The Atlantic / In Focus

If you like keeping up-to-date with world news, and you prefer the visual side of information, take a look at The Atlantic's 'In Focus' section on their website. They update it every day with a great collection of 10-20 press photographs on a particular topic. Have a look back at the Queen's Jubilee page (see below).

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/

Queen's Jubilee In Focus

Mega Laughs

Teehee . . . http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/06/photographer-tadao-cern-releases-hilariousdisturbing-video-of-people-being-blasted-in-the-face-with-wind/

M&S Packaging Design

I've noticed that for about the past four or five years Marks & Spencers have been developing their food packaging to the point where their food stores are now absolutely filled with products that you're tempted to buy just so your cupboards looks nice!

A visit to an M&S food store is a must if you're looking for insights into how to take a brand identity beyond the logo.

www Fans In A Flashbulb

Weegee's photographs amazed me from the moment I first found them. When I studied a bit about him, I came across Letizia Battaglia too, whose work I also really admire.

I think I'm starting to realise that my favourite photography is black and white portraiture/photojournalism. Helmut Newton . . yep, definitely seeing a trend.

It was during a search for Weegee's work that I found this great blog (one of those blogs you can't stop scrolling through):

http://fansinaflashbulb.wordpress.com/

The Redstone Shop

If you're scratching your head over xmas gifts (hopefully not literally) you might try Redstone Press, for all your totally-random-but-beautiful book needs.

http://www.theredstoneshop.com/

Here's a diary I bought from them - it's like when you're a kid and you get something for xmas that you never touch in case you break/damage it. I never wrote inside this! Much too precious.

Futtock

Patterns with smart objects

In a previous post, I showed how smart objects could be used in Photoshop for photo editing. Here's another good use for them. 

The fact that smart objects can be duplicated within the same .psd file means you can repeat them over and over to create patterns. I started the design below in Illustrator by creating a single triangle with bits of lettering inside it. Then I pasted that into Photoshop as a smart object and duplicated it loads of times into the pattern below (using the secret kaleidoscope recipe).

Whenever you want to try a new pattern, all you have to do is double-click on the 'vector smart object' in Photoshop and it'll take you to Illustrator where you can edit it. Once you've changed it, just save and close and it'll update the Photoshop file automatically. Lots more time to spend trying new patterns.

Formicate

www Estevan Oriol

My absolute favourite portrait photographer, Estevan Oriol, has a book out on Amazon! He's into the LA gangland so there's lots of tattooed guys with battle wounds and women who look as tough as nails. That's going on my Xmas list anyway.

www open library (free books!!!)

Typographers and Renaissance lovers, listen up!  (Unlikely mix, I know).

What a find! I must have spent three hours last night on this website. I knew about the Project Gutenberg website before – that offers the plain texts of loads of classic novels (gutenberg.org) – but I'd never come across this one before:

http://openlibrary.org/

The Open Library contains an amazing collection of texts, even in PDF form, for you to download or read online. I found some brilliant texts on the more neglected sides of Renaissance Florence, like the subject of the female writers of the time, and some interesting old editions of books that have people's hundred year old pencil scribbles on the pages.

I also found this awesome little book on advertising from the early 20th century that, as you'll see if you follow the link, shows us just how old the principles of layout etc have become.

Old typography/advertising book on 'Open Library':
http://www.archive.org/stream/typographyadver00trezgoog#page/n53/mode/2up

Looking at some of the pages in the book linked above, I saw a distinct similarity to an excellent book I bought recently: they both break down examples of advertising and feature basic pencil reproductions of them. It's amazing to think they were published about 100 years apart!

Advertising theory etc book on Amazon (it looks a bit crummy and basic in the pictures, but believe me, it's a beautiful and very helpful book for serious designers and advertisers):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Advertising-Concept-Book-Think-Design/dp/0500514054/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1319024016&sr=8-4

I'm sure, however, that I've only hit the tip of the iceberg on Open Library so I'm off to surf the web waves of literature some more. Enjoy!

