way, visually: if your intention is to make a straight line, if it is not seen as straight by your audience then your goal was not achieved. In the image above, the lefthand example is of a truly straight line cutting a vertical bar. The righthand example is of a ‘visually correct’ straight line cutting the same bar. The intention did not stand up to the perception in this case, and so visual corrections had to be made. This manifests in all sorts of design work and conscientious designers are always aware that they will have to make allowances for their audiences.
One of the clearest real-life examples I can think of is in identity design. At a large scale, an identity may be complex, colorful, with light typefaces and subtle tonal changes. The same logo at a small scale will have to be adjusted: tonal changes are intensified, typefaces are bolder, and the designer may have to leave some of that beautiful complexity behind for the sake of easy viewing and safe reproduction.
It is said that “good design is invisible”– and in this case, it is very true. Allowing an audience to move through a visual design without being jarred by the realization that they are looking at something “designed” in the first place, is the ultimate goal. Addressing these visual fixes certainly isn’t the most exciting part of a designer’s job, but I believe it’s one of the most important parts of being a good maker.
Non-Roman Type
I’m pretty sure there’s a moment in every graphic designer’s life when they first realize what typography is. When they first recognize that letters can look different from typeface to typeface– not just in the “I’m going to format my term paper in Minion this time” way, but in the “this O isn’t the same thickness all the way around…” way. I still remember a time when I assumed that all fonts with ‘those little tail thingies’ were the same. It took a long time before I began to inspect letterforms carefully, before I realized that the Art of typography was something to be reckoned with. It took a long time before I realized that I really enjoyed it (once I took the time to understand what it was all about).
Lucky me, I had two of those “a-ha!” moments in my life. One was when I found out about typography; the other was when I realized that typography applies to all alphabets, not just the Roman alphabet. It was then that I asked my father whether he knew of any interesting Bengali typefaces, Bengali being one of the most commonly-spoken languages in India. Again I somewhat assumed that Bengali was typed in a standard font that catered more to getting the point across than to getting a feeling across. Wrong again. As it turns out, a Bengali-language newspaper has as many fonts on the front page as an English-language one. It made complete sense after the fact.
It’s incredible to see a language that you can’t understand– not only can’t understand, but seems simply like a bunch of brush strokes!– in bold, in italics, with emphasis. It’s like looking at a picture upside down: you can see that it’s supposed to be something but it’s too abstract to figure out, and instead you see it for its parts.
I still can’t read Bengali but I can admire it for its curling, complex forms. And finally I’ve stumbled upon Bengali typography which isn’t meant to be functional first, but instead beautiful. See more of these specimens at Brown Town.
HASbags: a step-by-step
Recently, I embarked on a project with a good friend. She creates beautiful, handmade bags that can be folded into an envelope-shaped piece that is easy to carry and quite convenient for things like groceries or library books. My friend asked me to make a hangtag for these bags so that, upon purchasing one of the pieces, the buyer could easily check out the tag to learn how best to fold the bag into its tiny, stowaway form.
After thinking about this for only a short while, I decided that the most useful way to teach people to fold the bag was to fold one myself and photograph the process. Simple enough, I figured, but little did I know that this process would span multiple media and graphics programs and become a project within a project. The image below shows one of my source photographs and its corresponding diagram, drawn in Illustrator.
The diagrams were fun to make; I’ve always enjoyed converting realistic images to vector illustrations. There’s something about distilling information down to the most useful and necessary parts that makes me excited to be a designer.
But enough of the nerdiness: on to step two. Below is an image showing how I reworked the large vector diagram to a smaller, even less detailed diagram that would eventually go on the hangtag, which is shown on the right.
The tag looked nice enough as an Illustrator document with a tan background to indicate the ‘cardboard’ look of a natural hangtag. However, to give a truly solid example to my friend I wanted to show her what a tag might look like in real life. Aside from letterpressing my own tag and handing it to her in person, I could only think of one way to give her the impression of the hangtag in a real context: Photoshop. Fortunately I’m well-versed in the ways of making interesting things look more interesting in Photoshop, so I threw my design on top of another image and doctored it beyond recognition to create…
… as far as I’m concerned, a very realistic-looking mockup of what will eventually be my friend’s hangtags. And there you have it. From the shutter of my digital SLR to the pen tool in Illustrator to the lens blur in Photoshop, this project has journeyed across many programs and landed safely on my website as the newest addition to my ever-growing portfolio. And the beauty of it is that no part of this process felt like work at all.
A world unto itself
Back when I was working at the evil empire (you’re raising service charges again?), my main form of expressing myself creatively was by hand-lettering flyers. It didn’t happen often but when I had a chance, I’d go to town. The best part was that the bands that gave me license to explore were the 60’s-style, free love, swirly-type people. Fortunately the creative gatekeeper was a fan of all of this, too.
I knew that hand-drawn type was a world unto itself and that I’d only scratched the surface. Reminding me of this are people like Jessica Hische, who delivers viewers back to a time of retro typography and visuals. The example up top is one where when I first saw it, I didn’t want to navigate away. It’s the kind of color you just don’t want to let go of– warm, inviting, gorgeous. If ever I’d wanted to explore a true living in typography, hers is the sort of work I would look to for an understanding of what’s possible.
Grid systems
In my opinion, grid systems are underrated. Lots of designers have a bone to pick with people who create text in Photoshop or use Comic Sans, but me? I feel like these people would be absolved of their sins if only they’d stick to applying their use of Comic Sans to a grid system. (Who am I kidding? I have a bone to pick with those folks, too.)
Again, on my quest to figure out how to balance web design and graphic design (they are definitely not the same thing) I’m finding some amazing sites that put forth best practices in design as easy-to-digest, web-centric experiences. The application of grid systems to web design is one of the easiest ways for designers to attain some semblance of structure and clarity in what could otherwise be a very chaotic situation.
On that note, it is worth visiting Fluid 960 Grid System and playing around a little. Even if you know all there is to know about grids, the beauty of the site might inspire you to think inside the box once again.
Hand-drawn letterforms
In school, I (and all of my peers) spent an entire semester hand-sketching and hand-gouaching letterforms. There were concepts embedded in the work we did in that class that will stick with me for a lifetime. It’s a classic case of, “you have to know the rules to break the rules”– if you don’t know how to create something perfect, you’ll be hard-pressed to understand how to make it beautifully imperfect.
Hand-drawn letters are pretty rare nowadays. I love looking at new typefaces and seeing the ways in which people ‘break’ otherwise classic fonts. But the real treat is in seeing the process by which it was done. I don’t miss the tedium of that meticulous work, but it does make for a gorgeous product. Check out more of Lee25’s work at his DeviantArt site.