May 14, 2013

Impressive parchment animation

The crew at Second Home Studios animated Su Blackwell‘s paper sculpture for Pilsner Urquell:

It’s all the more impressive when you look the scenes:

[Via]

May 13, 2013

Illustrator adds CSS export, more

CreativePro.com features an overview of forthcoming Illustrator CC features. Of particular interest to Web & interface designers:

Another major addition to Illustrator CC will help you create layouts for websites and mobile devices. The new CSS Properties panel can generate the CSS code automatically for named objects and styles that correspond to your HTML or for unnamed objects, although the feature works better with named objects and styles. Use the Export Options dialog to define how Illustrator treats the objects for the CSS, including whether or not the CSS includes vendor prefixes for working with the very latest CSS features.

May 05, 2013

Animation: “Life on Mars”

Lovely work (great shapes, palettes) from Lukas Vojir:

Bonus: I dig the lovingly rendered physicality of the widgets on display here, too:

May 04, 2013

Retro homage: “Drive” for Sega Genesis

Heh. The creator writes,

9-bit colour, divvied up into 4 palettes of 15+alpha colours each, just like momma used to make. the song was made with an emulator for the Yamaha YM2612, the chip used to create the sound in the sega genesis.

Note: It’s just the intro graphics plus three minutes of song, and sadly not a deeper re-enactment of the movie in this style—though wouldn’t that be amazing?

[Via]

April 28, 2013

Illustration: Stop-motion life drawing

The phrase “nekkid A-Ha” comes to my juvenile mind. 

“Every easel in a life drawing class captures a different angle of the model. We created the film by editing each drawing with the next, moving around the circle of easels.”

[Via]

April 27, 2013

The impossible photos of Erik Johansson

Adobe’s Inspire magazine features Photoshop hoss Erik Johansson, his process & his work:

Johansson: I wanted to do something with paper — something more physical, not just a retouch project. Although I obviously use Photoshop quite a bit, I try to do as much as possible in-camera, which makes the illusion look more realistic and makes things easier during post-production.

April 22, 2013

Win a beautiful typographic poster courtesy of Illustrator

Check it: 

Illustrator’s Facebook page is giving away this beautiful Venus poster created by Dylan Roscover to 1,000 people! Head to their page for your chance to win now. 

April 20, 2013

Real Beauty

Dove smartly uses a forensic sketch artist to show women how their own self images compare to what others see:

And here’s the inevitable parody featuring a bunch of dudes:

[Via]

April 19, 2013

The UIs of “Oblivion”

Great work from Gmunk & team:

The Vimeo page features some making-of details. [Via]

April 18, 2013

A beautifully animated video on the basics of DNA

Check out this neat little piece from BBC Knowledge and Learning. Director Will Samuel of Territory Studio says,

We wanted to create nostalgia; taking the audience back to the days of textbook diagrams and old science documentaries, such as Carl Sagan’s COSMOS and IBM’s POWER OF TEN (1977). Using the double helix circular theme as a core design we focused on form, movement and colour to create a consistent flow to the animation, drawing on references from nature, illustrating how DNA is the core to everything around us. 

[Via]

April 15, 2013

The Daily ‘Shop

“I don’t even think that’s Photoshop,” says Jon Stewart of North Korea’s recent efforts. “That s*** looks like MS Paint!” Skip to about 3:30 in the first clip, then jump to the last 20s in the second.

“Now that is some MF’ing Photoshop!”

April 12, 2013

Dylan Roscover’s typographical “calligrams”

The Adobe Design Center features an interesting profile of Dylan Roscover, creator of beautiful typographic illustrations called calligrams:

All of Roscover’s calligrams are driven by pure passion, and each takes 40 to 60 hours of painstaking craftsmanship to render. “These days, it is easy to make things quickly and get them out the door,” he says. “But with this type of work, every image is special and a labor of love.

April 11, 2013

iPads + Macs -> Giant collaborative art

Check out Adrià Navarro’s Processing-powered Inkscapes project. The Verge writes,

“Inkscapes” is a sprawling installation that turns tablet doodling into something more profound. Created by Adrià Navarro and DI Shin, the system streams live iPad drawings across a giant, 120-foot-long display, located inside New York’s InterActive Corps building. The result is a hypnotic, undulating mural that’s equal parts painting and performance.

[Previously: Collaborative drawing: Is there a “there” there?]

If Inkscapes is up your alley, see also Fluidic. Colossal writes,

The interactive light sculpture is made from 12,000 suspended spheres that act as three dimensional pixels, or voxels. Surrounded by 3D cameras the piece can sense viewer’s motions which are then translated into light patterns, but amazingly the light supplied to the individual voxels is fully external. An array of high-speed lasers project into the cloud to create the dynamic visuals in real-time.

April 04, 2013

Map Illustrator artwork to 3D via LiveSurface Context

You might already know LiveSurface, a stock-image library that featured preset grids optimized to work with Photoshop’s Vanishing Point feature. Now the crew behind it has announced the beta of LiveSurface Context, a unique 2.5D app with a built-in artwork store.

Founder Joshua Distler writes,

The app makes design exploration & visualization (for both designer and client) much faster and more fluid by acting as a kind of next-generation WYSIWYG tool. Designers can work naturally inside Illustrator and visualize their concepts rendered photographically with a click. With it you can:

• Work inside Illustrator and preview ideas rendered in photographic realism with just a click.
• Simulate a variety of inks and materials (such as foil, emboss, fluorescent) by simply choosing swatches in Illustrator.
• Download surfaces by drag and drop; surfaces are automatically re-rendered at hi-res when the download completes.
• Resize and/or rotate Plus Surfaces with a few clicks.
• Output very hi-res renderings in the background, without interruption to workflow.

The app drew a nice write-up in Fast Company. Here’s a quick demo of browsing for photographic templates, then applying artwork:

More info is in 9to5Mac’s write-up.

March 31, 2013

CGI: The evolution of the human face

Kottke writes, “Here’s a video that shows how scientists believe the human face has changed over the past 7 million years:”

March 26, 2013

Illustration: Re-imagined movies, Tarantino books

I don’t know who re-imagined modern movies using classic styles & actors, but I love it.

[Via Bill Hensler]

And if that’s up your alley:

• Check out some vintage Penguin-style covers for Tarantino movies.
• Khoi Vinh writes, “Mike Joyce has been producing hypothetical gig posters for some of his favorite bands from the punk and post-punk era, designed in the style of Swiss Modernism.”

Animation: “Motorville”

In this fun, bizarre, and inevitably sad animation by Patrick Jean, “The map of an American city goes on a quest across the world to find oil in order to feed its body, made of streets, highways and freeways.”

March 22, 2013

Drawscript turns Illustrator shapes into code

Of his free new utility Drawscript, Adobe developer Tom Krcha writes, “It closes the gap between designer and developer in Creative Cloud (e.g. Illustrator -> Edge Code+PhoneGap) and adds value to Illustrator. Typical use cases are UI skinning on iOS, vector assets creation for games and apps, teaching/learning of vector graphics programming.”

Update: Renaun Erickson has posted a quick demo:

March 16, 2013

Lovely illustrations from David Smith

Folks seemed to really enjoy the video I posted a couple of weeks ago about master illustrator David Smith creating an album cover for John Mayer. Now David has posted a gallery of illustrations & photos from the project on his site.

March 15, 2013

Check out ColliderScribe for Illustrator

Another cool-as-hell plug-in from Astute Graphics, this time geared towards significantly one-upping Illustrator’s venerable Smart Guides feature:

March 14, 2013

The Feltron Annual Report arrives

Fast Company has a great gallery & write-up covering Nicholas Felton’s 2012 Feltron Annual Report. It’s an interesting history of the project & how he’s now using an app to capture life status.

Tangential: The Layer Tennis match between Nicholas & Khoi Vinh that I narrated.

March 13, 2013

An animated 3D chalk art snake

Chris Carlson is a madman.

[Via]

March 12, 2013

Participate in a new collaborative art project

More than 5,000 artists have already registered for the Adobe-Red Bull Collective Art project, and more than 60% of the time slots have already been reserved. As the site explains,

It is an evolution of the concept of “Cadavre Exquis” in which each collaborator adds to the Collective Art through being allowed to see the end of what the previous artist contributed. Participants are free to choose if they want to paint, draw or scribble their work or just to create it digitally with design software.

As the Adobe site says,

Sign up here to create an original piece of art to contribute as part of a global collective art installation. Then join Adobe® Creative Cloud™ to download Adobe creative tools you’ll need, such as Adobe Photoshop® and Illustrator®, to create your masterpiece.

Here’s footage of the event happening in Greece:

Minimalist Harlem Shake

You are most welcome. :-)

[Via Margot Nack]

March 08, 2013

Illustration: “Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant”

This one time, at math camp…

[Via Marc Pawliger]

Theoretically related: “a fully-articulated, 3D-printed gown with nearly 3,000 joints” that “follows the Fibonacci Sequence in the way it curves around a woman’s body, in order to maximize its theoretical beauty.”

[Via]

February 28, 2013

Watch a master illustrator at work

Check out Danny Cooke’s portrait of master sign maker David A. Smith exquisitely crafting an album cover & related artwork. And—gasp—does this mean I don’t hate John Mayer?

February 24, 2013

Oscar nominees as pictograms

Check out Matteo Civaschi’s set of clever pictogram movie posters that encapsulate this year’s nominees in pictogram form. For example, there’s the Life of Pi:

February 22, 2013

Animation: “Gray Keys”

Constraint can be a beautiful thing, and I like being reminded of how expressive the interplay of simple geometries can be. Behold the work of painter/mograph artist Carlo Vega:

[Via]

February 21, 2013

Michael Jackson in flat stop-motion Lego

You go, Annette Jung:

One hopes MJ fell in love with a girl—perhaps one named Billie Jean. [Via]

The entire Gangnam Style video as a hand-drawn flipbook

Oh dear lord—someone actually did this. Timothius Martin actually did this.

[Via]

February 08, 2013

Buildings in Motion: Giant canvases for animated GIFs

Adobe writer (and, tangentially, Survivor survivor) Lex van den Berghe interviews street artist INSA, talking about the crazy dedication needed to turn buildings into “GIF-iti.” Check it out.

Make your own Samuel Jackson puppet

Say “what” again, CrazyTalk app.

[Via Troy Church]

February 05, 2013

“Paperman,” a lovely short film from Disney

Gorgeous in every way. The Fox Is Black writes,

“This adorable story of finding love is told with a new in-house technology called Meander which combines the best of 3D modeling and traditional animation.”

February 04, 2013

Angry Birds All Levels

I find Evan Roth‘s work endlessly intriguing:

Evan Roth’s Angry Birds All Levels uses black ink on tracing paper to show the gestures required to complete each level of the popular bird-flinging game. Roth placed the paper over his iPhone to capture each swipe and tap, and the result is a work that aims to “contrast the excitement that happens in the gaming environment with the monotony that actually takes places in the physical world.”

[Via Mark Coleran]

February 01, 2013

Check out WidthScribe for Illustrator

A rough transcript of me watching this demo: “Uh-huh… sure, sure… Whoa!”

Using pressure to essentially “paint on” width, plus the Width Gradient tool? Very cool indeed.

WidthScribe comes from the same Astute Graphics folks who make the powerful VectorScribe for Illustrator.

January 23, 2013

Designing one new superhero every day for a year

I love the 365 Supers project from Pixar animator Everett Downing. According to a well illustrated interview in Wired,

“I got into a rut, I wasn’t drawing enough and a friend told me I was over-thinking things,” says Downing. “I just needed to do something I was really into that wouldn’t require too much thinking. I started thinking about designing superheroes and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I threw the gauntlet down and decided to draw a super every day.”

Everett does more than draw, too, dreaming up backstories for the characters. I’m partial to the teams like married couple “Ball & Chain.”

Another unlikely favorite is ”Dober-Man and Pincer,” a silly looking duo with a hilarious history “Altruistic exotic veterinarian Voss Brown was bitten by a genetically altered rabid doberman and given its approximate powers. He can run as fast as a pinscher and wields a dog-like fury! Together with his pet, Pincher (the now toothless dog that gave him his abilities) they pursue crime with a dogged determination!”

[Via NPR]

January 21, 2013

Photoshop customer profile: Illustrator Brian Haberlin

Photoshop.com profiles comics illustrator & storyteller Brian Haberlin, talking about his mix of digital & traditional media:

It’s really Faustian, meaning I will do anything it takes to get me to the final image. For example, I use both analog and digital techniques and go back and forth. I may print out my work, spray it with water, throw paint on it, scan it back in, or collage it with the original digital painting. I use anything from painting on a wet printout to using coffee as a paint source – whatever it takes to get there at the end of the day.

Brian shows his work & talks about key Photoshop features (Puppet Tool, Warp), favorite CS6 features (Background Save, Oil Paint), and more. (Note that a good chunk of the interview is inexplicably buried under a “More” link.)

[Via Daniel Presedo]

January 18, 2013

Napkin: Fast & clever image annotation

Longtime Adobe veteran Chris Parrish and the crew at Aged & Distilled have created Napkin, “the ultimate tool for concise visual communication,” designed to “painlessly annotate images or create diagrams and share the results quickly.” It looks rather slick:

Check out more details from Rene Ritchie.

[Via]

January 15, 2013

Interesting animation: “Malaria”

It is, Edson Oda writes, “the story of Fabiano, a young Mercenary who is hired to kill Death. This short film combines Origami, Kirigami, Time lapse, nankin illustration, Comic Books and Western Cinema.”

January 13, 2013

Animation: “That Will Be The Day”

In first grade or so, I was blown away to see green contour lines on a black Apple II screen (not unlike this). Seeing this work from Matthew DiVito (maker of some great animated GIFs) would have melted my face clean off:

[Via]

January 11, 2013

Hundreds: Clever visual game design

If Roger Black (or maybe Jack White) designed a game in After Effects, it might look a lot like Hundreds:

Don’t miss the lovely, spare design work & clever HTML/CSS effects on the game’s site.

January 05, 2013

A psychedelic animation made with ink, white-out and coffee

Bizarre intricacy:

Boston-based animator Jake Fried just released his latest psychedelic animation, The Deep End, which was drawn entirely with ink, coffee, and white-out. The animation is continually layered on top of itself as forms morph, bend and transform across the screen.

[Via]

January 03, 2013

A new spoof ad from Pixar

I loved being caught totally off guard by this ad, appearing as it did during a college football game amidst a bunch of predictable school self-promos.

December 30, 2012

Short film: Old Norse

Filmmaker Andrew Telling followed street artist Conor Harrington around Vardo, “a half-abandoned fishing village” off the coast of Norway, “one of the most Northerly and isolated parts of Europe.” I dig the minimal, meditative results.

Old Norse from on Vimeo.

[Via]

December 23, 2012

Celebrating Illustrator through an iPad pub

Remember when Adobe was a hardware company, making software only to sell printers & peripherals? Okay, that imagined future never came to be (despite being the founders’ original business plan), but the company was, for its first five years, all about PostScript. Illustrator marked a big departure—into the creation of application software (crazy talk!).

To celebrate Illustrator’s 25th (!) birthday, Adobe’s Ton Frederiks & his brother Hans have put together a free iPad app that tells the story of AI’s early years. They write,

Adobe Illustrator shipped on March 19, 1987. It was Adobe’s first software application based on Adobe PostScript, the technology that changed the entire publishing industry. Illustrator not only altered Adobe’s course dramatically, it changed drawing and line art forever.

For a lot of the current users of Illustrator it’s hard to imagine the impact that Illustrator made in a world where designs and illustrations were done manually.

With the app ‘Adobe Illustrator, the early years’ we want to give some insight into the early years of Illustrator and celebrate the creative freedom that Illustrator brought to designers and illustrators.

Related: Here’s the video demonstration that co-founder/CEO John Warnock shot & included on VHS with every copy of the product.

December 21, 2012

Neat Kickstarter idea: A printable, pop-up dollhouse

“Doll houses are space hogs, dust magnets and insanely expensive to boot,” writes Katherine Belsey. “That is why I designed this pop-up paper house. Knock it down and fold it up for storage or travel, and if you’re willing to put in a little sweat equity it can be yours for under $15.”

[Via]

December 20, 2012

One seriously dedicated animator

Artist INSA “creates elaborately painted walls that are photographed in sequence to create amazing, psychedelic animated GIFs.” Check out the gallery.

[Via] 

December 18, 2012

New Photoshop brushes from John Derry

Digital painting pioneer is offering a new way to lay down “Virtual Thick Paint” in Photoshop CS5/6:

John’s Impasto! for Adobe Photoshop CS5 & CS6 is a set of expressive brushes and layer styles providing an interactive three-dimensional surface appearance to your brush strokes. John’s Impasto! provides both paint and clear varnish styles.

John’s Impasto! tool presets are divided into depth-applying brushes and depth-removing erasers. Using one of the erasers on an Impasto! layer is like inscribing into wet gesso. A wide variety of surface appearances can be created using a combination of additive and subtractive strokes. And, any Photoshop brush can be used on an Impasto! layer.

The package comes with a set of 12 Impasto and 12 Varnish Layer Styles. Create art from scratch or apply virtual varnish to existing art. Each set has 4 surface styles: Matte, Satin, Gloss, and Smooth and is further sub-divided into Light, Medium, and Heavy. Impasto! layers can be interactively changed with a single mouse-click.

Here’s a video demo. Impasto is $20 from John’s site.

December 16, 2012

Foldify: 3D printing you might actually do

This app looks incredibly charming:

[Via Mark Kawano]

December 13, 2012

Demo: New features in Adobe Ideas v2.5

As I noted last month, Adobe’s vector-based drawing app for iPhone & iPad recently added speed-sensitive line thickness, a paint bucket, layer merging/flipping/duplications, and an eyedropper tool. Here PM Takashi Morifusa shows off the new tools:

December 11, 2012

Animation: “The real purpose of your life”

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” And if so, by whom? It’s hard not to relate to some of this short, rather charming video.

