February 20th, 2012
February 13th, 2012
January 9th, 2012
December 23rd, 2011
December 21st, 2011
December 19th, 2011
December 14th, 2011
December 12th, 2011
October 18th, 2011
September 15th, 2011
Offset 2012 takes place on the 9–11th March in Dublin City Center.
September 8th, 2011
September 7th, 2011
August 16th, 2011
August 2nd, 2011
August 1st, 2011
July 20th, 2011
July 20th, 2011
July 18th, 2011
July 15th, 2011
July 13th, 2011
Here’s a great example of an evolving brand, which shows how subtle design can make a huge difference.
The American Red Cross are a globally recognised organisation, thanks in no small part to their iconic logo. When tasked with updating such a well-known brand identity, Turner Duckworth showed how design flare and ingenuity can garner fantastic results. Inspired by the image above, they produced sophisticated new versions of this historical logo, solidly grounded in the integrity of the brand.
Their designs are made up of:
the “Button” logo – “for marketing purposes”;
the “Classic” logo - for use “in disaster situations, as well as times when a marketing-oriented button logo is not appropriate”; and the conceptual ‘cross pattern’ yet to be implemented.
Turner Duckworth’s use of light and shade, texture and typography have really tightened up the identity of the American Red Cross, achieving that ‘approachability’ factor that’s so important for charitable organisations. Interested in learning more?
Check out the website here.
We love this novel idea for giving your valentine a gift with a real difference. A shop window converted into a ‘Cabinet of Dreams’. Behind its gothic, Victoriana charm this shop front supports a very good cause. As the face of the newest Women’s Aid campaign it carries a message as sharp as Sweeney Todd’s blade – that ‘abusive relationships do not begin with violence, but often with gifts and flowers’. By investing in one of these items, you’re supporting a Women’s Aid campaign to raise money for victims of abusive relationships.
Via the Creative Review website
In this video Swiss Miss, Tina Roth Eisenberg, talks about the power of the personal project. Tina a graphic designer practicing in New York, talks about how she has organically left more and more client work behind to concentrate on her own personal graphic and website design projects.
Via the Swiss Miss website.
We are sure most of you seen this. But we really like it, its a nice clean animation for the Beatles on the Apple iTunes store.
Found via the Apple website
Banksy has given the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool an early Christmas present of a new sculpture. The piece titled Cardinal Sin is a comment on the scandals that hit the Church along with the subsequent cover–ups.
Banksy had sawn off the face of an 18th Century replica stone bust and replaced it with bathroom tiles, in order to replicate the pixilation newspapers use to protect identities.
“It’s a huge coup and we are sure his work will spark a reaction with visitors.” said Reyahn King, director of art galleries at National Museums Liverpool.
Banksy requested that the piece be put on display alongside the art galleries period collection.
Via the Guardian website.
We have posted more about Banksy here.
The news every graphic designer has been waiting for… the colour we will all be using in 2012 is Tangerine Tango!
Leatrice Eiseman of Pantone says “There’s the element of encouragement with orange, it’s building on the ideas of courage and action, that we want to move on to better things. I think it would be a disservice to go with a relaxed, soothing color now,”
As we said last year we want to see this colour all over Brum. Its going to be the best thing that has happened to graphic and web design since… well since Honeysuckle!
Via the Creative Review website
Yes we have been bad of late, with not posting cool graphic design on here, but we will be better. For now check this video out! Pretty unbelievable, I dont know too much about the artist except he has a lot of patience! Great little motion design!
Found via the 9gag website
The new Tintin movie really pushes the boundaries of computer animation and 3D special effects, but we really love this graphic intro by James Curran. The unofficial title sequence features scenes from each of the 24 books. An excellent use of colour and smooth animation throughout it is well worth a look.
Dublin has recently been named one of three capital cities to be considered for the World Design Capital 2014. This is an accolade any great city would love to have, and there was great competition from over 50 cities including Cape Town and Bilbao who were also shortlisted.
