Brand New, New brands.

Well, This has to be my favorite branding-related website.

The Brand New section of the underconsideration website is my personal "informant" for all the major rebrand cases on a global scale. It also has a section where professionals of the industry reviews some rebrands in-depth. It has a database of cases that goes back to around 2006.


The website is also crawling with other people who shares the same interest of branding, although the comment section can get hectic with people comparing logos with similar design traits (even though the two companies may be from different continents, and different professional sectors) and people trolling with self-made memes and other shenanigans. Nonetheless there are many insightful comments regarding the case in question. Plus, the rest are pretty amusing to read anyway.


The rest of underconsideration is full of goodies as well.  Art of the Manu would be my runner-up favorite.

underconsideration.com/brandnew/

underconsideration.com

underconsideration.com/quipsologies/


But yeah, have a great rest of the semester!

Hand-Lettering

I've noticed since the beginning of the semester quite a few dabblings in hand-lettering for various projects and designs from several different classmates in both Type 2 and Graphic Design 2. My interest piqued, I decided to look into hand-lettering and what sort of process it takes to come with a decent, clever design. A quick google search had me stumbling upon Sean McCabe and his website completely devoted to the pursuit of hand-lettering.




Mr. McCabe has a large portfolio of all hand-lettered designs in various styles ranging from modern to traditional and everything in between. It was extremely useful to see his site and the wide variety of design one can be exposed to in the sole medium of hand-lettered type.

 

This is for anyone interested in typography and the application of it outside the computer. McCabe has tutorials on hand lettering for those who would prefer a guided tour of hand-lettering, or you can just take a gander at his portfolio to see the diverse potential of hand-lettered typography. Either way, it's definitely something I'm going to keep a tab on for future design considerations.

 

For those who are interested, here's his website:

seanwes.com

Get Inspired! Websites

For this last blog, I’ll briefly talk about three useful websites where you can get inspiration from when you’re creating your projects and designs. Of course there are many others out there, but I feel like these three are ones you should definitely check out.

Number One: Behance

You probably have heard of Behance from your professors or whatnot. For one thing, I think it has a good interface that’s not hard to navigate, so that’s a plus. You can create an account and submit your designs there as well, and if you’re lucky someone browsing through may see your work and ‘appreciate’ it. This ‘appreciate’ thing to me is equivalent of a Facebook ‘like.’ But if you don’t want to create an account you can always just do what most people do and browse through other designers and artists’ works to get inspiration from. It’s not just general graphic design or typography work either, you can find other things like UX stuff too. 

Number Two: DeviantART

This is my favorite website to look through awesome artwork and get inspiration from. DeviantART has a huuuge amount of artwork in their gallery, and they’re distributed into many different categories from photograph, to digital art, traditional art, etc. Although some ‘junk’ or wrongly categorized artwork can be found in there, it doesn’t take from the really amazing ones. You can create an account and share your artwork there as well, and you can also join Groups created by other members; they have groups for almost anything you can imagine so you may find a couple that fit your interests. You can also find tutorials that other deviant members have kindly posted, to help you practice something like ‘lineart,’ shading illustrations, and such. I’m a proud member of this community, and I highly recommend it to others. 

Another cool thing about having an account here is that, if you’re browsing through art and find some great ones, you can ‘favorite’ it and it’ll go into your ‘favorites’ gallery that you can go back to and reference later.

Number Three: Abduzeedo

I’m still exploring this website, but from what I’ve already seen it’s a great website to view artwork. Abduzeedo offers a collection of different art styles, just as the other two do, from photographs to illustrations, logos and so on and you can also create an account if you’d like. They also have tutorials and tips for photoshop, illustrator and some other softwares you might be interested in checking out. If you don’t have anything in particular that you’re looking for as inspiration, I suggest a shortcut: hover your cursor on the ‘collections’ and go to the daily inspiration section; you’ll see the works and designs that the writers and users from the website have chosen.

