CREATIVE
MIND ISSUE 1 GRAPHIC DESIGN ILLUSTRATION DESIGN TIPS TUTORIALS
INDEX 4/7 Selection of the some best artists. In this section, you can see artists like Sara Blake, illustrator, fรกbio sasso, designer and chris spooner also working as designer.
-/Our favorites studios of this month are present and ready to show to you their amazing work
8 / 11 We give you some tips followed by some of very imporant designers
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14 / 15 See how they made their amazing work
-/Selection of tutorial that will help you innovating your work
12 / 13 Our selection of the best technology stuff of this month
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ILLUSTRATOR/DESIGNER
Sara Blake Interview: John Markel Local: 2nd Avenue When: 03.03.2012
New York (USA) www.hellozso.com
I’ve been drawing ever since I was a kid...
1. How long have you been an illustrator/ designer? I’ve been drawing ever since I was a kid, but when I left my full time job as an interactive designer last August I really started full steam ahead with digital illustration. As a kid and in college I mostly did fine art, but I think the interactive side really showed me how computers can be a great illustration tool as well. 2. What inspires your work? Pretty girls, fashion, fabrics, typography, textures and graffiti around New York City, MUSIC, beautiful mistakes, tattoo art, and a smorgasbord of other illustrators, designers, and photographers.
01 - Picasso
3. What media do you work in and why? My work is a mix of pencil, pen, pastel, watercolor, and digital photographs and PhotoShop. This sort of happened by accident though. I think I started to feel limited or frustrated with my skills on paper. I could never get to a place that felt finished or polished. As soon as a started bringing them into PhotoShop and adding textures I suddenly felt like something had clicked. “Undo” and “Erase” has also forever changed the way I work. I have more freedom to play.
4. How would you describe your style of design? Freestyle. Ha! I can sometimes scare myself out of working because I’m petrified of failing some sort of expectation for what the finished image is supposed to look like. When you freestyle and run with it, you don’t have that problem. The whole point it to not have expectations. Plus it’s way more fun. You have no other option than to be surprised with yourself.
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DESIGNER
Fabio sasso Interview: Adelle Charles Local: 3rd Avenue When: 04.03.2012
1 - Vintage Effects Porto Alegre (BR) www.abduzeedo.com
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I’m a graphic and web designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil. I have been working creating and developing websites since 1999, however my first experiments with this new media started a little bit earlier, around 96. In 2004 I started ZEE with a great friend of mine and architect, Fabiano Meneghetti. At ZEE we help companies to have a better presence online through well crafted websites. Besides ZEE I’m the founder of Abduzeedo, a personal project that has become the biggest promoter of my work. Abduzeedo is now one of the design world’s most sought after blog for inspiration and tutorials. In 2011 I moved to San Francisco, CA to work as Senior Designer at Google in Mountain View.
1. What is the best part about being a freelancer? I think it’s the freedom to do the things you want to do the way you want to do it. Not that you will forget about the client completely but I mean organize your projects the way you think is best for you. I’ve always had problems with that when I was a regular employee. 2. What are your best methods for finding/ attracting clients? The best way is having a very good network and let people know about your work. The promotion is the most difficult part of the process but as soon as you get a client and you do a good job,
they recommend you. Also there are so many good sites to find jobs and even different ways to get work like writing tutorials for example.
“...a personal project that has become the biggest promoter of my work.”
2 - Tron
3 - Nike
3. How did you start your blog? Abduzeedo? Where does the name come from? Abduzeedo started in the end of 2006. My office had been robbed and I had lost my computer and all my backups for the past 6 months of work. It was really tough and I had lots of experimental works in my computer, all of which were lost. I then decided to start a blog to promote myself and backup my experimental work, which became the tutorials I do now. The name is quite complicated to explain, but it means abducted in Portuguese, but the spelling is wrong. As my company is called Zee,my business partner and I were always trying to find words with the ZEE sound so we
4 - Zee
could replace to “zee�. Abduzeedo was one of them, the correct spelling is abduzido. 4. How did you get started? Did you study something in particular or are you selftaught? I have a degree in Graphic Design, but the tools I use like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, CSS and some programing languages were all self-taught.
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How to be a better designer MoRE TIps To hElp you
forget the perfect logo
Mads Jakob Poulsen A graphic designer from Copenhagen, Denmark, Mads’ iconic style brought him to New York where he now works with major brand identities at Wolff Olins. In 2010 he received the Young Gun Award from the Art Directors Club where he now serves as a juror.