[Via]

December 10, 2012

Decorating for Christmas the Photoshop way

“I thought myself too lazy to decorate the house this year,” writes Corey Barker of NAPP, “so I just did it in Photoshop.” Enjoy.

December 09, 2012

Amazing Anamorphic Illusions

Ready for your brain to hurt? PetaPixel writes,

YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik’s cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects.

December 08, 2012

Animation: “It’s A Bad Brains Christmas, Charlie Brown”

Enjoy it now, before the copyright cops kill the joy!

[Via Bruce Bullis]

December 07, 2012

MoGraph: Musselman’s Pop-Up Book

I like the straightforward charm of these animated illustrations. This kind of thing wins my heart over the disposably trendy every time.

December 06, 2012

Help me help a good cause

Remember AJ Brockman, the Photoshop artist who got to meet President Obama after painting a portrait of the First Family using just a couple of fingers? Now he & his production company, No White Flags, would like to make a documentary about his life and work, and they’re asking for support via Indiegogo. I’ve contributed mine:

Courage & enthusiasm are contagious, and I’m honored to say that AJ & team have asked me to sit on the board of No White Flags. I’m really looking forward to helping them tell interesting, inspiring stories about creators & their art.

December 04, 2012

Cute animations I probably shouldn’t show the kids

First up is Malcolm Sutherland‘s Umbra, drawn using paper, pastels, and Toon Boom Studio, then assembled in After Effects. Lovely, perplexing, mind-bending?

[Via]

And then there’s one (or more) to grown on. Behold, the ever so winsome Dumb Ways To Die:

[Via Christine Kerby Fitts]

December 01, 2012

Animation: “The Leaf Woman & the Centaur”

I can’t claim to quite grok the story Jordan Bruner is telling, but it’s full of lovely visuals:

November 30, 2012

Illustration: 126 wacky gadgets of ACME Corp.

“Tornado seeds! Giant magnets! Dynamite! Rocket-powered roller skates!” writes illustrator Rob Loukotka. “I spent over 100 hours illustrating, designing, and researching this one poster.”

The fictional ACME Corporation appeared in nearly all 43 Coyote & Road Runner cartoons from 1949-1994. They make any product you can imagine. I’ve loved The ACME Corporation since I was a kid because they’re a true dream factory.

How amazing would it be if The ACME Corporation were real? That’s why I made this poster; to make our world a little crazier.

November 27, 2012

Adobe Ideas gains speed-sensitive drawing, paint bucket, more

With version 2.5 Adobe’s vector-based drawing app for iPad & iPhone has just taken some big steps forward. The points below understate the impact, but in early reviews customers seem to be really enjoying the changes.

• Three new drawing tools with unique stroke characteristics.
• Ability to quickly fill areas with color.
• Duplicate, merge and flip layers horizontally or vertically.
• Enhanced eyedropper tool lets you easily compare and match colors in different parts of your artwork.

November 26, 2012

Demo: Creating beautiful swirly strokes in Illustrator

“Drawing a perfect curly, swirly Stroke with varying widths,” points out Jeff Witchel, “used to be a tedious task requiring a steady hand and a tremendous amount of ability using the the Pen tool.” In this tutorial he shows off how variable-width strokes in Illustrator make tricky looks much easier to pull off.

November 24, 2012

Creatorverse: Remixable physics-based drawing

The folks at Linden Lab have whipped up Creatorverse, what looks to be a super simple way to create drawing imbued with physics. Here, I’ll let them explain:

November 12, 2012

Illustration: Fingerprints come to life

This fun little bit from Marion Deuchars reminds me of the great old Compaq birds animation.

[Via]

November 10, 2012

Color mixing comes to Paper

The amazing thing isn’t that the folks at FiftyThree poured a year’s worth of work into “just” color mixing in their iPad app Paper. The amazing thing is that they had the guts to ship a drawing app without as basic & obvious a feature as color picking—and that by all accounts the app was a big hit without it.

November 09, 2012

Photoshop Troll

Is there any reason I should get such a large kick out of the punking of unsuspecting people who want free Photoshop work? No. Is that going to stop me? No. (Here’s my favorite I’ve seen so far.)

November 08, 2012

Illustration: Crazy dubstep animation

This certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and you’d do well to skip right ahead to 1:20 or so, but at that point it showcases some great illustrations: “The animation section was created by taking illustrations by Adam Relf, prepping them in Photoshop then animating and compositing in After Effects. I did the final compile in Adobe Premiere.”

November 07, 2012

Illustration: Re-creating John Lennon’s poster

Beatles fan Peter Dean enlisted woodcarver Andy English in re-creating a Victorian circus poster that inspired John Lennon to write the song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, which appeared on The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:

Lennon bought the poster in an antiques shop and hung it in his music room. While writing for Sgt. Pepper one day, he drew inspiration from the quirky, old-fashioned language and set the words to music… It is printed in a limited edition of 1,967.

Make Productions nicely tells the story:

[Via]

November 06, 2012

Artist Liu Bolin erases cars from photos, no software required

 ”Waldo was a chump at hiding compared to Liu Bolin.” The artist sort of Content-Aware Fills himself out of photographs, disappearing into background via elaborate make-up. Now Ford has cleverly commissioned him to highlight its competitors’ blandness, making them melt into their backgrounds. Check it out:

November 02, 2012

Summly, a polished new newsreader

I just came across Summly, a free, pretty app for reading news on iPhone. It makes extensive use of swiping (left/right to navigate among articles, up/down to drill in deeper or to go up a level), and it’s full of carefully executed little details (parallax, subtle animation, etc.). Check it out:

October 26, 2012

The story behind the cover of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures”

 Peter Saville talks about the iconic cover design (based on a computer-generated signal from the first pulsar ever discovered) that’s gone on to spread through our culture (showing up as tattoos, sneaker treads, & much more).

[Via]

October 17, 2012

Cassanet: A typography homage in flesh & blood

What a fun idea from Spanish studio Atipo: “To promote our new typeface Cassannet [a free download], based on the style of lettering seen on Cassandre posters, we’ve recreated on flesh and blood the famous triptych “Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet”.

[Via]

October 11, 2012

Tutorial: Gradients Galore in Illustrator

Looks like a deep & interesting tour from Adrian Taylor. Says Smashing Magazine,

This extended video tutorial covers a wide variety of topics including basic gradient tools (0:30), the appearance pannel and multiple gradient fill layers (2:30), creating gradients with the blending tool (3:45), gradient strokes (6:30), gradient mesh (7:45), using gradients with type (14:00), wrapping gradients with envelope distort (16:30), and using opacity masks.

October 10, 2012

Maily: Visual email for kids

Being the dad of young boys, and being really eager to encourage their drawing-skill development, I’m intrigued by Maily:

Especially designed for kids from 4 years old, Maily allows your kids to send quirky, personalized emails to mom and dad, their grandparents or close friends easily, rapidly, and securely.

Your kids can now create and send their own emails, using elements like digital pencils, brushes, photos, personalized backgrounds, stickers, and their most commonly used expressions.

[Via]

October 07, 2012

Painting a McLaren with lasers

They kinda had me at “Marshmallow Laser Feast,” but boy this is beautiful:

Working with McLaren we were able to process their wind tunnel airflow data and score out paths for individual trails of light. Each frame was then sliced into 650 frames that represent depths of 3D space and a plasma screen, mounted on a motion control rig, was used as a 3D light printer to play back the 650 slices as it moved through the space. We then repeated the move a thousand times for each frame of the animation and with each frame the camera, mounted on another motion control rig, moved a few millimeters so that over the course of the shoot we were able to create the effect of a moving camera.

[Via Adam Pratt & Gizmodo]

October 06, 2012

Video: Artists illustrate the mysteries of science

Check out this lovely trailer for The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science:

[Via]

October 01, 2012

USA Today’s (crazy?-)bold new logo

USA Today has rebranded with what’s almost the most minimal logo one can imagine: a pure blue circle. The press release states, “USA TODAY’s logo was redesigned to be as dynamic as the news itself. The logo will be a live infographic that can change with the news.” Armin Vit provides lots of details & perspective at Under Consideration. Here’s a taste of how the logo evolves:

I also enjoyed Stephen Colbert’s somewhat less appreciative take:

September 14, 2012

Car logos, good & bad

• Chromeography is a collection of (mostly) beautiful chrome logos found on vintage cars, typewriters, appliances, and more.
• Genius steals—and then there are just rip-offs. Check out this wild bogarting of car logos, mainly done in China & India. [Via]

September 13, 2012

NKS5 Natural Media Toolkit for Photoshop

I haven’t gotten to try it out, but the NKS5 Natural Media Toolkit for Photoshop CS5/CS6 looks interesting:

NKS5 is a custom toolkit for Adobe Photoshop CS5, CS5.5 and CS6. It provides a wide range of natural media, texturing, and production tools in an attractive, easy-to-use palette with a minimal footprint.

Here’s a demo:

September 11, 2012

Demo: Creating a Watercolor Painting with Adobe Photoshop Touch

We snuck this feature into a recent update of PS Touch. Russell Brown shows how to combine features like layers & blending modes to create a beautiful effect:

September 07, 2012

She’s a Rainbow

• Gorgeous: “American artist Tauba Auerbach presents the 8 x 8 x 8-inch hard-back cubes illustrating the RGB color scheme in a page-by-page medium. a digital offset print on paper with airbrushed cloth cover and book edges create a colorful reference volume of all the colors in existence.” [Via Chris Peppel]

• 99 Shades of Grey: As CreativePro writes, “For pledges ranging from $1 to $99, backers can get the book in soft-cover, hard-cover, or ebook formats, t-shirts, posters, and the privilege of naming a particular shade of grey.”

Or as someone just quipped about the Illustrator 1.0 video I uploaded a while back, “ANY SHADE OF GREY I WANT! <3″

September 04, 2012

Nissan’s crazy-long flipbook animation

Heh—this takes me back to my painfully ambitious childhood attempts at flipbook animation: the Nissan Note site tells a story as you scroll (and scroll, and scroll) down the page. In all my years online I can’t say I remember seeing this done before—and that’s saying something. [Via]

August 30, 2012

Beautiful animation for BBC Olympics coverage

Props to Pete Candeland & Passion Pictures.

[Via]

August 28, 2012

Make a Monty Python animation, win Adobe apps

 Adobe’s sponsoring an Animate Chapman contest, open ’til October 22. As CreativePro explains, 

The contest is being run to celebrate and promote the upcoming 3D animated film A Liar’s Autobiography – The True Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman.

Ten winners will be chosen and in addition to the software prize, will receive the honor of having their animation included in the DVD box set of the film and on the Python’s YouTube channel.

August 26, 2012

Animation backlash

I came to Adobe specifically to democratize animation, to tear down barriers that crippled Flash back then. There can be a fine line, though, between “democratizing” and “cheapening the coin,” as this funny, profane little piece from Harry Partridge illustrates:

[Via David Simons]

August 24, 2012

Video: Speed-shading in Illustrator CS6

French artist Jérôme Bareille is a gradient-mesh ninja:

[Via Stéphane Baril]

August 23, 2012

John From Cincinnati titles

Apropos of nothing, I’ve always loved the titles for HBO’s late & un-lamented John From Cincinnati. What a great evocation of time, place, and flavor. RIP Joe Strummer.

August 16, 2012

Demos: Using Adobe Ideas & Illustrator together

If you like to sketch out ideas while on the go & then refine them further, Adobe Ideas + Illustrator is a great one-two punch. Here’s a short series of quick demos that show the process & offer some best-practice guidance.

1. Starting a sketch in Adobe Ideas
In this video, we’ll go through a brief tour of the features of Adobe Ideas, before creating a sketch and prepping the workspace for our final illustration.

2. Creating a finished illustration in Adobe Ideas
Next, we’ll take our sketch and turn it into a multi-layered colored illustration. We’ll also cover some techniques to facilitate a smooth transition into Illustrator, allowing for maximized editing ability.

3. Modifying an Ideas file in Illustrator
Finally, we’ll use Creative Cloud to bring our Ideas file into Illustrator CS6. From there, we’ll learn some techniques on how to clean up and edit our artwork.

August 12, 2012

The Olympics via TRON

The Chemical Brothers teamed up with Crystal CG to create this piece. It’s slow to start, but hang in there a bit. “Played in the Velodrome before every session,” the creators say, “the video shows the Velodrome as never before, literally pulsating with excitement. ‘We’ve created sweeping contours and sleek surfaces as the backdrop for an intense, futuristic cycling ‘duel’ as two animated riders power round the track,’ said Darren Groucutt, creative director at Crystal. ‘It truly brings the Velodrome to life.’”

[Via]

August 07, 2012

The Olympics, rendered Lego by Lego

Brilliant: the Guardian’s Brick-by-Brick feature uses uses Legos + real audio from the games to re-enact the triumphs of Usain Bolt, the agonies of a South Korean fencer (sporting a stormtrooper helmet), and more. And how about Phelps putting away those turkey legs? [Via A. Jeremy P. Lawrence]

August 03, 2012

(rt) Recent infographic goodness

• Here’s a fun scrolling infographic of the London 2012 Games. (Dig the footer quip.)
• Love the stripy arrows, comrade: Cool Soviet-Era Infographics.
• The Evolution of the Web is a neat, interactive, HTML-based infographic.  
• Could be cool: Information Graphics, a new book from Taschen. 

July 28, 2012

A creepy look at the future of augmented reality

You know this is coming. You know it’ll be almost impossible to resist.

“The more we use knowledge found on the Internet (and not in our own minds) the less capacity we have to actually hold that knowledge internally.” Seems about right. [Via]

July 27, 2012

Video: Wind & water

Neat animation, using algorithms related to what powers the new Oil Paint filter in Photoshop CS6:

[Via]

July 21, 2012

Things made notable by their absence

A pair of interesting little Photoshop-powered projects:

• Zhao Huasen takes photos of people on bicycles, then erases the bicycles. [Via]
• McLean Fahnestock has created a series of rocketless rocket launches. [Via]

July 19, 2012

Michael Jackson as a stick figure

How much character of movement can be conveyed just by moving dots. Apparent crazy person Colin Rozee set out to find out, saying “I manually keyframed 19 mask paths in AE. There’s over 20,000 keyframes in the piece, but it needed to be that detailed to achieve the fluidity of movement….” He used the Plexus particle-system plug-in in the project. [Via David Simons]

July 17, 2012

Animation: “Cascade”

I’m guessing that Timothy LaPointe, like me, sees these things when he’s falling asleep. The difference is, he can show you:

June 28, 2012

The Sydney Opera House, Animated

Check out URBANSCREEN’s giant projection work, “Lighting of the Sails”:

[Via]

June 24, 2012

Can 6/7 year olds draw Mona Lisa’s smile?

Marion Deuchars puts a bunch of kids (and a few grown-ups) to the test:

[Warning: Content may include brief glimpses of Bart Simpson, Uncle Sam, and boobs.]

June 22, 2012

Monkeygram & Jittergram: Animation in your pocket

I’m a fan of the joyful iPad app Toontastic, saying last year:

The other day I said that creation on tablets would be more about fun, about speed, and about the unbridled pleasure of creation than what we know today. Toontastic is the sort of thing I have in mind.

Now its creators have created Monkeygram, a way to create animations (featuring your face, if you’d like) from your phone. It’s “Toontastic for the rest of us”:

Will “the kids” now start sending each other animations instead of texts? I don’t know, but I dig that these guys are trying.

Elsewhere, Jittergram helps you “make a 3D sterogram or a long stop motion animation… Jittergram makes it easy by showing your previous frame on top of the current camera view so you can line everything up perfectly. It then automatically creates a GIF and makes it super easy to share.”

As soon as my lads are old enough to start creating the stop-motion Lego videos they so enjoy, I think we’ll be all over this one.

June 21, 2012

Hand lettering

I dig Pablo Delkan’s hand-drawn lettering portfolio:

[Via]

June 19, 2012

Video: Blade Runner as watercolor

“This animation is made of 3285 aquarelle paintings,” writes Anders Ramsell, “and form the very beginning of my paraphrase on the motion picture Blade Runner.” Nothing the god of watery pigments wouldn’t let you into heaven for.

[Via]

June 16, 2012

Creating the Iron Man HUD for The Avengers

The VFX team at Cantina Creative sat down with Adobe to discuss the incredible attention to detail they put into creating on-screen graphics for Marvel’s The Avengers. From consulting with an A-10 pilot about his “ultimate HUD” to animating thousands of Illustrator elements in After Effects, their process makes for a really interesting read. The move to 3D demanded even tighter craftsmanship:

We focused a lot of time on how widgets and graphics would actually function because everything was clearly readable. Everything in the HUD, even down to the tiny micro-text, relates precisely to the current story-point.

June 11, 2012

Video: A brief history of video games

Here’s “an abridged history of video games in under three minutes. Made using only sounds, music and video from the video games themselves.”

Showing my age, I find the first half or so much more compelling than the latter. Hadouken!!

June 08, 2012

(rt) Illustration: Honest movie posters, intricate skulls, & more

Having recently been chided for not posting enough non-Adobe links (funny, I used to get nailed for just the opposite), I respectfully submit the following.

• Brutal truth:
  • “Extremely Lame & Incredibly Cloying”: Truthful movie posters, Oscars 2012 edition [Via]
  • “At the airport. F it, I deserve it…” Honest ads. [Via]

• “These pixels are making me thirsty”: A fun illustrated Seinfeld tribute.
• Meyoko draws gorgeous, incredibly intricate illustrated skulls.

• I love Alexandra Pacula’s Blurry Nightlife Oil Paintings.
• “Stacy Green, Will You Marry Me?” Marriage proposal as infographic [Via]
• Unsolicited Proposals for New Beverages: Pass the NyQuil Ice & Earl Grey Loko!

May 27, 2012

Whatever happened to all my design links? (Hint: Pinterest.)

