Filed under: Design Resources | Tags: april fool's, aviary, crane, humor, image editing, paper, pencil, photoshop
I may be a bit behind on this one, but I just this morning stumbled upon the April Fool’s prank from the folks over at Aviary. In addition to making some really great web-based design applications, they have quite the sense of humor. Behold CRANE, the world’s first paper-based image editor.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Personal design piece.
Filed under: Graphic Design Humor
A friend sent me the above link. I think it’s really funny. Happy Friday all.
Filed under: Ad Campaign | Tags: Ad Campaign, ads, calorie, edgy, hand drawn, illustration, pepsi, pepsi max, suicide
While I don’t usually read things on Cracked.com expecting to find useful design info, a posting from a few weeks ago piqued my interest. The article, “9 Attempts at ‘Edgy’ That Failed (Hilariously),” features some woefully misguided marketing/ad campaigns. By far the best (worst) one featured was a Pepsi Max campaign intended for European release but quickly shelved thereafter. The thrust of the campaign was that Pepsi Max contains only one calorie, so (obviously) that calorie must be so lonely that it wants to off itself. Sound logic, no? Regardless of how off-base, misguided, poorly planned, insensitive, et. al that this campaign concept was, the illustrations are freaking awesome. Check it.
source: http://eplay.typepad.com
source: http://www.culture-buzz.com
source: http://theworldsbestever.com
Some further reading on the campaign via AdAge:
http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=132952
http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=133043
Filed under: Logo Design | Tags: design, dog park, lawrenceville, logo, logo gala, pro bono
I’m pleased to announce today that I’ve once again been featured on Deron Sizemore’s LogoGala site. This most recent entry was for the Lawrenceville Dog Park, a pro bono project I’ve been working on to help establish an enclosed, off-leash dog park in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Many thanks are in order to Deron Sizemore who is doing an amazing job with the Logo Gala site and also to Elise Gatti, Chris Lugo, and everyone involved with the Dog Park project for allowing me to get involved with this project. As the park progresses I will surely keep you all updated with the work I am doing as well as the forthcoming establishment of the park itself.
Filed under: Art | Tags: animation, design, Ilana Yahav, painting, real time, sand
A friend sent me a link to Sand Fantasy, the home of “world renowned sand animation artist” Ilana Yahav. These videos are awesome.
Filed under: branding | Tags: bottom line, brand, branding, design, packaging, re-brand, tropicana, value
Consider your brand for a moment. Read this article. Now reconsider your brand in terms of collateral (PACKAGING, logo, letterhead, etc.). How much do you think you stand to lose (or Gain!) because of your brand and how it’s interpreted at the consumer level?
image source: http://brightbrightgreat.com
The Tropicana re-brand was met with great resistance from the design community. So much resistance in fact, (from the design community as well as countless others apparently) that Tropicana decided to scrap the re-brand and go back to zero in just a few short weeks. Enough has been written why the new brand failed, but I think it’s worth noting the article from AdAge as to just what kind of impact your brand has on your business. It’s a rare opportunity when your brand can be spoken of in terms of the bottom line as the case is here.
Filed under: Icons | Tags: brushes, design, folders, fonts, icon, organization, resources, stash, textures, vectors
A week or so ago Marmalade Moon posted a contest asking readers to submit ideas for, “beautiful and exceptionally useful” icons. I submitted an idea and I’m one of the lucky winners who will eventually get the set for free!
My winning concept was to create a blanket, useful folder icon to represent “resources.” My line of thinking was that my workflow generally entails at some point in my day reading all my design blogs and usually in turn downloading any number of freebies I stumble across (vectors, brushes, fonts, textures, etc.). I figured these could all be dumped into a general designer’s resourcesw folder, thus making them accessible while eliminating desktop clutter. Additionally, I think that the idea of a “resources” folder translates well across numerous computer user types. Ultimately, I can’t wait to get my free set and see what a wonderful job they do!
Filed under: Web Design | Tags: .gif, .jpg, .pdf, file types, image, resolution, web desing
Let me begin by stating that I have been ridiculously ill lately and thus the lack of recent posts. Sickness now aside, it’s all brass tacks (or maybe Pantone 8962C tacks har har).
Jarel Remick has written a GREAT post today at the In the Woods blog. His article deals with how, when, and nicely, why to use the various image file types for web considerations. It’s relatively brief but covers a ton of good ground from technical aspects to some well-pointed examples. Check it out here.
This had a bit of special interest to me as I recalled writing a paper comparing .gif and .jpg for a design class as a sophmore in college. What I remember most clearly was that my paper was not very good and in my naievete I changed the font from the standard Times New Roman to Courier, which is every college high school kid’s way of saying, “I’ve written as much crap about this as I can and it’s still not long enough, so this is what you get.” Important to note that this probably doesn’t fly in most classrooms, but it especially shouldn’t fly when you’re teacher is a master of typography. I think I ended up getting a “B” on the paper because ultimately the class’ thrust was actual student design work and the point of the paper was to just make sure we could form sentences in addition to beginning mastery of bezier curves. Looking back, I must have looked like such a shmuck to the professor, but it’s good for a laugh now.