A brand is defined by all the ele- ments of its design system, says Mads Jakob Poulsen, so leave the logo in the corner. Throughout my first years at college studying visual communication in Denmark, I was like a sponge absorbing everything that I could about the world of rules. I lived for grids, guidelines, kerning and design manuals from the 60s. Every project was about creating some delicate design elements for a brand and making damn sure nobody would mess with them, ever! After a while, my perception of the world changed. I stopped and changed direction. I got into system-based design, which wasn’t based only on one rule, but on a combination of elements and how they behave. During a school trip to Amsterdam I heard the term ‘huisstijl’ or ‘house style’ (I think while visiting studio Lava or Solar Initiative). It might just be the Dutch word for visual identity but they used it in a new way,
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and this new understanding made me aspire to break out of a world confined by rules and grids and push to create designs based on a living, breathing system. I’ve continued in this direction ever since, creating designs that open doors, instead of closing them. By designing systems that blossom instead of stagnating, my clients can actually grow with them after we’ve finished the project – maybe even redeveloping or improving them over time. Recently I gave a talk, presenting my work, at Parsons New School of Design in New York. Next to one of my identity projects I had scribbled in my notes the phrase “not the little thing in the corner” to remind myself to talk about my approach to visual design. Identity and packaging design used to be dominated by that little thing – the logo in the corner. This is no longer the case. An iden- tity or even a brand is defined by all the
elements of the design system. The logo is no longer the shining star it once was. It has faded into the background and its supporting elements – colour scheme, typeface, graphical elements, language style and photo style – have become the stars. This even extends to the way a brand handles itself in the public domain, including the language and voice used in advertising, online and social media. Stop just focusing on making the perfect logo. If you’re designing a logo for a beer label, make the whole system act like a logo. Create a custom typeface that can be used on the labels as well as online. Be iconic. Stand out! Instead of spend- ing all that time creating a logotype for a client to put in the bottom corner of a poster, spend the time designing their posters, the content and the words. Make these elements have just as much an impact as the company logo, if not more – make the posters the logo.
how to be a better designer
Daniel Gjøde Daniel is creative director and founder of Danish digital design company Stupid Studio. His work combines true passion with a remarkable ability to fuse visual images with communication that epitomises the zeitgeist.
Daniel Gjøde spares us the slick quotes to deliver his top 10 down-to-earth tips for being a successful designer Dear designer: just like you, I’m flooded on a daily basis with super inspiring, lifeaffirming, pocket philosophical and wise impressions from the design world. Everything has gone global and it doesn’t require much more than adding ‘designer’ to your email signature for you to become one (I’ve been there). I’ll therefore spare you the references to Sagmeister’s books and the ShitMyDadSays Twitter feed. Instead, I’ll humbly give you 10 down-to-earth, practicable tips on how to become a successful designer. One: love the process. I simply don’t agree that life as a designer is dull until you get to work for Coca-Cola or Nike. That’s bull. The process behind any new project is valuable and educational, so let go, feel the moment, explore the detail and try to truly
understand the projects you’re working on. The more you’re involved, the more you’ll come to love the process and the result – no matter the name of the client. In short: you have to like what you’re doing to do it well. Two: forget about your own taste. This isn’t an encouragement to make ugly stuff; rather it’s a reminder that if you’ve used the same three colours for the last three identity projects, then an alarm ought to go off. Forget about your own taste. Love the premise and your client’s hideous logo. As a designer, you’ll know your client’s needs, and you’ll know how to align design and content to make everything cooperate. When you forget about your own taste, you can start making great designs.
smashing things. However, how often do you start off with the words ‘I think…’? When you say, ‘I think green is prettier than yellow,’ you seem no more creatively competent than the client you’re working for. Learn to argue for your design decisions. Go crazy and experiment, but make sure you put it all in order at the end. Don’t be afraid of a bit of craziness, but alongside the process remember to pin out what it’s teaching you about your client and the product. Four: don’t hold yourself back. Make sure you know how to play, even though you’re a grown up – if you don’t know how, you need to learn – otherwise you’ll be holding yourself back.
Three: everybody is creative, right? As a professional, you’re capable of more than just making CREATIVE MIND
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How to be a better designer More tips to help you
How to choose a typeface by Douglas Bonneville
Choosing a typeface can be tricky. The beauty and complexity of type, combined with an inexhaustible supply of options to evaluate, can make your head spin. But don’t be baffled — and don’t despair. While there are no easy-tofollow rules on how best to choose a typeface, there are many tried-and-true principles you can quickly learn and apply to make an appropriate typeface choice. If you work systematically through the options below, you’ll have a winning typeface choice in no time. Let’s get started. What Is Your Goal? The first thing you have to do in order to choose a typeface is form a strong impression in your mind about how you want your audience to react to the text. This is your goal, and it will guide the process. You might provide this impression, or it might be dictated to you by your client, or it may be determined by your audience. Whatever the case, your choice of typeface needs to strike a good combination of both legibility and readability, while remaining appropriate for the audience and the message. Each of these characteristics requires some degree of independent consideration. As you may already know from experience, it’s easy to
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go about this the wrong way and get overwhelmed. This problem can be compounded as a design evolves. Perhaps the hardest part of breaking down the typeface selection process is understanding which parts are more subjective and which parts are more objective. After reading and digesting your client’s text, it is easier to start with the objective aspects of typeface selection because they — by default — make subjective decisions for us. There are no fixed positions on the spectrum from subjective to objective. However, we know that legibility is more easily quantifiable than a mood. Let’s start with the two most objective attributes — legibility and readability. Legibility It may seem at first glance that legibility and readability are the same thing, but they are not. Legibility refers to the design of the typeface, as in the width of the strokes, whether or not it has serifs, the presence of novel type design elements etc. It is easy to tell one letterform from another in a legible typeface. For instance, decorative typefaces have low legibility because they are primarily meant to be seen at a glance, rather than read at length. Conversely, typefaces designed for novels or newspapers have very high
legibility. You need to design a specific, overall legibility based on the function of the text. Consider this example where the left block of text is set in Tobin Tax, a decorative serif typeface. Compare it to the same text set in Sabon, a classic and highly-legible serif typeface. Where does your typeface choice fall between these two extremes? Quick tips for great legibility: Choose typefaces with conventional letterforms. Letterforms composed of unique shapes, artistic deformations, excessive ornamentation or other novel design elements cause the reader to have to process what they are looking at first, instead of just taking in the message. Novelty always comes at the cost of immediate comprehension. Choose typefaces with generous spacing. Tight tracking causes the eye to fill in visual gaps between the various shapes that make up different letterforms, thus slowing down the time it takes to both recognize letterforms and word and sentence structures. Generous spacing allows the eyes to proceed as fast as the cognitive skills of the reader will permit. Choose typefaces with a tall xheight.