You might remember that I often used to featured bulleted lists of links about photography, illustration, typography, etc.  I still share links when possible via Twitter, but I just haven’t had time in recent months to amass collections as I once did. (Could I now be working for a living? Perish the thought!) I still pine for an automated solution that apparently doesn’t exist.

A silver lining, though: Now I find that my Pinterest boards absorb what would otherwise have been tweets. I can’t add quite the same context/commentary there, but the site offers a beautifully visual presentation, and you might want to follow me there.

May 18, 2012

What do you think of the CS6 icons & splash screens?

In 6 years of daily blogging, I’ve never gotten deluged more than I did when revealing the CS3 icons.  After 500+ comments, I even got turned into icons myself. Suffice it to say, people have strong opinions.

These designs don’t happen by accident–quite the opposite.  Adobe XD (Experience Design) manager Shawn Cheris has posted a thorough tour of how CS6 branding evolved & the thinking that went into it.  He talks about how they started with color, moved into shapes, and ultimately created thousands of individual graphics across the entire Suite.

How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2

As the world probably doesn’t need more nail-biting anxiety, I almost hesitate to share this one–but all’s well that ends well:

[Via Dan Mall]

May 16, 2012

A 5-year-old sketches logos

Charming: Adam Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos for 5 seconds apiece, then asked her to draw what she remembered:

[Via Carolina de Bartolo]

May 13, 2012

Animation: Acid Drops

This is “The second in a series of hand-painted studies,” writes Matt Box, “that aim to psychedelically capture the individual styles of influential skateboarders.”

[Via]

May 12, 2012

Recursive drawing

What do you think of this cleverness?

Could people wrap their heads around the idea enough to use it productively? In my experience many people still struggle with things like symbols & Smart Objects–if they even use them at all. [Via Mausoom Sarkar]

May 08, 2012

Mordy shows Illustrator CS6

Our old friend (and former Illustrator PM) Mordy Golding tours what’s new in CS6: 

An overview of everything that’s new in Illustrator CS6, including 64bit support, a new user interface and underlying framework, pattern creation, image trace, gradient on stroke, and more!

On the Real World Illustrator blog, Mordy talks about details of the new UI, what 64-bit means to you, and more.

May 07, 2012

Photoshop, Pirates, & The Force

Hmm… What would make for a good list of dark-to-light descriptions?

As he was working on Photoshop CS6′s new dark UI feature, engineer Joe Ault put in bread-based placeholders for the brightness values: Pumpernickel, Dark Rye, Whole Wheat, Sourdough–then solicited suggestions from the team.  Steve Guilhamet from QE explains.

The base ground rules were 4 names that reflected the tonal range of the 4 UI options, with consideration for cultural variance and localization (e.g. Pumpernickel in Scandinavia is not thought of as a dark bread). There was a food theme to start but it opened up a bit. We had beer, coffee, tequila, macaroons, rice, cakes, etc. There were moon phases, seasons, rocks.

Steve suggested clouds (Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus, Nimbus– “Because you can’t see ‘Cloud’ used enough these days”), pirate flags (Henry Every, Richard Worley, Stede Bonnet, and John Rackam), and more.  My favorite, though, is one he mocked up:

Eventually things died down & the UI ended up with just unnamed color swatches–the right move, I’m sure, but a bit less fun.  (Hard to say, though, what would happen if one held down modifier keys while clicking them in the Prefs dialog…)

May 05, 2012

A Pixelated History of Cameras

Short & charming.

[Via PetaPixel]

May 04, 2012

The art of the start

Eminent motion graphics pros discuss recent work (e.g. Zombieland) and some classics (Saul Bass & more).

May 02, 2012

Vintage MoGraph: Wang 1980

Tell me you don’t want to see Panic make an homage in this style.

April 27, 2012

Interesting recent collages

• John Stezaker “appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades,’” producing some disconcerting juxtapositions. (Hit the “Next” button at the top to see more.) [Via Guido Reule]
• Matthew Cusick creates portraits & collages from shredded bits of maps.

April 24, 2012

Illustrator CS6 is now a 64-bit Cocoa app

You can now use all the RAM on your system–great if you’re working with big, complex files. Other highlights include:

Gaussian blur received special attention and has been specifically optimized in CS6. As a result, other effects with operations that depend on Gaussian blur have also been enhanced, so you’ll see performance improvements in both drop shadows and inner glows. […]

You’ll notice a nimble, lively touch when you work with multiple artboards and threaded text. Creative tools such as the Bristle Brush have been optimized for both speed and efficiency so you can work fluidly, even when you generate immensely complex designs composed of hundreds of overlapping transparent paths.

And it’s not just Adobe saying it. Here’s Jean-Claude Tremblay writing for CreativePro.com:

It feels as if Illustrator has been re-energized… Modifying these effects in Preview mode is almost in real time. This speed increase and better reliability might not be the sexiest features, but at the end of a day, I’ll be glad I can do more and faster.

The reworked UI also offers efficiency tweaks, including inline editing of layer names (yeah!) and keyboard navigation of font lists.

April 18, 2012

Demo: Speed drawing with realistic pencils in Photoshop CS6

Groovy. I can’t wait to check out John Derry‘s complete set of CS6 painting & drawing vids, due soon. (For details on how the new erodible tips work, see previous.)

April 17, 2012

Sneak Peek: Gradient strokes in Illustrator CS6

From the simple (e.g. adding a sheen to the edge of an iOS button) to the ambitious (check out that motorcycle!), gradients in paths can be amazingly useful:

I’ve been (im)patiently awaiting this one for years. Combining transparency with gradients, plus reshaping strokes via the Width tool (introduced in CS5) and Pencil is incredibly powerful. You can create some amazingly subtle shaded regions using just vectors.

I think gradient strokes will go a long way to democratizing the power that’s lingered in AI’s potent but often inscrutable Gradient Mesh tool, and I can’t wait to see & show more.

April 14, 2012

*Real* airbrushes & pencils, in Photoshop?

What if your airbrush sprayed a real 3D cone of paint, so that tilting your stylus affected the shape you laid down? And what if pencils could actually wear down as you drew, producing interesting effects?

Oh, wait: in the CS6 beta, now they can. Deke McClelland shows how:

March 31, 2012

Animation: Alternate Mad Men titles

[Contains some profanity & a few risqué bits, so please move on if that offends you]

[Via Chris Peppel]

March 21, 2012

Adobe Ideas gets new features on iOS, Android

Adobe Ideas 1.6 for iOS is now live in the App Store. New features:

• Easily pick up colors using the new Eyedropper tool
• Choose colors using new HSB and RGB color pickers
• Drag and drop to save your own color themes
• Name your ideas to distinguish them on your device and for easier sharing
• Use up to 10 drawing layers for each sketch at no extra cost

Ideas 1.5.1 for Android is live in Google Play. This version will also be bundled with the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. New features:

• Bug fixes, including a fix for a problem with sign-in to the Creative Cloud on Android 4.0 (ICS)
• Support for Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 S-Pen

March 16, 2012

Motion graphics: A Hunter S. Thompson homage… for a bookstore?

“It is not very often that we have the opportunity to create a graphic equivalent of a drug-fueled rant bringing all of our collective skills to bear,” writes the team at Buck. “And it is almost unfathomable that we could actually do something like this and benefit a good cause.”

The project promotes Good Books, an online bookseller that passes all its profits through to Oxfam. [Via Russell Williams]

March 11, 2012

Illustration: Toy Shining

I’ve previously mentioned artist Kyle Lambert & his amazing work done in Adobe Ideas. Now he’s created a rather incredible homage to The Shining, all painted using the Brushes app:

March 09, 2012

The story of Keep Calm and Carry On

“Did you know,” asks Kottke, “that this British WWII poster was never distributed to the public and was discovered only recently in an English book shop?” It’s adorned my Mac for years, but I had no idea. Three interesting minutes:

I kind of like this variation, and this one.

March 04, 2012

Design: Truthful posters, Saul meets Spider-Man, & more

• Mike del Mundo has created a Spider-Man-themed homage to Saul Bass.
• Speed lines! Kang Duck-bong uses PVC pipes to create sculptures that appear to be moving. [Via]
• Posted:
  • Mubi collects some of the best movie posters of 2011. [Via]
  • “Extremely Lame & Incredibly Cloying”: Truthful posters for this year’s Oscar nominees.
• Photography
  • Lightboys worked for two years to create the large-format “Polaboy, an LED-backlit photographic frame that is a direct 10:1 scaling up of a Polaroid snapshot.”
  • Retronaut shows off Shackleton’s 1915 Antartica excursion–in color.

March 02, 2012

Collaborative drawing: Is there a “there” there?

The $4 Sketchshare enables realtime collaborative drawing, complete with voice chat among participants. Here’s a quick demo:

Do people actually do collaborative, realtime document editing–and if so, under what circumstances? Painter tried it in the 90′s with NetPainter (which only I & John Derry, who worked at Fractal back then, seem to remember), and I’ve seen tons of tools come & go over the years. Drawing is, for most people, difficult; we feel weird being watched; and we don’t like to watch others draw badly (or maybe even draw well in realtime).

And yet, and yet… I remain kind of fascinated by Layer Tennis, Mixel, and other collaboration efforts. Are there specific, real-world cases where you’d use tools like these–e.g. when brainstorming/moodboarding with teammates? And if so, do you use such tools (and if not, why not?).

In a slightly related vein, Draw Something makes collaborative drawing into a game (sort of mobile Pictionary), and apparently 2 million people are using it every day (!!).

February 13, 2012

Animated lunacy: My Little Pony meets Skrillex

I get an absurdly large kick out of this. (Here’s the backstory.) Stick with it til 1:15 or so–if you can.

February 11, 2012

Time & Tide

Canada’s Bay of Fundy features a high tide that can be 50+ feet higher than low tide. Check out this time lapse:

In an old, obscure corner of my career, I was a Navy Midshipman who spent a month on the USS Zephyr. (Would you have guessed?) I sat on a dock in Alaska, sketching the aft 25mm cannon (below), which I’d just unsuccessfully shot at some seagulls (thankfully I missed). I tend to draw each part methodically, and I kept kicking myself as I failed to get the perspective right among the various pieces. Finally I realized that the tide was lowering the ship so fast that the lines were rapidly changing. Not a great place to draw in pen!

[Via]

February 10, 2012

Making iOS vector icons using Photoshop

Matt Gemmell shares his tips on creating extremely small PDF graphics using a combo of Photoshop and Panic’s utility ShrinkIt (reducing the size of his test file by 85%).

February 05, 2012

A 5-year-old responds to company logos

I’ve gotta try something like this with our little dudes.

[Via]

January 23, 2012

Design tools: Gesty & UI Toolkit

Of potential interest to Web/screen designers:

• “Gesty is a set of vector gesture icons useful for UI/UX designers, manuals publishers and many other creators.” $4.99 [Via]
• The $8 UI Toolkit offers “20 Photoshop Styles, 94 Vector Glyphs, 40 Background Patterns, Shadow Creator Action, 130 Custom Shapes, 10 Ring Indicators, 10 High-Res Photo Textures, 34 Common UI Symbols.” [Via Jason Santa Maria]

January 21, 2012

Five people playing a single guitar

No, I don’t really know what it has to do with this blog, either. Pretty great, though, right?

The original version makes interesting use of stop-motion painting (ah, there’s the tangential connection):

January 11, 2012

The Icon Handbook

Designer Jon Hicks (famous for things like creating the Firefox icon via Fireworks) has written The Icon Handbook:

I’ve set out to create the manual, reference guide and coffee table book that I always desired… Along the way, I talk to icon designers such as Susan Kare, David Lanham and Gedeon Maheux of the Iconfactory and many more about their process behind well known icons.

The book promises to get into technical details, too, as in this excerpt about using fonts in lieu of bitmaps to present icons. I can’t wait to get a copy.

January 03, 2012

Epic stop-motion with jellybeans

22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, 288,000 jelly beans–and no CGI or green screen (!). The video itself is interesting enough…

…but the making-of is truly fascinating. A bean-encrusted full-body cast is just part of the epic dedication.

[Via]

January 02, 2012

Funky cartoon mash-ups

• Seuss meets Venkman: “There Goes a Gozerian, Ghostbuster!” [Via]
• The Sex Pistols get the Hanna Barbera treatment. [Via]
• Mulan with a nose ring? Princesses Gone Wild.

December 28, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Film history, politician abuse, & more

• Bizarre Photoshoppery: “Newt’s Nudes: Renaissance paintings featuring Newt Gingrich’s head.”
• This cute illustration by Tymn Armstrong might become my new desktop. (Or, if you prefer, here’s an edgier alternative. [Via])
• A funky art-making machine: The Chromatic Typewriter
• Historical:
  • Neat Mac/UI history: The original sketchbook of Susan Kare.
  • Vintage illustrations: Gremlins posters from WWII.
  • Neat bit of film history: “How they shot the Star Wars opening crawl“.

December 26, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Outstanding movie poster remixes & more

• Cinematic:
  • Brilliant: Movies revisited as neon animated GIFs. [Via]
  • Solid: 13 Movie Poster Trends & What They Say About Their Movies. [Via]
• Don’t you hate it when people drive RC cars on planes? Happens all the time!
• Recursive Hulk Hogan mustache–can’t unsee!!
• The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2011 list is up.
• Brian Matthew Hart and Dena Pickering make amazingly intricate light paintings.

December 22, 2011

The journey is the reward?? A fun holiday card done in Photoshop

From the folks at Viewpoint Creative:

[Via Ben Zibble]

December 18, 2011

Stop-motion paper fun: Protéigon

Steven Briand spent two months creating this ambitious little piece:

[Via]

December 17, 2011

Video: Vintage Russian animation

We’re awakened every day by young boys charging in & requesting “Truck videos!”–shorthand for watching random stuff on YouTube. Somehow we unearthed this weird old gem, a Russian production from the 60′s. Fair warning: It contains one an epic ear worms so catchy that it might be a mind-control plot.

Bonus kid-hypnotizer: The guys delight in this simple old Flash 3D piece. “Toss the monster truck out the top!!”

December 07, 2011

Stop-motion goodness: Mario in the Real World

I just saw eighth grade flash before my eyes:

[Via Devlin Donnelly, from whose blog I ganked the "Address is Approximate" video, and from whom I anticipate lifting plenty of good stuff in the future]

December 03, 2011

Video: Terry Gilliam on animation

“The whole point of animation, to me, is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea,” says a young Terry Gilliam. “The technique itself doesn’t really matter. Whatever works, is the thing to use.” Here’s 15 minutes with a master:

[Via]

December 02, 2011

“Drive”: An animated trailer

I dig the style & atmosphere of Tom Haugomat & Bruno Mangyoku’s animated trailer for the movie Drive (which I’ve yet to see, dammit). Warning: it’s violent.

[Via]

November 23, 2011

Photo-realistic painting in Adobe Ideas

Want to annoy a photographer? Just say, “Great image! What camera did you use?” (“Telling a photographer that his camera takes great pictures is like telling a chef that his oven makes great meals,” notes Terry White.) We do well to focus more on artists than their media.

Kyle Lambert shows how far one can take even very simple tools. Kyle is a fine artist based in the UK and was formally trained as an oil painter. He currently freelances and specializes in painting, illustration and animation. He’s becoming well known for his striking character portraits and was the first artist to create photo-realistic work using Adobe Ideas. Check it out:

November 13, 2011

A beautifully animated ode to spaceflight

Check out this gem from Celine Desrumaux (fullscreen, of course):

[Via]

November 11, 2011

Happy Nigel Tufnel Day

;-)

[Via Adam Jerugim]

November 09, 2011

Check out Mixel: Social collaging for everyone

I’m delighted to see that Khoi Vinh & Scott Ostler have launched Mixel, a free & intriguing iPad app for creating, sharing, and remixing artwork. Check it:

I had the pleasure of color-commenting a Layer Tennis match in which Khoi parried with Nicholas Felton last year. Afterwards we chatted a bit about whether & how the fun of “Photoshop tennis” could be brought to a radically wider audience. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of this new project, and I got to kick the tires while swinging through New York a few weeks back.

Two bits of interesting sauce:

• Like Instagram, Mixel lets one follow & be followed, and it can import your existing connections.
• The app keeps all pieces separate, making it easy to find artwork, see what’s trending, etc.

Khoi’s shown remarkable restraint in crafting the editing environment. Forget about things like complex layer blending: there’s no adding text* or even simple brush strokes. That’s by design: You’re meant to communicate visually rather than verbally, and drawing skills can’t be a prerequisite. Anyone should be able to jump in & participate immediately. It’s 180 degrees from most Adobe apps (which trade simplicity for power), and I find that refreshing.

It’ll be fascinating to see who tries the app, who sticks with it, what they make, and why. Will the rough aesthetic have legs, or will the app be drawn towards refinement & complexity? How might it grow to serve particular audiences (e.g. designers wanting to brainstorm/moodboard together in small groups)? We shall see.

In any case, congrats to these guys on the launch. What do you think of Mixel?

[See also: Khoi's philosophy on the app's mission is well worth reading.]

* One can add images that include text, but you can’t whip out a text tool and start laying down captions. No lolcats for you!

November 03, 2011

Brian Yap on Adobe Ideas

Boxing Clever‘s Brian Yap creates amazing artwork using Adobe Ideas (for example, this portrait of Talib Kweli). Here he talks about what the app means to him:

November 02, 2011

Dave Malouf on Adobe Collage

I had to pleasure of meeting Dave Malouf, design professor at Savannah College of Art & Design, at Adobe MAX and moderating an interesting panel discussion with him. In this brief clip he talks about using Adobe Collage to express & share ideas quickly:

October 18, 2011

A beautifully simple iPad app for kids

The Micronaxx (ages 3.5 & 2) spent the weekend transfixed by Harold & the Purple Crayon, a narrated version of the classic children’s book. I’ve previously shied away from elaborate, high-concept kids book-apps, figuring they distract instead of encouraging imagination. In this case, though, simplicity is key, and the lovely hidden little treats (e.g. a little crab that pops out of the sand, or–yes–a burping porcupine) are delightful.