So what was it about Dublin that made it stand out, against bigger, and I am sure some would say, more creative cities? We have talked about Dublin City on here before in an article we wrote for Created in Birmingham, and the creative atmosphere Dublin has, which is unique to the city. But of course the World Design Capital committee look at much more than just Graphic Design, the awarded city must have a deeper understanding of how design can enrich peoples lives. And this is what the Pivot Dublin bid showcases, looking at four distinct areas: Connecting Cities, Making Cities Lighter, Making Cities Flow and Making Cities Smile.
There are many great stories and articles on the Pivot Dublin website about how design has enriched and enhanced the lives of the people of Dublin. One such story is of the library in Blanchardstown, the jury saw an exhibition which explained how the Local authority was using the quality of the design of its public buildings to raise awareness and expectation that design quality mattered. Marguerite Murphy explained that 1800 people a day used Blanchardstown Library, and a queing system had to be put in place.
The Jury also visited The Grand Canal Square and Theatre, home to among other things the Offset festival. Offset is a must see for any design agency in Dublin, it gathers the biggest names in the design world for three days of events and talks. The orgainsers of the festival discussed how this self financed project came about.
The WDC will come to a decision as to what Capital city wins WDC 2014 in October, we think Dublin has a huge chance of winning this. It is a city that thrives on creativity and design.
Offset 2012 takes place on the 9–11th March in Dublin City Center.
The Pivot Dublin website has a lot more information on how Dublin was selected and what they plan on doing for 2014.
Check out the Offset website here: http://www.iloveoffset.com/
Check out the Pivot Dublin website here: http://www.pivotdublin.com/
Typo London, is happening this October 20–22. Three days of presentations spread over two stages, with some really big influential names from the design world giving lectures.
I attended a similar event to this in Dublin a few years ago. The fantastic Offset, which included some big international names and also some local Dublin talent. Speakers at the Typo London event include Neville Brody, Michael Bierut, Erik Spiekermann, Tony Brook and Chip Kidd and many more.
Tickets are available from the Typo London website here but at £550 each it is not really open to everyone!
Now we are looking forward to seeing the line up for Offset 2012, hope the tickets are a bit more reasonable.
We posted work by Johnny Kelly on here before, like this one and this. We really like this animation he did for Chipotle Mexican Grill. The film tells the story of how a farmer turned his farm industrial. He no longer cares for the animals and has become motivated by money. The film features a special recording by Willie Nelson of Coldplays The Scientest. As the track says were going back to the start so does the farmer, he gets rid of the industrial machinery from his farm, and begins to take care of his animals once again.
Like a lot of Kellys work the colours are bright and playful and there is a lot of humor in the clip, but this underlines the serious message of industrialization. Kelly began his career in Dublin, Ireland, before moving to the UK.
The Nelson track is available to download and all the proceeds go to Chipotle Cultivate Foundation, which is committed to helping create a sustainable food supply and to raising awareness concerning food issues.
Via the Creative Review website
There has been a couple of new releases from Adobe lately in preparation for the arrival of HTML5. And the great news is that both these web packages are free downloads. First up was Adobe Edge, which we talked about here, and now they have released Adobe Muse.
Muse is a web package which lets you create rich HTML5 websites without knowing too much code. Much like Adobe Dreamweaver I guess, but the user interface is more like InDesign. Looking at some early videos it does look promising and easy to use. Lea Hickman, vice president of Design and Web product management at Adobe says “Those who have tested Muse are thrilled that something this intuitive yet powerful is now available.”
Jason Prozora-Plein, quality engineer at Adobe, raises a good point, he says “people don’t hand edit post-script or PDF files for print. In five, ten years I don’t think very many people will be coding in order to design websites”.
You can download a copy of Muse for free from the Adobe website:
http://muse.adobe.com/
Found via the website Gizmodo
With the advent of HTML 5, which we talked about here before, there is a lot of really cool things happening in website design and development. In order to keep up with trends Adobe have created Adobe Edge.
Edge is a new web motion and interaction design tool that allows web designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.