Mafia couple

I was inspired by a video I saw a couple of weeks ago about a character illustrator – it's often the case that, despite what we might assume, these top notch concept artists and illustrators use the most basic methods or technology. The video showed how the guy when from paper to pixel with his drawings and it looked so simple.

I meant to just spend 30 mins or so on this, like the guy in the video I watched, but I still had Bert Monroy in my head . . . so I applied minute detail to everything (which you can't see in the image). For instance, if you zoom right into the guy's trousers you'll see a stitching texture! Alas . . . . this ain't no Google Art Project, so no mega zoom will be possible.

Bob-haired girl

I turn my back for two minutes (okay, two months . . or more) and Blogger looks totally different! Still, I really like it, it's much simpler and cleaner. They still haven't fixed the composer though!

This is a recent Photoshop portrait I did using a photo which, sadly, isn't mine. Thanks to the stupidly patient Bert Monroy, who took it upon himself to paint an image of Times Square in Photoshop and spent years doing it, I got a much better understanding of not only painting in Photoshop but also how the software works in general. Lynda.com is the biz! I still find Photoshop to be my weakest area though, so I'm trying to overcome that and make it my best!

I was surprised at how smart you can be with the filters in Photoshop – I was told at uni to avoid them like the plague (a bit like you do with Comic Sans in typography classes) but, in fact, filters can be really useful when used properly (usually meaning in small measures). I could have used a slight texture filter for the skin here, and then painted it back out in areas that didn't need it, but decided against that.

Hermetica

This is a very interesting read if you haven't already. It's just another set of opinions about the world, doubtlessly contributing to the ongoing battle among believers, non-believers and . . misc.

It was a big deal during the Renaissance – Ficino was even told to put his translation of Plato on hold in order to translate Hermes Trismegistus's writings for Cosimo de Medici. The book pictured is a very condensed version of the original writings – which spanned many books, one of which, I think I read, is lost.

Whether you agree with it or not is, of course, not the point. I personally question a lot of it, but at least it gets us asking questions. At one point it mentions 'seeing with your mind' – that's an idea that could keep you thinking for a while.

Timeline of lives

One function of the book I'm putting together is to use visual means to enlighten the reader where possible. A lot of people find it easier to understand things if they're represented visually - slow people, yes, like myself. I really like to see maps and family trees at the start of books, so I intend to build on that dramatically for my own.

I've therefore started putting a timeline together of the lives of all the key characters from the era I'm focusing on (1450-1550 Italy). It's fascinating for a number of reasons - especially when you consider adding in 'key moments' of people's lives and measuring them up against the other characters.

This is early on in its creation - I've colour-coded names as best I could according to their being either an artist, writer, ruler or 'other' (I'll work on that). I've already noticed some very interesting outcomes from the timeline: Lorenzo de' Medici and Aldo Manuzio (the world-famous publisher) were born in the same year, as were Leonardo and Savonarola, as were Amerigo Vespucci (whose feminised Latin name was given to America) and Agnolo Poliziano (scholar, friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, bane of Lorenzo's wife's life), as were Pico della Mirandola and Caterina Sforza, but perhaps the biggest year of them all was 1475: Michelangelo, Pope Leo X and Cesare Borgia come out to play.

Downside Up

To take Alan Fletcher's advice of 'thinking sideways' one step further, what happens if we think upside down? Whereas Fletcher applied this to design, anybody can apply it to anything.

Looking at The Ambassadors recently, I found myself studying the brilliantly detailed globe (see below) that you can see in the background. Being from Holbein's time, it wasn't exactly satellite accurate and as I figured out how it was oriented I started to think about the relevance of north, east, south and west, or the irrelevance.

Which way is north in space? None. And which way is up in space? You might say whichever way goes against gravity, but that would make 'down' finite - in other words, surely there's no 'up' or 'down' in space either.