[Via]

October 12, 2011

Friday demo/Q&A: Perspective drawing in Illustrator CS5

My neighbor is an industrial designer & can’t stop raving about perspective drawing in Illustrator CS5. If that’s up your 3-point alley, check out this session Friday at noon Pacific:

Whether you are drawing street scenes, architecture, product concepts, packaging, or even infographics, being able to craft art in perspective consistently, and accurately, is a must-have skill. In this session we’ll learn how Illustrator CS5 makes this possible with the new Perspective Drawing tools. Learn how to map 2D vector art to existing perspectives, draw in perspective, and get the skinny on some tricks to help you work.

September 22, 2011

“Mac n’ Cheese”: Painterly animation, nothing to do with food

Why the name? You’d have to ask the four Dutch students who made it. I love the painterly textures the team achieved. It’s just 2 minutes long, and full-screen is a must:

(“We can not be held accountable for the blowing of your mind, the bleeding of your eyes or epileptic seizures,” they note.) [Via]

September 20, 2011

Video: Green graffiti

What if cleaning, rather than painting, created images? Marc Cameron and Moose Curtis use stencils & a pressure washer to blast away layers of filth, creating their own “reverse graffiti”:

[Via]

September 14, 2011

Pixels in Plywood & Cork

Artist Scott Gundersen creates giant portraits using wine corks. [Via Tara Sturtevant] Meanwhile, Finnish artist Tomi uses a “MDF-based CNC router*” to drill halftone patterns into stained plywood:

*No I don’t really know what that means, but I feel kinda nerd-macho repeating it. [Via]

September 01, 2011

Video: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

Looks like this game features some really slick art direction:

Here’s more info on the project.

August 30, 2011

Check out the new Wacom Inkling

“Wouldn’t it be great if your ideas could start as sketches with a ‘real’ pen on paper & immediately become electronic vector graphics?” Er–yes, please:

So, why not just sketch with regular pen & paper, then snap a photo of the results? A few things come to mind:

• Layer creation while drawing
• Fidelity (vs. a photo) and pressure sensitivity
• Sequence: “As Inkling records your drawing,” the site says, “you can play it back to see how your drawing was made, stroke-by-stroke. You can use the ‘scrubber’ feature to isolate parts of your drawing to separate into individual layers.”

I haven’t tried the device, but it looks exciting. Props to Wacom for thinking in some interesting new ways.

August 29, 2011

(rt) Recent poster goodness

• “Loose Lips Create Rifts”: Modern “Workplace Propaganda Posters” from Steve Thomas.
• “Wire Inspire“: Motivational posters based on “The Wire.” Fantastic. (Or rather, maybe, sheeeeeeeeit.)[kottke]
• Brian Yap drew this Talib Kweli poster entirely using Adobe Ideas for iPad.
• The quality of entries varies wildly, but I’m generally digging these Minimal Movie Posters.
• The Dark Knight vs… Unicorns? You can’t unsee it! [Via]

August 20, 2011

Fun motion graphics for BBC Knowledge

From weareseventeen & Mauro Rader:

And here’s another fun one for the same client, this time from Sean Pecknold:

[Via]

August 15, 2011

(rt) Illustrated miscellany

• Remixes:
  • Bizarre & kind of excellent: Soviet Army Monument Transformed into Superheroes.
  • Mona Lisa Remix, reducing the painting to just 140 colors. [Via]
• Heh–I love it, quickly: the “Fastest Possible Drawings of Everything.” [Via]
• Dave Grohl as coloring book: check out the Foo Fighters’ absurdist concert rider. (The ice cubes primer is particularly hilarious.)

• Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo is one intense individual. [Via]

August 04, 2011

Press-on nails as stop-motion animation

900 press-on nails, 1,200 bottles of nail polish, and a month of work = this animation. The process seems incredibly punishing/tedious, but then again, it did just get me to watch an ad for Kia hatchbacks!

[Via]

August 02, 2011

Video: Illustration time lapse

Jelle Gijsberts gives a high-speed tour through the creation of one of his richly detailed illustrations made using Illustrator + Photoshop:

[Via]

July 27, 2011

Video: A History Of The Title Sequence

How meta: “Designed as a possible title sequence for a fictitious documentary,” writes film student Jurjen Versteeg, ”this film shows a history of the title sequence in a nutshell.” Fullscreen viewing recommended.

The sequence includes all the names of title designers who had a revolutionary impact on the history and evolution of the title sequence. The names of the title designers all refer to specific characteristics of the revolutionary titles that they designed. This film refers to elements such as the cut and shifted characters of Saul Bass’ Psycho title, the colored circles of Maurice Binder’s design for Dr. No and the contemporary designs of Kyle Cooper and Danny Yount.

[Via]

July 25, 2011

(rt) Illustration: New posters & infographics

• Posters:
  • I dig the cool use of negative space in this poster for The Dark Knight Rises. [Via]
  • Portman meets Fairey: Obey the Swan.
  • “A Champion Will Rise… About 2 Inches Off The Ground.”
  • “Jefferson X-Wing” & “AC/D2″: Coachella by way of Star Wars. [Via]
• Infographics:
  • Here’s a brief history of Isotype, “the vintage visual language on which modern infographics are founded.” [Via]
  • I’ve yet to explore the new infographics site visual.ly, but it looks promising.
  • What Would Don Draper Do? [Via]

July 24, 2011

Video: The Saga of Bjorn

I found this beautifully animated piece from The Animation Workshop wittier & more engaging than I’d expected:

[Via]

July 11, 2011

Bert Monroy speaking this Thursday in SF, plus seminars

Master digital illustrator Bert Monroy will be speaking this Thursday at the San Francisco Photoshop User Group (presentation starting at 7pm). He’ll be enlightening us with great photo editing, compositing and painting tips he picked up while working on his colossal, 750,000-layer Times Square project (see previous).  Please see the meeting page for directions, RSVP info, etc.

Bert has also announced a series of one-day seminars, “The Making of Times Square: Live,” taking place this fall. He plans to cover the creation & use of brushes, use of Photoshop’s 3D tools, creating realistic hair, and more. I’ve really enjoyed Bert’s presentations at Photoshop World and elsewhere, so I’m sure these will be great sessions as well.

July 09, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Groening does Apple, Fairey does Carpenter, & more

• Another reason I loved Apple in the 80′s: Vintage ads from Matt Groening (!).
• More beautifully simple visual puns light up IBM’s Smarter Planet series.
• You Will Obey: Shepard Fairey’s They Live Poster. (It all comes full circle.) [Via]
• You won’t be unseeing Fractal Tom Selleck. And you’re welcome.
• Cute: “Snoutlet, The Pigs Behind Electrical Outlets.”
• Heh: I like David Friedman’s idea for Thing Three and Thing Four.

July 07, 2011

(rt) Good recent infographics

• From “Indie Designer” to “Eurotrash A-hole”: A fun survey of wine label styles.
• 695,000 Facebook updates & more: 60 Seconds on the Web.
• “Goodbye to Drama”: Very Small Array charts box office receipts by genre over the years. [Via]

July 04, 2011

Video: “Is Tropical: The Greeks”

I’ve gone back and forth on whether to post this one. Even cartoon violence, when paired with children, can be very disturbing. On the other hand, having passed countless childhood hours with friends pretend-shooting each other, I think there’s something interesting in this video’s take on how kids make sense of the images they encounter. I leave the decision of whether to watch up to you.

[Via Steve Guilhamet]

July 03, 2011

Terminator 2 turns 20 today

All I know is, “This video is a tribute to the best movie in the world: Terminator 2, which turns 20 on July 3.” That, and I still wish I were made of liquid metal.

[Via]

June 30, 2011

Video: “Looks That Kill”

Dig this exuberant throwback animation from illustrator Kevin Dart & animator Stephane Coedel. It’s the little didn’t-have-to-do-that touches (reflections, rippling heat behind a jet exhaust, etc.) that nail it for me. Fullscreen viewing recommended.

[Via]

June 24, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Retro “Cars” & more

• I love this retro-illustrated poster for “Cars 2.” We’re taking the kids today (er, this evening, boss, if you’re reading) for their first outing to the theater. [Via]
• How about snuggling up with a Photoshop color palette bedspread? [Via]
• “Blood on the Tracks” as pulp fiction & more: What If Your Favorite Album Was a Book? [Via] Update: Check out this slideshow of all the work. [Via Marc Pawliger]
• I get a weird kick out of this Santa/birds illustration combo. Check out lots of other good stuff at stevenbonner.com.
• “Disposable portraits“: Idan Friedman lovingly embosses artwork into cheap aluminum pans.

June 23, 2011

Illustration: Music vid hand-animated via iPad

Animator Shawn Harris painstakingly drew some 7,000 strokes using the iPad app Brushes, then combined them into a full-length music video. Check out the making-of:

[Via]

June 20, 2011

Tape as art

Chris Hosmer makes amazing illustrations, including murals, using humble electrical tape. Check out his site, and if nothing else, this short clip of him in action:
[Via]

June 14, 2011

Dutch stamps add augmented reality

Popping 3D architectural data out of a postage stamp? Crafty, to say the least:

Check out the project site for more info. [Via]

June 10, 2011

Bizarre cartoon mashups: Peanutweeter & more

Having a real love of both the absurd & illustration, this stuff is right up my alley:

• @Peanutweeter combines Peanuts cartoons with tweets. [Via]
• The Nietzsche Family Circus “pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.” (I used to inject little Nietzsche bits into my designs–e.g. a non-sequitur pull quote in my résumé’s cover letter. I figured it would turn off most employers but help me find My People. And it did.) [Via]
• TechCrunch Comments as New Yorker Cartoons is, well, what you’d think–and funny.

June 09, 2011

Infographics: Losing your time (here included) & more

• In A More Perfect Union, Roger Luke DuBois used dating site info to create “a road atlas of the United States, with the names of cities, towns, and neighborhoods replaced with the words people use to describe themselves and those they want to be with.”
• “It’s funny because it’s true”: how a designer’s time gets spent, 1980 vs. today.
• Not that you asked, but there’s a whole t-shirt lifecycle.

June 05, 2011

Illustration: Beautiful birds, clever signs, & more

• Paper craft:
  • Alex Queral carves phone books as if they were blocks of wood, fashioning unique portraits out of them.
  • Bronia Sawyer colors, folds and rolls the pages of books to create beautiful bird illustrations (sculptures?).
• Creatures:
  • Excuse me, ma’am, there seems to be a monkey on your face.
  • Horse/face.
• Signage:
  • Could you communicate a public safety message in 2 seconds, with 2KB of RAM? The Barbarian Group did. “Slow Down (don’t make skeletons).”
  • This is not a good sign. Ba-dum, tssch.

May 31, 2011

A record-player wedding invite

How incredibly cool:

The resulting booklet is comprised of a cover, two inner pages, a letterpressed band (with instructions and a tear-off RSVP postcard), and a flexdisc on a screwpost. The recipient bends the second page of the booklet back to create a tented “arm.” With the needle placed, they then carefully spin the flexidisc at 45 RPM (ish) to hear the song. The sewing needle travels the length of the song and produces the sound.

Check out the designers’ blog for more info & photos. [Via]

May 26, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Silhouettes, CSS, & Mr. Peanut

• I love these clever, subtle silhouettes (Rushmore, PW Herman, etc.) from Olly Moss.
• LayerStyles.org offers a Photoshop-style interface for CSS editing. [Via]
• Ill advised:
  • An illustration I’d almost like to see: “UFC Fighter Has Idea For T-Shirt With A Bunch Of Sh*t Written All Over It.”
  • Worst illustration idea ever? “Gang tattoo leads to a murder conviction“–plus Mr. Peanut!
• To cleanse the palate, here’s some classic Russian design inspiration: The Posters of Dziga Vertov.

May 18, 2011

Gradients & meshes in Illustrator, this Friday

This session (noon Pacific on Friday) with illustrator Russell Viers might be up your alley. The point I’ve bolded sounds particularly interesting:

• Adding light perception and depth with a basic gradient
• Bringing your art alive with Gradient Mesh
• The value of Gradient Swatches
• A nifty hidden feature in CS5 that lets you finally add a gradient to live text
• Understanding that crazy Gradient Tool
• How the Gradient Panel can help
• Non-uniform gradients with Gradient Mesh

May 16, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Hidden images, Saul Bass, 3D lights, & more

• I love these beautifully designed stamps for the Royal Shakespeare Company. [Via]
• Amazing: illustrator István Orosz hides artwork inside anamorphic drawings. [Via]
• Did you know that Photoshop’s 3D lights can do 2D effects?.
• Bass-o’-matic:
  • Saul Bass’s great work has been pretty systematically wiped from DVDs.
  • Fortunately, fans online have been collecting his beautiful title sequences.
  • Christian Annyas rounds up Saul Bass logo design: then and now.
  11:02 AM | Permalink | No Comments

May 07, 2011

Animation: Tim Minchin’s “Storm” rant

This funny, profane beat poetry eats like a meal, and it was beautifully animated by Dan C. Turner using After Effects, Flash, Photoshop, and a Wacom Cintiq.

See the project site for more info. [Via David Simons]

May 06, 2011

VectorScribe adds powerful tools to Illustrator

The “Vector Paparazzi” app I blogged on Sunday drew an extremely strong response, and now it’s arrived for real: VectorScribe is available in two flavors, Designer (£39+VAT (roughly $65/€45)) which features path manipulation & measurement tools, and Studio (£69+VAT ($119/€79)) which adds smart shapes & dynamic corners. Here’s a slightly updated version of the earlier video:

The site features a large number of training videos, and VectorTuts has posted a detailed tutorial on creating a vector motorcycle using the VectorScribe tools.

I’ve only just started playing with the tools, but I think that the dynamic corners features alone will be a godsend. If you give it a try, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

May 02, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Buscemi eyes, Ali, & more

• A colleague rushes in: “My God, this site just changed my life!” ChicksWithSteveBuscemiEyes.
• Michael Kalish has made a portrait of Muhammad Ali using 1300 punching bags, held up by 5 miles of stainless steel cable and 2 miles of aluminum tubing. [Via Maria Brenny]
• Check out the neat HTML parallax on the Bloom.io site; scroll down to see it. [Via]
• “Omar comin’, yo!” The Wire gets made literally Dickensian.

May 01, 2011

Vector Paparazzi adds smart shapes to Illustrator

I know very little about it (nothing beyond what this video shows, in fact), but the Vector Paparazzi plug-in promises to give Illustrator a number of features I’ve wanted for years–most notably smart shapes (e.g. live rounded rectangles with on-screen control handles):

April 28, 2011

Illustrator Appearance demo/Q&A tomorrow

We’re all creatures of habit, and too few people use the powerful, efficient Appearance panel in Illustrator. If you don’t use it, or haven’t looked at it since CS4 (when it went from “meh” to really fulfilling its promise), check out tomorrow’s “Ask a Pro” session with Rufus Deuchler (12-1pm Pacific time):

Learn about what Rufus defines the “coolest feature” in Adobe Illustrator: the Appearance panel. The Appearance panel gives you full control over the appearance of paths, objects, texts, and much more, and lets you easily repurpose appearances you create by saving Graphic Styles.

Here’s the Adobe Connect room address, and you can RSVP here.

April 27, 2011

Haunting animation for World Water Day

Beautiful, affecting work from Clément Beauvais:

[Via]

April 24, 2011

Virgin ad drawn, animated (!) all in Photoshop

Every so often I think, well, we pretty much know the limits of what people can do in Photoshop. And then something like this happens:

Check out the making-of story from the team at Three Legged Legs. Amazing work, guys! [Via Stéphane Baril]

To defuse a possible criticism: I can imagine someone saying, “Whoa, see, Photoshop is trying to be everything to everyone, and now it’s a poor man’s After Effects.” That’s not the case & was never our intention. Rather, video layers & onion skinning enable using Photoshop’s unique paint tools frame by frame. PS complements, rather than competes with, AE’s motion graphics chops.

April 20, 2011

Animation: My Favourite Animal

As children talked about their favorite creatures, Songeun Lara Lee drew their descriptions frame by frame. It’s totally charming, and now I want to rip off the idea with our kids.

[Via]

April 15, 2011

Watercolor effects in Adobe Eazel for iPad

Here’s a quick look at Adobe’s forthcoming Eazel painting app for iPad, including a peek at its integration with Photoshop CS5:

April 14, 2011

A look at Color Lava for Photoshop CS5

Last year engineer (and DJ) Christoph Moskalonek & I were talking about what viscerally pleasing creation experiences one could bring to tablets. Having just shipped some great paint-mixing technology in Photoshop CS5, we hit on the idea of mixing colors with multitouch input, then sending the results to Photoshop. In this video clip, Christoph shows the outcome of that investigation:

April 12, 2011

Astronomical distances

Happy 50th anniversary of human space flight!. Healing Brush creator Todor Georgiev, noting that April 12 is World Cosmonautics Day, somewhat ruefully observes:

If 50 years ago we had a state-of-the-art spaceship, and if we launched a flight to the nearest star (at the same time as Gagarin’s flight), where would we be now? Already there and back, right? No. Or maybe halfway there? No! The answer is: We would have travelled 0.03% of the way. I just did the math. It would take us 150,000 years to get there. And I am not counting the costs.

Lest that get you down, here’s NASA astronaut Cady Coleman and Jethro Tull founder Ian Anderson in an earth/space flute duet playing homage to Yuri Gagarin. (Also, you might like Chopping Block’s Above Earth t-shirt, commemorating 23 historic flights. The little chimp & dog silhouettes make it for me.)

