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Friday, August 19, 2011

Top 10 Logo Design Tips

  1. Keep it Simple
  2. Engage your Audience
  3. Logo Longevity - Think Ahead
  4. Vector is Better
  5. Adaptability - Be Ready for Change
  6. Make it Memorable
  7. Relevance - Keep your Products and Services in Mind
  8. Choose your Colors Wisely
  9. Keep it Unique
  10. Versatility Pays Dividends

Monday, August 15, 2011

How We Look Now: Authenticity and Imagery in a Pixelated World


On August 11th 2010, I had attend an event by AIGA–Chicago the guest speaker Andrew Delaney from Getty ImagesAndrew is responsible for the creation and development of Getty Images’ creative stills and footage, ensuring that customers find the right content at the right price points every time they search on www.gettyimages.com

The seminar was about How We Look Now: Authenticity and Imagery in a Pixelated World, His presentation was really compelling in many ways. He talked about the usage of social media and how it's changing daily. The usage of social has impact our generation to think beyond just paper and pen. We somehow unknowingly are going back to good old days. Our generations– not only of designers but people who are in other fields of profession are thinking beyond their limits. We constantly keep in touch with what's happening on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr , etc., not only to update our status but to know what others are doing as well. Somehow are we making ourselves noticed more and more. Our lives have become so public that just typing our name in the Google's search engine we  are able to pull out our history of the last status update, or photo upload etc. 

This amazed me even further, when Andrew mentioned that the use of social media has changed, the way designers think these days. We are going back to the old ways of illustrations, photography, layouts, and especially advertising. People are connecting with concepts of authenticity instead of fabrication. The audience these days want real images of people, moments, and want ordinary people to create the advertising thats being publicized theses days. The audience do not want actors and famous people to be advertising for companies such as Puma. His message both effected and influenced me to ask myself the value of being authentic rather then basing my design, illustrations, editorial publications to a certain way.

 As far as imagery goes, my professor John, made us do a digital sketch book for his class at first I didn't realize the value of it but, I understand his point now. That having your own picture bring more value to the design or even illustration. Because, as an artist you have the right to claim it and we have the ability of making it either famous or even well known. 

My new goal for this year to expand my digital library and built a collection of imagery and good photography. Although photography is not what my main focus is, but I definitely want to be a well-rounded designer, I can create my own claims at my own work. 

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

How Does Cartoon Animation Work?

Cartoon animation works by stringing together a series of drawings in rapid succession, as the human eye fills in the gaps between each image. Understand the science behind animation with helpful information from a writer, director and animator in this free video on cartoon animation.

Know more: 
http://www.ehow.com/video_4872032_cartoon-animation-work_.html

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

33 Typographic Sins...

  1. Two spaces between sentences
  2. Dumb quotes instead of smart quotes
  3. Dumb apostrophe instead of smart apostrophe
  4. Failing to tuck periods/ commas insides quotes marks
  5. Failing to kern display type
  6. Using two hyphens instead of an em dash
  7. Too many consecutive hyphens
  8. Large amounts of body text in uppercase letters
  9. Large amounts of revised type are hard to read
  10.  Using process colors for body text
  11.  Underlining titles instead of italicizing them
  12.  Under process colors for body text
  13. Failing to eliminate orphans
  14.  Rivers in justified text
  15. Inconsistent leading
  16. Indenting the first paragraph
  17. Indenting a paragraph too far
  18. Failing to hang punctuation into the margin
  19. Failing to use to create fractions
  20. Incorrectly abbreviating a.m. and p.m.
  21. Failing to provide margins for type in a box
  22. Faux italic/oblique bold and small cap type
  23. Strokes that encroach upon letterforms
  24. Horizontally scaled type
  25. Vertically scaled type
  26. Negative Letter spacing
  27. Bad line breaks in headlines and body text
  28. Failing to indent bulleted lists
  29. Failing to align baselines of type in adjacent columns of body text
  30. Stacking lowercase letters
  31. Failing to use accent marks
  32. Failing to correct bad rags
  33. Failing to use ligatures