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 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.
[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 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 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.
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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 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.
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.
- Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box)
- Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
- Enable smart shapes:
- Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
- Support other parameterized shapes (e.g. stars with an adjustable number of points; lines with arrowheads)
- Make various layer effects enhancements:
- Apply effects at the layer group level
- Re-order effects
- Duplicate effects (e.g. apply multiple strokes per layer)
- Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box)
- Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
- Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update)
- Enable layer search (i.e. type to filter by layer name or attributes)
- Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
- Improve text rendering
- Export text & graphical styles as CSS
- Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts)
- 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:
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]
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
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- Fun: “Crayola’s Law” shows a doubling of colors every 28 years. [Via]
- Micheal Deal is exploring the Beatles through lovely infographics. [Via]
- Anatoly Zenkov traced mouse usage in a Photoshop project over time. See the comments here for links to the tool he used. [Via]
[Update: Speaking of Atari, welcome the newborn & excellently named Leo Atari Pitaru, son of the very talented Amit Pitaru.]
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]
November 25, 2009
Animation: Visualizing the fall of empires
Here’s a rather fascinating animated infographic from Pedro M. Cruz. Stick around for those late-20th-century fireworks:
Here’s some behind-the-scenes info on the project. [Via]
November 18, 2009
Fascinating slow motion water drops
Trippy!
[Via]
Coincidentally, here’s a cool tutorial on milk-drop typography using Photoshop.
November 16, 2009
(rt) Infographics: Violent death, Hey Jude, & more
- Brutal: “In my Swedish elevator i discovered one of the worst ways to die.” [Via]
- This excellent interactive infographic shows the relative size of objects, from coffee beans to atoms.
- “Hey Jude” as a flowchart. [Via]
- I love this set of fanciful theme park maps. (As a kid I used to pore over my posters of Great America & Brookfield Zoo.) [Via]
November 09, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Amazing concept art, Vintage VDubs, & more
- Check out some incredible concept art from Rodolfo Damaggio.
- I love these automotive manual cutaway drawings turned into giant wall art. If the imagery trips your trigger, Bryan Hughes suggests How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. [Via]
- Cool map to the LA Olympics… of 1932: (More info is here.)
- Tutorials:
- Slick–How to Create Smoky Brushes and Type In Illustrator CS4.
- Halloween+Photoshop: Russell Brown shows how to turn people into monsters.
November 01, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Japanese monsters, skulls, beer, and more
- Seasonal creepiness:
- I love these bizarre illustrations: Anatomy of Japanese Folk Monsters. [Via]
- “I want your skulls…” Lots of cool illustrations.
- Oh, this heart doesn’t look healthy, does it? Here’s more such weirdness. [Via]
- Abduzeedo rounds up great Guinness ads past & present.
- The Chopping Block crew has posted tips on using Photoshop to Prep & Color Scanned Drawings.
October 30, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Friday Infographics
- Man, what a gorgeous space infographic. See also the lovely Race to the Moon.
- A three-year-old’s view of the NYC subway. (I have to get my illustration mojo back & start doing things like this for our boys. I keep wanting to do a diagram of baby Henry scootching around his crib, a la the sailing stones of the Racetrack Playa.)
- A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades. [Via]
- Map of how long it takes to get to a ‘major’ city (+50k people). [Via]
October 27, 2009
How goes the war?
- The Big Picture’s Afghanistan, September 2009 gallery is full of striking, often heartbreaking images.
- Matthew Cook filters the Iraq war through a hazy, watercolor prism. [Via]
October 23, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Martians, killers, and more
- Infographics:
- A lovely, highly readable, one-image history of missions to Mars. [Via]
- “A billion here, a billion there…” Gigantic expenditures visualized.
- “A Killer Among Us??” The Science News Cycle as a handy infographic. [Via]
- Cool: Sketchbook Mobile for iPhone now emails layered PSD files. [Via]
- The recent evolution of various logos (Hilton, Hertz, more).
- Chris Haines makes some amazing photo illustrations (Thom Yorke & others). (They get better as you scroll down.)
October 18, 2009
Video: The creation of the CBS Eye logo
Being ever curious about logo design, I found this brief history of the creation of the CBS Eye logo interesting:
Funny to think that the work was expected to be just a one-season item. [Via]
October 15, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Mickey D’s to Decapitated KFC’s
- Infographics:
- Map of the US, visualized by the distance to nearest McDonald’s. Here’s more info. [Via]
- Beautiful “Nonsensical Infographics” by Chad Hagen.
- I love the excellently simple Decibel Fest poster.
- Check out the nifty retro illustrations from Lab Partners. More are on their blog. [Via]
- The best flag in the world. [Via]
- Filed under Stuff You Were Previously Unlikely To See Today: A
dogfox eating Col. Sanders’ head, courtesy of graffiti artist Banksy. Brainstem-lickin’ good.
October 10, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Bold type, controversial covers, & more
- The original IBM ThinkPad (Spoiler: It’s an actual pad.) [Via]
- Dang–artist Eric Natzke keeps raising his game: “Is it made with Paint or Code?” [Via]
- Tutorials:
- How to Create Vintage Vector Bottle Caps In Illustrator CS4.
- Dig the bold 3D type in this poster tutorial.
- “Is God Dead?” The Most Controversial Magazine Covers of All Time. [Via Jackie Lincoln-Owyang]
- Getting clever:
- “Shoot forth thunder.” Visual plays on Shakespearian lines, as sprinkled through “Romeo + Juliet.”
- A great set of logos featuring visual puns. [Via]
October 09, 2009
Sneak peek: Illustrator + Flash + Dreamweaver -> CANVAS
Check out this demo of Illustrator handing vector art to Dreamweaver, and DW binding the artwork to data so that it can be displayed via the HTML5 CANVAS tag:
Mordy Golding summarizes the demo as follows:
[The engineer] starts by taking art drawn in Illustrator and copies it to the clipboard. Then he goes into Dreamweaver, selects a DIV and chooses a function called Smart Paste. Dreamweaver then pastes an FXG conversion of the Illustrator art directly into the page. If you aren’t familiar with FXG, it’s basically a better SVG* (you can get more information on the open source FXG spec here). In other words, you draw in Illustrator, copy and paste into Dreamweaver (which converts it to code), and the art displays as vector art in a web browser. What’s more, the engineer proceeded to actually bind XML data to the chart.
After that, the presenter copies an animation in Flash Professional as XML, then pastes it in DW as a CANVAS animation.
It’s kind of funny to see this demo now, as Illustrator could export XML vector graphics (SVG) to the Web some 10 years ago. Later people made various efforts to display & manipulate SVG using Flash. This new demo uses different tools & a different display engine to do similar things.
I think this is a key point: Adobe makes money selling tools, not distributing viewing software. Those tools must address customer needs. If Flash Player is the right choice for some projects & HTML/CANVAS for others, no problem: we get paid to help you solve problems, not to force one implementation vs. another.
* I have no idea whether FXG is “better” than SVG overall & don’t want to get into a debate on that subject. FXG is based on SVG but maps more closely to the Flash drawing model.
October 04, 2009
A little Adobe-flavored bloodletting
Longtime InDesign PM Will Eisley has decorated his inner forearms with some bold type (larger image). Replying to my sharp-eyed wife, he says, “Yes, the marks are color and grayscale bars which are part of InDesign’s printing marks.” Hard core.
Next up, he says is “a series of 3′s in ITC Franklin Gothic Heavy. One of the best 3′s in all of typography, IMO.” Will also recommends checking out Body Type, dedicated to tattoo typography.
Previously:
[Photo courtesy of John Cornicello]
September 28, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Charlie Parker, Busted coffee, & more
- One bedtime treat is reading young Finnegan an ABC book from the amazing Charley Harper. (Reading him the marvelously weird Charlie Parker Played Be Bop is another.)
- The Photoshop team coffee pot was recently broken again–and yes, QE has graphed the impact!
- This “Tech support cheat sheet” from xkcd is spot-on funny. [Via]
- Here’s a 6-minute video on how Wired makes mag covers. One involved a 1GB (!) Transformers .PSD rendered by ILM. [Via Adam Pratt]
- Check out some impressive photo manipulations/illustrations from Erik Johansson. [Via Kirsten Harris]
September 22, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Escher, Che-on-Che, & more
- Volkswagen has created a fun MC Escher homage. (Click the images for larger versions.)
- Heh: from the Onion, the “Che Wearing Che T-shirt T-shirt.”
- Fancy a beer? Make mine a Berserker. (“Lumberjacks give them the grunt of approval.”)
- Check out the beautifully simple “Redacted Book Series” project.
- Gene Gable rounds up solid vintage Ex Libris illustrations. I like this one for Woodrow Wilson.
- Enjoy some “Dirty Prancing” with the Swayzaur–not to mention Robocop + unicorns.
September 21, 2009
Monday Illustrations: Retro-modern Coke heads
- Retro modern:
- Jonathan Haggard is dynamite. The images illustrating this interview start slow and get better as you scroll.
- Check out the badassery on tap in ColourLovers’ “retro modern” gallery.
- Coke heads:
- Brand New charts the evolution of Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi branding over more than a century.
- From 1923 come these slightly abstract brand usage guidelines for Coke. (Click for a larger image.)
September 07, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Filter Heroes, puke-inducing logos, & more
[Quick reminder: The "(rt)" in the post headline signifies that I've previously posted these links on my Twitter account.]
- Infographics:
- Venn diagram of mythical creatures. Pretty excellent. [Via]
- Great infographic: Caffeine vs. calories. [Via]
- Check out the Photoshop Filter Heroes t-shirt from our pals at Chopping Block.
- Eye-popping monstrous illustrated goodness from Niark1. Lots more to like at Niark1.com.
- Design Won’t Save the World. See other words of wisdom for budding designers:
- Layers for iPhone does photo compositing + natural media & exports PSDs (!).
- Awfulness:
- Ouch: YourLogoMakesMeBarf.com. (But the “Johnston County Cornhole” does richly deserve it.)
- Hard-core awesome Web design: Havenworks and uh, this thing. (“How can you even look at that without having a seizure?,” asks my wife.) [Via Sam Potts]
September 02, 2009
Wednesday Illustrations: Mosaics of waste, Pantone rainbows, & more
- I find Chris Jordan’s photo illustrations, visualizing the sheer scale of human consumption, totally fascinating.
- Basheer Graphic Books commissioned a giant rainbow made from Pantone chips (8 meters, composed of 5,000 chips).
- The Wrath of Kant: Literature as video game cartridges. [Via]
- I love Tenfold Collective’s design for Odell Brewing.
- Check out Amy Martin’s highly diggable posters (available for purchase here). [Via]
August 29, 2009
Saturday Infographics: Delicious-nasty coffee & more
- Christoph Niemann has built a Periodic Table of Metaphors–classics, clichés, and more. See the rest of his site for lots more good stuff. [Via]
- The uncanny valley of beverages? Check out the Coffee Temperature Acceptability Index.
- What if you got rid of the NYC subway? You’d need a hell of a lot of parking lots, for one thing. [Via]
- The NYT quite effectively shows the volume of music sales by medium over time (more interesting than you’d think).
August 22, 2009
(rt) Illustration: CS4 cupcakes, Orc pee, & more
- “Game over, man–game over.”: Don’t be this (8-bit) guy. The image is part of a funky “Make Something Cool Every Day” collection.
- Colour Lovers features a collection of beautiful vintage typewriter tins.
- Of new Mountain Dew, Neven Mrgan writes, “Two-word review: Orc pee.” And speaking of oddball snack products, apparently Asia features Crotch-Kick Flavor Doritos.
- CS4 icon cupcakes! (Just don’t get the icing on your Creative Suite pillows.) (via Jeff Warnock)
- Awesome URL o’ the day: http://jon.dntfckwth.us/ (Worth a click for some awesome art there, too.)
- Vegetable steamer = awesome spaceship. I *so* did that as a kid.
August 18, 2009
Vector graphics software… from 1963
JFK was in office, and yet the app Sketchpad (from then-25-year-old Ivan Sutherland) offered multitouch input, auto-correction of vector strokes, and even reusable symbols (a la Flash, Illustrator, etc.). Very cool:
Apparently Dr. Sutherland once employed–you guessed it–John Warnock, seen here introducing Adobe Illustrator in 1987. [Via]
August 16, 2009
Sunday Illustrations: Creepy ads, Fruit cannibalism, & more
- Somsara Rielly is creating a collage a day for 365 days: Art Design 3(6)5. I’m a huge sucker for this faux-Photoshop error message. [Via]
- Frank Chimero makes nifty laser-etched wood panels featuring his work.
- Off-putting:
- “Is it always illegal to kill a woman?,” asks one of The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time. (Who says we don’t make at least a little progress?) The self-slicing pig reminds me of SNL’s old Cluckin’ Chicken ad.
- There’s weirdness a plenty in these 30 controversial album covers. (Now I’ll look even more askance as my neighbor’s crapped-out Crown Vic with the homemade Cannibal Corpse seat covers.)
- I have no useful way to introduce the work of Joel Trussell (illustrator for Gama-Go and more), but the guy’s got skills. (Poor Mr. Wobbles…)
August 10, 2009
Neat 3D sketching tools
- According to Gizmodo, “By using a ubiquitous interface metaphor (the Etch-A-Sketch), Sketch-3D allows anyone to participate in generating stereoscopic imagery in a way that is simple and engaging.” Very cool, though what’s nerdier than an adult playing with an Etch-a-Sketch? An adult playing with an Etch-a-Sketch while wearing those glasses. [Via]
- The always intriguing Amit Pitaru created Rhonda, a 3D sketching tool that’s best understood through the short video on the site. Apparently they’re looking for beta testers as they move forward.
- I could swear I’ve blogged previously about the even more ambitious ILoveSketch, but I guess not. Developer Seok-Hyung Bae has visited Adobe to demo the app & discuss ideas for the future.
August 06, 2009
Thursday Infographics: Maps as fashion & more
- Navigate the Big Apple in style with the NYC Metro Cuff.
- The NYT offers a cool interactive graphic on How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Click various segments (age, ethnicity, job status, etc.) and then mouse around to slice the data.
- “It’s all {Greek} to me…” Yeah, but what do the Greeks say (and Swedes & Russians, for that matter)?
- From the Ukraine comes a massive outdoor crossword puzzle
August 04, 2009
Tuesday Illustrations: Pimp my warp drive & more
- The Star Trek movie site features some bitchin’ alternate USS Enterprises [Via Jerry Harris]
- ColourLovers rounds up lovely & colorful desktop images.
- Eleanor Wood makes collages the old-fashioned way. [Via]
- The Container Corp. of America commissioned some great artwork in the ’30s-’60s. (See also galleries two and three.) [Via]
- CH Workshops host super cool tape drawings.
July 29, 2009
(rt) Illustration: AT-ATs, optical illusions, & more
- Here’s an awesome “Oakland AT-AT” t-shirt. I love those things (both kinds). (via @5tu)
- Vandelay Design rounds up 30 Text Effect Tutorials for Illustrator. Lots of neat ideas here, and I especially like the “Vibrant 3D Pixel Type Treatment.”
- The Daily Mail shows a set of garage doors as optical illusions. (I’m a sucker for folding-wing F/A-18′s myself.) Get ‘em here. [Via]
- What’s on Earth Tonight? If extraterrestrials are monitoring our TV broadcasts, here’s what they’re seeing. [Via]
- RT @khoi: Illustrator S. Britt’s homepage violates all rules of good Web navigation-but it’s so good.