Readability How your typeface is set, combined with the basic legibility of the typeface, yields a certain level of readability. Readability is the dynamic interaction of the type style, size, tracking, leading, color and other properties all combined into one overall impression. They add up to a certain typographic style which has a quantifiable degree of readability. For instance, you could use a style that has an intentionally low readability that is part of the message. Or you could focus on designing a high readability because your message is complicated, and you don’t want your type style to hinder the audiences’ understanding in any way. In most cases, communication comes before style, so resolve readability first. Let’s take our previous example of Sabon and alter the readability. On the left, we have taken the text and decreased the font size, altered the tracking and leading, lightened the color, and set the block to full justification. It’s now a mess with unattractive text rivers. On the right, we’ve left the unaltered for an obvious comparison. Changing several independent factors, as you can see, can add
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up to quite a difference. “Forcejustified” text, or hyphenless justification, always creates ugly rivers and awkward spacing which causes the reader to lose the natural flow of the text as the eye has to make various leaps and jumps to complete words and sentences. Currently, there is no proper native support for hyphenation in CSS, but you could use Hyphenator.js for a proper client-side hyphenation online. Make sure your line height is greater than the point size of your typeface for multi-line texts. It’s difficult for the eye to track across a line of text and stay “on track” if the lines above and below it are too close to it. Our eyes are easily confused especially when wrapping from the end of one line of text to another. How many times have you read the same line of text twice on generously-spaced lines of text? Probably once — of course if the content is easy to understand as well. Don’t make your readers work harder than they have to. With the two most subjective factors out of the way, let’s move on to appropriateness.
The beauty and complexity of type...
Quick tips for great readability: Choose typefaces that were designed for the purpose you are using them for (display fonts for headlines, body copy typefaces for body copy, etc.). Choosing a font designed for display purposes, like headlines or posters, means that it will not function very well as a body text typeface where larger quantities of text will be read. Conversely, a typeface designed for extended reading loses its impact in relation to how large it is blown up. Align text to “right ragged” for comfortable word spacing online to avoid “rivers”.
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Aspects of Appropriateness Some typefaces are more suitable for a design task than others. Appropriateness is something you can learn by both experience with a typeface, and by other attributes of the typeface, including its history and original purpose. Here are four attributes of a typeface you can consider
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Print techniques LET’S LEARN IT
Print techniques by Diogo Dantas
But... how to make it?
1 Letterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a “type-high bed” printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive rightreading image. It was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century until the 19th century and remained in wide use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century. In addition to the direct impression of inked movable type onto paper or another receptive surface, letterpress is also the direct impression of inked printmaking blocks such as photo-etched zinc “cuts” (plates), linoleum blocks, wood engravings, etc., using such a press.[citation needed] In the 21st century, commercial letterpress has been revived by the use of ‘water-wash’ photopolymer plates that are adhered to a near-type-high base to produce a relief printing surface typically from digitally-rendered
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Set type in composing stick
2 2 Put it in a chase (frame)
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Insert a sheet of paper
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Push down handle
5 Moustache - 01 Beer - 02 Rustic Fete - 03
Voila! A print! CREATIVE MIND
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How to be a better designer More tips to help you
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Ready Set Type by D McArdel - 01 Mikey’s First Lecture by Mikey Burton - 02 Picasso & Letterpress by Svetlana Lomakina- 03
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IES Puerta Bonita. CFGS de Diseño y Producción Editorial 1º curso, turno de mañana. MP de Procesos de Preimpresión.
Curso 2013/2014 Alumno/a: Rebeca Lozano Araque Sistema operativo: Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63) Aplicaciones: Photoshop, Indesign Tipografías: Bebas Neue, Tahoma, Univers, Minion Pro Formatos de archivo: tiff, eps RIP: EFI Fiery Graphic Arts Package Premium Edition Impresión: ProC 651ex 16 CREATIVERicoh MIND