April 11, 2011

Demo: Painting with Adobe Eazel for iPad

Adobe evangelist Mike McHugh shows off the unique interface, watercolor-style drawing chops, and Photoshop CS5 integration in Adobe’s forthcoming Eazel app:

April 08, 2011

(rt) Illustrations: Tommy guns, switchblade combs, & more

• Interesting infographic: The History of Web Browsers, though to borrow from AJ Soprano, “What, no friggin’ Mosaic?” [Via]
• “A Neverending Volley of American Justice!!” In “I Always Wondered,” Jarrett Green answers and beautifully illustrates his own most pressing questions.
• The designers at Fubiz take a swing at making minimalist packaging. (“How about we add a feature to dial out extraneous BS in one’s designs?” asks my colleague Bruce Bullis.)
• Switchblade combs! What a throwback. Check out the fun “Mediumcore” illustration & others from Leon Ryan.

April 06, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Movie posters, fractal meat, & more

• Cinematic:
  • Check out Viktor Hertz’s solid pictogram movie posters.
  • Daniel Norris has made a great poster for the old flick Westworld.
• Here’s a rather wonderful birthday card from a dad to his 1-year-old son.
• David Lynch’s hair gets compared to various works of art. [Via]
• Mandelbratwurst: A fractal meat treat!

April 03, 2011

(rt) Illustrations: Famous logos evolved & more

• I love these beautifully simple, graphical Don DeLillo covers by Noma Bar.
• Neat design history: Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands. [Via]
• Coke + La Sagrada Familia? Seems vaguely blasphemous, but it works. [Via]
• Center of Attention celebrates the lost art of record center labels. [Via]

April 01, 2011

Video Game Deaths

The incongruously cheery, blooping version of “Mad World” takes it somewhere special.

[Via]

March 31, 2011

(rt) Illustrations about, and for, Japan

• Japan’s Dark Spring: A beautiful, haunting NYer cover from Christoph Niemann.
• “Help Japan”–beautiful work from Mitch Fleming.
• Lorenzo Moschi’s seismic contribution is well done, too. [Via]

March 24, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Clever logos, disturbing art, & more

• Dig the clever use of negative space in this “Snooty Peacock” logo.
• “Possible Reasons Why Your Big Idea Is Destined to Fail…” See more “Pictures With Words On Them” from David Fullarton here.
• A bit disturbing:
  • Resist the Nazi Dinosaurs!! Bizarre faux-vintage posters.
  • “The Totally Insane, Candy-Coated Paintings of Charlie Immer”? Yep, that seems about right.
• The Manhattan street grid is 200 years old this week. The NYT’s Map of How Manhattan’s Grid Grew overlays maps from 1811, 1836, and today.
• Neat: UI Stencils help you draw interfaces on paper. [Via]

March 23, 2011

(rt) Particle Men

• Is he an illustrator or a sculptor? Andrew Myers makes amazing portraits made using pegboards & screws. “He starts with a base, plywood panel, and then places pages of a phone book on top. (Cool fact: He’ll use pages from his subjects’ local area.) He then draws out a face and pre-drills 8,000 to 10,000 holes, by hand.” [Via]
• ⁃Ben Heine creates celebrity portraits made from thousands of circles. Of the technique he says, “I first made a photomontage using several references, then a digital painting and I finally applied my ‘digital circlist’ technique (I placed each circle one by one, there is no automatic process).” [Via] The work makes me think of mosaics by Charis Tsevis, including one of me.

March 22, 2011

(rt) Infographics: Nuclear meltdown & rockin’ hair

• The NYT explains how a reactor shuts down & what happens in a meltdown. [Via]
• Eye-opening: “Chinese provinces compared to countries.”
• Fun poster: A Visual Compendium of Notable Haircuts in Popular Music. [Via]

March 20, 2011

Mobile graffiti machine

Adam Nilsson’s spray-cans-plus-bike contraption draws rainbows 20 feet wide. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

[Via]

March 19, 2011

Video: A Brief History of Title Design

Just like it says on the tin.

Seeing it takes me back to a lecture from Kyle Cooper when I was just starting out in New York, back in ’98 or so, featuring the classic work of Saul Bass & others. Great to see so much classic design again.

[Via]

March 14, 2011

Video: “Inception” as a 1-minute Victorian woodcut

Deeply nested mayhem from illustrator Wolfgang Matzl:

Our 3-year-old Finn found the video oddly captivating, asking to watch it again & again. (What dreams might he now have?) [Via]

(rt) Illustration: Monster-pimping cheap art, Disney at war, & more

• Involuntary Collaborations: “I buy other people’s landscape paintings at yard sales & put monsters in them.”
• James Gulliver Hancock is attempting to draw “All The Buildings in New York.” (The crazy ambition would go well with Sufjan Stevens’s Fifty States Project.) [Via]
• Speaking of states, what is your state the worst at? Find out with the United States of Shame.
• “I Wish This Was…” Fun stickers let you put social commentary all over your environment. Via]
• I find these Disney-drawn World War II insignia vaguely creepy. (Update for the benefit of one of my censorious, reactionary readers: It’s the mixture of cutesy & death-dealing that I find creepy. Call it like it is–like this.) [Via]

March 12, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Giant maps, Sugar skulls, & more

• With “Google’s World,” Alejo Malia imagines map iconography made huge. [Via]
• ¡Ay, scary Kermit! Dig these offbeat “Sugar Skulls.”
• My wife Margot, seeing Cabel Sasser’s wedding designs, says “Please befriend far less creative people so we can feel OK about ourselves!” Matthew Richmond is similarly humbling.
• Speaking of Margot, this could be a portrait of my curly-headed wife as a cassette tape.
• I love the intricate drawings of Nanami Cowdroy. Margot’s work Mac sports one courtesy of Gelaskins. [Via Paulo Sales]

March 11, 2011

Animation: “The Tadpole”

I can’t really tell you what’s going on here, but who cares when the animation is so nicely textured?

[Via]

March 09, 2011

Media Lab’s clever algorithmically produced logo

MIT Media Lab’s new visual identity, writes Creativity Online,

is based on an algorithm that produces a unique logo for each person, including faculty, staff and students. Each person can claim and own an individual shape, based on the three geometric shapes in the design used, and can use it on their business card and personal website. They can also create animations for any video content the Lab produces, using custom software.

[Via]

Beautiful game illustrations in “Tiny Wings”

I love craftsmanship like this:

The game is available on the App Store for $0.99. [Via]

March 05, 2011

Illustration: Retro styles, infographics made real, & more

• I like Gerard Saint’s 80′s-style vinyl covers for modern albums. In a similar vein, check out Stereo Stack, “A collection of amusingly enthusiastic banners promoting stereo technology.” [Via]
• Saturday afternoon with the kids napping can be pretty snailtastic, as captured in “The days of laziness.” [Via]
• With “Infographics in context,” Peter Orntoft makes charts & graphs of the things they describe. [Via]
• Autoblog readers got frisky with Photoshop to make some crazy backwards cars.

• The CBC’s logo got rendered in fried baloney. So, there’s that, then.

March 03, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Sheenian Dadaism, gorgeous posters, & more

• Genius: Charlie Sheen Quotes As New Yorker Cartoons. [Via] (The motivational posters aren’t half bad, either.)
• Sketchesnatched offers terrific portraits for Black Swan, 2001, & other films [Via]
• 8-bit:
  • Retro Nintendo fun: Toadstool Terrarium by Jude Buffum.
  • Nice: PacMan turntable.
• Childhood photos + little monsters = a charming little photo-illustration project.
• CV Dazzle applies WWI-era camouflage techniques to human faces, confounding facial recognition software. [Via]
• This Maxell ad homage is a pretty accurate illustration of our sons vs. tomato-based foods [Via]

February 22, 2011

The Layers feature in Adobe Ideas is on sale

Good news for the many users of Adobe Ideas: the Layers feature (which now brings with it scaling, movement, and rotation; see recent) is on sale for $1.99 (regularly $4.99) for a limited time. The feature is an in-app purchase: tap the layers icon (lower left), then hit the plus button next to “Buy Layers.”

February 21, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Star Wars as icons, poisonous treats, & more

• Nice: Wayne Dorrington has retold Star Wars entirely in icons. [Via]
• “Y’know, for kids…”
  • Apropos of nothing, here’s a lovely kids’-book illustration.
  • Weird packaging design: “Won’t This New Energy Drink Result in Children Drinking Poison?“
• I love the gorgeous, textured work of Irish illustrator Eoin Ryan. [Via]
• In an intriguing little video experiment, participants are asked to trace one another’s work as closely as possible. Things degenerate quickly.
• Check out some nifty Charlie Harper-esque illustrations from Ben Newman.

February 18, 2011

New features in Adobe Ideas 1.2

Check out scaling, rotation, a swappable toolbar, VGA output, and more in this quick demo from PM David Macy:

Adobe Ideas remains a free download (with in-app purchase of layers) for iOS devices.

February 15, 2011

Video: A few moments with Eric Carle

Given the tremendous amount of time we spend reading Eric Carle books to our lads, it’s funny that I’ve known very little about him until now. His life story is compelling, and I enjoyed this short interview:

[Via Mordy Golding]

February 14, 2011

(rt) Illustrations: Beautiful posters, Escher riffs, & more

• Reelizer is a nicely curated set of movie posters. (I’m digging Jeremy Jusay’s take on The Thin Red Line.) [Via]
• “By Valor & Arms”: It’s The State Mottos Project.
• Reserve monocle? Emergency Oreo? Sixteen Ways to Use Your Wrist Now That Watches are Obsolete.
• Props to the MC:
  • Check out these neat Escheresque images made by Josh Sommers using Photoshop + Pixel Bender. [Via]
  • Oscar Ramos has made some gorgeous modern Escheresque illustrations.
• I love the simplicity of the restroom icons in the Adobe Hamburg office.

February 09, 2011

Video: “Cliché!”

Check out the fun details in this animation from Cedric Villain:

His site features a short making-of presentation showing different steps done in Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, and Photoshop. [Via]

February 08, 2011

Kim Jong Phil

“I’ve concluded that to be effective–to be functional–I must guzzle an eye-popping cocktail of delusion and narcissism.

It occurred to me that being an artist* is a great deal like being a dictator.

Just like a dictator, I must live in a closed loop of self-delusion…”

This is now easily one of my favorite things ever. [Via]

* For “artist” also swap in “great product manager” (says the guy with 3D-printed busts of himself) ;-)). And no, I don’t *really* believe this, though sometimes you’ve gotta fight for your vision, and “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

February 06, 2011

(rt) Illustrations: 1.21 Jiggawatts, The Four Icon Challenge, & more

• Mildly nasty infographic OTD: Starbucks Trenta vs. your stomach.
• Oprah’s “SketchBook O” app sheds light on her audience’s demons.
• “Jigga What?” Excellent Back to the Future & GI Joe shirts. [Via]
• Fun illustrations: The Four Icon Challenge tackles 2001, The Big Lebowski, & more. [Via Chris Regan]
• Let It Dough! – More terrific visual storytelling from Christoph Niemann.

February 02, 2011

Video: Friday Afternoon in the Universe

Jack Kerouac + DJ Shadow wrapped in beautiful 3D (but not 3D-y) animation from Sean McClintock? Yeah, that’ll work:

Friday Afternoon in the Universe from Sean McClintock on Vimeo.

[Via]

January 31, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Loose Tweets, great posters, & more

• Poster art:
  • “Loose Tweets Sink Fleets!” Brian Moore makes propaganda posters of WWIII. [Via]
  • Mubi.com rounds up the best movie posters of 2010. And here’s another decent, if more mainstream, collection. [Via]
• Art history:
  • Check out the cheerful models who were used in “American Gothic” standing next to the painting. [Via]
  • You can buy fantastic Susan Kare prints of original Mac icons. Moof! [Via]
• I’ll see you on the Dark Side of the Dorito.

January 28, 2011

An epic 750,000-layer PSD is done

Bert Monroy eats your wimpy little 50-layer files for breakfast!

After four years and more than three quarters of a million Photoshop layers (spread across several docs), his monster Times Square file is online & zoomable. According to his site,

• The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 Gigabytes.
• It took four years to create.
• The painting is comprised of almost three thousand individual Photoshop and Illustrator files.

Faces in the crowd include the Knoll brothers, numerous Photoshop experts & authors, and even, somewhere in the lower-rigth quadrant, me. Amazing work, Bert; congrats!

January 27, 2011

Awesome app o’ the day: Toontastic

The other day I said that creation on tablets would be more about fun, about speed, and about the unbridled pleasure of creation than what we know today. Toontastic is the sort of thing I have in mind:

I just spent half an hour creating cartoons with our 2- and 1-year-old sons, quitting only when I had to go to work. We had a pirate-loaded ball.

I’m reminded of my own childhood, when I tried animation with flipbooks and even an Etch-a-Sketch Animator. Apple IIgs apps were similarly promising but frustrating. It wasn’t ’til college that I found Director & Flash, but of course those are complex pro tools. I love seeing the creation experience taken to the next level.

Thanks to reader Hendrik for pointing out the app.

Video: “Why Can’t We Walk Straight?”

Here’s a neat little animation from Benjamin Arthur on an interesting subject; worth watching despite Robert Krulwich’s characteristically twee & cloying narrative style.

[Via]

January 23, 2011

Illustrations: Fun logos, social commentary, & more

• Round, logo-y:
  • I dig the details in the fun “Get Zero” competition logo.
  • Let’s bones it out!
• Kottke uncovered an interesting depiction of the World’s Tallest Buildings, 1884. [Via]
• Cycling enthusiasts lay down some cheeky social commentary in a bike lane.
• Map Your Moves: “This map distills more than 4000 moves from over 1700 people, collected in an informal survey by WNYC, a New York based public radio station.” [Via]

January 21, 2011

(rt) Interesting Miscellany: Riffing on Starbucks, Android goggles, & more

• Heh: The predicted ongoing simplification of the Starbucks logo [Via Russell Brown]
• Design:
  • S&P meet PS: Photoshop salt and pepper shakers!
  • I love Randy Hage’s crazy-detailed NYC storefront models. [Via]
• New ski goggles run Android (!), offering built-in maps & video.
• Heh–check out this MacGyver-style iPad drawing aid (low-tech palm rejection).
• Kickin’ it dough-school: Shell-toes in Play-Doh.
• Know who won’t be boldly going through these doors? Girls.

January 15, 2011

Painting with lasers & Photoshop (seriously!)

Honest to God, I kind of live for seeing inventive people like Russell Brown combine the tools we make in really novel, unintended ways. Here Russell uses Pixel Bender CS5, a laser etching machine, a printer, and some old-school artistic media to create digital paintings with real depth:

Russell’s also giving away ten copies of his book on the subject, From Reality to Renaissance; see more info if you’re interested.

[Via]

January 09, 2011

(rt) Illustrations: Strangelove, disfigured Muppets, & more

• I love “The Haunted Household“: Clever, beautifully simple illustrations from Christoph Niemann.
• “I’m so cute and cuddly! I help you pee!” Hello, Kidney. See also “In Cutero.”
• Check out some great Strangelove-style desktop wallpaper from Ross Zietz.
• Dig these minimalist posters for musical genres. I love the one for the Twist.
• Infographics:
  • The horror! “What I remember most about LEGOs.” [Via]
  • Outstanding: “People Who Touch Your Junk.” (I’d suggest listing my kids, but they do it pro bono.) [Via]
• So, this exists, then: http://muppetswithpeopleeyes.tumblr.com/ (And if you write to say you can’t unsee it, I’ll reply in the vein of Airplane!: “You saw the URL, you knew what you were getting into: I say, let ‘em crash.”)

January 06, 2011

Video: The Tale of How

To quote Towlie, “I have no idea what’s goin’ on right now…,” but it’s rather beautifully animated:

Update: Here’s the making-of video. I’d skip past the first three minutes or so.

[Via Maria Brenny]

January 01, 2011

A New Year’s Photoshop resolution (no DPI required)

Happy New Year, everyone!

I’ve been unsuccessful in tracking down the origin of this great little image, but I hope the creator won’t mind my sharing it here. Props to Tymn Armstrong for the image. [Via Pierre-Etienne Courtejoie & Jeff Almasol]

December 28, 2010

(rt) Illustrations: Best of 2010, Gatsby letterpress, & more

• If all the countries in the world geographic positions based on population, you’d get something like this.
• Best-of:
  • “The Best Illustrations of 2010“: An uneven collection, but containing some gems.
  • “Funniest T-Shirt Designs of the Decade“? Not sure, but some clever, well executed stuff.
• Gorgeous: Letterpress business cards for Jay Gatsby’s guests.
• A beautiful invitation to marriage at the La Brea Tar Pits…

December 22, 2010

(rt) Great recent posters: Star Wars, games, & more

• Star Wars:
  • Check out three terrific posters from Olly Moss. [Via]
  • Justin Van Genderen crushes it with gorgeous posters for fictional cities (including Bespin, Coruscant, and more). [ia Margot Nack]
  • Mondotees offers plenty o’ solid Star Wars posters, though you may need to scroll down. (The line work brings back Bones Brigade memories.)
• “Fake Criterions” is whole blog of overly serious/artsy movie posters. [Via]
• Rachel Morris has made fun posters for the NYU Game Center. [Via]

December 20, 2010

A tiny tip on Illustrator anti-aliasing

A reader today wrote, “Can anyone tell me if it’s possible to drag a one-pixel-width diagonal line in Illustrator without it forcing anti-aliasing?”

My suggestion: Try choosing Effect->Rasterize, then choosing 72PPI and no anti-aliasing.  If you often need this technique, you can create a graphical style & then easily apply the look to multiple paths.  You can also get some funky lo-fi pixel-art looks by cranking the PPI setting way down.

Fortunately it’s largely unnecessary to think about this stuff now that Illustrator CS5 has excellent pixel chops (at last).

December 10, 2010

Infographic video: 200 countries over 200 years

In “The Joy of Stats,” Hans Rosling “tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers… plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810.” Cool.