- Fast Food Mafia presents mascots as gangsters. (Click for the higher-res version.) [Via]
- What Apple’s web site would have looked like if the Internet existed in 1984. (via @davecross)
- Teehan + Lax have created a new PSD to facilitate designing for Palm Pre. (They’re the same guys who made the iPhone GUI PSD.)
July 23, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Amazing light paintings & more
- Jan Wöllert and Jörg Miedza create amazing long-exposure light paintings.
- Creative Suite icons done via human pixels from Italy. (via @jdowdell)
- Free 3D models from NASA; can be loaded into Photoshop Extended. (via Pete Falco)
- Finally an Illustrator tutorial that takes advantage of warping tools + blending modes, not just c1990-era stuff: Creating an MRE package.
- “404 Humor Not Found”: fun error pages. More here. (via @gridirondaniel & @inspiredm)
- A personal ad in infographic form: My kind of girl!
- Nicknames for famous corporate logos. (My fave: “Two and a Half Hotdogs”)
- Simple, powerful book cover design for “Busted.”
July 19, 2009
Quick Illustrator tips: Create a ribbon; batch convert
A few Adobe technical folks bounced around some ideas last week, responding to a question about how one would create a pink ribbon-style illustration. Stéphane Baril made some great suggestions in this very brief, five-step tutorial (PDF). (Live Paint is your friend!)
Elsewhere, developer Richard Bates has created a free utility & notes on Batch SWF Conversion with AIR and Illustrator CS4. [Via David Macy]
July 18, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: Paper madness, Grassfitti, & more
- Interesting surfaces:
- Frank Chimero makes nifty laser-etched wood panels featuring his work.
- “[Screw] Round-Up. Grassfitti can’t be stopped.” [Via]
- Insane paper contraptions:
- Wataru Itou’s paper castle took four years to construct & features electrical lights and a moving train.
- Far less involved, but OCD in its own way, is this lined paper created using red & blue thread.
- Sipho Mabona creates amazingly intricate origami pieces.
July 14, 2009
(rt) Illustration: Man vs. tank, Pixar vs. Dreamworks, & more
- Can one commission Chinese artists to batch-paint the Tiananmen “tank man”? One man tries.
- The iPhone GUI PSD has been updated for iPhone 3.0. Way to go, guys! [Via Mark Coleran]
- I like the idea of a Lego Remote: The cartoon is similar in spirit to Adobe Configurator.
- “There is bad taste and then there is this“–the new MSFT Bing logo. [Via Mark Coleran]
- Oof–a probably unfair but funny Pixar vs. Dreamworks smackdown. (via @5tu)
- I had a little weekend fun with Illustrator’s Live Trace feature.
July 13, 2009
Illustrations: Creepshows
- Winkler & Noah’s The Puppet Show is a collection of photos of real children modified to look like puppets. So, um, they’ve got that going for them. [Via]
- RetroComedy has picked out the “15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of All Time.” [Via]
July 12, 2009
(rt) Illustration: PS Playboy, World War III, and more
- Photoshop named Playboy’s “Employee of the Month.” [Via Michael Ninness]
- Optical illusion pavement art: giant hole in bike path. [Via Stephen Shankland]
- Killer hair-based illustration o’ the day [Via Mordy Golding]
- “Someone Tweeted!” Check out these WWIII Propaganda Posters.
- Would you trust this man to draw on your face? If so, that makes one of us. (And yes, the girl turned out to be lying.)
- What’s the difference between a bug and a feature?
July 08, 2009
Wednesday Illustrations: Geekery, skating, & more
- Browser-related:
- One seriously excellent error message: Hatin’ on IE6.
- Sub Pop celebrates horrible, horrible 1996-era Web design with a new promo page. [Via]
- Skate & create:
- Smashing Magazine rounds up 40 Beautiful Skateboard Designs.
- Adobe & Nike folks talk about the behind-the-scenes process of creating & streaming the Nike Skateboarding Debacle HD video. [Via]
- I spied this Joel Tudor board in Santa Cruz the other day, chuckled, and had to snap a pic.
- Core77 reviews New Skateboard Graphics.
- I’m not sure what’s up with John MacConnell’s head, but he might want to have it looked into.
July 07, 2009
Tuesday Infographics
- White Glove Tracking “asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean,” producing all sorts of creative visualizations of the resulting data. [Via]
- “A love of baseball plus a love of infographics equals Flip Flop Fly Ball.” Fascinating & beautifully executed stuff. [Via]
- Narcissism + Stalking + ADHD = Twitter! It’s the Social Media Venn Diagram Tee.
- Ben Fry’s All Streets is an image of the US comprised of “26 million individual road segments.” [Via]
July 06, 2009
Monday Illustrations: Snacks + Chroma
- Chow:
- I love Louise Fili’s intricate, stamp-themed design for the Bedford Post cafe.
- Lunch gets a whole lot weirder through Ginou Choueiri’s Potato Portraits.
- Color:
- ColourLovers hosts a collection of beautiful vintage circus posters. (A Ringling Bros. poster hung over my childhood bed for years, and I’d endlessly pour over the details of trains receding into infinity.)
- Dig Comex paint’s cartoon-themed ad for their color-matching prowess.
- This Cube’s for you, print geeks: Ignacio Pilotto’s Pantone-themed Rubitone Rubik’s Cube.
July 04, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: From subways to space
- Happy Fourth:
- Crackerpacks.com wraps an enormous set of fireworks packaging art in some eye-wateringly ghetto “vintage” Web design.
- Rosemarie Fiore creates drawings by containing and controlling firework explosions.
- These Tokyo “subway manner posters”, designed by Bunpei Yorifuji, manage to inform & entertain without condescension. [Via]
- Brushes & patterns:
- If you think Illustrator can do only crisp vectors, look again. Think Design has shared 15 paintstroke Illustrator paint brushes. I’ve taken them for a spin & found them quite nice.
- Handy when the moment arises: Susan Libertiny has created a free set of passport stamp & postmark Photoshop brushes. [Via]
- YouWorkForThem is selling sets of intricate line patterns of the sort that appear on currency.
- Wipe your feet on this great, nerdy doormat. [Via]
- Mischa McLachlan has created a slick 2001: A Space Odyssey icon set. [Via]
June 25, 2009
Infographics in motion
- Hot Rocks: The NYT presents an interesting 2:30 overview on the dangers of drilling deep to tap geothermal power.
- Realtime 3D Airtraffic Network Simulation: Lufthansa’s Brand Academy features “a 14-meter-wide, 180-degree projection [that] lets the visitors dive into the fully navigable, realtime 3D visualization of 16,000 daily Lufthansa and Star Alliance flights.” Check out the video. [Via]
Update: Looks like the links have been pulled, at least for the moment. Check out alternate links (courtesy of Ken Beegle) in comments.
June 24, 2009
Assorted Pixar Awesomeness
- Former Pixar production artist Lou Romano has posted a wealth of materials (videos, photos, paintings, and more) showing how the art of UP came to be. He shows how everything from gouache & miniatures to Photoshop & After Effects come together to explore & prototype the work.
- In a follow-up post, Lou has shared higher-res images of the complete color script for UP. [Via]
- The Art of the Title Sequence celebrates the wonderful end titles from WALL-E, interviewing director Jim Capobianco and animator Alexander Woo. [Via]
- Amazon lists Tim Hauser’s The Art of UP and The Art of WALL-E.
June 22, 2009
Monday Illustrations: All tutes, all the time
- Veerle Pieters offers up some nice Illustrator tutorials:
- First up is using Illustrator swatches & blends to make a quantized gradient background.
- She then puts Illustrator’s blending modes & masks to good use in creating a lovely poster, step by step.
- From Layers Mag:
- Corey Barker shows how to get some slick results using Illustrator’s Live Trace, symbols, and brushes.
- Dave Cross maps a vector logo onto a t-shirt, keeping it scalable & editable even when rippled via the Displace filter.
June 18, 2009
Thursday Infographics: From Rambo to D&D
- How does Rambo’s shirtlessness affect his per-minute killing prowess? Flowing Data has the answer! [Tangentially related: Five terrible fake Sylvester Stallone franchise revivals. Even more tangential: My wife has ancestors named Rambo, but strangely she won't sign up for using "Rambo" as our forthcoming son's middle name.]
- “Effing Hail!” It’s infographics as a game. [Via]
- Crossing a couple of nerd-streams, check out these D&D-style maps of the C++ programming language.
- Wikipedia shows the mean center of United States population as it has evolved throughout the years. [Via]
- oobject collects maps of 12 of the world’s most fascinating tunnel networks. [Via]
June 11, 2009
Cool recent infographics
- “Dustin Curtis is a Statistic,” presenting his life as a series of data points. [Via]
- The GOOD Transparencies Archive offers a terrific set of infographics. [Via]
- NYC
- Horizonless New York presents a really unique take on city topography.
- iPhone app UpNext NYC is an interactive 3D map to explore Manhattan.
- The Joy of Tech has a funny take on How Apple Approves iPhone Apps. [Via]
- Oh yes–this is American Apparel in a nutshell.
June 08, 2009
Monday Illustrations: Monsters, luchadores, and more
- Jon Hicks creates Daniel’s Daily Monster for his son. “Every morning when making his lunch, I give myself 5 minutes to draw a monster on paper from one of those memo pad things, give it a name and quickly photograph it with the iPhone.” Awesome.
- I love Steve Bonner’s intricate take on the classic Stormtrooper.
- Paper:
- Jen Stark makes beautiful, incredibly intricate cut-paper sculptures. She even animates them in kaleidoscopic blooms.
- StarWars.com features Star Wars lucha libre masks. (Our little guy will go nuts for these in a year or two.) [Via]
- Logos:
- “Get Excited and Make Things” is a nice riff on “Keep Calm and Carry On” (a WWII-era poster that’s hung on Adobe’s West 9 for quite some time).
- Killed Productions; heh.
10:10 AM | Permalink | No Comments
June 04, 2009
Logos a-Go-Go
- Alex Faaborg & his Mozilla crew really, really sweat the details of Firefox icon design. [Via John Dowdell]
- “…no one knows you’re a dog.” I dig the ID for the Internet Identity Workshop. [Via]
- Colour Lovers features a great collection of vintage airline logos.
- “There is bad taste and then there is this:” the new Microsoft Bing logo. [Via Mark Coleran]
- tschka-tschka-”Trends“ (Demitri Martin-style)
- Bill Gardner rounds up dozens of current examples in exploring logo trends. [Via]
- Bill Marsh examines before & after versions of “warmer, fuzzier” logos.
- Jane Sample uses logos to create a “brand timeline portrait,” showing the different brands she uses and interacts with during the course of a typical day. [Via]
June 03, 2009
Wednesday Illustrations: Lines, holes, & more
- Line Art:
- Air Lines is “an art project showing worldwide airliner routes. Every single scheduled flight on any given day is reresented by a fine line from its point of origin to its port of destination, thereby forming a net of thousands of lines.” [Via]
- Simplicity rules these ads for the Ikea Assembly Service. (I wonder if they have a service for gluing all that shattered MDF back together again.)
- On the street
- Love the juxtaposition of big diver, little girl.
- Makita drilled over 20,000 holes to create one large image.
- No explanation of this Tel Aviv wall art from Pilpeled, but I dig it anyway. More from the artist is here.
May 30, 2009
Illusions & explorations
- Richard Russell created “The Illusion of Sex” by using only image contrast to affect our perceptions of masculinity & femininity in a face. [Via Nicolas Chaunu]
- WebExhibits uses a simple Flash viewer to demonstrate some of the magic behind Monet’s Impression: Sunrise. [Via Todor Georgiev]
- Mark Frauenfelder points out some optical illusions you can explore using by Photoshop to check real color values.
May 29, 2009
Friday Illustrations: iPhone art, Mao, & mo’
- In case you’ve somehow missed coverage elsewhere: Jorge Colombo drew this week’s New Yorker cover using an iPhone while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. His site features more of his work.
- What the hell, exactly, is going on with this Spanish kids’ game and its morbid illustrations? [Via]
- Elliot Weaver makes illustrations from spam subject lines. [Via]
- Ian Wright has made an awesome Mao mosaic using silk-covered buttons.
- I really likes me some shark-mouth illustrations, and this custom USS Enterprise from House Industries answers the mail.
May 28, 2009
Keepin’ it real… hostile
- Flickr user 9000 just doesn’t like marketers. At all.
- What possible search terms would produce this stock photo? [Via Mark Coleran]
May 25, 2009
Video game art, 8 bits at a time
- The 8-Bit Fatalities project presents the killing in pixelated video games as realistic illustrations. [Via]
- Mario scores magic mushrooms, thanks to t-shirt illustrator Ian Summers.
- In tangentially related news, Video-Game Character Feeling Healthier After Eating Turkey Leg Off Ground.
- I dig Sean Mort’s Gaming Revolution T-shirt [Via]
- Not entirely sure I want to know what’s going on here.
May 23, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: DIY Terminator, useful AI scripts, and more
- Planet Photoshop’s Corey Barker shows how to turn a human skull into a Terminator face.
- Sato Hiroyuki has created a bunch of useful scripts for Illustrator. (“Downloading these scripts is like jumping through a magic portal to awesome-land,” enthuses designer Adam O’Hern.)
- Paul Hollingsworth gives a peek into the development of his CS4 launch illustration. [Via Rufus Deuchler]
- I’m enjoying Mark Weaver’s sometimes freaky collages. Much more is on his site.
- Sweller than Swell: Gene Gable rounds up unintentionally absurd vintage advertising.
May 20, 2009
Wednesday Illustrations: Swine flu, Gang bangers, & more
- Illustrated masks:
- The Vader Project features “100 reimagined helmets.”
- Gizmodo rounds up some awesomely illustrated anti-flu masks from Mexico.
- Chicago’s gang cards of the ’70s are a particularly odd form of folk art. I imagine my uncle cracking these thugs’ heads back in the day.
- The Rare Book Room site “has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.”
- Paper Moon brings beautiful monochrome illustration to 2D gaming.
- Urban infrastructure:
- Subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.
- Triptrop creates slick heat maps on the fly to show how far by subway any point in New York is from any other.
- Perpetual Kid offers manhole cover coasters.
May 18, 2009
Monday motion goodness: Waves in HD, bearded hippies, and more
- BBC cinematographers captured waves from under the surface in gorgeous high-def slow-mo. [Via]
- Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg used chalkboard drawings to produce the Autumn Story music video for Firekites. [Via]
- Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational early-70′s Scanimate demo. Some part of me kind of wishes that Adobe tools involved more retro levers, switches, cable splicing, etc.–and of course that their use was accompanied by funky 70′s horn sections.
- Infographics:
- Melih Bilgil’s The History of the Internet tells, well, you know, using minimal lines but loads of attention to detail. (The fly-over of Cuba is terrific.) Adobe designer Ethan Eismann writes, “My new personal mission in life is to bring this level or higher of engaging instruction to an Adobe welcome screen near you.”
- Slagsmålsklubben would be cool just for its name.
May 13, 2009
Infographic comedy jams
- I love Jessica Hagy’s clever, minimal index card diagrams. [Via]
- The Photographer’s Math blog consists of nothing but snarky little equations. [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
- Artist “lunchbreath” nails the creative design process. His Flickr stream is full of great stuff (e.g. fun with Bluetooth).
