May 18, 2012

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

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

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

How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2

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

[Via Dan Mall]

May 16, 2012

A 5-year-old sketches logos

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

[Via Carolina de Bartolo]

May 13, 2012

Animation: Acid Drops

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

[Via]

May 12, 2012

Recursive drawing

What do you think of this cleverness?

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

May 08, 2012

Mordy shows Illustrator CS6

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

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

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

May 07, 2012

Photoshop, Pirates, & The Force

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

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

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

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

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

May 05, 2012

A Pixelated History of Cameras

Short & charming.

[Via PetaPixel]

May 04, 2012

The art of the start

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

May 02, 2012

Vintage MoGraph: Wang 1980

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

April 27, 2012

Interesting recent collages

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

April 24, 2012

Illustrator CS6 is now a 64-bit Cocoa app

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 18, 2012

Demo: Speed drawing with realistic pencils in Photoshop CS6

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

April 17, 2012

Sneak Peek: Gradient strokes in Illustrator CS6

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

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

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

April 14, 2012

*Real* airbrushes & pencils, in Photoshop?

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

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

March 31, 2012

Animation: Alternate Mad Men titles

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

[Via Chris Peppel]

March 21, 2012

Adobe Ideas gets new features on iOS, Android

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

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

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

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

March 16, 2012

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

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

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

March 11, 2012

Illustration: Toy Shining

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

March 09, 2012

The story of Keep Calm and Carry On

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

I kind of like this variation, and this one.

March 04, 2012

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

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

March 02, 2012

Collaborative drawing: Is there a “there” there?

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

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

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

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

February 13, 2012

Animated lunacy: My Little Pony meets Skrillex

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

February 11, 2012

Time & Tide

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

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

[Via]

February 10, 2012

Making iOS vector icons using Photoshop

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

February 05, 2012

A 5-year-old responds to company logos

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

[Via]

January 23, 2012

Design tools: Gesty & UI Toolkit

Of potential interest to Web/screen designers:

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

January 21, 2012

Five people playing a single guitar

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

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

January 11, 2012

The Icon Handbook

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

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

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

January 03, 2012

Epic stop-motion with jellybeans

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

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

[Via]

January 02, 2012

Funky cartoon mash-ups

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

December 28, 2011

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

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

December 26, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Outstanding movie poster remixes & more

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

December 22, 2011

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

From the folks at Viewpoint Creative:

[Via Ben Zibble]

December 18, 2011

Stop-motion paper fun: Protéigon

Steven Briand spent two months creating this ambitious little piece:

[Via]

December 17, 2011

Video: Vintage Russian animation

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

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

December 07, 2011

Stop-motion goodness: Mario in the Real World

I just saw eighth grade flash before my eyes:

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

December 03, 2011

Video: Terry Gilliam on animation

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

[Via]

December 02, 2011

“Drive”: An animated trailer

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

[Via]

November 23, 2011

Photo-realistic painting in Adobe Ideas

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

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

November 13, 2011

A beautifully animated ode to spaceflight

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

[Via]

November 11, 2011

Happy Nigel Tufnel Day

;-)

[Via Adam Jerugim]

November 09, 2011

Check out Mixel: Social collaging for everyone

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

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

Two bits of interesting sauce:

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 03, 2011

Brian Yap on Adobe Ideas

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

November 02, 2011

Dave Malouf on Adobe Collage

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

October 18, 2011

A beautifully simple iPad app for kids

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

[Via]

October 12, 2011

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

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

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

September 22, 2011

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

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

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

September 20, 2011

Video: Green graffiti

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

[Via]

September 14, 2011

Pixels in Plywood & Cork

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

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

September 01, 2011

Video: Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

Looks like this game features some really slick art direction:

Here’s more info on the project.