December 09, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Cool vans, Weezer raveled, & more

• “Would it be cooler as a van?” What a fantastic illustration concept: Famous movie cars made “Cooler as a Van.” (Resident car guy Hughes wants to give famous vans the opposite treatment: “What wouldn’t be cooler not being a van?” Mystery Gremlin, maybe?) [Via]
• Check out Tom Whalen’s dynamite Art Deco-styled Batman poster. [Via]
• “Li’l Elvis and his Bad Hair” concerns “a young boy and his bad, but *well intentioned*, talking hair.” (For ten years I have been, you would have no way of knowing, tinyElvis@adobe.com. You’re welcome, spam bots.)
• Weezer Dry Cleaning: “We Won’t Destroy Your Sweater.”

December 05, 2010

(rt) Brilliant NatGeo photos, painterly fashion photos, & more

• Brilliant photography (amazing storms, bugs, & more) abounds in the National Geographic 2010 contest.
• Mark Leibowitz creates beautifully impressionistic fashion photos. [Via]
• Romain Laurent catches great portraits mid-splash. See his site for even more striking images. [Via]
• Think you’re a hardy photographer? Would you keep shooting after your legs were just blown off?
• “I drew a little balloon,” says spittle artist Finn. So, there’s that, then.

December 03, 2010

Illustrator iPad Sketch Elements

The guys at Teehan+Lax, the creators of the popular iPad GUI PSD, have created a complementary set of vector-based iPad Sketch Elements.  The widgets are deliberately visually rougher, meant to facilitate faster & looser comping.  Cool; thanks, guys.

November 23, 2010

Video: An optical illusion for public safety

“You’re probably not expecting kids to run out on the road.” Nor, presumably, are you expecting that event to be simulated via large street art. Is this effort helpful, alarming, desensitizing? I don’t know, but it’s certainly interesting.

[Via]

November 19, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Pixel art, beautiful cards, & more

• “Achtung!” Here’s a rather brilliant TSA Checkpoint sign. [Via]
• Goodness abounds in the beautiful state card designs in this Dribbble set.
• Pixel art:
  • I love Andy Rash’s pixel Star Wars characters. If those are up your alley, see his pixel Bond, Borat, and others.
  • “Koopa, It’s What’s For Supper.” Jude Buffum’s made meat-cut diagrams for Nintendo characters. [Via]
• Cinematic characters:
  • Halloween party stylings: Four duelling DeNiros & more appear in Ivan Brunetti’s great New Yorker cover.
  • “It’s Murray Time…” Bill Murray as other Wes Anderson characters. (Malkovichian.)
• Lee Rubenstein’s created crazy lo-fi creatures from CS5 splash screens. [Via]

November 13, 2010

Video: OKGO + Geoff McFetridge = Animated toast (really)

[Via]

November 10, 2010

Microsoft enables Illustrator->HTML5 Canvas

How cool: Microsoft’s Mike Swanson has enabled Illustrator (CS3-CS5, Mac & Win) to export vector graphics as HTML5 Canvas elements. As former Illustrator PM Mordy Golding puts it,

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could generate great-looking and useful HTML5 content (with interactivity, motion, interaction, etc) DIRECTLY from Illustrator? Now you can — with a new FREE plugin for Illustrator.

Here’s a great 90-second demo (no embedding option I can discover, unfortunately). Now Illustrator can create SVG, CSS, and Canvas content, thanks to this plug-in plus the recently released Illustrator CS5 HTML5 pack. Way to go, Mike & Microsoft.

[Semi-pointless historical footnote: the plug-in brings back memories of Macromedia's ancient Flash Writer plug-in for Illustrator (the system requirements for which still list Windows NT!). Here, I'll make that same part of your brain twinge again: "DeBabelizer!"]

November 08, 2010

Adobe Ideas adds iOS4 support, layers, more

I’m really pleased to say that the Adobe Ideas team has released version 1.1, offering a range of free enhancements plus the app’s first optional paid feature.

Free features:

• Support for iPhone 4 retina display
• Support for iOS4 Multi-tasking
• Support for Redo
• Available in French, German and Japanese
• Sketches save much faster, avoiding loss of data when you close the app or you need to answer a phone call.
• Save drawing to “saved photos” album on iPad and iPhone (no longer a need to create a screenshot)

In-app purchase (optional):

• Layers: Available for in-app purchase. Create up to 10 drawing layers plus a photo layer for each sketch; control order and opacity for each layer.

Here’s a quick (sub-2-minute) demo:

You might also be interested in the Ideas Facebook page, Flickr Gallery, and team blog.  Congrats, guys!

(rt) Illustration: Black Swans, fun with Carbonite, & more

• “Holy crap is Africa big,” observes Daniel Jalkut. [Via]
• Check out some bold & excellent “Black Swan” movie posters. [Via]
• Star Wars:
  • Heh: Mr. and Mrs. The Hutt Make a Compromise.
  • I like José Pulido’s Día de los Muertos-style Star Wars illustrations.
  • Long, long ago–specifically, from the 70′s: Boba Fett’s invoice to Jabba the Hutt.

November 03, 2010

Video: Star Wars via paper animation

Heh–a great tune, too:

[Via]

October 23, 2010

Subaru gets A-Ha-ish

To be honest, when compared to Mike Patterson’s Take On Me & previous work, this piece comes up short, but it’s worth a look just for the little trick revealed towards the end.

Viva zoetropes. [Via]

Tangential but fun: Subaru is running a tongue-in-cheek campaign for The 2011 Mediocrity.

October 22, 2010

President Obama uses Adobe Ideas

Well, for a moment, anyway: he used it to sign an iPad.  Tablet owner Sylvester Cann even put up a little mini site to capture the moment.  Cool! [Via Ideas engineer Paul George]

October 17, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Beautiful Fireworks, duck fear, & more

• Web tech:
  • Smashing Magazine rounds up impressive illustrations done in Adobe Fireworks, including the Firefox & Adobe CS icons.
  • Colorzilla offers a nice Photoshop-like CSS gradient editor.
  • Check out a beautiful webcam/fluid experiment by Eugene Zatepyakin. [Via]
• “Anatidaephobia” translates as “The best accidental advert placement in the history of mankind.” [Via]
• Nerdtastic: PANTONE Visa Cards. [Via]
• Rocking this laptop skin would be up there with growing a mullet for irony.

October 16, 2010

Photoshop CS5 paintings from Jack Davis

Author Jack Davis has been producing some really nice work in CS5:

October 12, 2010

New Dry Media brushes for CS5

Building on the success of his Artists’ Brushes for Photoshop CS5, digital painter John Derry has released John’s Dry Media for Photoshop CS5, a $19.95 set of brushes for Photoshop CS5. Here he demonstrates creating a painting from scratch:

And here’s turning a photo into a pastel painting:

Related: John’s Lynda.com tutorial, Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush.

October 11, 2010

The short film that gave birth to A-Ha’s “Take On Me”

This 1981 gem from animator Mike Patterson paved the way to his now-classic animation for A-Ha:

The BBC has the back story on how the song & video came to be.

October 10, 2010

Banksy does the Simpsons

Street artist Banksy has overseen what must qualify as the darkest Simpsons opening ever:

Update: The NYT has a Q&A with Simpsons producer Al Jean about how the piece came to be. [Via]

Video: A Paul Rand retrospective

Great work from Jeremy Cox:

For Paul Rand’s posthumous induction into The One Club Hall of Fame, Imaginary Forces created this short film, combining original animation with a videotaped interview of Rand himself, that encapsulated his unique and timeless contribution to the design community.

After I’d proposed to Margot, I sent her this graphic in an email simply titled “You.” She deciphered (and loved) the meaning, which is why she’s The One. :-)

It’d be nice for Mad Men to give Rand a little shout-out, she notes. [Via]

October 06, 2010

Video: “Mars”

Cute n’ depressing, just like I like it:

MARS! from Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham on Vimeo.

[Via]

October 03, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Van Gogh, Chewbacca, and more

• Rocking this laptop skin would be up there with growing a mullet for irony. (Might get you some good customer reviews & tribute vids, though.)
• Photoshop + Van Gogh = tilt-shift good times.
• “Chewbacca riding a squirrel fighting Nazis = YES!” [Via]
• During the BP oil spill, Bob Staake did a rather excellent Escher-style New Yorker cover.

September 27, 2010

Illustration: Soviets, Star Wars, & facial hair

• JustinVG makes great Star Wars planets & Soviet-style posters.
• I know such collections can be a dime a dozen, but maybe you, too, will like these lovely, simple iPhone wallpapers.
• Dig the simple, nuanced presentation of Shyama Golden‘s portfolio.
• I love the color palettes from illustrator Melancoloric. [Via]
• Moustache Buttons. “Useless? Maybe. Hilarious and beautiful? You betcha!” [Via Zorana Gee]

September 26, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Great shirts, Bill Murray, & more

• Shirts:
  • How many can you get? 80′s films as logos.
  • I love Neven Mrgan’s falling-stuff-as-dude Incident shirt.
• Offbeat but impressive: Hand Painting Ads by Guido Daniele.
• “For relaxing times… Suntory Time” Just ordered this great poster. Good Don Draper & Joan, too.
• A nice tutorial on creating a digital bokeh effect using Photoshop’s brush engine.

September 15, 2010

New PSDs for iPhone 4, Android UIs

• The folks at Teehan+Lax have updated their iPhone GUI PSD, scaling it up to take advantage of the iPhone 4′s high-density Retina Display.
• The staff of Webdesignshock have created a similar PSD for creating Android UIs. [Via Dave Dobish]

September 14, 2010

Feedback, please: Potential Web/drawing features in Photoshop

Photoshop’s vector shapes & layer effects (strokes, gradients, etc.) are mainstays of Web & mobile design work, but they haven’t gotten updated in a while.  If the Photoshop team were to improve this area of the app, what improvements would you find the most important?

The following list isn’t exhaustive, but it includes popular requests we’ve heard.  It would be great to get your feedback via this quick survey.  We can’t do everything (certainly all at once, anyway), so please let us know what matters most.

1. Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box)
2. Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
3. Enable smart shapes:
   1. Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
   2. Support other parameterized shapes (e.g. stars with an adjustable number of points; lines with arrowheads)
4. Make various layer effects enhancements:
   
   1. Apply effects at the layer group level
   2. Re-order effects
   3. Duplicate effects (e.g. apply multiple strokes per layer)
   4. Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box)
   5. Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
   6. Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update)
5. Enable layer search (i.e. type to filter by layer name or attributes)
6. Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
7. Improve text rendering
8. Export text & graphical styles as CSS
9. Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts)
10. Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)

Notes:

• We want to know what’s more important than other things, so please bear that in mind when assigning relative ratings.  (That is, don’t make everything “extremely important” or “not important.”)
• Please don’t tell me that Photoshop should never be improved vis-à-vis Web & mobile design, and that everyone should use Fireworks (or Illustrator or whatever).  You may be completely right about those apps, but it’s just not relevant to this survey.
• Inevitably there’s some amount of overlap among these items (e.g. applying effects at the layer group level would offer an alternative to applying multiple copies of one effect on a layer; for example, you could stroke a layer, then add another stroke on a group containing that layer).

Many thanks in advance,
J.

Video: “Cache Rules Everything Around Me”

The always interesting Evan Roth (see previous) has assembled all his animated GIFs into one trippy 10-minute video:

[Via]

September 12, 2010

Illustrator CS5 gains HTML5 chops

Double rainbow ‘cross the sky, oh my God, so intense... Wait, that’s something else–but this is pretty great, too: the Illustrator team has just released the Illustrator CS5 HTML5 Pack, downloadable from Adobe Labs.  Highlights include the ability to:

• Export named character styles as CSS
• Export artwork appearances as CSS
• Include selected Graphic Styles as CSS in SVG
• Create parameterized SVG (vector graphics tagged with variables)
• Create multi-screen SVG (leveraging media queries to serve up design variations)

See the download page or Mordy Golding’s nice summary for more details. You can ask questions & provide feedback on the Labs user forum.

I’m curious to see whether this news makes it onto the Mac sites that’ve beaten Adobe up for a perceived lack of enthusiasm about HTML5 (tough, as it just doesn’t fit that sterile, stupid narrative).  The funny thing is that these changes build on the SVG support that Illustrator has been shipping for ten years.  Sometimes it just takes a while for the world to catch up.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch wasn’t kidding when he said, “We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML5.” These Illustrator developments have been in the works for a while; Dreamweaver has just made its HTML5 Pack for CS5 official; and you’ll see more from Adobe going forward.

Update: Here’s a demo from evangelist Greg Rewis:

September 11, 2010

(rt) Illustration: AT-AT as Eeyore & more

• Dig James Hance’s Star Wars characters in the style of Winnie-the-Pooh illustrations. [Via]
• Illustration: Three terrific Star Wars posters. [Via]
• Completing the Star Wars tweet hat trick: the excellent San-Francisco-as-Cloud-City t-shirt.

September 10, 2010

Video: “TELEPHONEME”

Damned if I know what’s going on here, but I like it:

TELEPHONEME | MK12 from MK12 on Vimeo.

[Via]

September 09, 2010

Animation: “Germans in the Woods”

A sad, touching remembrance from a veteran:

September 08, 2010

(rt) Offbeat illustrations: Bears, bikers, & more

• “Sandwich Defender!” Bizarre, oddly charming plate illustrations.
• Terminator-style child care: Gotta love it when your motorcycle-enthusiast babysitter shows up wearing this. (Go Chris go. :-))
• Rainn Wilson presents “The Greatest Portrait You Will Ever See.”
• Parenting advice for those too dumb to be parents.
• “Partay, Bitchezz!!” WWII on Facebook. [Via]

September 07, 2010

Illustration: Fun with playground mishaps

I began a solo week of Mr. Mom duty in the park yesterday, trying so hard not to be this guy:

In six work days at Adobe, Margot has logged more miles than I have in a year; madness. Go get ‘em, champ.

September 05, 2010

Illustration: Art cars & great book covers

• Cover lovers:
  • David Pearson spent a large chunk of last year working on a fantastic series of covers for Cormac McCarthy’s books.
  • PSDTuts rounds up “50+ Kick-butt Book Cover Designs.”
• German wheels:
  • Janis Joplin’s 1965 Porsche art car is far out. (And here I thought she was into Benzes.)
  • Jenny Holzer comes, very oddly enough, to a set of Keds. I remain much more drawn to her BMW art car. [Via Margot Nack]

September 04, 2010

Video: Making Van Gogh-style paintings in CS5

Liquify + Pixel Bender: Nifty.

[Via]

August 30, 2010

Big money (literally)

• What’s the name for those fine, moiré-looking swirls often found on banknotes?  Guillochés, it turns out.  Aegir Hallmundur features a nice set of them, plus info on how they were created.  See also his Future of Money designs. [Via]
• The folks at the GigaPan project provide close-ups of guillochés, pennies, and much more with their new giant close-ups. Here they demonstrate photographing a circuit board:

August 27, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Amazing 3D street paintings, Apple 1910, & more

• Christoph Niemann (of Lego NYC & other fame) kills with a hilarious visual journal of a flight. [Via]
• This remains easily my favorite book cover, ever. (What’s with the other hand? Crushing your head?)
• Fans of optical illusions will love this set of 3D street paintings by Edgar Muller.
• Cool how-to: Creating gradient rings in Illustrator.
• Retro tech: Apple FaceTime, 1910 A.D.
• Flickr features a whole set of pixel cityscapes.

August 25, 2010

(rt) Photography: History in color, plus Iggy

• The Ghosts of World War II: Sergey Larenkov’s computational rephotography carefully overlays past & present. [Via]
• Is that an onion dome, or are you… no, it’s an onion dome. Amazing Color Photography from Russia in the Early 1900s. [Via]
• The Denver Post rounds up images of America in Color from 1939-1943. [Via Gary Ferster]
• Lust for leather: The Official Iggy Pop Shirtless Aging Timeline. I’m somewhat speechless.

August 24, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Bad Dudes a go-go

• “My Style is ‘Whoop That Ass’” – These 52 Bad Dudes illustrations feature Anton Chigurh, Tyler Durden, & others. [Via]
• Seeing the project takes me back to WDDG’s old Bad As Sh*t Project. (Good luck getting that horn riff out of your head.)
• SAMCRO LEGO: I love these incredibly intricate tattoos on Minifigs. [Via]
• From the Not Really Helping Dept.: Man Uses Photoshopped Photos In Plea For Reduced Prison Sentence. [Via Adam Pratt]

August 18, 2010

Video: “Little Red Riding Hood” told through infographics

A calorie readout on grandma paired with a droning Eurotrash beat? That’s good eating.
[Via]

August 14, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Outstanding movie posters

• Man, how great are these? Terrific movie posters from Olly Moss. (His previous work is also rad.)
• Jesus, Hitler, and Superman appear on behalf of the Tokyo subway system. [Via]
• Veerle Pieters curates a collection of gorgeous posters and more. (The content changes, and I wish I could direct-link to some of the standouts. It’s all good, though.)
• Smashing Magazine rounds up 50 Beautiful Movie Posters. Not every one’s a hit for me, but there’s plenty of strong stuff.

August 12, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Egress with beer, Sonic Youth, & more

• Aviation:
  • Awesome! “Proper technique for exiting aircraft.” [Via] Speaking of which, isn’t Steven Slater the guy from “Airplane“? [Via Reen Bodo]
  • Check out the beautiful vector art of Richard Perez’s “Supersonic” series.
• Foxy: I dig these beautifully simple, textured illustrations from Ty Wilkins.
• Jon Contino makes all kinds of illustrated interestingness. [Via]
• Margot’s new bob + specs = apparent Sonic Youth cover audition. (Props to Toon-FX + Diptic on the image creation.)

August 11, 2010

Video: A bizarre psychedelic love letter to cartoons

I’d show this video to our kids, but I’m not sure they’re ready to trip their faces off:

[Via]

August 09, 2010

Illustrator CS5 updated

The AI 15.0.1 update (Mac, Win) fixes a number of problems, including the following:

• Out-of-memory problems specific to Macs with RAM exceeding 4GB, including failure of shortcut keys, rulers, or file open.
• Glyph Panel issues.
• Several crashes occurring at launch or quit.
• A crash when traversing a variable data set containing linked images.
• An issue with white lines appearing on rasterized gradient mesh objects.