May 12, 2009
Tuesday Illustrations: Terminators, Punx, & more
- Invisible Skoda! Artist Sara Watson (“a dead ringer for a healthy, human Lindsay Lohan”) has pimped her ride right out of existence (or visibility, anyway). [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
- Simon Schubert creates ghostly 2-D scenes by folding paper slightly. [Via]
- In Apocalypse How, designer Martin Laing narrates his team’s process for creating the world of Terminator: Salvation.
- With Springfield Punx, illustrator Dean Fraser renders famous faces Simpsons-style. [Via Adrian Such]
- Barnaby Ward uses Twitter to show his sketching process in Photoshop.
May 05, 2009
Tuesday Illustrations: Paper, pantslessness, & more
- Alberto Cerriteño offers great illustrations as laptop-skin decals. (My wife says this skin is more up my alley, though.) Peep his whole portfolio for more excellence.
- Paper:
- Noriko Ambe cuts shapes into books and stacks of paper.
- Jill Sylvia creates incredibly intricate structures from ledger paper. [Via]
- Jacquet Fritz Junior makes sculptures from toilet paper rolls.
- “Watch your favorite artists live today.” Deeply weird illustrations promote Tzabar ticket services. (Fortunately Danny Gans was not included in the list.)
- Uhh…
- Pantsless, by Laura George
- It hurts when I pee. Yes, I’d imagine so. Lots more here.
May 01, 2009
Illustrator 1.0 – The complete video
Last year I uploaded the first ten or so minutes of the instructional video that accompanied Illustrator 1.0, hosted by Adobe co-founder/Illustrator developer John Warnock. I received some requests for the full recording, and now Adobe evangelist Rufus Deuchler has tuned up the audio & posted the entire video, split into five segments.
Seeing the video, and remembering that Dr. Warnock was (as I recall) one of just four names on the Illustrator splash screen, I can’t help but think of videos posted now by the developers/founders/executives/chief bottle-washers of various Twitter-related startups. (Here’s a good one for Birdhouse.) 20 years from now, will we be passing around one of these links, remembering when so-and-so got her start?
April 29, 2009
Wednesday Logos
- I love Google’s salute to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
- “Chicago Bulls logo + upside down + some color = robot reading the bible on a bench!? Ahh logo ruined.” You be the judge.
- Hidden Meaning–nicely done.
- Iron Man Ironing Service makes clothes maintenance look pretty butch.
- HelloLED is a bright little guy.
April 27, 2009
Monday illustration tips, tutorials
- Scott Hansen has created a tutorial (with source files) demoing the techniques used to create a Dylan poster homage.
- Heh–I had no idea that it’s possible to designate a “key object” in Illustrator & align objects to it. Check out Terry Hemphill’s quick tip to learn more.
- The Chopping Block does symmetry with these Illustrator reflection templates. (Illustrator’s combo of live effects + the ability to target anything from individual paths to groups to layers is enormously powerful–and woefully underused. The Appearance panel in CS4 makes things much easier, but I find that many artists just won’t make the cognitive leaps necessary to harness this power.)
- PSDTUTS shows how to create insectoid 3D text using Photoshop + Cinema 4D.
April 26, 2009
Business card excellence (and horror)
- “Screw die-cutting. Forget about foil, popups, or UV spot lamination. THESE business cards have two ingredients: MEAT AND LASERS.” Oh, hell yeah. [Via]
- Equally aggro, far less cool: “Your business card is crap.” (Is this guy for real? Hard to tell.)
- Assorted kickassery is on display in Francesco Muganai’s round-up of “the best 65 business cards of the year.”
- More than meets the eye:
- Dan Ross, publisher/apparent vintage Nissan fan, invites you to cruise off with his card.
- Core77′s latest 1-Hour Design Challenge features a business card that transforms into 3D glasses.
- Not overwhelmed yet? Card Observer will soon solve that problem.
April 25, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: Lucky teens, giant walkers, & more
- Striking Empire:
- Best Tattoo Ever? An AT-AT goes Dalí.
- Similarly excellent: the AT-AT Anatomy t-shirt. [Via]
- Fortunate Teens Party With Morrissey, 1994. Sometime I’ll have to tell you about Bryan Hughes driving by the Mozzer’s house and getting invited in for a “choco-milk.”
- Josh Poehlein’s Modern History project is “a series of collages assembled exclusively from screen grabs of Youtube videos.” [Via]
- I’m really enjoying Jon Klassen‘s beautiful palettes & delicate linework. Animated pieces & more appear on his site.
- Looking at once totally annoying & like a technical tour-de-force: the Toyota Venza takeover. [Via]
April 17, 2009
Friday Science: All space, all the time
- Wanderingspace has created 19 fetching Planetary iPhone Wallpapers.
- An old chart illustrates the “Unbelievable Time Required to Cover Immense Distances of Space.” [Via]
- 40 hours of exposure time were required to create this composite of the night sky. [Via]
- Ministry of Type highlights some great science and technology ads from the 50s and 60s, found in a much larger Flickr set of the same.
- In a short & interesting slideshow/audio piece on the NYT, “The Hubble Repairman” John Grunsfeld talks about his arduous missions to the space telescope.
- Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 looks like a groovy kids book.
March 31, 2009
Tuesday Illustrations: Creeps, guns, & more
- I’m Creepin’ While You’re Sleepin’: I have no idea what’s going on with this giant Neckface mural, and I’m pretty sure I want to keep it that way.
- Al Farrow’s gun-based sculptures mix the sacred & propellant, creating reliquaries made from guns n’ ammo. [Via Margot Nack]
- Emilie Chollat‘s site encourages & rewards exploration. Dig those fun photo montages. [Via]
- For no particular reason:
- Class up your grip tape with some oil-painted nudes on skateboard decks. [Via]
March 28, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: All autos, all the time
Cue the Gary Newman…
- Jalopnik profiles master car cutaway artist Yoshihiro Inomoto.
- Bavarian propellerheads:
- Robin Rhode used a BMW Z4 as a giant paint brush. See it in action on the BMW site.
- Coincidentally, the NYT features a slideshow accompanying its piece about the BMW art cars being displayed at Grand Central Station. (The Jenny Holzer ride will likely always be my fave.)
- Speaking of BMW, it’s tangential, but this computer prototype BMW Group Designworks USA is pretty stylin’.
- GM is seeking to attach some cachet to their design efforts with their Inside Chevy site.
March 27, 2009
Friday Illustrations
- Famed pop artist David Hockney has started using Photoshop as his new medium. Apparently Russell Brown & co. had him out for a visit to Adobe nearly 20 years ago to introduce Photoshop; looks like the seed has finally sprouted.
- Emma McNally’s pencil drawings feature a “borderline OCD” level of detail.
- Liquify, anyone? I like the subtlety of this Bosch ad.
- Get yer geek on with a set of Nerd Merit Badges.
- Kuler:
- PSDTUTS offers pointers for Using Adobe Kuler to Enhance Your Photoshop Color Workflow.
- This isn’t just theoretical hand-waving, either: kickass illustrator Nick La uses Kuler in his design process. Check out his portfolio to see some beautiful pieces. [Via]
March 22, 2009
Sunday Logos
- Spacesick has fun doing a little Evil movie megacorporation rebranding. (With all the bad news coming out of Detroit, I wonder how long it’ll be until OCP actually does step in.)
- The “Web 2.0″ aesthetic makes me think of this set of Web logos as origami. [Via]
- Abduzeedo collects a set of clever logos. (The “Eight” piece is up my alley.)
- The endlessly popular Helvetica anchors at least 40 well-known logos.
- I can hear buzzing out the window in the Insomnia Entertainment identity.
- The Closing Logos wiki rounds up an overwhelming set of movie company logos modified to fit the film at hand.
March 21, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: Fast cars, skiing toilets, & more
- I dig Sam Weber‘s soft palettes & surreal imagery.
- Poster designs:
- A White-Hot Juggernaut At 200 Miles Per Hour! PSDTUTS hosts 50 Brilliantly Photoshopped Movie Posters. I especially dig the Death Proof & Lord of War pieces.
- COLOURlovers rounds up a great set of Mid-20th c. Euro Poster Art.
- I could try to describe this crazy Japanese ski-bathroom, but you’d better just see it yourself.
- In Matt Silber’s series of floating logos, “Elimination of the support structure in the photographs allows the signs to literally float above the earth.” More photos appear in part 2 of the series. [Via]
- Illustrator:
- Matt Kloskowski has a great idea: raid Illustrator’s library for art to use in Photoshop.
- Abduzeedo features some great ideas for using scatter brushes in Illustrator. (Man, there’s so much underused power in that app.)
March 11, 2009
New Illustrator team blog launches
I’m happy to see that the Illustrator team has launched Infinite Resolution, their new blog. On it they’re looking forward to “sharing knowledge about Illustrator and vector graphics in general as well as linking to and discussing some of the things we see going on in the world of vectors.” I’m expecting some good give-and-take between passionate customers & app-builders.
Wednesday Illustrations: Super Mario, free textures, & more
- I love this crafty little Super Mario riff from NYC.
- Omid Sadri made himself some awesome multi-functional businesscards: “There are three different cards within the set. One which suggests to use portion a of the card as a dental floss, one for cleaning under nails, and one for chewing gum.”
- I’m digging Paul Lee’s crazy characters & punchy palettes.
- Speaking of punchy, check out the colors & images in Jimmy Roberts and Brian Christopher’s collaborative project Exquisite Corpse. [Via]
- Free resources:
- There’s a big free texture archive on Flickr. [Via]
- Sketchory hosts more than a quarter million Creative Commons-licensed sketches. (You largely get what you pay for, of course.) [Via]
March 03, 2009
Tuesday Illustrations: Crayons as pixels, tutorials, & more
- Squared Eye brings lovely illustrations & color choices to their work. [Via]
- Tutorials:
- Veerle shows how to create a beautiful diamond flower in Illustrator.
- FlashEnabled links to good resources in their Illustrator Tutorials Roundup.
- Low res:
- Chritian Faur uses crayons as pixels. [Via]
- OMGif amasses numerous animated GIFs. I dig the total lack of rhyme or reason.
- Historic bits:
- COLOURlovers hosts a great collection of vintage Israeli postage stamps.
- General Mills is trotting out retro cereal boxes. [Via]
February 28, 2009
Covers, best & worst
The CD Cover Meme is pretty terrific, challenging you to combine randomly selected Wikipedia topics, quotations, and images from Flickr into album covers. Check out some of the results. (Here’s my personal fave of the moment.) [Via Kent Christiansen]
Elsewhere in cover-land:
- Joseph Sullivan from the NY Times shares his Favorite Book Covers of 2008.
- Pitchfork offers a funny take on The 20 Worst Album Covers of 2008. (Hey man, I like the Death Cab piece.)
- Sans value judgements, The Book Cover Archive offers up a trove of inspiration.
- Cedillas + Op Art = 60′s & 70′s Brazilian Album Covers
- There’s tons to love in this Ode To Criterion Box Art.
February 27, 2009
Friday Illin’: Edgiest quilts ever & more
- Quiltsrÿche promises to let you “bark at the moon in the coziness of a hard-rocking, handcrafted heirloom.”
- MoMA’s The Printed Picture is “an exhibition of physical specimens made using all the different ways that type and image can be printed on paper, metal, glass, etc, with a special emphasis on dozens of photography techniques, from albumen prints to dagguereotypes to color photography.” [Via]
- I like the ghostly simplicity of Levi van Veluw’s ‘Light’ Portraits. (To spare you any suspense, nothing really happens in the videos.)
- You can view now extremely high-res presentations of famous artwork, courtesy of Google Earth.
- These brand-name ripoffs seem like dyslexic Photoshop jobs, but they’re apparently real. [Via]
February 18, 2009
Wednesday Illustrations: Excellent Photoshoppery, scary logos, & more
- Strength in numbers:
- PSDTUTS hosts a collection of 40 Brilliantly Photoshopped Print Ads. (Roygalan shows the downside of eating too much Cadbury.)
- Smashing Magazine collects 100 (Really) Beautiful iPhone Wallpapers.
- Toxel rounds up 24 Creative Business Card Designs. The printed peanuts look informative and delicious. [Via reader Trace]
- Andrew Lindstrom’s collection of 45 vintage space age illustrations makes me want to play polo on a jet ski. Or not. [Via]
- Logos:
- Tell me you’ll ever look at the new Pepsi logo again and not see this. [Via]
- This Horror Films logo is “so simple it’s scary.”
- The imagery on the Mobiado 105GMT is very JNack-blog-positive, wouldn’t you say?
February 13, 2009
Friday Illin’
- Maira Kalman is back on the NYT (yeah!). “The Inauguration. At Last” is packed with great color, brushwork, and observations.
- The laser-cut grip tape in Core77′s 1-hour design challenge is pretty rad. (Man, how much did I love Powell-Peralta, VSW, and Jim Phillips/Santa Cruz skate art back in the day?)
- Speaking of that, Powell has created The Ripper Art Show, celebrating their most iconic image. (I had a huge poster of it hanging over my bed.) Some 58 artists created their own interpretations. [Via]
- Janine Rewell makes much vectory goodness. (Dig “Helsinki in Berlin.”) [Via]
- Monochrome:
- Having grown up on David Macaulay, I’m a sucker for good B&W detail like that found in this piece from The London Police.
- I love the simplicity of Core77′s welcome from ’08 to ’09.
- Chroma has no place in the new Good Housekeeping logo.
- Is there anything not to like about this animated GIF of a magical little deer? (Answer: no.) [Via]
February 06, 2009
Friday Illustrations: Painting as a game & more
- Paint your way out of this: The Unfinished Swan is “a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden.” [Via]
- I’m digging Pablo Perra’s work–especially the funky “Detector Series.” (Click images for a larger view.) [Via]
- Mark Verhaagen’s portfolio showcases some rich vector stylings. [Via]
- Flix:
- Movie Poster Floating Heads guy takes his job a little too seriously.
- Neatorama’s brief history of movie studio logos offers some entertaining details. [Via]
- Save gas & save space with cutely smushed cars.
February 05, 2009
Recent infographics
- The NYT shows Twitter Chatter During the Super Bowl organized by time & geography.
- The paper also charts the grim state of print advertising.
- Queens of InfoVis: “Ever see an awesome graphic or visualization in the New York Times and wonder who did it?” asks MetaFilter. “Chances are it’s either Amanda Cox or Megan Jaegerman.” The site links to some notable examples. [Via]
- Andreas Nicolas Fischer has turned financial charts converted to computer-generated 3D wooden sculptures. [Via]
- A poster from Very Small Array graphs the genre of #1 hit songs in the USA, 1950-present, though unfortunately it’s not possible to zoom in on the design.
February 03, 2009
Lego NYC
Christoph Niemann’s Lego renderings of NYC ephemera are so totally great that they deserve a post all of their own. (The rest of his portfolio is well worth a look, too.)
Drawing from sound
- "Want to try something hard?" asks Ze Frank. His sound-powered drawing toy produces some wacky results. Low volume produces counterclockwise curves, medium volume goes straight, and high volume curves clockwise. I’d love to see videos of people trying to use this thing. (I’m letting it run in a team meeting, but voices are too faint to do much interesting.) [Via]
- Johannes Kreidler fed Microsoft Songsmith with charts based on plunging stocks, deaths in Iraq, and other dismaying stats. The results are kind of depressingly awesome. [Via]
January 31, 2009
Logos n’ details
- Logos:
- The NYT features some great alternate logo designs for the Superbowl. [Via]
- Brand New rounds up the Best & Worst Logos of 2008.
