Design World 2.0

AIGA Design Archives

Here are a list of designer’s that have really made me push me design ideas and create interesting pieces:

Alison Popp was once a Art Director and Designer for BBK studios, now known as People Design. The work she has featured credits were with being a designer, the Art Director, and couple of other things. However, the work featured was a web site that showed people the difference between the quality of Herman Miller products and other brands while taking you through the different styles and timeline of advertising back the beginning of the company to more modern times. Her work really makes me excited about web design and shows that web design doesn’t have to be boring. She has given me a real interesting web design and pushed me to make my work  up to its full potential.

Linda Powell was a designer for Herman Miller, the work she has featured are across the board from typographic to more image based pieces. One piece which put me in the holiday spirit was the christmas card she did for Herman Miller. It was really cool the way she incorporated the shapes into the tree. One of the other pieces I liked was the typographic “Designers” piece. It showed a good eye for type and allowing people’s name to still be legible even when they were a bit distorted. Her overall approach and direction when she looks at my sketches and directions gives me good ideas and spark my idea’s when I get stuck.

MIlton Glaser is probably one of my biggest influences and makes his work stand out with his illustration skills and great sense of what works in different situations. The Bob Dylan promotion that he Designed for Columbia Records was really interesting in the color use and profile flat color outline. Of course you can’t forget the I heart NY poster he did along with the revision in 2001 after 9/11 where he place a small burn in the heart and attached: MORE THEN EVER to it. Overall he has made me focus on more illustrative qualities to my designing and maybe one day I will do my own illustrations.

Paula Scher who currently works for Pentagram, has become a favorite of mine with the more and more design work I see from her. Her striking use of photographic elements and interesting use of type have made me look to extremes when looking at designing for mediums I haven’t worked with, like my calender coat project. A good example of here interesting work is the ballet-tech advertisement that shows a really nice limbo image of a dancer in mid jump with striking colors. In another example Paula was a art director and also she was one of the designers for a environmental design project for the new location of Bloomberg Inc. where she help with graphics that served as floor markers all over the building. From the outside some numbers were placed where you could see them. She has overall made me expand my use of medium and pushed me to go over the top.

( PART OF THE BLOOMBERG PROJECT PAULA WORKED ON )

Michael Bierut he is another designer from Pentagram that really seems to range this in a bit more, however still seems to impress with the simple and interesting. One example is the What is good design? piece that he did for Pentagram. In this piece he took a piece of paper and in writing that looks like a young child may have done it, wrote out what good design is and simply left the background black. The isolation and interest is created making you read the message and through blacking out some words it shows that design isn’t always going to be right the first time. One other piece I wanted to mention was the Next Wave Festival brochure that takes type and chops off the bottoms without loosing the word. Moreover, he adds satyrical value with the hand waving. His style is simple yet effective and i’ve taken that to use with a couple projects I have done last year where less seemed to work better then more.

( JUST A SMALL SAMPLE OF HIS WORK )

Continuing to find interesting design work is something that will broaden my horizons ( LOL that’s a funny way of saying it) and not put myself in one style of design:

Ken Sakuri has a couple of designs in the archive and he uses a flat color style in two of the logos he designed. One of those is a logo for Duffy and Partner where he used flat color to place a p inside of a d that are kind of in the shapes of a quote bubble. The other is a outlined bottle for a bath oil. His style is interesting and I like the use of flat color.

Paul Davis is a illustrator and designer that has a lot of different projects that he has worked on. In a lot of his pieces he does illustrations of portraits like Che and Mickey Rooney and uses simple colors including red, blue and black. I would like to do more illustrated stuff on my own and he seemed to know what he was doing.

Jurek Wajdowicz is a designer and art director who is really talented with taking images and applying type to them that is unconventional but seems to work with most of his designs. “Isaac’s first swim” is an example of his style where he places the centered type on the water keeping with the perspective of the image. You can read some of the paragraph but you get what it says just from what you can read. He’s a good designer to look toward for typographic ideas.