August 08, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Infinite Keanu & other jokes

• Fractal weirdness: Infinite Sad Helmet Keanu, “the GIF that keeps on giving.” (See the rest of the meme.)
• Waah! A logo for “the League of Internet Commenters.”
• Shirt: “You are here… but I can fix that in Photoshop.” [Via]
• Heh–the iPhone 4 ‘End Call’ sticker. (For what it’s worth, my reception has been fine.) In other now-slightly-dated levity, there’s “apple vs. flash!” and an Orwellian Apple/Adobe shirt [Via Marc Pawliger]
• “I Wish” shirt. (“Now it’s in your head, too,” says Tom Hogarty.)

August 03, 2010

Video: Between Bears

With just a few gradients & glows, Eran Hilleli brings amazing atmosphere to a highly geometrical world; fullscreen viewing is a must:

July 30, 2010

Painting in Photoshop? Check this out.

Digital painting pioneer John Derry has just released a Lynda.com title, Photoshop CS5: Painting with the Mixer Brush, going into depth on how to wring the most out of this new tool.  And building on the success of his Artists’ Brushes set for CS5, he’s previewing a set of Dry Media Brushes.  Should be some powerful, interesting stuff.  For more on John’s work and his take on CS5, check out this interview.

July 29, 2010

GUI elements library for Illustrator

If you do interface design work in Illustrator, check out this User Interface Design Framework, including 290 free vector icons. [Via]

As I’ve mentioned previously, pixel rendering in Illustrator CS5 is much, much improved, so I highly recommend it to Web & screen designers (and not as an Adobe employee, but rather as someone who sweated over such details & who regularly cursed Illustrator’s old behavior).

Previously:

• Illustrator-friendly iPhone UI elements
• New iOS 4-ready PSD templates available

July 27, 2010

Zooming in Adobe Ideas = Interesting note-taking

Kevin Burg has posted an interesting article on How To Take Notes Like a Champ using the free Adobe Ideas iPad app.  In a nutshell,

Adobe Ideas allows fractalesque zooming. You are able to use vast scale differences to communicate importance as well as benefit from a very flexible canvas, so you almost never run out of space taking notes.

Via David Macy, Ideas PM. For David’s perspective on what Ideas is all about, see previous.

July 23, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Mad Men, devils, and Tom Selleck

• I dig these Minimalist Mad Men posters. (Sunday Sunday Sunday…) [Via]
• PSDTuts features A Brief History of Computer Icons. (I wish it included more pre-Mac work, not to mention NeXT.)
• Photoshop:
  • Thomas Scholes makes beautiful, painterly landscapes in Photoshop.
  • Blue Devil: A Pixel Bender + CS5 experiment from Greg Geisler.
• Offbeat:
  • Our 2-year-old Finn, observing classical cherubs cavorting on a gift bag: “Bunch of little nudists on there!”
  • Exactly what it promises to be, oddly enough: SelleckWaterfallSandwich. [Via]

July 15, 2010

Talking to illustrators in LA

On the off chance you’re at the ICON Conference in Los Angeles and feel like talking about tablet apps, Photoshop, digital publishing, etc., drop me a line.  I’m headed out at the crack of dawn tomorrow and will be on hand through Saturday. I hope to talk to illustrators about their needs and ideas in light of new mobile drawing hardware.

July 13, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Dennis Hopper, Piet Mondrian, & more

• “Heineken…!?” Blue Velvet, Lost in Translation, and more: Great postcards to great characters.
• Old-timey:
  • I do love me some retro illustrations by Matthew Lyons.
  • “Yea, Verily Doth This Look Tapestryshopp’d…”
• Check out this do-it-yourself Piet Mondrian painting with movable pieces & changeable colors. [Via]

July 11, 2010

Illustration: Surreal creatures, optical illusions, & more

• Feric Feng‘s drawings are a “surreal blend of the natural and mechanical.” Run, don’t walk. [Via]
• I like this 2.5 dimensional optical illusion bookshelf.
• Here’s some rather delightful work from LouLou and Tummie.
• Brodsky & Utkin offer crazy-detailed unbuilt structures.

July 10, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Space, beautiful & laughable

• JoeJesus creates some beautiful space-scape artworks (and some cheeky ones, too). [Via]
• I like this proposed NASA logo redesign, though it’s evidently polarizing. [Via]
• “Fancy, your pants are”: Fun Victorian-style Star Wars portraits from Greg Peltz.
• Colt .45 for all! “I, Lobot: A Day In The Life of Lando Calrissian’s Assistant.” [Via]

July 08, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Infographics, disappearing rugs, & more

• The gorgeous design for utility app Kaleidoscope may take the cake for maximum marriage of aesthetics and geekiness.
• What do you do after drawing a dry-erase Persian rug? (Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?)
• Infographics:
  • Art Lebedev provides an interesting peek inside the making of the Moscow Metro map. [Via]
  • I dig this handsome, if now dated, World Cup radial bracket poster.
• I could get behind this mid-century-styled Wooden PC by Design Hara.

July 06, 2010

(rt) Photos & Illustration: Tetris everywhere, the Hand of God, & more

• Don’t hate the game:
  • “Tetris Tetris everywhere“: real-world objects that resemble the falling blocks.
  • What if popular gaming consoles were buildings, as imagined by Joseph Ford. [Via]
• Interesting media:
  • “A Matter of Taste”: Photographer Fulvio Bonavia recreates luxury goods from food. [Via Lynn Grillo]
  • Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal, rendered in Legos. [Via Steve Guilhamet]

July 01, 2010

Demo: Pressure-sensitive sketching on iPad

The folks at Ten One Design have prototyped a pressure-sensitive stylus for use with iPads:

It’s encouraging to see this progress, but according to the developers’ notes, it sounds like Apple may disallow the inclusion of the needed library. Let’s hope the bottlenecks get removed sooner rather than later. [Via]

June 28, 2010

Illustration: Hairy bikers, chemical coffee, & more

• Packaging & branding:
  • Terrible (?) name, solid visuals: wrap your lips around some Hairy Bikers Potato Crisps.
  • Seattle’s Best gets a new logo. Clean, yes, but it just says “ChemLawn” to me.
  • Pentagram Marks: four hundred logo marks from nearly four decades of branding
• Muralist Ron English has created an X-Ray Guernica in Rome.
• From the “Who Knew?” dept.: Drainspotting, a book about Japanese manholes.

June 26, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Goals, gorgeous cars, & more

• Athletic:
  • Retro Infographic: What happens in your head when you shout “Goal!” [Via]
  • Illustrations created entirely of handmade shoeprints for the Chicago Marathon. [Via]
• Automotive:
  • Jeff Koons has designed the new BMW art car. Bold as hell.
  • Stunning: the 1948 Buick Streamliner. [Via]
• Buzzcuts as illustration: an NYT slideshow.
• Heh–here’s a sort of MacGyver-style iPad drawing aid. (Obviously a software solution is needed, but still neat.)

June 24, 2010

Illustrator-friendly iPhone UI elements

I find myself mocking up iPad interfaces in Illustrator (<-trendy tongue twister?) this morning, so I’m finding this collection of iPhone UI vector elements from Rusty Mitchell & the folks at Mercury Intermedia quite handy. Thanks, guys! [Update: See also Mordy Golding's vector iPhone and components.

[Previously: iOS elements for Photoshop.]

June 23, 2010

Modern tech rendered as 70′s kitsch

“What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously…”
So much brown, so much wood grain… Alex Varanese has created one of my favorite things in a long time. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

June 19, 2010

Crafty maps

• Bing Maps offers some really cool looking napkin-sketch-style map renderings. (Unfortunately, even after downloading a Silverlight update and restarting my browser, I still can’t get it to work.)

• Heh: “Fears of Dust Bowl Déjà Vu Spur Oklahoma Expansion.” Michael Crawford makes (mostly) witty map art for the New Yorker. (Deep linking is being flaky, so click through for the Oklahoma bit.) [Via]
• Locals vs. Tourists shows where people take photos in various cities around the world. [Via]

June 18, 2010

New iOS 4-ready PSD templates available

• Designer Sebastiaan de With has updated his iPhone/iPad icon PSD file, adding support for iOS 4 and 114x114px icons.
• Neven Mrgan leverages that file and offers lots of comments and tips for making clear icons using Photoshop and Illustrator.
• The designers at Teehan+Lax have revved their own iOS4 PSD, saying “Fully redesigned Photoshop template. Now accurate, still free.” [Via] (Not using these templates in production, I’m not in a position to evaluate their relative strengths.)

June 14, 2010

Beautiful HTML5 slides on Web design

My friend Matthew Richmond from Chopping Block has posted a beautifully designed slide deck on “Web Design Concepts for Non-Web Designers.”*

In this case the medium is much of the message: the slides demonstrate what can be done with the (relatively) rich typography, positioning, and transitions supported in modern browsers. It’s great to see custom fonts, rotated type, and more getting used for real, but I want to see Adobe tools enable much easier, higher fidelity support for these standards. The print designers who approached Matthew after his talk reinforced this point: We know how to design, they said, and we like our tools–but how do we transition those designs to clean Web output?

There are plenty of interesting challenges here. Translating between formats and rendering models is tricky, and much more so when the destination format is human readable/editable. Almost no one would look inside, say, an EPS file and harrumph, “Well, that’s not how I’d write PostScript”–but they absolutely do that with HTML. Even if apps generate the code well, it’s hard to know how to blend it with the coding styles of each user. But hey, no one ever said progress was gonna be easy.

* “There’s nothing more magical than a robot riding a unicorn.” — Quote o’ the week

June 13, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Vintage computer art, vector vehicles, & more

• Funky design book idea: The Geometry of Pasta.
• Spirographs can’t be killed. Check out this computer art from the 1950′s.
• Vectortuts features a set of Hot Vector Vehicles.
• “Get Your Mom Off Facebook“: 19 various coupons for tech nerds and web enthusiasts.
• Compare: Spongebob, age 50 vs. real-world Homer Simpson & Mario. [Via]
3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments [1]

June 12, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Peeling faces, physical Photoshops, and more

• “Hipsters, Start Your Photocopiers.” I’m loving The Big Caption. (Sometimes I identify a little too closely with the Thai guy in the helmet.) [Via]
• Real-world Photoshop:
  • Heh: “Photopaddles physically ‘Photoshop’ your pics.”: [Via]
  • Had to happen: A literal adobe photo-shop. [Via]
• Cool: Creating a peeling Escher-style face in Photoshop.
• What if our money weren’t grossly ugly? Check out a proposed U.S. Currency Redesign by Michael Tyznik.
• Video demo: Drawing pixel art on iPad using Sprite Something.

May 17, 2010

(rt) Illustration: The UIs of Iron Man, vintage ads, & more

• Atomic age:
  • A Flickr set rounds up beautiful science and tech ads from the 50s/60s. (via @iso50)
  • Animation house Perception has a great in-depth piece about how they created the interfaces, PDAs, presentations, and more in Iron Man 2, including some faux-vintage work. [Via]
  • Graphic design history: Here’s an incredibly detailed history of the iconic fallout shelter symbol.
• “Beautifully Banal”: classified ads turned into graphic design. (I love “Poodle: All Colors”) [Via]
• I really enjoy the lovely colors & palettes from illustrator Lotta Nieminen. [Via]

May 12, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Posters, old-school Mac art, & more

• Check out this set of great travel posters from Heads of State.
• Mac bits:
  • Master digital painter Bert Monroy recently showed me his Escher tribute self portrait done in 1987 using MacPaint.
  • “Make it so.” Sebastiaan de With says, “This 21st century motivational poster sure makes me work harder.”
• “Happy To Serve You“: RIP, creator of NY’s Greek-themed coffee cup.
• Interesting video: The Art Behind Google’s Doodles. [Via]
• Walking Men is a collage of 99 pedestrian traffic-light icons from around the world. [Via]
• Are these photos or paintings? Living still lifes. [Via]

May 07, 2010

Vector painting hotness in Illustrator CS5

I’ve posted some demos showing off Photoshop CS5′s new physics-simulating brush engine–but did you know that the same engine is part of Illustrator CS5 as well?
Check out this painting and behind-the-scenes info from Greg Geisler, one of the artists behind A Scanner Darkly (see previous). Greg makes amazing use of the new Bristle Brush engine. I’m also digging this illustration by Joel Cocks, done using the same tools.

Side note: When I met Greg in Austin a couple of years ago, he talked about how useful he’d find the ability to tell Illustrator to put subsequent strokes/shapes behind the current one, rather than on top of it. Apparently the Rotoshop artists use this technique extensively when tracing over imagery. I’m pleased to say that Illustrator CS5 implements the new Draw Behind mode. Here’s a brief (2-minute) demo of that feature, along with the related Draw Inside mode.

May 06, 2010

(rt) Infographics & the like

• “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” Dangers of that cognitive style when real bullets are involved.
• Which is worse for the environment (emissions-wise), planes or a volcano? [Via]
• Check out this witty “Tax Form for the Marginally Employed” by Sam Potts.
• Interesting timeline: Watch the Growth of Walmart and Sam’s Club Across America. [Via Ben Hansen]

May 04, 2010

Illustrator CS5 has excellent pixel chops (at last)

When I started working at Adobe nearly 10 years ago, I got up in the Illustrator PM’s face. AI9 had just implemented Pixel Preview mode for Web and screen designers, but the feature was maddeningly incomplete. I made my point forcefully, and over the years Illustrator has made improvements (e.g. enabling inside/outside/center placement of strokes), but the job just wasn’t done.

Until now.

You can now set up a document so that all art automatically snaps to pixel boundaries, meaning that, for example, 1-pixel black strokes will remain 1 pixel in width instead of looking like blurry 2-pixel gray strokes. You can also snap objects selectively to the grid, and you can choose among anti-aliasing options on text. See the Illustrator help docs for more info, or better yet, watch this three-minute video:

But don’t take my (or Mordy’s) word for it. Recently the noted Web designer Jon Hicks (creator of the Firefox logo, among other things) was unhappy with Illustrator for Web work. What a difference a month & a version make:

• March 22: “Illustrator [CS4] in particular irritated the hell out of me with it’s pixel preview artefacts.”
• April 30: After trying Illustrator CS5, “I’m rather smitten with it… Having pixels work properly in Illustrator is fantastic.”

April 22, 2010

Video: Painting in Photoshop CS5

Digital painter John Derry has been pushing the boundaries of computers & painting for 25 years, and he’s now created a great tour of his favorite painting features in Photoshop CS5. I love seeing how a real artist puts the tools to work.

(Full-screen viewing recommended, naturally.)

April 14, 2010

Behind the scenes on the CS5 icons & branding

Ever wonder what goes into the creation of Creative Suite product icons, splash screens, and other branding? Designer Veerle Pieters chats with Adobe design lead Shawn Cheris about project goals, the great designers who inspired their work, and more.
I’m always kind of amazed at how much passionate commentary these designs tend to elicit. To this day no post of mine has drawn remotely as many comments as the one where I revealed the CS3 icons.
For what it’s worth–my own subjective opinion–I think the CS5 designs are a great improvement over the CS4 ones, which I disliked relative to CS3. (I used to joke that we could “upgrade” various bits of CS3-branded swag–T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.–simply by mailing people a Sharpie & telling them to blot out the white text.)
Oh, and as with the past several releases, Photoshop remains the one team that insists on listing team members’ names on the splash screen. In the spirit of the original Macintosh team signing the computer case, we believe that artists sign their work. (Plus, when you have access to a name like Seetharaman Narayanan, you don’t hide that light under a basket!)

April 07, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Literature as cigarettes, Krakens, & more

• Flame is a gorgeous online drawing app. [Via]
• Great literature gets rendered as cigarette packs; well executed. [Via]
• Photoshop joins Bar Mitzvahs, Quinceañeras, and other rites of passage. [Via]
• Mikal Reich & team have crafted some beautiful packaging for Kraken rum. Elsewhere, here’s a round-up of Krakens as portrayed across movies & games.

April 06, 2010

Sneak peek: Painting in Photoshop CS5

Digital painter John Derry writes,

I’ve put together a quick video that simultaneously demonstrates Photoshop CS5′s painting capabilities as both a “from scratch” tool and photo interpretation tool. Which one is faster? Watch to find out!

[Previously: Sneak peek of new Photoshop technologies, including painting.]

(rt) Photography: Gorgeous insects, Star Wars, & more

• Wildlife:
  • The Daily Mail features gorgeous pictures of sleeping insects covered in early morning dew [Via]
  • Zero-to-gore: Drag-racing cows in the mud (no kidding). [Via]
• Star Wars:
  • Photography skills + Star Wars imagery = The Dark Lens. (Click the “Work” link up top.)
  • In a related vein, I like this random historical mashup. [Via Barkin Aygun]

April 05, 2010

How Adobe Ideas came to be (and where it’s headed)

David Macy, artist & product manager for Adobe Illustrator and the new Adobe Ideas for iPad, shares his thoughts on the goals of the new project. –J.

Its pretty darn hard to beat pencil and paper for jotting visual ideas down quickly. That’s why this great combination travels with many artists everywhere they go.

Adobe has explored, and even prototyped a variety of thoughts related to digital sketching for some time, but we could never believe that they would compete with a pencil and a nice sketchbook. Aside from the precision and tactile feel of a pencil, there was always the problem of needing a computer. Even if we built the most elegant sketching application one could imagine, would our creative customers be convinced to pull out a laptop to sketch on in the park or in a café? OK, sure some would, but I think most would find it just too cumbersome.

And, oh yeah – there’s that issue of using a trackpad or mouse to draw with. I love my Wacom tablet too, but by the time I fish through my bag for the tablet and USB cable and wake my laptop, I could have already done some nice doodling on the nearest napkin.