- I dig Ben Pieratt’s Oil Slick logo, among many, many others.
- A2Detail:
- Alex Trochut creates wonderfully intricate images. (His site’s navigation is clever, though I wished I could just flip through his work more easily.)
- The WWF has commissioned some beautifully detailed illustrations from Ogilvy & Mather India. Commenters point out the similarity to Albrecht Dürer’s rhino.
- PSDTUTS has some cool ideas for How to Simulate Fractals in Photoshop.
January 27, 2009
Tuesday Illustrations: Killer movie posters, RUN-DC, & more
- Retro remixes:
- Olly Moss’s Poster Remakes are pretty damn terrific. [Via]
- Same goes for Mitch Ansara’s Retro “I Can Read Movies” Book Covers. The Close Encounters and Sixteen Candles entries are especially solid. [Via]
- The continuing Obamarama:
- RUN-DC: Awesome.
- Obama painted via motor oil.
- Mac bits:
- Is the Snow Leopard UI going really, really old school? This I’d kind of love to see. [Via]
- Layers is a screenshot tool that saves your windows as a layered PSD file. Nice! [Via Michael Ninness]
January 18, 2009
Interesting Inaugural bits from the NYT
- The New York Times features an interactive photography portfolio called Obama’s People, offering portraits of key staffers. The audio commentary (via the link below the photos) is worth a listen, describing the subjects’ choices in what to bring to the shoot (e.g. a chocolate chip cookie for David Axelrod). The separate making-of piece features Kathy Ryan talking about how shooting digitally has enhanced the collaborative aspects–and maybe the time pressures–of portraiture. [Update: Ellis Vener points out a hilarious "Real Behind-the-Scenes" take on the shoot, followed by some good discussion in the comments. "Blue Steel..."]
- The paper (that term seems more than a little outmoded, doesn’t it?) also features an excellent overview of the Inauguration Day goings-on via a 3D-rendered map and timeline.
- Looking back, another piece depicts the changing configuration of the White House.
I’d love to be in DC in person, but that map triggers a memory of having gotten stuck on the Metro under the Potomac on a sweltering July 4 years ago. With Tuesday temperatures due to hover around freezing, maybe I’m okay with TV after all.
January 17, 2009
Saturday Illustrations: Stalactites, stained glass, & more
- Speak freely: I love Experimental Jetset’s Loose Lips poster. [Via]
- Stained glass gets frisky in these ads for Bishop’s Finger beer.
- Miquel Barcelo used more than 100 tons of paint on the 16,000-square-foot elliptical dome for the UN’s Geneva offices. The BBC has details. [Via]
- Jon Hicks shows the sketch-to-final-rendering evolution of his icon design for Font Explorer Pro.
- Svenska Karamel! The packaging for these Swedish candies is pretty darn cute.
- Shoot the Baddies has fun with some familiar silhouettes. (Roll over each for its name.) [Via]
- RISD is hosting a symposium on dazzle, the World War I/II camouflage technique meant to confuse enemy submarines. The site points out that a Greek billionaire recently commissioned Jeff Koons to dazzle his yacht.
January 14, 2009
Wednesday Illustrations: Presidencies to video games
- Infographics:
- Good Magazine features The First 100 Days, chronicling the early terms of various US presidents.
- The NYT shows what people spend, and on what, around the world. [Via]
- Maps:
- Milky Way Transit Authority: Samuel Arbesman has mapped our galaxy in the style of a subway map. [Via]
- Korean designers Zero Per Zero have created a beautiful heart-shaped map of the NYC subway system. They’ve likewise done Seoul as Yin-Yang, Tokyo, and more. [Via]
- Also check out the NY subway map in ASCII! [Via]
- 2D gone 3D:
- Disney gets deconstructed with the Cartoon Particles project.
- Dotter Dotter features Lego-like 3D renderings of 2D video games like Donkey Kong & Excitebike. [Via]
January 13, 2009
Photoshop Subvertising
Artist-vandals in Berlin have rather brilliantly hacked a set of subway posters, overlaying them with stickers showing the Photoshop UI. [Via Mark Stern, Serge Jespers, Jeff Lietz, and others]
I have a soft spot for the trippy impromptu public art projects that subway posters often become–everything from Van Dycks & puke lines to political commentary. I got an unreasonably big kick out of a Bourne Identity poster in the NY subway that featured three images of Matt Damon on which someone had scrawled, respectively, “Loner… gun owner… stern taskmaster.” (Told you it was unreasonable.)
[Update: Kottke links to more photos on Flickr. Apparently the project is called "Don't Forget..." [Via]]
[Previously: Real-world Photoshop.]
January 09, 2009
Kuler adds Community Pulse
The team behind Kuler, Adobe’s color harmony creation & sharing site, has introduced a neat new feature:
Explore the Kuler global community with Community Pulse, a big picture view of color usage. This is a beta feature, using data visualization (screenshot) to show the relative popularity of colors across a sampling of countries, time periods, and tags.
To check it out,
- Sign in with your Adobe ID to play around with it
- Mouse over the histogram to see the hues on the color wheel
- Try the granularity slider to see more/less color detail
- Use the comparison icon (two circles) to compare/contrast
If you have questions, check out Kuler Help. And don’t forget to check out the Kuler panel in Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and InDesign CS4 (see Window->Extensions->Kuler). Here’s a couple of screenshots, plus a video demo. [Via]
January 01, 2009
Pen Zen for 2009
Mordy Golding offers 10 Illustrator Resolutions for 2009–ten great suggestions for getting more out of this amazingly powerful app. My notes:
- If you do nothing else, try double clicking your artwork to enter “isolation mode.” It’s just like editing a symbol in place in Flash. Stop doing the whole lock/unlock, group/ungroup dance. Isolation mode is your friend, particularly in CS4.
- Mordy is right on about the power of the Appearance panel. In CS4 the panel is at last just what I’d hoped it could be–namely, a killer one-stop shop for adding and editing object effects and parameters.
- My personal addition to the list? Envelope distortions. Create some artwork, then choose Object->Envelope Distort, then either Make With Warp or Make With Mesh. I like choosing the latter, then selecting the Free Transform Tool (E), clicking and dragging on one corner, and then while still moused down holding Cmd/Ctrl to do a perspective transform. Bam, instant re-editable Star Wars text.
If you really want to brush up on your fundamentals & really wrap your head around the Pen tool, I recommend a couple of great resources:
- Sharon Steuer’s Zen of the Pen PDF goes back a few releases, but it remains clear and relevant today.
- To learn more about the pen in PS, check out Ian Yates’s Photoshop’s Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide from PSDTUTS.
And oh yeah, Happy New Year! We’ll see whether my blogging can hold up under not one but two bambinos. Bring him/her on! ;-)
December 19, 2008
Friday Illustrations: Vader, fractals, & more
- I love, love, love this Vader “Self Maintenance” drawing.
- Logopond features a terrific logo for Ed’s Electric. The one for ETA ain’t bad, either, though I’m not sure I’d have read the letters correctly without some guidance.
- PSDTUTS has a great tutorial on how to simulate fractals in Photoshop.
- Miquel Barcelo used more than 100 tons of paint on the 16,000-square-foot elliptical dome for the UN’s Geneva offices. [Via]
- These are, without question, the most deeply messed up soda ads I’ve ever seen.
December 08, 2008
Monday Illustrations: Fast cars & dirty fingers
- Beginnings & endings:
- Drink Smoke Shutchomouth: David Cole has created an excellent set of truthful title cards. [Via]
- Tom Djll has amassed “The End,” a great collection of closing title cards for movies. [Via]
- Motor speed:
- The NYT features a gallery of beautiful race car concept designs. See the accompanying article for more.
- Watch Vaughan Ling go to town in Photoshop in this 1-Hour Design Challenge
- Funky media:
- “Make Jar Jar Binks from potatoes (and hastily devour this hateful creature)” with this set of creative food manipulation. [Via]
- Repubblica.it features photographs of a series of elaborate hand paintings. [Via]
- ColourLovers features interesting overviews on The Colors Of Global Brand Identities and The Color of Money from Around the World.
December 01, 2008
Illustrator CS4: Faster launches, new scripts, & more
As I’ve noted a few times, I really like the way the Illustrator team focused on the fundamentals in CS4. Among these, they’ve made some great headway in bringing down the application’s launch time. Brenda Sutherland from Illustrator QE passed along a few benchmarks:
Win XP CS3 CS4 Cold Launch on Benchmark Machine* 21.7s 12.8s Cold Launch on User Machine** 36.4s 19.5s iMac (Leopard) Cold Launch 25.5s 16.4s
* Benchmark machine is the optimized setup machine for taking consistent launch performance numbers. It has no virus scanner and a totally defragmented hard disk.
** User machine is the one similar to user environment, having a virus scanner, fragmented hard disk with a few common applications installed.
My own unscientific tests (using Watch It on a 2.33GHz MacBook Pro) produce similar findings, knocking about 35% off the cold launch time & cutting the time for a warm launch roughly in half relative to CS3. Thanks, guys!
In other AI-related news:
- The team has posted a series of how-to guides and source files created by leading designers.
- Jack Westbrook came up with a set of scripts for exporting each AI layer as a separate PNG.
November 22, 2008
New Illustrations: Mad Men to Hot Rocks
Dept. of Mad Chops:
- Rik Oostenbroek makes some beautiful abstract pieces in Photoshop, and he’s interviewed on PSDTUTS. (Oh, and he’s 18. Man, if you saw what I did in PS at age 18, you’d have me fed to wild dogs.)
- Depthcore pulls together some terrific noirish monochrome illustrations. I especially like Karol Kolodzinski’s piece.
Illustrated misfortune:
- I’ll have the drumstick in this recent Photoshop disaster.
- Certain things about cartoon characters, you’d just really rather not know.
Self-aggrandizement:
- The pixel masters at eBoy featured yours truly among a field of ‘Dobe peeps. Thanks, guys! (Incidentally, this illustration plays ridiculously well with content-aware scaling in PSCS4.)
- At the recent party to celebrate shipping CS4, Photoshop engineer Geoff Scott took a cool shot of me that I turned into a quasi-Hot Rocks-style illustration via the new PS Pixel Bender plug-in. (I used subblue’s Droste Effect filter kernel–a free download.)
November 15, 2008
Illustrated Miscellany: Obama, the Joker, & molten wax
History & politics:
- #44: Outstanding. [Via]
- David Klein created striking images in an earlier era. [Via]
- Bat-fans might be feeling The Audacity of Joke from James Lillis. (The layers build up, with audio, on YouTube.)
Packaging & Objects:
- Veerle showcases some beautiful packaging.
- Go Media sells PSD templates that can help you drop artwork onto various wrinkly shirts.
- Virgil O. Stamps will print on just about any crazy material–duct tape, shredded targets, National Geographic pages, etc. [Via]
Cool Devices:
- The notional Virtuo virtual palette “uses sensors and light to mix digital colour and apply it to a screen.” [Via Jerry Harris]
- Man, I can’t wait for our son to get old enough to rock out with the Crayola Glow Station. (My mom used to let me paint with crayons using paper on a hot plate. Ah, the ’70s: a simpler, less safety-conscious time. ;-))
November 06, 2008
Real-world Photoshop
Straight-up awesome. :-) [Via Lori Grunin & Adam Jerugim]
Update: By popular demand, here’s a higher-res version, plus the making-of photo set. [Via Rob Christensen]
Update 2: According to Laughing Squid, ad agency Bates 141 created the project for Software Asli. [Via Keith Johnson]
November 05, 2008
Post-election bits
I’m finding it hard to get back into the blogging game after such a* historic election. Doesn’t blogging about megapixels and keyboard shortcuts just seem kind of… trite?
In an effort to spool back up, here are some interesting visual bits I’ve encountered:
- Oh yeah!: "The Final Endgame Go Time Alpha Action Lift-off Decide-icidal Hungry Man’s Extreme Raw Power Ultimate Voteslam Smackdown ’08 No Mercy: Judgement Day ’08." That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Peep The Daily Show’s ode to/mockery of over-the-top motion graphics.
- Jason Kottke has aggregated a huge list of election maps from around the world, from whiteboards to the Onion. I love the way various maps, including the one on the NY Times site, let you zoom into states to see a county-by-county patchwork of voting. Also check out the way the NYT map features "county bubbles" and a voting trend comparison slider.
- Mark Newman’s maps offer insight into voting patterns by geography and population. [Via]
- The Guardian features a gallery of newspaper front pages from around the world. [Via]
- In The Living Room Candidate, the Museum of the Moving Image features TV ads from US presidential races, 1952-2008.
- Typography:
- Channeling campaign fatigue into type, This [Farging] Election aggregates many of the year’s memorable phrases into a single column.
- Obama + dingbats = ObamaBats, courtesy of Jeff Domke. [Via]
* Not "an". Hah; I knew it. We’re not Cockney, for crying out loud.
October 31, 2008
A handful of Halloween art
- Goodwill Halloween–awesome. :-)
- Obey Alfred E. Neuman! Related: A million and one Obama poster parodies.
- Calamity Coach is an Edward Gorey-esque tale of vehicular woe. [Via] For a less frightening, more nostalgic trip, see Gene Gable’s round-up of vintage Greyhound bus art.
- John McConnell shows how to turn Tom Cruise into an alien. (Isn’t that a little redundant?) [Via]
- What the hell is going on with this broccoli?? [Via Matthew Richmond]
October 24, 2008
Recent political illustrations, animations, & fruit
The US presidential election is motivating all kinds of creativity, from posters to pumpkins. (And before anyone flips out, let me say that A) I’m trying to be evenhanded in the distribution of links below, and B) I picked things to share based not on political affiliation, but based on creative/graphical interestingness.)
- Comics:
- IDW Publishing has created comic book biographies of the two presidential candidates. [Via]
- Meanwhile, in the Marvel universe, Stephen Colbert is a presidential candidate, so naturally (?) he’s teaming up with Spiderman. [Via]
- Start your day right with Cap’n McCain’s and Obamaos (and annoying jingles!).
- MC Yogi’s pro-Obama video shows skillful type chops. [Via]
- Ceremonial fruit orbs:
- Better Homes and Gardens offers downloadable pumpkin-carving stencils for creating the likenesses of the candidates, not to mention media figures from Colbert to Oprah.
- Orange State’s Yes We Carve project is all Obama, all the time.
- You may just want to tune out the politics, rocking out with Yoda, Space Invaders, and other geekery. [Via]
- Posters:
- Designers for Obama brings together graphic artists in support of the candidate. Examples feature some cool typography and color palettes. In a similar vein the Obama Art Report shows off more solid illustration & type.
- Meanwhile community-made McCain posters are on Zazzle and CafePress.
- The NY Times features an interactive presentation that tracks their editorial endorsements for president through history, including blurbs from the endorsements, links to full articles, and an indication of which candidate prevailed.
- Well, you can’t say you don’t know what to expect with this one: The Brokers With Their Hands On Faces Blog.
October 20, 2008
Monday Illustrations
A slightly random sampling for a Monday morning:
- Same actor, different role: clever, and kind of self-explanatory once clicked.
- Who needs to wait for a bank collapse when you’ve got this ATM mugger? (Lose money the old fashioned way, I say.)