So what does that mean about how we visualise space and our planet? Why do images of solar systems always present the planets on a horizontal plane? Think of a map - what we call the north pole is always found at the top - but magnetic forces have no sense of north/south so why are they treated as such? Have you looked at where you live on a map and, on a whim, decided to see what other places lie directly above/below? Absolutely meaningless when you think about it. It took humanity quite a while to accept that it wasn't central in the universe. It also took time to see that it was not even centre of the solar system, that the Sun did not revolve around Earth. By our sense of 'north, south, east and west' we are still putting ourselves in a central position in relation to the surrounding world.

Aren't our methods of orientation in someway detrimental to how we see the world? I'm not referring to location or co-ordinates, simply the idea of north, east, south, and west. These terms aren't just methods of direction - we attach our own ideas and feelings to them - e.g. I feel like going south would be the best way to escape, while north would be a hazardous journey.

I've added some screen shots below (without borders/labels) that show what I mean. Both of the last two images are of the same area - Europe - and both force us to look differently at the world. In the first, we can see more clearly how the UK's coastline resembles the edge of Scandinavia, and how France and Portugal jut out to create an enormous pincer. The second shows Italy to be the arm and pointing hand of the mainland - and the UK seems to share something in common with it - as if it used to be the opposite arm but broke off at some point.

Of course, all this is still meaningless in itself - but it destroys the ideas we originally had of these geographical areas, for the better. It reminds me of what a tutor at my uni said; if he and his colleague  were asked to draw a whale, he'd probably draw a big blue smiling smudge while his colleague would make a perfectly accurate and realistic drawing. It's all down to our understanding of things.

So, if you're ever tasked to draw Italy, go for an abstract portrayal and draw an out-stretched arm and pointing hand, and say that you see the world for what it is rather than what everyone else sees.

www Mark Porter

Some nice editorial design work. A bit limited for a Creative Director's website though!

http://www.markporter.com/home.html

www Bridgeman Art

I found another good stock image website for people looking for full quality images of fine art  - this one is a better website so its probably worthwhile to use this one instead of the previous site I posted about.

http://www.bridgemanart.com/Default.aspx

Adobe tutorials

www.deke.com/

What a life saver this guy is. You can find loads of Photoshop video series by him on Lynda.com but his website has lots of good free info on it for anyone who uses Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator.

NBA design

www.nba.com

I used to play basketball quite a lot as a kid and ever since then I've been fascinated by the visual side of the NBA - the logos are obviously central to each team's 'look' and you can see, on the website above, how cleverly the designers have 'padded out' each logo to create a uniquely styled website for each team.

I think the site is a great example of how many different ways you can make what is essentially the same content look using a good template. If you go to the 'teams' tab at the top left of the page and click on each to cycle through,  you can see what I mean. Nothing too complex either - just loads of strokes, upon strokes for the type, some drop shadows here and there, and lots of colour/colour gradients or a textured background.

If there's one reason I'd love to live in America, it's so I could go to basketball games! It's one of the few things from my childhood that I still find exciting today. The worst part about it is that my favourite team, Settle Sonics (Shawn Kemp was awesome!), were disbanded for whatever reason years ago.

New typefaces

In my (very) tentative approach to starting my book I've been looking at typefaces I could use for it. I'm also looking for a good site to buy stock images relating to the Italian Renaissance but have only found one or two so far:

www.artres.com/

www.superstock.com

Definitely have a look at the second link - some nice photography in there but there's also a lot of fine art images that you don't find in the more popular stock photo websites.

Back to type though! I'm a fan of Garamond, but I always found it a little soft edged and really wanted something more refined so that I could set large headings with more confidence. Galliard is ideal for this - the 'ITC Galliard' version that I got has 4 weights which also makes it great for general use. 

Cut by Robert Granjon in the 16th Century, Galliard is very similar to Garamond but appears to have a more deliberate shape to it. I've made the two faces visually equal in size, below, to more clearly show the differences.

I also got Stymie because I wanted a nice rounded sans but Mrs Eaves sans was too expensive...  Still, I like slab serifs so Stymie is a good'n. Only thing I've noticed is that its default kerning attributes will usually need some attention.