Edge will be updated regularly to add new functionality, stay ahead of evolving web standards, and incorporate user feedback to provide the best functionality and experience possible.
Edge has great potential and it should take over Flash for simple to medium projects. However, a lot of people are saying they wouldn’t be surprised if it kills-off Flash in the long run.
Say hello to our new design studio mate. I think we have just named him Frank.
Huge thanks to Lisa and all at Inkygoodness. We will give him a good home.
We are really looking forward to the Character Totem homecoming show tomorrow night (27th of July 2011) in Zellig at the Custard Factory. We got to have a quick look yesterday morning before set up was finished and it is already looking great! We have never seen so much colour in one exhibition.
It promises to be a great night with live music, live drawing, stalls and beer! What more can you ask for?
The show itself is brought to us by Inkygoodness, after a successful trip to Berlin, they wanted to bring it home. The Inkygoodness mission is to showcase new and emerging talent in illustration, character design and lowbrow art. They have been organising shows since 2008, having a number of events across the UK. Most recently Berlin; debuting their first international exhibition as part of the Pictoplasma Character Walk earlier this year.
Tomorrow night will also be the launch of Issue 7 of AMMO magazine. So make sure you come down, join in and have a drink!
Check out more from Inkygoodness on their website: http://inkygoodness.com
Really nice video on the creation of a Letterpress poster.
Really great Motion Graphics piece by Patrick Clair.
An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code.
We just love these posters for Coppélia. This is just a selection of 27 poster designs submitted to Pointe Blank, a new collaborative project created by Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Designers and Artists were invited to create original artwork based on the story of the ballet Coppélia. Great selection of posters, from pure typographic pieces to detailed illustrations. The posters were then put on display in an exhibition. It’s great to see this kind of thing happening and we look forward to more.
We’ve posted about HTML5 on here before. But what exactly is it? HTML5 is to become the new web standard, it greatly reduces the amount of code web-designers have to use when creating and structuring pages. Perhaps the biggest benefit to HTML5 is the fact that it can handle Video and Audio in the browser, so there’ll be no need for extra plug-ins.
With the inclusion of video in the browser this may do away with the need for Adobe Flash. Apple have already refused to use Flash plug-ins in its iOS, they say its due to the amount of resources it takes up. HTML5 should bring us rich media content to all our devices.
So there are plenty of new and exciting possibilities with HTML5. And with animation techniques also being introduced it’s hard to think that Adobe Flash will be around much longer in its current state. I imagine they will change the output settings, from the standard SWF to something more like Swiffy.
Swiffy is a Google Labs project created by Pieter Senster, who was an intern working on a small project to convert SWF files to HTML5. From this Swiffy was born and Pieter was hired to work on the project full time. Although at this point in time it is still in its infancy it will convert most SWF files, it has however got problems with some Flash content.
You can check out some demos of Swiffy in action on the Google Labs website here: http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/gallery.html
We tried it on our musical Stripeyhorse at homepage and it does work. The music worked too in Safari and Chrome but when we tried it on an iOS devise unfortunately it didn’t, However, Google have already said it doen’t support all kinds of sound files.
With the introduction of HTML5 I imagine a lot of websites are going to start using it and pushing it to its limits. I can see a lot of websites going down the route of the early flash adopters. When in the mid 90′s it seemed every website was Flash based even when it was very unnecessary to be. But we’re looking forward to seeing the developments and the crazy websites which will be published using HTML5.
We really like this website: http://nizoapp.com/ The site is for a new app called Nizo. Every element animates onto screen smoothly as the user scrolls down. All of it done with Java script, so no Flash required. It’s a very clever site, allowing the user to then grab and move any object on screen. It’s this kind of website which gets us excited about HTML5.
Other readings and links to HTML5 websites:
http://pixelclouds.com/2011/03/16/25-brilliant-websites-designed-with-html5-css3/
http://www.stripeyhorsecreative.com/blog/2011/05/title/
http://www.stripeyhorsecreative.com/blog/2011/01/html5-branding-and-logo-design/
http://www.stripeyhorsecreative.com/blog/2011/01/html-5/