- Folicular stylings (perfect for our XD group):
- Desktop facial hair contest
- I {Heart} ‘Stache
- Related/previous: this offbeat Beard font.
- Tutorials & resources:
- Veerle offers guidance on drawing Apple’s cloverleaf "Command" shape in Illustrator (or, if you prefer, call it a Swedish campground symbol).
- 40 Dark and Futuristic Photoshop Effects [Via]
- 40 Sets of Abstract Glow Brushes
- Dilbert creator Scott Adams is all over Photoshop + Wacom Cintiq. [Via many people]
October 06, 2008
Monday Illustrations: Current events to optical illusions
- Current events:
- The Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart [Via]
- An NYT infographic shows how Congress voted, district by district, on the bailout plan (first time around) [Via]
- From the history books:
- While the Supreme Court considers tobacco company advertising practices, Contexts.org posts some vintage Marlboro ads targeted at moms. [Via]
- CreativePro’s got a roundup of strange old illustrations found by Gene Gable. (SF is so colorful and gay!)
- James White pulls together Saul Bass’s most iconic logos. [Via]
- I love Bryan Katzel’s super cool long-scrolling design. Scroll down the page to see how it mixes foreground elements with a stationary background. [Via]
- Optical tricks:
- Axel Peemoeller has crafted a parking lot signage system whose messages can be read only from certain angles.
- I have no idea how this works, but I like it: Math, art, and the Droste effect
October 01, 2008
“Dear InDesign, Illustrator…”
Continuing a bit of a theme:
- InDesign Sr. PM Michael Ninness has responded to nearly all the top 25 beefs reported on DearAdobe.com. He’s also provided another 15 responses to other gripes that they plan to address in a future blog entry. (Regarding the gripe about the lack of a color picker, although it’s not exactly what’s being requested, I’d point out that InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, and Photoshop CS4 all feature the same Kuler panel (screenshot) for color selection. We’re sharing more code, but it’s not an overnight thing.)
- Meanwhile former Illustrator PM Mordy Golding has surveyed the remarks about Illustrator, and he’s posted responses to the top 25 comments along with good points about what does–and doesn’t–constitute useful, actionable feedback.
September 25, 2008
Illustrator CS4 goodness
Among the comments on my list of details polished in Photoshop CS4, a number of people wished for a similar list for Illustrator & suggested that the Illustrator team start a blog. As it happens, my friend & former Illustrator PM Mordy Golding runs the great Real World Illustrator blog, and he’s posted some illuminating resources:
- Illustrator CS4 – The Facts is a pretty comprehensive round-up of what’s new in this release. (The Appearance panel is killer–everything I always asked that it be.)
- His interview with Illustrator PM David Macy offers good perspective on the team’s thinking & discusses other points of polish in CS4.
In the past I’ve said "I swear because I care," and caring a lot about Illustrator, I’ve directed some well-intentioned swearing in their direction over the years. I distinctly remember sitting at my desk at Agency.com some nine years ago and hearing a (long since departed) Illustrator PM dismiss my request by saying, "Oh, customers don’t want multiple pages." (At that point I started wondering, "Now, is it still murder if it wasn’t premeditated, and can I claim temporary insanity…?") That’s why I’m delighted that they’ve both addressed some eternal requests (yay, multiple pages–er, artboards!) and have polished lots of existing functionality. As Mordy writes,
In the past, Illustrator had a reputation of adding new features, but never really going back to refine them in subsequent versions (i.e.,gradient mesh, 3D, brushes, graphs). With an improved Appearance panel, more capable graphic styles, a revamped gradient feature, better clipping mask behavior, isolation mode, and Smart Guides in CS4, it’s refreshing to see the team adding much needed polish to some of these "older" features.
The more I’ve played with the new Illustrator, the more I’ve found the "little" changes to have a big impact. I think you will, too.
September 19, 2008
Friday P-shoppery
- What would happen if you applied every single filter in Photoshop to an image? Well, someone had to try. [Via]
- If you ask people on forums to edit your images, you never know what you’ll get (possibly NSFW). [Via Michael Ninness]
September 17, 2008
Political illustrations
- Photographer Jill Greenberg is under fire for doing a cover shoot with John McCain for The Atlantic Monthly, then using the outtakes to create harshly anti-McCain photo illustrations. The magazine has disavowed her actions, and Mark Tucker asks a number of questions (while linking to more commentary). Greenberg has posted her images at manipulator.com.
- On a much lighter note, I’d vote Tauntaun any time. (Not so much actual Hope, though.) [Update: Also, McCain gets the Frank Miller treatment. (Via Steven Johnson)]
September 14, 2008
Vintage Sunday
- "Dyna Moe" has produced the excellent series Mad Men illustrated. (Yes, I resisted watching that show for a long time, then gave up. You should, too.) Love Peggy, Sal, and Joan, but Don looks too generic & happy. Useful bonus: Sally Draper’s Cocktail Cheat Sheet. [Via]
- Veerle rounds up numerous classic movie title sequences. The premium-blend mentholated Thank You For Smoking would fit right in on Mad Men.
- Gene Gable’s posted a great collection of letterheads.
- Motortype: Adam Polselli rounds up a set of lovely vintage car logos.
September 06, 2008
New infographics: Hockey Moms to Wu-Tang Clan
- The NYT visually represents word usage at the Democractic & Republican conventions. Hmm, the Dems must really want "four more years" of this "Bush" character… [Via Ken Lawson]
- DIY 411: MIT’s Mycrocosm is "a Web site that makes it possible for people to use statistical graphs and other visual language tools for expressive social communication. In particular it provides an alternative to purely text based micro-blogging software." [Via]
- Reader "PW" (presumably not PW Herman) points out Pratt’s interesting mechanism for navigating classes & faculty.
- Mission Creep illustrates US troop presence worldwide by country over the last half century. [Via]
- Slate’s got a short history of information visualizations. It’s good to be reminded of beautiful work like Ben Fry’s Genome Valence (video). [Via]
- It’s not an infographic per se, but it riffs nicely on their familiar shapes: Sony’s new Walkman ads play with the forms of famous subway maps. Zooming in on the Sydney piece, you can see that station names have been replaced by bands.
September 05, 2008
P-shopped Chrome
Heh–good for a Friday laugh: Google’s Chrome browser comic gets mauled by a bunch of wiseasses. (Mocking goateed hipsters will always, always sort me out.) [Via Fergus Hammond]
Other random graffiti-ish bits:
- Big mugs: Wooster Collective turns up some very cool huge faces in Carthagena, plus even more massive faces projected in Quebec City.
- CNET talks about "Green graffiti"–using various forms of technology (lasers, LEDs) to create paint-free messaging. I love this little safetyman busting out.
September 02, 2008
Spraygun Mona Lisa, hipster anatomy, & more
Recent illustration finds:
- At the Nvision conference across from Adobe last week, the Mythbusters guys showed how to paint the Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds. [Via]
- "Part medical and part American Apparel": Hipster anatomical drawings. [Via]
- Radiating:
- I want to run around with Dan Funderburgh’s array of sharp things, letterpressed into a poster.
- Dig Sam Winston’s pencil shavings.
- Hot cartographic action:
- National Geographic offers a map o’ the day feature, displaying high-res maps through what appears to be Zoomify. [Via]
- Adding perspective to maps: Mark Mayers demonstrates how to give flat Illustrator maps a third dimension by using the Free Transform tool and a custom perspective grid.
- Mark Simonson surveys the cartographic typography of the Indiana Jones series.
- This poop-scooping illustration doesn’t stink. [Via David Macy]
September 01, 2008
Chinese political illustration, then & now
- Ethan Persoff has gathered a collection of anti-US Chinese political cartoons c.1958-1960. Without translations or other context, many are baffling, but I find this one especially creepy. [Via]
- Drawing your own political messages in China is less welcome: James Powderly of the Graffiti Research Lab (see previous) was detained for six days for attempting to display Tibet-related protest messages during the Olympics. He tells the story in a series of interviews.
- History repeating as farce: Now you can get a hand-painted version of your face in a Chinese propaganda poster. [Via]
August 29, 2008
Friday Illustrations: Beer, bathrooms, & The Shining
-
Stay frosty:
- For the Beck’s Canvas project, "Four young artists will be selected by a panel of judges from the Royal College of Art to showcase their art on the labels of over 27 million bottles to be distributed nationwide from August 2008." [Via]
- Bryan Hughes came across a great Photoshop beer-drawing tutorial from Eren Göksel.
- How to draw anything in one step: Draw a dog covering the thing you can’t draw. (You may want to combine this with the drinking.) [Via]
- It’s the Waiting for Guffman of puzzle-making: Garson Hampfield, Crossword Inker is a subtle, insanely well observed parody of craftsmen who are just a tad too into their work.
- Love this set of paintings of families from films (the Torrances from The Shining, the Griswolds from Vacation, and more).
- Interesting bathroom decorating idea: pixels to tiles.
August 28, 2008
On-demand skate decks & more
I’m always intrigued by technologies that enable on-the-fly creation of media (print, Web, video)–what Adobe dubbed "network publishing." Recent examples I’ve found interesting:
- "MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more." (Kind of a step up from my 8th-grade experiences publishing a skate ‘zine with a friend’s Mac & my dad’s office Xerox.)
- On another skating note, Zazzle now enables creation of customized skateboard decks. [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
- Faber Finds publishes out-of-print titles, generating a unique cover for each on the fly. [Via]
August 27, 2008
Recent infographic goodness
- Stefanie Posavec creates beautiful, sometimes abstract images from data in her “On the Map” project.
- The NYT renders Olympic medal counts by country, also enabling the user to navigate through time. (Tossing it around too freely, I managed to blow up Safari.)
- “UFO sighting convincibility” is on the rise, thanks to Photoshop. [Via Rob Corell]
- xach.com offers a cool way to visualize 2008 box office results. [Via]
- I think I should chart my mood on a line stretching from “Earnest” to “Scurrilous*,” as Vanity Fair does with the content of their Blogopticon. [Via Tom Hogarty] It’s similar to New York Mag’s Approval Matrix.
*Defined as “grossly or obscenely abusive… characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive.” Hells yeah.
August 25, 2008
iPhone GUI bits
- The guys at teehan+lax have created a slick, well organized iPhone GUI PSD file. Geoff Teehan writes, "We created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable." Nicely done! [Via Joel Eby]
- Felix Sockwell offers a detailed walk-through of how he developed icons for the NY Times’ iPhone app.
- Vaunted info-design expert Edward Tufte critiques iPhone interfaces in terms of their info-to-overhead ratio. [Via]
Marginally related at best, but too good not to share: the highly unique unboxing video for the Samsung Omnia. [Via Russell Williams]
August 23, 2008
Saturday drawerings, from Tron to rayguns
- I love the Chopping Block’s Tron tee. (Would the dog try to stick its head out the window of a lightcycle, too?)
- Going the other direction, Bibliodyssey points out this ancient tank design–from 1646. (Don’t mistake it for a ThinkPad.) [Via]
- Illustrator-fu:
- Veerle shows some great, simple applications of Illustrator’s underused Make with Mesh command.
- Chad Neuman has a cool idea–splashing real paint, then using Illustrator’s Live Trace feature to vectorize it.
- In Little Chicken Growing Up, scientific illustrator Mieke Roth chronicled the growth of a baby chicken through a series of lovely drawings. [Via]
- Vintage:
- Flickr features a huge mid-century illustration archive, grouped by illustrator. [Via]
- Apropos of nothing, I stumbled upon a solid raygun illustration. [Via]
August 12, 2008
Tuesday Illustration: Iron Man, lasers, and more
- If you’re feeling "cleared for weird," peep the intricate, disturbing paintings of Ryohei Hase, all painted in Photoshop.
- The UI Resource Center features a long and detailed interview with the team that designed Iron Man’s heads-up display.
- Semi-political
strangeness:- Politicians often serve as pincushions, but it’s rare that they’re actually made of pins, as in this Thumbtack Obama. [Via]
- Gene Tempest’s long but interesting essay covers the Posters of Paris ’68, talking (among other things) about how the French artists played on memories of Nazi collaboration.
- "Did United Artists doctor a photo of anti-Hitler plotter Claus von Stauffenberg to make him look more like the Top Gun actor?" asks the Guardian. [Via] (Even weirder: My wife just glanced at the image and said, "I thought that was you for a second.")
- Designer Marian Bantjes
has been producing great stuff lately:- Her Design Ignites Change is a limited-edition, laser-cut poster that dramatically changes appearance under different conditions. Proceeds benefit kids orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Kenya. [Via]
- In Love Stories she creates a riot of great type–some of it edible!
July 27, 2008
Killer animations o’ the day
- Despite finding it some time ago, I’ve been avoiding blog The Art of the Title Sequence, knowing that it would likely take over my life. Sure enough, it’s loaded with good stuff. Check out the beautiful titles for El Don, whipped up by Santiago artists Smog. I saw motion graphics pioneer Kyle Cooper (SE7EN, etc.) speak years ago and remember him saying that every frame should hold up on its own as graphic design. This piece aces that test. (For unrelated goodness, see Smog’s “monkey-headed dancing guy” (or whatever “un mono bailarín” is).)
- Motion artist PES creates incredible stop-motion films using found objects. KaBoom and Western Spaghetti are particularly great (c’mon, Candy Corn as flames?). Check out his work before People for the Ethical Treatment of Upholstery shut him down. [Via John Peterson & Maria Brenny, "Because (re: KaBoom) I know what you do in the desert"]
- My Drive Thru is a new stop-motion video for Converse, produced by the team at Psyop. Behind the scenes, Pharrell Williams talks about rescuing Chuck Taylors from the taint of Punky Brewster, and Glossy interviews the Psyop crew while posting some high-res stills. [Via]
- Superfad has kicked out a trio of stylish ads for Sprint. The Hurricane Katrina spot is particularly worth a look.
July 22, 2008
*Real* Real-World Photoshop, Vitruvian Wookies, and more
- In his Tell a Lie project, Henry Hadlow "uses a camera to mimic common Photoshop effects." Killer! [Via Paul McJones]
- Vader Crossing the Delaware: On Worth1000, P-shoppers mash up Star Wars with fine art. Surveying a couple of the pieces, Bryan Hughes remarked, "Man, that is some seriously disturbing stuff. Sort of like Joe Satriani for the eyes …which is to say that, yeah, I know there’s crazy talent there… but what a way to misuse it!" [Via Dave Dobish]
- Green Patriot Posters bring kick-ass poster art to the fight against climate change. Nick Snyder writes, "Contributions from other designers will be featured in the coming months. In September, Green Patriot Posters will launch an online competition where participants may submit Green Patriot Poster designs, view other posters and vote on designs."
July 20, 2008
Walruses, Wolverine Monkeys, & mo’
- Animation:
- In 1969, 14-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, I Met The Walrus is the Oscar-nominated short film that resulted–5 minutes of fluid, often surreal images morphing into one another over the recording. YouTube hosts the full piece in high quality.
- I’m not sure what to say about the coffee-stirrer-based (?) Endless Not stick animation, but I can dig it. [Via]
- I love the crazy little characters made by Matthew Porter. (His Dr. Wagner portrait is staring down at me now.). Next time you need to commission a Wolverine monkey, you’ll know where to turn. [Via Margot]
- Coca-Cola’s very cool WE8 site brings together illustrators, musicians, and other artists from West & East in the spirt of friendship (well, that and of selling tasty sugar water). The site features interactive 3D Flash versions of the packaging they’ve created, downloadable desktop images and more. [Via Terri Stone]
- Peep the charming skulls of Kristina Collantes desktop wallpapers.