August 30, 2011

Check out the new Wacom Inkling

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

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

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

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

August 29, 2011

(rt) Recent poster goodness

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

August 20, 2011

Fun motion graphics for BBC Knowledge

From weareseventeen & Mauro Rader:

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

[Via]

August 15, 2011

(rt) Illustrated miscellany

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

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

August 04, 2011

Press-on nails as stop-motion animation

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

[Via]

August 02, 2011

Video: Illustration time lapse

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

[Via]

July 27, 2011

Video: A History Of The Title Sequence

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

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

[Via]

July 25, 2011

(rt) Illustration: New posters & infographics

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

July 24, 2011

Video: The Saga of Bjorn

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

[Via]

July 11, 2011

Bert Monroy speaking this Thursday in SF, plus seminars

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

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

July 09, 2011

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

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

July 07, 2011

(rt) Good recent infographics

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

July 04, 2011

Video: “Is Tropical: The Greeks”

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

[Via Steve Guilhamet]

July 03, 2011

Terminator 2 turns 20 today

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

[Via]

June 30, 2011

Video: “Looks That Kill”

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

[Via]

June 24, 2011

(rt) Illustration: Retro “Cars” & more

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

June 23, 2011

Illustration: Music vid hand-animated via iPad

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

[Via]

June 20, 2011

Tape as art

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

June 14, 2011

Dutch stamps add augmented reality

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

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

June 10, 2011

Bizarre cartoon mashups: Peanutweeter & more

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

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

June 09, 2011

Infographics: Losing your time (here included) & more

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

June 05, 2011

Illustration: Beautiful birds, clever signs, & more

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

May 31, 2011

A record-player wedding invite

How incredibly cool:

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

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

May 26, 2011

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

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

May 18, 2011

Gradients & meshes in Illustrator, this Friday

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

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

May 16, 2011

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

• I love these beautifully designed stamps for the Royal Shakespeare Company. [Via]
• Amazing: illustrator István Orosz hides artwork inside anamorphic drawings. [Via]
• Did you know that Photoshop’s 3D lights can do 2D effects?.
• Bass-o’-matic:
  • Saul Bass’s great work has been pretty systematically wiped from DVDs.
  • Fortunately, fans online have been collecting his beautiful title sequences.
  • Christian Annyas rounds up Saul Bass logo design: then and now.
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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 13, 2010

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

[Via]

November 10, 2010

Microsoft enables Illustrator->HTML5 Canvas

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

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

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

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

November 08, 2010

Adobe Ideas adds iOS4 support, layers, more

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

Free features:

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

In-app purchase (optional):

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

Here’s a quick (sub-2-minute) demo:

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

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

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

November 03, 2010

Video: Star Wars via paper animation

Heh–a great tune, too:

[Via]

October 23, 2010

Subaru gets A-Ha-ish

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

Viva zoetropes. [Via]

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

October 22, 2010

President Obama uses Adobe Ideas

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

October 17, 2010

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

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

October 16, 2010

Photoshop CS5 paintings from Jack Davis

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

October 12, 2010

New Dry Media brushes for CS5

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

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

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

October 11, 2010

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

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

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

October 10, 2010

Banksy does the Simpsons

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

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

Video: A Paul Rand retrospective

Great work from Jeremy Cox:

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

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

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

October 06, 2010

Video: “Mars”

Cute n’ depressing, just like I like it:

MARS! from Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham on Vimeo.

[Via]

October 03, 2010

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

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

September 27, 2010

Illustration: Soviets, Star Wars, & facial hair

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

September 26, 2010

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

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

September 15, 2010

New PSDs for iPhone 4, Android UIs

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

September 14, 2010

Feedback, please: Potential Web/drawing features in Photoshop

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

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

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

Notes:

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

Many thanks in advance,
J.

Video: “Cache Rules Everything Around Me”

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

[Via]

September 12, 2010

Illustrator CS5 gains HTML5 chops

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 11, 2010

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

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

September 10, 2010

Video: “TELEPHONEME”

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

TELEPHONEME | MK12 from MK12 on Vimeo.