Efrat Rafeaeli is a owner of his own design firm based in San Francisco. A design he has on the archives is pop style that was created with only 2-colors but contains what looks like cyan, yellow, and magenta. It’s interesting to know that he created a third color out of the paper selection that worked and did it on a small budget. He makes me think allot about paper selection and that design goes further then just what is on screen. 

Paul Sahre is a owner of his own firm based in New york and allot of his designs are typographic. One of the most interesting ones I saw was “The secret lives cowboys” where the hand written type is in a white “sign here” box with one image of a open hilly scape and the other is a cowboy in a grocery store. However, the one piece that really caught my attention was a piece entitled “Exercises in Futility part IV poster” that is really funny because the type is really condensed and you can hardly read it. It shows that to have a good design it doesn’t always have to be legible (case in point: David Carson LOL).  

Richard Avedon

This was a really great exhibit in the GRAM and really excited to take a look at more of his collection then what I had seen prior to going to this exhibit. Richard Avedon had such an eye for the simple black and white portrait side of photography. I believe one of the first prints that he had up was Dovima with elephants which really grabbed my attention with the striking black and white contrast. He seemed to really capture the true expression and feeling a person in different states of emotions.

One of my favor photographs was the presidential series he did but my favorite was Ronald Reagan:

The exhibit was fairly large filling two of rooms in the museum with his photography showcasing not just celebrities but people in the working class and he did a great job of capturing the struggle of both the upper and lower class. The craziest one would have to be the Hepburn portrait that shows a very angered and kind of ugly facial expression.

However, a good portion of his work include high fashion that was very influential and he has been featured as a icon on shows like America’s Next Top Model, where Nigel Barker is a fellow photographer, judge for the show, all around student of Avedon’s work. 

Sadly Avedon passed away on October 1, 2004 and left behind a legacy no one will forget. He not only got the beauty but the ugly side of people and made a story out of every person he photographed.

Case in point the fab four, which was featured at the exhibit. 

GRAM Gold LEED Certification

Build in 2007 and opened on October 5, 2007 the GRAM was a project set a high standard by becoming the first museum built to LEED standards. Located in the heart of downtown Grand Rapids located next to Maya Lin’s Ecliptic, a sculpture accompanied by a park. 125,000 square feet and cost around $75 million to build. One of the first things that I really noticed when I first saw the museum were the huge rectangle sky lights.

LIGHTING

The skylights are to allow natural light to highlight different exhibits and cut down on using any kind of lighting system. An shading system allows the natural light to diffuse throughout the museum. Louvers in the skylight galleries are adjustable to different exhibits. Moreover, during the night there is a glow from the skylights which appear to from stored solar energy.

Next thing that seem fairly important to keep art work in good condition definitely has to air.

AIR

A passive air conditioning system uses vapor misting that have no HCFC emissions and strict CO2 emissions monitoring throughout the museum. What does that mean you ask? That the emissions are mostly vapor with little CO2 mixed in to the outside.

A couple of other things include Water that is gathered via rain and used for toilets, planting irrigation, and there fountain.

INSULATION

Things used in this aspect include light colored concrete walls, three-layer UV filter glass in windows, Argon gas between glass window panels, and low-emission coatings on all components.

One of the biggest things that makes the GRAM are the strict recycling policies that instill to cut down on day-to-day environmental effects.

THE BUILDING ITSELF

When building the GRAM they didn’t skimp on the material chooses to create a sustainable structure. Recycled material made from paper and fiber were used from the structure along with cement from a local company near Lake Michigan along with sand and stone.

Overall the building a really nice addition to the Grand Rapids area and shows the possibilities of building a much greener future! 

Linda’s Sabbatical

HOLIDAY CARD

Linda showed us the holiday card she made when she was on her sabbatical with Herman Miller. She went from a first prototype of falling worlds relating to the holidays and went through color and type size change. She ran it by Steve a Corporate level personnel who liked the initial idea. She gave it Clark a copy guru and he took out allot of the song words and was wondering if it could be copy that encompassed all religions.