- Public service:
- Speed bump: $1500. Drawing of a speed bump: $80. Effectiveness: pretty comparable–at least until people catch on. [Via]
- What do the "Safetymen" on signage do all day? Signs of Life aims to shed light.
July 18, 2008
The Ocelot, in ink
Wow–now this you don’t see every day: John Pischke, an Image Capture Manager at Quad/Graphics in Minneapolis, has used the “Ocelot Rampant” image from this blog in a tattoo on his arm. I furnished him with the original Illustrator file last year, and on Tuesday it was turned into ink. “You’ll be happy to know it was completely designed in Photoshop,” writes John P. Nice!
Tangentially related surreality:
July 17, 2008
Great #$!@!’in Type
- What the %@^! does one call those "random non-alphabet characters to indicate cursing?" Answer: Grawlix. (Bonus cutting aside: "Is that the sound of a designer waiting for Adobe Updater to complete?" Oh, from the top rope!) [Via]
- On Flickr, user "el estratografico" collects "retronomatopeya"–classic sound effects in cartoons.
- Batman may have gone all modern & hardcore, but "Las onomatopeyas o Batsigns" showcases the sound-effect renderings of his classic, corny past. [Via Rob Corell]
July 16, 2008
Wednesday Illustration: Cash money & Mo’
- Ducats:
- Weird juxtapositions rule in these money/celebrities mash-ups.
- "What Could Be More Unforgettable Than Dollar Bill Albert Einstein?" Check out Cabel Sasser’s fireworks packaging round-up.
- The Etch A Sketch has been reborn as an iPhone app! (Shake the phone to clear the screen.)
- How do Californians perceive their fellow Americans? Counterpoint: How New Yorkers see the rest of the world. (This all reminds me of the Onion t-shirt "Stereotypes are a real time-saver.")
- Mordy Golding has a solid tutorial on embossing text in Illustrator. In it he produces a pretty convincing license plate.
- Posters:
- Dig BLT‘s elegant new Batman poster.
- "You’ll gargle with fear!" I love the homage to classic poster styles in these Futurama illustrations
July 09, 2008
Wednesday Illustrations: Smoke, fire, and floods
- Put down the menthols & peep these beautifully rendered Brazilian anti-smoking ads. (I wonder what illustrator Clement Hurd would think.)
- The Paper Version of the Web takes me back to my roots as a Web designer, sketching up pages for British Airways and others. I always like being reminded that technology aside, it’s the ideas that count. [Via]
- Flooded London "depicts imaginary scenes in London in 2090, when rising sea levels have inundated the city." [Via]
- Rat finks unite in this collection of Big Daddy Roth illustrations.
Buy N’ LargeWal-Mart is getting a new logo. [Via] Here’s a timeline of their designs.- Laser-etched tattoos: hey, what’s the worst that could happen…?
June 25, 2008
Wednesday Illustrations
- The Executive Coloring Book (from 1961) will really make you want to claw your way to middle management.
- I love the slamming, superheroic quality of Evgeny Parfenov’s portraits.
- Yeondoo Jung does real-life recreations of children’s drawings. [Via]
- Photoshop UI designer Julie Meridian loves to sneak these weird vintage magician bits into her interface mockups.
June 19, 2008
Infographic stylings: From bacon to Ludacris
- Love bacon, love the bacon flowchart. "Are you wearing pants?" (Evidently this will prove important.)
- Men’s Vogue celebrates Massimo Vignelli’s sleek 1972 New York subway map.
- The Boston Globe teaches you to nap. [Via]
- Stefanie Gray maps the area codes in which Ludacris claims to… uh, know ladies. [Via]
- Mark Rabinowitz uses the graphical language of nutrition facts to illustrate some truths about prostitution.
- How many employees does Google have? About this many. [Via]
- It’s tangentially related, maybe, but I dig these out-of-context small boat images. [Via]
June 18, 2008
The Color & the Shape, in PS & AI
- Dr. Woohoo has been creating some very cool images by driving Illustrator and Photoshop from Adobe AIR. Check out Generative Painting in AI with 3D Symbols, as well as some good bits on Flickr. "For this animation," says the Adobe Design Center, "Dr. Woohoo developed an AIR app that drives the colors, brushes, and animation timeline in Photoshop CS3 via a swfPanel in Illustrator CS3."
- Veerle Pieters talks about making simple organic shapes in Photoshop. If that trips your trigger, you might also like her quick tutorials on creating a spiral ornament in Illustrator, and making light motion trails & glowing sparks in PS.
June 14, 2008
Random Saturday brilliance
Gold-plated vertically integrated batter-dipped Photoshop-rendered AJAX-flavored Flash/Flex 3D RIA workflow mash-ups: Impressive.
Also impressive: A Sharpie, a stove, and something to say. (I wonder whether any dead people read my blog.) [Via]
Elsewhere: Willie Nelson in Kiss make-up (hey, why not?).
Off to eat BBQ,
J.
June 11, 2008
Dolla Dolla Bill, Mickey D’s, and more
- "Change We Can Believe In": the typography.com guys compare the new
currency designs of the UK & US. (Honestly, the giant purple Helvetica "5" is a prank… right?) [Via]
- Vintage:
- BibliOdyssey offers up a collection of knight attire.
- Frank Chimero inserted a historic map of Europe, personifying the various countries, into his set.
- Packaging:
- I really dig the skin of this Victorian-styled Mac Mini. (Wish I could find a higher-res shot of it, though.) [Via]
- Check out the great DVD packaging for Mad Men.
- The Smithsonian features an article about and small gallery of Afghan war rugs, featuring scenes of 9/11 and more. [Via]
- McDonald’s channels David Carson*? [Via] (Company spokesman R. McDonald responds with a violent outburst.)
*or "David Car-five-n," as an art director of mine used to call him due to his once-unorthodox method of substituting characters, e.g. "5" for "s"
June 10, 2008
Infographic goodness
The NYT has been kicking out the good infographic jams lately:
- Andrew Kuo created a funny, handsome infographic on why music festivals are worth skipping. For more from Andrew, see his blog + previous.
- Matthew Bloch, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox have created an interesting Flash-based infographic that totes up "All of Inflation’s Little Parts." I often find presentations like this dense, impenetrable, and/or over-designed, but this one’s an exception. [Via]
- Adobe XD guy Ethan Eismann points out a couple of video-based info presentations. In one of them, interactive voting is tied in with the content.
Elsewhere:
- Ben Terrett pulls together lots of interesting visualizations. [Via]
- Rorschach Economics: Japan’s Phillips Curve looks like Japan; cigarette consumption looks like Virginia.
- It’s been around a while, but I still dig Michal Migurski’s flashy newsmap
June 09, 2008
Monday Illustrations: In Cars
- Frank Chimero renders the various United States as objects with similar shapes. (Florida has been scrupulously omitted.) [Via]
- The cover of a recent Vice magazine featured a glowing, ghosted BMW illustration.
- Vehicular cruelty?:
- "Flower Power" isn’t just for aging first-gen iMacs anymore. Check out this drawn-upon Bentley Continental.
- "Pimped" doesn’t begin to capture the illustrated, bejewelled craziness of these Pakistani custom vehicles.
- Game theories:
- The Playstation blog talks about using Photoshop to Make Your Own PS3 Themes. [Via]
- Not to be outdone, an Xbox blog talks about paint customization features in the NASCAR ’09 game. "The online connectivity of Paint Booth allows players to download a car template from easports.com and import it into editing programs, such as Photoshop, giving users a multitude of design options."
June 01, 2008
Sunday Illustration
- Jacqueline Pytyck produces some seriously foxy work with a nice sense of depth. I especially like her self portrait. [Via]
- PingMag covers Steven Wilson’s cool Psychedelia, made using Illustrator & Photoshop.
- Right ’round like a record:
- What likes beyond The Wall? Find out in a great design challenge to extending album art.
- In Cover Stories, Old and New, Khoi Vinh surveys past & present album art from long-serving artists.
- Politcally themed:
- "God Is a Graphic Designer?" Chip Kidd plumbs the meaning of a curiously torn newspaper. (This reminds me of when I returned to my laptop once and found the "Y" key missing from the keyboard. I was convinced that my legitimately crazy and dangerous roommate was trying to send me a message. Turned out to be the work of my cat, though… I think.)
- Somewhere I stumbled upon a cool Obama illustration.
- Veerle Pieters
has been featuring some great illustrators:- She interviews Alberto Seveso, creator of a really distinctive photo-illustration style. (For a number of links to his work, see previous.)
- Elsewhere she chats with the wonderfully talented Oksana Grivina.
May 24, 2008
Miscellaneous interestingness
New fatherhood -> sleep deprivation (yeah, still) -> abandoning any pretense of categorization. That said, here are a few interesting bits I’ve seen lately:
- The New Yorker reports on the world of high-end retouching in "Pixel Perfect — Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality." (Hey, someone uses the Smudge tool!) [Via Ivan Cavero Belaunde, Clare McLean, Gary Cosimini, Claiborne Brown, and seemingly everyone else I know ;-)]
- The Times Online features "Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera" [Via Jeffrey Warnock]
- As I’ve said before, Logo design = Bullet magnetism. Now "OGC unveils new logo to red faces," says the Telegraph. Er, um, yes. (But hey, it’s no worse than the "Lisa Simpson" London Olympics logo.) [Via Lori Grunin]
- "Oh man… two words: Photoshop Filter," says Adobe’s Chris Arkenberg. Behold Man Babies.
May 21, 2008
Viva frilly bits
Who doesn’t like the occasional dingbat & swash?
- Cameron Moll demonstrates great attention to detail with the little embellishments on his site. In response to reader questions, he offers 25 resources for ornaments, fleurons, and "frilly bits."
- On a related note, Illene Strizver answers questions about typographic dingbats on CreativePro.com.
May 18, 2008
Illustration in motion
- The hallucinogenic visions of graffiti artist Blu play out across walls in Buenos Aires & Baden. Fascinating. For more from him, see previous. [Via]
- Chad Pugh wired his computer to take a screen capture every 5 seconds while he worked in Illustrator, resulting in this blistering condensation of a 40-hour process. Photo-sensitive pre-teens need not watch.
- Jackie A-Go-O: Illustrator Chris Ware offers up a great animation for This American Life.
- The Etch-a-Sketch clock automatically redraws time.
May 12, 2008
I say “Adobe” you say…
…what, exactly? That’s what Noah Brier’s fun Brand Tags project asks, and here’s what people have said so far. It’s kind of fun to read the small print, too: "arcane awesome bastards… stucco structure… techy teepee telefónica terrorists…" (Too bad Adobe doesn’t make people think "hot cyclone action," like Dyson does.) You can play your own word association game on the main page, and you can go backwards, playing name that brand based on what people say. [Via Mark Baltzegar & John Dowdell]
PS–Speaking of things affecting the Adobe brand, there’s always Adobe Updater, now the subject of its own music video. [Via Zalman Stern]
May 10, 2008
Calef Brown rocks
Having a wee man in the house certainly cuts into the time I’d otherwise put into scouring the Web for good bits to share; hence the dearth of illustration, photography, and type links lately. On the other hand, it exposes me to books and illustrations I’d never otherwise see (not, y’know, being in the typical Pat the Bunny demographic).
My wife Margot turned me on to the works of the wonderful Calef Brown, poet & illustrator extraordinare. Both the text and the art are hilariously loopy. Check out some samples from Polkabats and Octopus Slacks to see what I mean.
Of course, it’s fun to revisit the classics as well–Goodnight Moon especially. Each night as I read it aloud, I try to amuse Margot by sneaking in some new reference to illustrator Clement Hurd’s smoking habit–a penchant now hidden through Photoshop. A little Googling reveals that other Photoshoppers couldn’t leave that news alone, staging a "What Is Clement Holding?" contest. (Keep kids off the Soloflex!)
Next up, I need to prevail on my folks to send us my old & very well-loved set of Mercer Mayer’s A Boy, A Dog, and a Frog books–totally wonderful.
April 18, 2008
Strange Photochops
- From the "Why Do It To Yourself?" chronicles:
- Why choose when you can have a Hillary/Barack hybrid?
- Freaking News started a Photoshop contest to replace celebrities’ eyes with their own mouths. Bleaugh. [Via]
- Photoshop + pro wrestling + the South = "Nipplegate."
- People looooove the
HitlerHistory Channel and its endless exploration of WWII. Did the Germans really have an Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzer (Superheavy Armored Walking Tank)? Scroll down to view the evidence. [Via] - Copyright this: Adobe’s Serge Jespers reports on a Belgian exhibitor looking for 100 Photoshoppers to remove a famous building from all their images. Bizarre. [Via]
- I really have no business passing this along, but knowing that our product helped land a giant Mr. T Cabbage Patch doll on SF brings a tear of pride to my eye.
April 15, 2008
Lasers, Orwell, and Mad Magazine
New illustrated biz:
- The NYT offers a great interactive presentation of Al Jaffee’s Mad Magazine fold-ins.
- "Putting the king back in stalking." Big ups to Barska binoculars for breaking some new ground with their ads. "I prefer to think of myself as a ‘stranger enthusiast’…" [Via]
- Art nerds who really want wedgies can opt for this laser-etched Moleskine unicorn notebook. I wonder whether you can read it from inside the darkened locker where you’ve been stuffed. [Via]
- Shout-outs to the Eastern Bloc:
- Shepard Fairey does George Orwell, via covers for Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm.
- Peep some crisp label designs for Lovejoy Vodka [Via]
- Logos:
- Toyota offers Scion users the ability to roll their own logos.
- Apple vs. the Big Apple: Mom, Dad, don’t fight!
- The logo for the Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection is a crafty little ambigram.
- I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: The NYT features a slideshow of the logos of secret US military programs, along with an accompanying article. Trevor Paglen’s book of the logos is here.
April 12, 2008
Adventures in album artwork
Back when vinyl was giving way to tapes & CDs, I heard purists bemoan the loss of a large-format way to distribute album artwork. Now with the prevalance of downloads, do you know offhand what artwork is attached to most of your music? iTunes tries to help, but it’s an uphill battle. Anyway…
- Nikolay Saveliev’s rad Pop Matters project consists of “Vinyl record sleeves with 2-sided insert featuring
faux-academic material on pop music and the state of the
record industry…
Snuck onto used& new record store shelves.” Personal fave: “Nickelback: The Recursiveness of Professional Mediocrity.” - Pitchfork picks The Worst Album Covers of 2007.
- Listropolis has translated the artwork for Rolling Stone’s Top 20 Albums into color palettes. [Via]
- Should classic album covers be redesigned every few years? Ben Wardle makes that case, with examples. [Via]
March 22, 2008
Logo trends, past and future
- The mid-70′s book The World of Logotypes features hundreds of vintage logos, now scanned and presented on Flickr. [Via Durin Gleaves]
- The peace symbol has turned 50. Apparently the shape incorporates the semaphore letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament). Here’s a brief history. [Update: More good details from the BBC.] [Via]
- Are “waves the new swooshes”? Yes, says Logorange, in predicting 10 trends that will define logo design in 2008.
- Jon Hicks, creator of the Firefox logo, provides a quick walk-through of his icon design process.
- I dig this logotype for Big Boss, as well as the little color chips of Dreamscape Design.