[Via]

September 09, 2010

Animation: “Germans in the Woods”

A sad, touching remembrance from a veteran:

September 08, 2010

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

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

September 07, 2010

Illustration: Fun with playground mishaps

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

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

September 05, 2010

Illustration: Art cars & great book covers

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

September 04, 2010

Video: Making Van Gogh-style paintings in CS5

Liquify + Pixel Bender: Nifty.

[Via]

August 30, 2010

Big money (literally)

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

August 27, 2010

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

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

August 25, 2010

(rt) Photography: History in color, plus Iggy

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

August 24, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Bad Dudes a go-go

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

August 18, 2010

Video: “Little Red Riding Hood” told through infographics

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

August 14, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Outstanding movie posters

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

August 12, 2010

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

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

August 11, 2010

Video: A bizarre psychedelic love letter to cartoons

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

[Via]

August 09, 2010

Illustrator CS5 updated

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

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

August 08, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Infinite Keanu & other jokes

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

August 03, 2010

Video: Between Bears

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

July 30, 2010

Painting in Photoshop? Check this out.

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

July 29, 2010

GUI elements library for Illustrator

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

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

Previously:

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

July 27, 2010

Zooming in Adobe Ideas = Interesting note-taking

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

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

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

July 23, 2010

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

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

July 15, 2010

Talking to illustrators in LA

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

July 13, 2010

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

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

July 11, 2010

Illustration: Surreal creatures, optical illusions, & more

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

July 10, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Space, beautiful & laughable

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

July 08, 2010

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

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

July 06, 2010

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

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

July 01, 2010

Demo: Pressure-sensitive sketching on iPad

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

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

June 28, 2010

Illustration: Hairy bikers, chemical coffee, & more

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

June 26, 2010

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

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

June 24, 2010

Illustrator-friendly iPhone UI elements

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

[Previously: iOS elements for Photoshop.]

June 23, 2010

Modern tech rendered as 70′s kitsch

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

June 19, 2010

Crafty maps

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

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

June 18, 2010

New iOS 4-ready PSD templates available

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

June 14, 2010

Beautiful HTML5 slides on Web design

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

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

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

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

June 13, 2010

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

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

June 12, 2010

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

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

May 17, 2010

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

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

May 12, 2010

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

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

May 07, 2010

Vector painting hotness in Illustrator CS5

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

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

May 06, 2010

(rt) Infographics & the like

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

May 04, 2010

Illustrator CS5 has excellent pixel chops (at last)

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

Until now.

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

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

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

April 22, 2010

Video: Painting in Photoshop CS5

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

(Full-screen viewing recommended, naturally.)

April 14, 2010

Behind the scenes on the CS5 icons & branding

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

April 07, 2010

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

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

April 06, 2010

Sneak peek: Painting in Photoshop CS5

Digital painter John Derry writes,

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

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

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

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

April 05, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 04, 2010

Draw & share with Adobe Ideas for iPad

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

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

Key features:

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

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

March 31, 2010

A couple of good iPad wallpaper resources

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

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

March 26, 2010

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

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

March 22, 2010

(rt) Infographics: Space, violence, & more

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

March 21, 2010

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

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

March 15, 2010

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

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

March 11, 2010

Illustration: Fun with Google Maps

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

  

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

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

March 10, 2010

Colosseo: A letterpress rendering of the Roman Coliseum

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

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

March 07, 2010

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

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

March 06, 2010

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

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

February 28, 2010

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

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

February 21, 2010

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

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

February 12, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Planets, pushpins, & more

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

February 06, 2010

(rt) Illustration: Bananas, evil, & more

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

February 05, 2010

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

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

January 22, 2010

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

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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 dog fox 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:

• The Adobe logo as tattoo
• This blog’s logo as tattoo

[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:
  • Bad Paintings of Barack Obama. [Via]
  • Liquified Google [Via]
• 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.