But it didn’t seem to work with what Linda wanted and i can understand that because it can be really hard to do something like that. So after that she brainstormed a new list of words/phrases. Which turned out to be things that were in general relation to the holidays. Some of the phrases had to be changed but in the end it all worked out great.

INVEST IN THE MARK

Linda mainly went to Herman Miller to help her former co-worker Steve to take a look at the word-mark and make small tweaks to it. She started with understanding where the mark is now and where it could go in the future with just having the mark standing by itself. She looked at existing applications and found the mark works best from the space around it and all the color applications that can work with the mark. She did tons of exploration here.

More then just placement of the mark she also took existing things and stationary being designed and place the mark in several different positions and color treatments (I mean TONS!). Which is really a good idea and it shows me that my projects need to be tried in the same way.

BRAND MANUAL

She then showed us a manual she designed that was to show disruptors how they could us their logo with different material like trucks, billboards, web sites, etc. She showed how you could use your logo with Herman Miller Retailer to call out to you consumers to hopefully get more business.

Check out www.hermanmiller.com

T-SHIRTS RULE!

Design consideration for starting t-shirt design: stay within given constraints

Here are the two ways to produce t-shirts:

transfers- printed and heated onto the t-shirt and pressure and needs to be   reversed. Can be done to a small quantity of shirts. Lower cost and can be saved to be used later on. 

- Inks are fairly opaque.

- Paying for the shirt and less on the setup.

direct printing- screened directly onto shirt. Good for large quantity of shirts being pressed. Under-print with white to help with opacity and to get colors where u want them. Can apply design to sleeve or top of the back of a shirt. 

- Avoid half-tones and fine lines.

- Image size 12x12 in. max and make sure that that image size can fit all sizes of shirts.

- With kids through Adult XXL think about a smaller image for Kids- Adult M then a bigger for the rest.

- Make the design in that 12x12 are because side and other place printing can be expensive.

Puff printing- kind of like thermography, with heat it expanse and rises. Keep it to something that makes sense.

T-SHIRT BRANDS

Specify quality brand names Fruit of the Loom or Hanes are usually the best quality. Also I have used the Gildan brand and like their quality

Fabrics

100% cotton (heavy or beefy T) they will shrink but have a nice quality feel

50/50 don’t shrink a little thinner in weight they get pills on them (little balls of fur)

Colors don’t come in the same fro 50/50 and 100% cotton

Many colors available and change with the season for the fashion sense. Look at a swatch book for the colors and check availability for the colors in different styles

Whites are the cheapest then pastel then the darker are the most important as the quality gets higher.

Prepress

Check with printer for the software they use, many don’t have Mac’s they are using Corel Draw and Windows (really tough), communicate with them about saving files for them that they can use.

Make sure that everything like typefaces and links are included

Paths may be the right way to go and ask about trapping to insure the coverage with out gaps.

Tell the printer where you want the shirt placed on the shirt.

Color Matching

You can give them a large color you printout to try to match and rename the swatches to something other then PANTONE 232 (river bank run blue, or something).

Semi-screen printing inks are going to dulled by the shirt because it is semi-opaque ink and will show the shirt a bit.

Presentation

Show the prototype at the size of the design and on the actually material you are printing it on when doing a presentation.

Web Tips

The two Sarah L’s gave us a couple of different web related sites including the following:

flickr:

This is a site that you can create an account upload pics and videos to share with friend and pretty much anyone you want to. You can also create a set that allows you to upload a bunch of photographs that are all related. Overall it is just a great site to store photographs and videos you want to share.

Pictobrowser:

This a way to place a gallery on your website without having to fumble through a ton of Javascript code and allows for personalization with color, size, and so forth of elements in your gallery.

The way this works is through you flickr account and it takes the images you have uploaded on you flickr to create the gallery. Moreover when it is done how you like you all you have to do is copy and paste the code into your site.