March 18, 2008
New Illustrated Hotness
- Goofing on cartoons:
- Garfield Minus Garfield is totally weirdly brilliant. [Via]
- Some Old Man Still Churning Out Marmaduke, reports The Onion. "’I love what I do,’ said the elderly cartoonist, his body and mind crippled by an endless and repetitive stream of doodles featuring the Great Dane."
- Know your history:
- Billboard’s got the 25 Best Rock Posters of All Time. [Via]
- Pay up, suckers! Gene Gable finds cool vintage artwork for shaking the money tree. Reminds me of Jesse James’s palm (clearer view).
- Worth1000 features excellent vintage ads for modern products. [Via]
- Fancy a Victorian DeLorean? Peep Silhouette Masterpiece Theater. [Via]
- Chroma police:
- "PixelPastry oozes fresh flavours, tastes that entice tastebuds and well fed clients." I’m inclined to agree. [Via]
- Pablo Bisoglio’s work vibrates with color. I dig this dragon in particular. [Via]
- Pedro Franz sings the eyeball electric. (Okay, that doesn’t mean anything. But you try coming up with 50 unique ways to say, "Hey, here’s a cool site I think you’ll like." ;-P)
- The Bible has been reimagined as a graphic novel.
- Dig this well crafted bit of digital imaging for San Patrignano. [Via]
March 10, 2008
From D&D to decapitations, in infographics & maps
- Sam Potts has created a hilarious infographic for Sunday’s NY Times, part of their sendoff for D&D creator Gary Gygax.
- The NYT has been posting other interesting graphics lately, including How Americans Spend Their Money and the Flash-enabled Ebb & Flow of Movies.
- In Rudimentum Novitiorum, Bibliodyssey surveys maps & other infographics of antiquity.
- With a more modern spin, Colourlovers talks about the use of color in transit maps, offering a number of cool examples.
- How about a world map made from musical notes? [Via]
- What does an hour’s worth of movement in front of the TV look like? One Flickr user endeavored to find out, using a video camera & a grid of masking tape to plot the positions of dad, kids, and cat. [Via]
- For the greater good:
- Easier voting through graphic design: Marcia Lausen is "determined to apply the highest possible standards of information design to make [voting systems] clear, accessible, easy to use and the results accurate." [Via]
- John Emerson’s Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design offers a guide for NGOs, non-profits and advocacy groups. [Via]
- If you can’t go another day without knowing how to stage a realistic decapitation, well, consult these graphics.
March 01, 2008
Now showing: The original Photoshop icons
With Photoshop recently having celebrated a birthday, it’s fun to stumble across the original Photoshop icons. Make that "PhotoShop," as the big S was present when the application was briefly bundled by BarneyScan, before it became an Adobe product*. The original product icon, designed by Photoshop co-creator John Knoll, was replaced by the eye that served from 1990-2003. John added his perspective in the blog post’s comments. [Via]
If this is up your alley, you might also enjoy:
- Photoshop splash screens and toolbars through time
- Derrick Story’s brief history of Photoshop (as of 2000, anyway)
- Jeff Schewe’s very deep history of the first 10 years (PDF)
- A ppodcast interview with Brett Wickens of MetaDesign, who worked on the CS/CS2 icons and packaging
*Until recently, however, the spellchecker in MS Office insisted on inserting the capital S–completely annoying. I filed a bug with Microsoft, but I don’t know whether the change made it into Office ’07.
February 26, 2008
Fun with physics-based drawing
The great thing about computer-based drawing and painting tools is that they do exactly what you expect, over and over [reliability => productivity.]. That’s also what kind of sucks about them, though: happy accidents can be hard to come by.
Taking a different spin on things, Umeå University’s Phun is “an educational, entertaining and somewhat addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion.” Although it’s not a drawing tool per se, Phun mixes literalness with a measure of unpredictability. Check out this video of it in action. [Via Jerry Harris & Jim Geduldick]
If that’s up your alley, take a look at Nelson Chu’s amazing MoXi watercolor simulation (details). Computer power (GPU power in particular) is starting to enable sophisticated simulations on every desktop. Look at the way an app like Little Big Planet leverages a great physics engine and redefines the process of computer-based creation (in this case using a PlayStation, but so what?).
It seems like every other day I read about some app or other using the Flash platform to partially emulate old versions of Photoshop. That’s all fine, but I’m much more excited about harnessing the platform to build much richer, more immersive, and (optionally) less predictable creation experiences. We can have the best of both worlds, and that’s what keeps me amped & in the game.
February 25, 2008
Poster Flava: eBoy on AIR & more
- Today Adobe launches Adobe AIR (read about it, I dunno, everywhere), and the always wonderful eBoy collective has created a poster for the AIR launch. [Via]
- Veerle Pieters recently kicked off a “What Is Graphic Design?” poster contest, and now she’s posted the excellent winners. (I, of course, have a soft spot for this one.)
- Steven Heller offers a brief survey of US political posters. [Via]
- Film poster John Alvin, creator of pieces for everything from Blazing Saddles to Lord of the Rings, has passed away at age 59. The NYT offers a short rememberance. (I wonder what he thought of Trajan.)
February 24, 2008
Naked saunas, 3D Flash globes, and other infographic goodness
- My wife and I are nervously quizzing each other on these expert (and very funny) baby care instructions (boosted wholesale, it would seem, from David Sopp’s Safe Baby Handling Tips). [Via]
- Wable is “a coffee table that displays a user’s web activity via physical bar graphing.” Yes, I remember pining for such a thing not ever. (Are Venn-diagram kiddie pools next?)
- Maps:
- Concentric circles are coming for us!! The Onion has fun with news infographics.
- Seeking to place events into geographical context, Yahoo has created a 3D NewsGlobe using Adobe Flex. ComputerWorld’s got background on the project. [Via]
- In similar vein of “Learning America Smarter,” check out the naked saunas, black metal, and ass-beating of Scandinavia. (And you thought it was all chilling out with MDF.) [Via]
- The Gough Map is said to be the oldest accurate map of Britain, dating from around 1360.
- Signage:
- My little brother Ted let me ride along last month as he drove his garbage truck. This safeyman image (somewhat dodgy iPhone-cam quality, sorry) I snapped in his cab shows the truck really putting the “screw” back in “screw of Archimedes.”
- “Do not iron while wearing shirt (on an iron-on decal)”: more good advice from the safetyman chronicles. [Via]
- I can get behind this “Faith healing sign” at Disneyland, not to mention Serbian children escaping a triangle.[Via]
- Blogging software has made self-publishing seem simple, but beneath the covers, a whole lot’s going on. Wired has a Flash-based diagram showing what all happens when one hits “Publish.” [Via]
February 19, 2008
A history of logos, great desktops, and more
- Logos:
- Neatorama features a history of tech company logos, from Adobe to Xerox. Who knew about the 1,000-armed Canon, or Nokia and the fish?
- Google invites kids to “Doodle 4 Google.” The winner gets a $10,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for his/her school.
- Tap some taproot with the cute Jacobs & Sons Carrots logo (diggable). I also enjoy the efficiency of the Colorado Conservation Trust mark.
- Having grown up with the illustrated genius Richard Scarry, and having just gotten some of his books at a baby shower, I’m especially charmed by this Beastie Boys Sure Shot remix. [Via Marc Pawliger]
- Veerle has posted a bunch of lovely patterns, plus plenty of links you can use for further pattern research/inspiration.
- Smashing Magazine offers up some “(Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers.”
- Concept art:
- io9 features a gallery of movie concept art. [Via]
- Besides being a hilarious mofo, Shaddy Safadi is a talented digital artist who’s been working on Neopets, Drake’s Fortune, and other popular video games.
- Vintage
- There’s plenty of 50′s art and illustration on Plan59.com
- For related goodness, see the I Love My Electric Appliance!! Flickr pool. “Lots of overjoyed women leaning on stuff,” notes Core77.
- Vanity Fair hosts a slideshow of classic Hollywood lobby cards from the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader’s collection.
- The Hatch Gallery offers up a sample of contemporary letterpress work. [Via]
- I enjoy the Art Deco stylings (not to mention the writing) in 1930′s The World in 2030. [Via]
- Also from the Thirties, you might like these Colliers ads and illustrations. [Via]
- Talk about dedication to a (suddenly) losing cause: a guy gets a Pats tat on the head. [Via, of all things, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me]
February 18, 2008
Meet Adobe Illustrator (1987)
As promised a couple of weeks ago, I’ve uploaded a copy of the VHS tape that shipped in the box with Illustrator 1.0, hosted by company co-founder/president/Illustrator developer John Warnock:
Many thanks to Andrew Keith Strauss for digitizing the tape. Of the video Dr. Warnock writes, “That video demo tape was shot live, with no editing. We didn’t have video production tools at that time, and we didn’t want to pay for a professional to do it, so I did the demonstration.” It’s fun to contrast this tape with the Illustrator 88 video made just a year later.
February 15, 2008
Fun & clever recent infographics
I’m endlessly fascinated with how people display information visually. Here are some cool recent examples:
- JamPhat features a hilarious (and huge!) collection of hip hop-inspired infographics. Images are helpfully linked to YouTube vids of the related songs. It was a good day…
- Fun with Venn diagrams: I love the simplicity of this clever music elitism t-shirt. (Compare to Wu-Tang Clan.) [Via]
- What if we regarded flags as info visualizations? That’s what Brazilian designer Icaro Doria did for the magazine Grande Reportagem. [Via]
- Call it "Most Inscrutable. Karaoke Interface. Ever." Or just call it pretty. Robert from Flight404 (see previous) has used Processing to create the lovely video Solar, incorporating lyrics from Goldfrapp. [Via]
- HistoryShots sells prints of really cool infographics.
- ArmsFlow presents global arms transactions, visualized in an interactive map. Clicking individual countries shows their import/export flow for a given year. Interesting concept, but the lines overlap so densely that it’s hard to see what’s happening. I’d love to see the whole thing taken further. [Via]
- Knowing things Biblically:
- Chris Harrison pours ancient texts through graphical filters in his Visualizing the Bible project. [Via]
- In the early 20th century Clarence Larkin turned his scriptural knowledge into Biblical infographics. [Via]
- Virtual China features a Chinese diagram on how to cook chicken with beer. [Via]
February 07, 2008
Shat Shat Revolution, car cutaways, and more
“Some creators love a great sunset; some have in mind my bloodshot eyes…” So says William Shatner of The Shatner Show, a gallery presentation and now book of artwork inspired by the man, rendered in every conceivable medium (including Lego). B to the zzare. The project reminds me a bit of Naoki Mitsuse’s Elvis Paintings. (I have a particular soft spot for Tiny Elvis.)
In other illustration news:
- Juan Francisco Casas creates large-format artwork using just a ballpoint pen. In looking at the images, I could swear I just smelled that sticky, sickly Bic scent. [Via]
- The Periodic Table of Elements Printmaking Project brought together 96 artists “to produce 118 prints in any medium; woodcut, linocut, monotype, etching, lithograph, silkscreen, or any combination.” Etsy hosts an interview with the organizers. (Apparently my blog is Hassium-powered.) [Via Petra]
- 8-bit jams:
- Jimi Benedict has made a rather great Super Mario portrait. He’s also made some obligatory Obama artwork (quite the little cottage industry these days). Oh, and his riot of death-rod imagery makes me think of the recruiting poster my old friend Adam Symons created for AGENCY.COM back in the day (simply
ripping offremixing a Pietasters album cover, I believe). [Via] - On a Mario-related note, peep Sam Mullins’s Super Mario sleeve tattoo.
- Jimi Benedict has made a rather great Super Mario portrait. He’s also made some obligatory Obama artwork (quite the little cottage industry these days). Oh, and his riot of death-rod imagery makes me think of the recruiting poster my old friend Adam Symons created for AGENCY.COM back in the day (simply
- Automotive:
- General Motors CEO Bob Lutz gets into the digital manipulation game, posting a “photochopped” Corvette police car design. And if that’s up your alley check out Rafael Reston’s Chrysler ‘Cuda mockup.
- Cartype features a huge gallery of car cutaways. [Via]
- Logos:
- Get ready for 5000 Web Apps in 333 Seconds. (If you watch for more than a few seconds, try not to swallow your tongue.) [Via]
- Genius steals? Behold these Automotive logo ripoffs. [Via]
- Wilhelm Deffke was a trailblazing German identity designer. I’m guessing there’s one work he’d like to omit from his portfolio, however.
- Musical Notes
- Play “Connect the Notes” with the Berliner Philharmoniker.
- This ad seem to say, “Our jazz radio makes people puke!”
January 30, 2008
Recent illustrated goodness
- Obey Giant creator Shepard Fairey is backing Obama through his iconic posters. [Via] (I’m not trying to make this blog political, btw; just passing along interesting intersections of design & campaigning.)
- In the vein of posters and street art, Phelyx’s got a how-to on bleach-stenciling a shirt. [Via]
- Russian designer Melamed cranks out powerful work. Love these gym promotions in particular. [Via]
- Design Observer pointed out a really interesting piece on the many covers of JG Ballards’ Crash. [Via]
- "Every time I see the new [Coke] can, I cry," says Mac developer Cabel Sasser. "It took Cola-Balls…" [Via]
- The New Yorker’s been running a contest to redesign Eustace Tilly (the monocle-wielding mascot). [Via]
- Sleeveface is all about overlaying record sleeve art on the real world. SF gate’s got the story. [Via Jackie Lincoln-Owyang]
- On a related note, how about overlaying currency illustrations with celebrity photos? [Via]
- Apparently Spike Jonze is making Where The Wild Things Are, and a couple of stills from it have emerged. [Via]
- I love the simplicity of this Heinz volcano cutaway .
January 28, 2008
Back to the Future with Illustrator 88
Pass the banana clips and fire up Less Than Zero: It’s time to visit the late 80′s with the promotional video for Adobe Illustrator 88. It’s fun to see all that was possible even then, and to hear that the marketing message of “do more, and more easily, so you can focus on being creative” is eternal. Now I shudder at visions of a besweatered James Spader dropping the French curves and grabbing a mouse. [Via]
The timing is kind of spooky: for nearly a year I’ve been meaning to upload a copy of the John Warnock-hosted VHS tape that shipped in the Illustrator 1.0 box, and just last week I got serious about doing so. Of the work Dr. Warnock says, “That video demo tape was shot live, with no editing. We didn’t have video production
tools at that time, and we didn’t want to pay for a professional to do it, so I did the
demonstration.” Pretty cool that the company co-founder and CEO was not only one of four names on the product splash screen, but also the main demo man. (“Everyone sweeps the floor around here,” said Chuck Geschke of that time.)
This posting lights a fire under me, so look for the Warnock video soon. [Interim bonus retro fun: the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator video. Everything old is new again, and self-serious yuppies will always be with us.]
January 23, 2008
Logos a Go-Go & mo’
- “Che Guevara meets Jesus”: Proving that the corporate world can cheapen any coin, the ad campaign for the new Rambo movie features spray-painted graffiti. [Via]
- Logos:
- On the revolutionary tip, I love the RVLTN logo.
- Soothing tasteless clients everywhere, it’s Make My Logo Bigger Cream. [Via]
- Rock Band Logos is an entire blog devoted to the iconography of Black Flag, Bad Religion, and hundreds of others. [Via]
- Corey Holms has constructed a cool visual taxonomy of animals and plants used as corporate logos. [Via]
- The NYT covers the new Xerox logo. On the same topic, Armin at Brand New discusses the logo & its history. [Via]
- Bibliodyssey features Anton van Dalen’s funky logo mashups.