I love it when technology changes in unexpected ways. When we saw what the latest smart phones could do, and heard the super-un-secret rumors of this year’s crop of tablet devices, we new that something very important had changed. Portable, high resolution, multi-touch devices are destined to be a close companion of many digitally savvy creatives. This simple realization was the birth of Adobe® Ideas.

Simply stated, Adobe Ideas is a digital sketchbook, meant to help you with exploring and realizing your creative ideas.

OK, sounds great, but can it compete with pencil and paper? Nah – at least not for the basics of drawing. A capacitive touch-screen without pressure sensitivity and without a fine-point stylus* isn’t going to win if you just talk about plain and simple drawing.

But if you add a resizable pencil tip, color mixing, transparency, zooming, the ability to drop in photos, automatic color extraction from photos, 50 steps of undo, and a vector file format compatible with Illustrator and Photoshop, then you’re talking about a great start on the concept of a digital sketchbook.

And, yes this is just the start. The small team that’s behind Adobe Ideas is having too much fun now, so we plan on revving the app frequently and adding other functions that relate to creative ideation, probably some of them as “premium” features. What ideas come to your mind?

*Check out the Pogo stylus for one that’ll be better than your fingertip.

April 04, 2010

Draw & share with Adobe Ideas for iPad

Adobe Ideas, the company’s first iPad app, is now live on the Apple App Store. Here’s a set of full-res screenshots.

This free app helps you sketch out ideas, annotate photographs, extract color themes from photographs, and more. Sketches created in Adobe Ideas can be emailed as a PDF for editing in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or viewing with any PDF viewer.

Key features:

• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable-size brushes using multitouch control (i.e. you can resize the brush tip on the fly while painting, approximating pressure sensitivity)
• Vector eraser
• Huge virtual canvas
• Automatic creation of harmonized color themes from your photos or images
• Ability to email ideas as PDF files for editing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or for viewing with any PDF viewer
• Gallery-style organizer to quickly scroll through your ideas and color themes
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• Easy creation of multiple versions of design concepts
• 50-level undo

We’re eager to hear your feedback. It’ll be interesting to rethink what an app should be, especially as Adobe tools are known for being big and feature-rich as opposed to light & tightly focused. Where should the Ideas team take the app from here? What else would you like to see Adobe bring to tablets?

March 31, 2010

A couple of good iPad wallpaper resources

• I’m quite fond of The Desktop Wallpaper Project at Kitsune Noir, and now site curator Bobby has created a set of iPad-formatted versions.
• Panic designer Neven Mrgan has made a PSD template (complete with blocked-out regions for UI elements) that facilitates putting together iPad wallpapers.

[Update: Check out the comments for links to more good resources, as well as this collection from Veer.]

March 26, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Destroyed money, cassette tape illustrations, & more

• Dolla dolla bill:
  • “Boom–Head Shot!!” 30 Bizarre Examples of Defacing Money. [Via]
  • I stumbled randomly upon the history of the “hobo nickel,” an art form I’d never heard of.
• Justin Van Genderen makes fresh, sometimes edgy Photoshop illustrations. Impressive stuff. [Via]
• Fame:
  • Ghost in the Machine: Musicians’ portraits done using cassette tape. [Via]
  • Nicely done: Illustrated Celebrity Tweets. (I really dig this Shaq weirdness.) [Via]
• Bullet the blue sky–a highly diggable little illustration. See the rest of the collection for other good ones. [Via]
• iPod as bird & more: Fun illustrations from Romain Mennetrier.

March 22, 2010

(rt) Infographics: Space, violence, & more

• Michael Paukner makes beautiful space schematics & more.
• Excellent & eye-opening: The Mariana Trench To Scale. [Via]
• FlowingData renders famous movie quotes as charts and graphs. On the Waterfront is my favorite. [Via]
• Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg created a beautiful visualization of Boston Common over the seasons, made by querying Flickr.
• Here’s the gruesome, functional graphic design o’ the day, which my son and I found while cavorting on heavy machinery.

March 21, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Bond posters, Homer Simpson’s car, & more

• Cinematic:
  • Graphic design history: Posters for all the Bond films. [Via]
  • Abduzeedo rounds up great old spaghetti western posters (originally charmingly mislabeled “western spaghetti;” nice idea for a restaurant name.)
  • “Suck It, Dreamworks!” Funny movie posters: Honest Movie Titles: Oscars 2010. [Via]
• Automotive:
  • Dig this weird vintage car ad. “I love the little bicycle basket between the jet engines,” says Roger Ebert.
  • Visualize the Difference Between Firefox, Opera, Explorer & Safari. (Firefox looks very Homer Simpson-positive.) [Via]

March 15, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Danger, Dismemberment, & Adobe Tips

• Adobe tips & info:
  • Thorough & useful: All About Transformations in Adobe Illustrator. (Applying transform effects, especially to strokes, isn’t nearly well known enough.)
  • Nice, quick tip on painting dotted lines in Photoshop.
• International Icons:
  • The NY Times hosts an interesting short video covering Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages. (Sometimes the “Genius!/Garbage!” tenor of critiques like this strikes me as a little excessive. I did like our two-year-old son’s observation on the classic pictographic idiom: “Head popping off.”) [Via]
  • Speaking of pictograms + Finn, he and I found this gruesome, functional graphic design yesterday while traipsing around a piece of unattended heavy machinery.
  • No Exit: On Slate Julie Turner offers a nice overview of the battle of the green running man vs. the red EXIT sign. [Via]
• “What is HTML5 good for?” Funny, coarse, and concise. [Via]

March 11, 2010

Illustration: Fun with Google Maps

• Christoph Niemann has excellent fun riffing on the visual language of Google Maps.

  

• Neven Mrgan asks, “What’s next for Google Maps now that they’ve added Bicycling Directions?,” providing some tongue-in-cheek answers.

[Previously: See Niemann's great Lego NYC illustrations.]

March 10, 2010

Colosseo: A letterpress rendering of the Roman Coliseum

You don’t need to be a type nerd to enjoy Cameron Moll’s new Colosseo letterpress project, a year-long labor of love:

The video starts a bit slowly, so if you’re pressed for time you can jump to the 4-minute mark where Cameron starts describing the project. Around the 6-minute mark you can see a time lapse of Illustrator being used to create some of the intricate textures on the building’s facade. Amazing stuff.

March 07, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Terrific posters, race cars as graphic art, & more

• Dear God these are good: Tavis Coburn illustrates the BAFTA Nominees.
• Glenn Jones makes excellently droll illustrations. (Our two-year-old is still trying to process Thomas the Tank Engine as a Transformer.) Vectortuts interviews him.
• Zoom zoom:
  • Apple sponsored a race team in the 70′s? Check out the images & short video accompanying “Go Faster: The Graphic Design of Racing Cars” I love the Porsche-as-cuts-of-meat design. [Via]
  • Check out this elegantly simple Mini Cooper convertible ad.

March 06, 2010

(rt) Infographics: Hot Pockets, transmogrifiers, & more

• All the ingredients in a ham & cheese Hot Pocket get laid out in a rad typographic poster. [Via]
• From XKCD: “Kid with Transmogrifier” FTW! [Via]
• Linzie Hunter makes fun, funky map illustrations. [Via]
• Massive infographic: Google facts & figures.
• This infographic “describes 95% of films, 40% of best picture nominees,” says Roger Ebert.

February 28, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Ingenious negative space, beautiful patterns, & more

• “Is that a Riding Hood in your mouth, or…?” Check out some ingenious negative space illustrations by Noma Bar.
• Chopping Blocked:
  • Viva old school: Photoshop “Filter Heroes” poster.
  • Behold, Nerd Rider!
• Check out the beautifully complex patterns that Tatiana Plakhova creates. [Via]
• Star Wars-related:
  • I dig the weirdly offbeat acrylic paintings of Ryan Jacob Smith.
  • These minimalist Star Wars tourism posters are great, but I’d still like to see one for Mos Eisley. (Maybe “Wretched hive of scum & villainy” is too long to be “minimalist.”) [Via]

February 21, 2010

(rt) Illustration: “Defeat the World!,” great logos, & more

• “Defeat the World!!” Stephen Colbert + Shepard Fairey = Awesome Olympic Poster.
• Logos
  • MTV’s logo, like its aging viewers, has chubbed out. [Via]
  • Abduzeedo rounds up The Best Google Custom Logos.
• Infographics:
  • Nice infographic satire: “Data Underload.” [Via]
  • I’m loving Ward Shelley’s intricate, painted timeline infographics, chronicling the histories of things & people like Frank Zappa & Andy Warhol. [Via]
  • Danny Jones has put together a handsome if not terribly data-heavy Death Valley Sailing Stones Infographic.
  • “In case of emergency, open door with dirty look.” — Jim Gaffigan

February 12, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Planets, pushpins, & more

• Check out these gorgeous planetary posters from Ross Berens. [Via]
• “Shaped by War” is a gripping 4-min audio slideshow featuring photojournalist Don McCullin.
• Great linework & palettes populate the retro illustrations of Brent Couchman. [Via]
• Outrageous numbers of pushpins go into Eric Daigh’s detailed photo reproductions.
• I dig the colors & shapes of Marc Kolle’s illustrations.

February 06, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Bananas, evil, & more

• Dig this super fun Chiquita banana redesign. I want the luchador sticker! [Via]
• Here’s a high-res set of 60 Recent Movie Posters. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but there’s some solid Photoshop action here. (I like the Crank 2 and Terminator Salvation pieces in particular–more than the corresponding flicks themselves.)
• Newsweek features “Unattainable Beauty: The Decade’s Biggest Airbrushing Scandals.”
• Infographics:
  • “My Heart is Divided“–fun schematic shirt from the Chopping Block.
  • Meet The Milky Way Transit Authority: our galaxy as tube map. [Via Ellis Vener]
  • Man, does Japan have fast broadband. This and other stats get visualized via the State of the Internet Explained In One Giant Infographic.
• “Evil and Lazy” shirt. How nice. (Couldn’t get the Adobe font right, though.)

February 05, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Fake UIs in movies, solid caricatures, and more

• “What you need, my friend, is an Internet Online Website!” Clever tool for educating newbie clients. [Via]
• UI designer Mark Coleran appeared on NPR, talking about creating fictional computer UIs for movies. [Via]
• Depression Press serves up a tasty carnival of retro logos & illustrations.
• I dig these groovy caricatures from Fernando Vicente. [Via]
• Heh–here’s a wry comment on the excessive comping of screens in Photoshop.
• 50 cars or 1 bus? Here’s a vivid visualization of the impact of mass transit.

January 22, 2010

(rt) Illustration: “Crayola’s Law,” Photoshop, & the Beatles

<ul

January 16, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Best & Worst Logos of ’09, more

• Logos:
  • Brand New collects The Best and Worst Identities of 2009. [Via]
  • I dig the logo for Colossal Pictures.
  • The Museum of Flight features a wealth of classic, vintage airline logos. [Via]
  • Ouch: it’s a tongue-in-cheek TSA logo design contest. [Via]
• Distressed zest: the Mister Retro “Machine Wash Deluxe” filter has been updated. [Via]
• Infographics:
  • Dollars spent vs. life expectancy around the world: US = WTF? [Via]
  • Enjoy some beautiful Victorian infographics. [Via]

January 14, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Classic letterheads, the retro future, & more

• “Batgirl Is Now Prince”: Classic album covers get reinterpreted via superheroes. [Via]
• “V is for Vanish”: Robert Samuel Hanson makes beautifully clean, simple illustrations. [Via]
• Dig these rather spectacular Japanese-flavored vector art from Sheena Aw.
• Printing:
  • Letterheady.com features the custom letterheads of everyone from Einstein to Hitler to Johnny Cash.
  • Maggie Frost has created a tasty papercraft-flavored concert poster.
• The future of the past:
  • The year 2010, as seen from a kids’ book in 1972. [Via]
  • Matthew Lyons illustrates with a retro sci-fi kick. [Via]

January 09, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Killer posters, plus Nic Cage everywhere

• Kings of the road:
  • Here’s a cool large-scale Photoshop job: “Snakes on a Bus.” [Via]
  • Okay, I’m reaching in calling this illustration, but I dig Art Lebedev’s concept for a “transparent” semi truck. [Via]
• VectorTuts has some great ideas/techniques for building a face from typography.
• Posters:
  • Brandon Schaefer makes terrific minimalist movie poster designs. [Via]
  • Check out these cool poster designs for Slaughterhouse Five, Moby Dick, & more.
• Cinematic hacks:
  • “Photoshopped Movies“: kind of speaks for itself. [Via]
  • Photoshop, what hath ye wrought? There’s a whole blog of Nic Cage as Everyone.

January 07, 2010

“Gee, I wish I were a man…”: Vintage ads & posters

• “Attack Attack Attack!” VectorTuts features 80+ Amazing WWII Allied Propaganda Posters. (Seems they really wanted to muzzle the Al Gore of antiquity.)
• The Vintage Ad Browser offers “100,000+ vintage advertisements to explore.” Dig the old-school computer ads in particular. (64kb of RAM for a mere $1495 in 70′s dollars? Make it so!) [Via Marc Pawliger]

December 27, 2009

(rt) Infographics: Cereal selection, nukes, & killer jellyfish

• “Are you Chuck Norris? Are you high?” Here’s a hilarious cereal-choosing infographic. [Via]
• Solid old cutaways: Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts
• Just about every designer will recognize The Dreaded Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors!

December 26, 2009

(rt) Illustration: Negative space, minimalism, & more

• I dig these beautiful minimalist renderings of TV shows from Albert Exergian. See also his excellent portfolio site.
• The Web Design Ledger showcases clever negative space in logo design. [Via]
• Crazy, often beautiful: Matt Kish is doing one drawing for every page of Moby-Dick.
• True copy & paste: Billboard hacking with Doom’s HUD. Solid. [Via] Reminds me of Photoshop “adbusting” in Berlin.
• How to make dotted borders in Photoshop. (Not hard, but we should simplify the process.) [Via]
• Amazing–EyeWriter: Physically Paralyzed Artist Draws Graffiti on Buildings w/His Eyes.

December 16, 2009

(rt) Illustration: Top 10 Book Covers, Man-hunger, & more

• Book design:
  • “Man Hungry!” Gotta love vintage pulp novel covers. [Via]
  • The Book Cover Archive rounds up the Top Ten Book Covers of the ’00s. Some good stuff, but somehow I’m not quite as blown away as I’d hoped to be. [Via]
• Impediments:
  • Inspired set of “Ideas & their enemies.” (But come on, marketing managers are the Big Bad Wolf? That’s giving ‘em too much credit.)
  • “Four Obstacles to Writing“–funny illustration from Tom Gauld.
• Violence Illustrated:
  • I dig “The Ancient Circle of Mutual Aggression” & other illustrations from Juan Molinet. [Via]
  • “Theatre of Cruelty“: Medieval peeps really did get medieval.
• The “Aqualta” project presents visions of New York & Tokyo under water. [Via]

December 13, 2009

(rt) Illustration: Accidental geography, Expressionist video games, & more

• “Accidental Geography” consists of photos of objects weirdly resembling recognizable landmasses. (via @kottke)
• Superfly Wi-Fi:
  • “Ernie & Birch”: Christoph Niemann illustrates with nothing but leaves. (Love the “wireless ginko.”) [Via]
  • Check out this beautifully simple ad for Wi-Fi at Mickey D’s.
• Toddler-vision:
  • Our lad Finnegan sees the Champion sportswear logo and says “Mailbox!” He just might be onto something.
  • Finn + Marker + Kix Box = A.M. “art” lesson w/Dad. “Unicorn lady… beard… tattoo!”
• Distilled to the limit: “Expressionist” renderings of classic arcade games. [Via]

December 07, 2009

(rt) Infographics: Megafonzies, mind mapping, & more

• Megafonzies, Kilowarhols, & more: Wired lists some fun units of geeky measure. (“1 Warhol equals 15 minutes of fame, so if you’ve been famous for three years, that’s just over 105 kilowarhols.”) [Via]
• “Create Random Acronyms Pointlessly”: Core77 features a funny beatdown of “mind mapping” cliches.
• The Onion’s infographic take on Jim Brown: “The good kind of crazy, but just barely.” (Love the bit about his empty uniform carrying on after his retirement.)
• Visual Aid: Cool infographics available as posters. (Dig the spacecraft size comparison.)
• Interesting infographic: “Tokyo vs Cairo”: Using word analysis to compare Obama’s foreign policy speeches.

December 05, 2009

(rt) Illustration: Great business card designs, laser-etched Macs, & more

• DesignrFix rounds up 40 solid business card designs. Dig the illustrated characters in particular, plus the obsessive behavior of Marian Bantjes. [Via]
• Physical graffiti:
  • Peep some sweet hand bags made using book cover illustrations. [Via]
  • Laser-etch art onto your MacBook, Moleskine, etc. [Via]
• Photoshop CS4 wins over an industrial designer for concept sketching. Adam O’Hern shares his findings and tips.
• Europa:
  • Dig the detailed vintage style on display in this “Caricature map of Europe, 1914.” [Via]
  • See Bibliodyssey’s “Theatre of Cruelty“: Medieval peeps really did get medieval.

• Heh–fun poster for the Jewish Film Festival. [Via]

November 29, 2009

(rt) Illustration: Edgy ads, clean vectors, and more

• “Nothing Really Mattress…” Creative, often edgy ads from around the world. [Via]
• Eastern Bloc:
  • Cyrillic lettering Яocks. More cool Russian posters. (Just don’t try to match drinks with this guy.)
  • Abduzeedo hosts a fun collection of modern Constructivist-style posters & illustrations.
• Artists interpret literary figures at Hey Oscar Wilde. (Love the Chekov, Lord of the Flies pieces.)
• Simplicity:
  • I dig the flat, clean illustrations of Katie Kirk. [Via]
  • Nice, simple vector/raster animal art from Ty Wilkins. (“‘Vector/raster’ = Illustrator/Photoshop,” he notes in reply.) [Via]