Design elements

Rhythym

Accent font I liked & free font sites...

Accent Cookie Dough

Photoshop tutorials

Here are some really cool links to some awesome new Photoshop CS6 features. The first link will show you some of the amazing "content aware" upgrades and the second link will show you a quick overview of a majority of the new CS6 features. Check them out, you might just learn something.

http://youtu.be/yIm6uvxJ7OU

http://youtu.be/D58CG_-AWnY

These photos show you a the before & after photos from one of the new features in CS6. Something similar was possible in previous versions, but it took quite a bit of precise selection & use of the correct blur filters. The new way is much easier, without the "jumping thru hoops" of the previous version.

Thanksgiving in Typography

I wanted to wish all a very Happy Thanksgiving &
to show some holiday typography.

It is fun to note that in the last three designs some of the same words are used to describe the Thanksgiving season.

Just because...

I wanted to toss some photos that I've taken on here. One shows the movement that can be found around children (note the smile on the little girl's face & the fact that she's moving, too). The other shows how light can affect something as simple as a blanket and make it look interesting & fluid.

Stock photos for design

This photo is from "foter" free photos
paul+photos=moody / Foter / CC BY-NC

This one is from Getty Images.

See a theme yet? I love snow!

...and this one is from Corbis.

The fog with the snow caught my attention. 

Something like Helvetica...for Typography

Verdana,
Sometimes I like you, sometimes you're just not enough...

 

Then there's Tahoma (as seen above)... 

But the original, Helvetica (and it's follower, Arial) still remain...really bland and plain in my book.

This week in Desgn Media/Principles

We are studying icons, cliches, stereotypes, etc. this week. So.... I thought I would include some for your viewing pleasure.

Maybe it's always greener, maybe it's not!

Check out these stereotypes. I really like the heading they have on here...

Deconstruct

Discuss

Educate

... excellent advice.

Font Design for Typography

This was my attempt at a font design. I know it's pretty weird, but, my patience ran out.


I called my font "kalani", which is a Hawaiian word/name and means "little part of heaven". So, my idea was kind of tropical. The tops of the "k", "l" & "n" are meant to look like leaves (kind like on a palm tree). I also took the look to the dot on the "i". The "a", and part of the "n", is meant to look more like a coconut. Then, on the "a" I added a leaf as the "tail".

for Design Media/Principles class

Since we are studying critiquing this week I thought it was only appropriate to put some cartoons on here.

For my Typography class

This week we are reading about Print Fonts vs Web Fonts. There aren't very many "pretty" pictures about this topic, but, I did find a couple of examples for you to compare.

For Typography, see my previous post, please.

This week we are talking about colors & emotions in Design Media/Principles so I thought I would throw some at you.....

The pinks and violets in this one say old fashioned, romance, that kind of thing to me...

Here we have a deeper violet color, but, the way it is used is much more sensual, sexual & alluring...

Don't you think?

Then you have a Midnight Blue Maserati.....my absolute FAVORITE color!!!!

 And.... who wouldn't want something that looked like this in their home....heavenly!

Lastly, speaking of heavenly, this picture of lightning has both the violets and the midnight blues.

               Beautiful!

This week, some of the things we are studying are dingbats and symbols. These have always fascinated me. There are at least as many of these as there are type styles.

There are some very interesting things out there. Some symbol sets are detailed as much as, or even more than, clip-art. Dig hard and you might be surprised by what you find.

I looked for this in a "W", but could only find the "P". I think it would make a pretty sharp monogram or logo element. It kind of amazed me that a simple letter could be so dramatic.

Here is a different take on The Avengers. It has just six key elements but gets the entire message across. I think this is a pretty cool approach!

What an awesome 3-D effect on this Heineken billboard. The hand looks like it is coming out of the wall to grab the bottle. Bravo designers!

I decided to show you some of my work this time. 

These are two different layouts I came up with for this customer. They had their logo "Steinmetz Pediatric Dentistry" but didn't know where to go from there. I came up with many more ideas, but these were the final two. In this instance I didn't have direct contact with the client, only written instructions as to the information they wanted included and that they also liked "sky blue" and would love to see it included somehow.

Even though it seems a bit cluttered, the customer went with the bottom design.

All I was given for this was the print information.
This is a good example on how you can take the absolute minimum amount of information and come up with an appealing design. The customer loved it.

The actual colors are much brighter than this scan of my paper printout.

This one was much more difficult. The client was a dentist and he wanted

to let his clients know that he now carried these mouthguards.

I had to go to the Pro-form website and do research on the product,

make sure that I was allowed to use their images and logo in my design, and 

figure out what I was going to include and what I was going to disregard.

Above is the front and below is the back (I blocked the name out on this one).

Gretchen, 

This is just for you!

Plain use of typography, but made to look 3 dimensional. Kind of "sweet" in it's own way.

If you look really closely, you'll notice that not only is the design (which is a number 2) made up of numbers, but, the background is too.

Think of the time it took to make this....

Symbols, Symbols, everywhere...

Saw this on another blog & thought it was kind of neat.