- Wham-O co-founder Richard Knerr recently passed away, prompting Boing Boing to post some cool old Superball packaging. Also cool and barely related: Aimee Mann’s rockin’ Superball.
- Guerrilla artist James Clar’s efforts to draw a smiley face on a Dubai tower have been ground down by The Man.
- Jesse Kaczmarek’s portfolio is loaded with strong work, and the refreshingly clean, simple, and understated Flash UI doesn’t get in the way.
January 20, 2008
Sunday Illustrations: From snowboards to Wonderbras
- Kottke proclaims Minority Kart "possibly the GAGOAT (greatest animated GIF of all time)."
- I love the beautiful simplicity of this snowboarding poster.
- It’s not often that a Web design strikes me as particularly fresh, but the punchy, hand-illustrated intro for Fray.com makes a good go of it.
- From the vaults:
- Irony & good cheer come together in this set of Old Soviet Christmas cards. [Via]
- Flickr hosts a set of classic posters. [Via]
- Yes, it’s always illegal to kill a woman: the Daily Mail hosts a collection of outrageously politically incorrect advertisements from years past. As might be said on Conan, "Not cool, Zeus–not cool." [Via]
- Wacom’s new 12" Cintiq tablet/monitor gets some serious love from Gizmodo (a four-minute video demo followed by detailed text). [Via] Adobe evangelist Terry White loves it, too.
- Life imitates art:
- Wooster Collective has made a thought balloon for the real world. [Via]
- xkcd covers the phenomenon of "Insisting that real-life objects are Photoshopped." [Via Rob Corell]
- Speaking of real-life objects, Saatchi & Saatchi makes excellent use of "The Wonderbra Hills."
- Mosaics:
- Dig these icon mosaics for Teknograd Mac Support. (They just wouldn’t be the same using the blah-looking folder icons from Leopard.)
- Michael Sporn talks about those in the New York subway. For more on that subject, see the book Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit. I always really dug the Irresistible Romance of Travel at Grand Army Plaza. [Via]
January 11, 2008
It’s not the size of your brush…
Cue “It’s In The Way That You Use It” (and good luck getting that out of your head): Illustrator Bob Stakke uses Photoshop 3.0 (no, not CS3–the one from ’94) to create some great-looking characters. In a tech-saturated, next-next-next-oriented world, it’s nice to be reminded that creativity comes from people, not from machines and other tools.
Shakespeare could have rocked out in WordStar, and heck, you can draw Scarlett Johansson using MS Paint if you’d like. That’s not to say that new tools don’t enable tons of new things, of course, and hopefully let creativity flow more freely. It’s just a reminder that a car is nothing without its driver. [Via Doug Nelson]
Speaking of Photoshop demos, “You Suck At Photoshop” returns with volume 2 of its depresso-funny PS stylings. No “shaggin’ wagon” this time, but there is some territory-marking. [Via Clare McLean]
January 07, 2008
War and rebirth, in photos & illustration
- When not driving between continents & documenting the experience, German-born, Brooklyn-dwelling photographer Christoph Bangert produces gripping photojournalism in Iraq, Darfur, and elsewhere. You can find his Iraq effort reviewed here, and on the NYT site Christoph narrates over a selection of his photos.
- Offering a different take on Iraq, Shooting War is a graphic novel written by Anthony Lappe & illustrated by Dan Goldman. You can find background & a review on MotherJones.com. According to that site, "To layer drawings and shading on top of photos, Goldman drew everything directly onto a 21-inch touch screen using an electronic, wireless pen, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop. Everything combined, this is a slick-looking book."
- On a rather brighter note, the NYT features a slideshow on kite flying in Kabul–a colorful pastime banned under the Taliban. See related article, with video.
December 27, 2007
Zeppelin inspires art
Given all the iconic images that Led Zeppelin has inspired over the years, a chance to add to that legacy sounds like a dream commission:
- A few weeks back I saw Led Zeppelin’s complete works being advertised on iTunes, and the graphic up top struck me as in the vein of Obey Giant auteur Shepard Fairey. Sure enough–he was asked to do the work.
- UK-based illustrator/animator Steve Scott got the nod to create an animation that would accompany the band’s recent reunion concert. "So after four weeks of hard work there I was watching Led Zeppelin play Kashmir live in front of the world’s largest monitor–a 28 x 12 meter giant–and 20,000 screaming fans." Here’s the result (B.Y.O. contact high); screenshots are on the main page of his site. See also The Society of Victorian Mutants & other solid illustrations on his site. [Via]
December 21, 2007
I got yer brains, *right here*…
The ol’ noggin provides endless inspiration for artists:
- Russian site Advertka features a neat photo composite featuring a brain made of arms.
- Cycling Australia depicts fragility via brains as vegetables.
- Artist Jun Takita has sculpted bioluminescent algae into the shape of a brain.
In other skullduggery:
- Brawndo "will make you wonder why you haven’t ever crushed a human skull with your bare hands!!" Delicious!! (I need to order a case of this stuff for the Photoshop team.)
- The Skull-a-Day blog provides just that. [Via]
- For next Halloween (or, just to be weird, maybe Valentine’s, or Arbor Day), you might hang onto these pumpkin skull templates. [Via] I still think they’d have a time beating my wife’s Dia De Los Muertos-inspired doppel-pumpkin.
- If this stuff is up your alley, see previous for lots more.
December 20, 2007
Old-school Star Wars, Lego graffiti, & more
Mo’ betta illustration:
- Star Wars goes old old school Euro in Baroque Wars. (Dig that crazy Death Star.) [Via] Coincidentally I just stumbled across this Wikipedia-hosted rendering of similar-looking Landsknechte mercenaries.
- If, like me, you’re a no-good, non-gift-buying slacker, you can try to compensate by banging out festive imagery for loved ones. These Photoshop brushes could help. [Via] (I’m doing a mid-day mall sprint after publishing this; hopefully my boss isn’t keeping up on the blog. ;-P)
- Street art :
- A graffiti artist has found Jesus in the urban landscape. [Via]
- Legos visit the Summer of Sam era with some stop-motion train-tagging. (In light of recent world history, I wouldn’t be tossing around the phrase “train bombing” myself.)
- Tyskie Beer commissioned some crafty flag renderings using its packaging as raw materials.
- Kavel Rafferty offers “A reference for vinyl geeks and graphic artists” in Record Envelope–a whole blog devoted to record sleeve art. I like the big-mouthed Knäppupp in particular. [Via]
- The opening of Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World features a groovy subway map of the world. (I take a weird pleasure in San José appearing (with accent!) on the map, but SF getting shut out.) [Via]
- Hire An Illustrator will help you… um… bury people in Grant’s Tomb? (Maybe it’ll just help you hire an illustrator.)
- Edward Hann’s Internally Displaced People ’06 attempts “to demonstrate the scale of humanitarian crisis in Western Darfur and Eastern Chad,” and a quarter of the profits from its sale go to Amnesty International. [Via] It’s too bad that the Web presentation makes it hard to see the work in detail, as I can’t really assess how it’s tackling the problem.
December 14, 2007
Friday Illustrations: Japanese cuteness, Grand Theft Auto, and more
- Illustrator Justin Gerard offers what looks like a nice set of Photoshop tools. Here you can see him putting them into action.
- Michal Tatarkiewicz creates cool life-sized subway drawings. [Via]
- Rockstar Games commissioned four mural artists to create a large version of the new Grand Theft Auto box art, hosted in a Brooklyn warehouse. Here’s a timelapse video of the 31-hour creation process. [Via]
- Logos:
- PingMag surveys cute Japanese logos for transportation companies.
- On CreativePro, Malcolm Grear reveals how to create memorable logos (featuring some cool examples).
- The Comcast logotype has undergone some rework. Blink and you’ll miss the changes, but what do you want to bet they paid a million bucks for the privilege?
- Historic bits:
- The Getty features a long, folding photomontage from master El Lissitzky. [Via]
- Cornell is hosting a gallery of some crazy historic illustrations. [Via]
- Somewhat similarly, the Trade Card Place features galleries of Victorian trade cards. [Via]
- Word to the wise: Don’t send your kids onto railroad tracks. Limb-shedding badness will ensue. [Via]
- Here’s a nice collection of Roman funerary portrait art. [Via]
December 09, 2007
Gandhi as potato, Spam as art, and more
- George Carlin points out that when considering life via license plate slogans, "Somewhere between ‘Live Free Or Die’ and ‘Famous Potatoes,’ the truth lies… I’m guessing it’s closer to ‘Famous Potatoes.’" The Pfanni company might agree, and they cheerfully offer "Only good potatoes."
- Guilherme Marconi‘s illustrations explode with color and detail. [Via]
- Christopher Lee makes super fun, retro-fab creations. Roll over the little hearts under the pieces in his illustration setup to see details & concept sketches.
- Linzie Hunter beautifully subverts junk mail with her Spam one-liners illustrations. [Via]
- "My line paintings are painted using one continuous line with a beginning, and an ending," says Geoff Slater of his line paintings. "Although it changes colour, the line never touches, or crosses itself. [Via]
- MIT’s John Maeda talks about his process for creating an illustration for the NYT.
- Creator & creation: There’s something in the water reminds me of Animator vs. Animation.
- Veer offers a rad collection of vintage sci-fi imagery. (I think I once had this guy as a gym teacher.)
December 01, 2007
Best Vector Graphics Ever, and more
- Linkinn.com amasses a collection of the "Best Vector Graphics Ever." I’d call it more of a mixed bag, and some of the images sometimes don’t load; even so, it’s worth a visit.
- Mailer for Mayor: Michael Frumin posts the poster. Hey, let’s hear it for that West Side Monorail! (See also the Capitol-shaped airplane flying in Federal cash.) [Via]
- If political posters are your bag (tube?), see also this collection of posters from the Spanish Civil War, as well as Gene Gable’s collection of Labor Day imagery. [Via]
- On another politically-themed note, The New Republic sticks it to the new US passport design. "The cover may say United States, but the design taste is pure red states."
- I love this vintage US Navy instructional artwork. [Via]
- GelaSkins offers cool stick-on designs for laptops, phones, and more. [Via Zorana Gee, who's rocking Nanami Cowdroy's Kintoto Blot on her MacBook.]
- Wake up to whimsy: Susie Ghahremani makes "tiny matchbox-size paintings of little forest creatures."
November 02, 2007
Illustrations with bite
I’ve been running across examples of illustration designed to shake things up & reflect on the world, for better & for worse:
- [Note: Not for those offended by profanity] Paul Krassner’s 1963 “F Communism” bumper sticker is a an incredibly efficient little satire of politics and obscenity. Check out Kurt Vonnegut’s commentary on the work for historical context.
- On war & walls:
- The NYT features a piece on Baghdad muralists hired to beautify, or at least adorn, the city’s grim anti-suicide-bomber blast walls. “With few opportunities for work, [the artists] are delighted with the money, but are also uncomfortably aware that all they can do is paint the symptoms of a conflict that has mired their city in death squads…”
- Elsewhere in the region, elusive British street artist Banksy has decorated Israeli’s security wall.
- Back in this part of the world, online company Brickfish kicked off a contest to “Design your own border fence” for the US-Mexico frontier.
- The San José Museum of Quilts & Textiles (we have a museum of quilts & textiles?) just concluded a show cataloging the ways war is represented in traditional folk art. I was struck by the Afghan war rugs, featuring enormous craftsmanship: “Weaponry images are rendered in extreme, accurate detail, so much so that one can distinguish between a Hind Mi-24 attack helicopter and a Hip Mi-8 troop-carrying helicopter.”
- Worth1000 members have fun subverting propaganda posters. Yes, giant bloody kaiser space gorillas scare the hell out of me, too.
- In response to the Boston PD flipping out earlier this year about Lite-Brite depictions of cartoon characters, deviantART member Kalapusa has worked in the same medium with an eye towards really getting their goats. [Via]
- Ethan Persoff has dug up a creepy segregationist comic from 1962. [Via]
- Jessica Hagy offers concise political commentary by way of a Venn diagram. [Via]
October 29, 2007
Hipsters, gangstas, & unacceptable haircuts
Chart! And! Graphs!
- Maps
- “As a resident of Manhattan and an owner of a complete set of bodily organs, [Jack Anderson] knows a thing or two about subway maps and anatomy. Now you do, too.” Check out his Illustrator-designed digestive-system-as-subway-map t-shirt. [Update: See also the Metropolitan Cardiac Authority.] [Via]
- Online comic xkcd offers a map of online communities. (It somehow makes me think of a Hobbit map that spent years stuck to my childhood bedroom ceiling.)
- This Virgin Atlantic map drives home the vast number of movies available for viewing in flight.
- I love the incredible intricacy of Christa Dichgans’s maps. [Via]
- Graphs
- Artist Andrew Kuo spent the summer hitting as many NY concerts as possible, and he “obsessively charted the entire experience, from reviewing the bands to counting the number of porta-potties.” Check out the results. See also the brief accompanying article. Many more infographics live on his blog.
- Protec’ ya neck: Chris Sims lets us peer into the rigorous science of gangsta rap. [Via]
- This Australian dating ad uses infographics to make its pitch. (Only 11% of suitors have “unacceptable haircuts”? They must not be counting the vast number of Aussie dudes with fauxhawks.)
October 22, 2007
Using Illustrator to print money; more
Illustrator mensch Mordy Golding reports an interesting interaction at a recent show:
After my tutorial this week, one of the attendees approached me, telling me how much he enjoyed the session. Then he told me he’d like to present me with a gift — a quarter. No, he wasn’t trying to bribe me to lobby the Illustrator team for multiple pages. But it was a special quarter indeed, because he designed it.
Check out Mordy’s post for more info & images.
In other illustration news (no real thematic connection here, but that’s what I get for more airport blogging; the audio system has a real Harrison Bergeron effect):
- Move over, Bad Spock; it’s time for Jamar Nicholas’s Fat Wonder Woman Blog. [Via]
- Drawn.ca has uncovered a great 1981 interview with vocal legend Mel Blanc on David Letterman.
- Oh, the childhood memories: Punking the Land O’ Lakes box. [Via] It’s right up there with typing “55378008″ into a calculator & looking at it upside down. (Go ahead, I’ll wait.)
- Cinematic bits:
- Something Awful pulps the hell out of flicks with the help of a little Photoshop love. [Via]
- If that’s your bag, it’s time for a healthy, Photoshop-powered Grindhouse breakfast.
- Photojojo’s got 11 Super Awesome Photoshop Movie Effects
- The Washington Post (of all places) hosts anamatics from Shoot ‘Em Up.
- Mutating Pictures uses artificial selection to create faces. “[It's] striving to generate human likenesses out of random blobs — 1000 random pictures have been uploaded to the site… The most human-like are used to spawn 1000 new offspring, mutated from their genome, and so on, until the perfect human face emerges.” [Via]
- Dig these little sign language matchbooks. [Via]
- Mary Robinette Kowal has modified her laptop to look like a typewriter. [Via]
- Adam O’Hern has found some ridiculously cute little gymnasts on a paddle.
July 28, 2007
Tracking graffiti with help from Flash, Google
The Graffiti Archaelogy project uses a Flash interface to let visitors navigate to different heavily tagged spots (links at left), then see the work at various stages (links at bottom). Using the M & N keys to cruise back and forth in tim