Tumblr Blog to Your Site

It really simple. Here is the long and short of it. Copy and paste this code into your site, into a div: 

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://YOURSHORTNAMEHERE.tumblr.com/js”></script>

Your links will stay intact but body copy and headlines will have to be controlled with CSS.

Domain and Server space

Here are some links to get a domain name and server space for creating you own personal website:

http://webhostinggeeks.com/ 

http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx 

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ 

http://www.dreamhost.com/ 

http://www.doteasy.com/index.cfm 

https://www.kattare.com/signup.kvws

Camera RAW!

Jessica and John showed us the world of RAW and told us that it is a uncompressed file that you use when you are not always getting the correct lighting when on shoots and also it is a little slower when shooting and you have the time to wait. First thing they told us were a couple of things you want to use RAW over a GIF or JPEG over, they are as follows:

You can’t get the color in the image quite right

You frequently want more exposure control: using RAW for the under exposed may cause grain when trying to give more light to the image.

You are frequently shooting in low light or in mixed lighting situations

You regularly crop and enlarge your images or print your images at very large sizes

It’s simple to find in most camera usually you can find it under Menu > Quality > RAW area. Now it shows RAW above the largest image size because it is uncompressed and nearly 8 mb in storage versus 2 mb JPEG.

Oddly enough the file format for camera RAW is different for each brand of cameras. most of use Canon which are .crw or .cr2 and the founder of this format is Panasonic which uses the .raw format.

Ok so you have a RAW image that needs some work just drag it into Photoshop and a menu will pop up that will allow you to start editing the image with tools like:

Setting white balance

Color balance

Crop tool

Straighten tool

Retouch tool

Red eye tool

The histogram shows you the color range in you image from having too much light and too much dark and leads into changing the image color. These tools include: white balance, brightness, contrast, clarity, tone curves, detail: noise adjustment, grayscale, lens correction, and presets: this will allow you too take the same kind of changes and add them to a lot of images. 

exhibit design consultants

This last Tuesday we took a trip down to Grand Rapids and were given a tour of Exhibit Design Consultants. When you first walk in it is awesome the space is really open and welcoming, plus their was a cat wondering around so you know that they arn’t complete stiffs. Then Mike Morris gave us the tour where we stopped first at a whole lot of small exhibits that they have created and talked about a couple of things to look out for placing type and important information at a level where people can see it from a distance. Also shocking color should be used so it will get your audiences attention when they are walking through tons of different set ups at a conference center.

After taking a gander at all of those displays we went into the design HQ (lol) where all the designers created and printed client projects. He when we go in their a project was printing already and it was a large format printer putting out a nearly 170 in x 60 in piece. He told us that it take only about 30 min to print something like that, compared to about five years ago the same piece would take about nearly 1 hr 30 min to 2 hrs. Most if not all of their work was printed digitally so they need to insure that the ink will not wash out by placing a protective coating over a piece weather or not the client knows about it.

They go through the same pantone matching process that we do and print out the less amount of paper and toner as they can. The cost that they go through it enormous and it’s really hard to get your head around that one cartridge cost $250!

Overall the experience and advise that Mike gave us on designing for exhibits that they do and what we should think about when we design for other consultants we design for.  

Adobe Bridge

Here is a good overview of Adobe Bridge that Katrina and Ryan talked about.

It is a program that really expands on the capabilities of iPhoto in that it allows you to take a folder of pictures and organize them. Preview in the middle is a good way to go because it allows you to separate content from the technical aspect. You can also rate the different images based on the quality of an image.

You can also keyword photos according to whatever you think is appropriate like summer or birthday party. Then you can take those photos and take them into a another folder that you created. You can copy or you can move your photos into the new folder that I talked about above.

Bridge can be your default for importing photos from camera instead of using iPhoto which is you default importer for macs. Different options include compact mode, full screen display, thumbnail mode, stacks, and more.

Double clicking on a image allows you to open it into Photoshop FYI! You can easily open CS3 programs and easily place many images into those programs into things like a contact sheet for printing.

Preset workstations are also available to use if you don’t want to mess with itself. You can also open video! ( Any file that Adobe creates )