 

These are just 3 of many that I find to be very solid websites to go to if you’re in need of some inspiration or motivation, especially when you feel stuck or have that ‘artist/designer block’ that I’m sure all of us get from time to time. So if you have time check these websites, and you know just do a quick browse of what they have, I’m sure you’ll find something that catches your eye. Hope you found this blog useful!

Hand Lettering and Modern Day Typography

This semester of classes as recently opened my eyes in the world of typography. There is a whole new world of typography in hand lettering. I have gained a new respect for typography and hand lettering. I feel that each type has its own mood and personality. Any advertisement can be drastically changed with the type that is put in it.

I decided to share hand lettering as my post this week because I feel that it is important to have an understanding and appreciation for typography. It can make or break a piece. I shared a pinterest link to inspire and promote hand letter. It can be incorporated into shapes, on top of pictures, or even stand on its own. There is something so personal and homemade about hand lettering, I think that is why it has become more appealing among our generation of designers and marketers.

So just take a few minutes and enjoy this art placed before you. Each one tells a story and has a personality of its own.
In addition each "hand lettering" word has a different link to other get hand lettering websites.


http://www.pinterest.com/poppytalk/typography-hand-lettering/

Shh...this has nothing to do with our next project.

I totally forgot to reply to this blog.

In other news, since project 2 is starting soon, I thought that it would be a good idea to share a relevant article about packaging design. I stumbled upon this while researching for the project.

Here are some of my favorite designs.

I adore the "bean bag" for it's organic, transparent look. The product looks so much fresher in it than the normal bean products I saw at the supermarket last week. (It reminds me of the "milk in a bag" I encountered in China back in the 2000s, I think they have those in Canada now.)

The pun involved in this design is just genius. Putting mints in coin rolls (usually distributed by monetary mints) makes it a memorable item that you can find in store.

This reminds me of the IKEA packages. The important texts are bold and highly visible on the package. The opening makes it easy for consumers to examine the light bulbs before purchasing. Also, just imagine how much ink (& money) the manufacturer will save by using this design.







I just love the dogs in this one.















The milk cartons are great because they are simple. It really gave me the impression that the milk are perfectly white and pure. Here is also a similar design that I also like.

This has to be my favorite one. Despite the cost concern I loved how it has the academic theme. Perhaps it could be sold individually by the test tubes. 

These are all designed by students, not that we need to raise the bar because of that...

In you're interested in seeing all 30 of them, here's the link to the article: Awesome

Pemberton & Whitefoord Design

While we were taking a break from the Project 1 craze this weekend, I decided to do some stumbling across the web to see what sort of design firms and ideas I could pick up in preparation for Project 2. One site that I stumbled upon is P&W design.

Like any design firm or company, the website really has to showcase P&W's prowess both in general design as well as website design. This site in particular clicked with me because of the clever intro to the site that featured a doorbell that was actually interactive. Although there wasn't a blatant button saying 'push the doorbell to enter', the concept of pushing a doorbell to enter a house is so deeply ingrained in people that it was instinctive to click the doorbell without considering if it was a button or not.

Not only is the website designed cleverly, there are a few little easter eggs that aren't really important for P&W, but it makes the audience grin. For instance, try clicking on the watering bucket on the left side of the page.

I'm not saying there aren't flaws. When the mouse hovers over a clickable item, the cross stitch in the center of the page switches to display what that button is supposed to do. When I first saw the site, the change was so subtle that I didn't notice it until I was looking directly at the center of the page.
Also, some areas that appear clickable because the mouse changes when you hover over them wind up not leading you to any new page. This is either misleading or it shows that the site may still be in development.

I encourage you guys to look at this site both for it's content and portfolio, as well as the actual design of the site - usability, friendliness, all that jazz.

P&W offers a guide book for clients to see how P&W works.

Part of P&W's Starbucks branding project in their portfolio.

Paint Tool Sai

For this blog, I’d like to bring people’s attention to a software that I’ve come to grow very fond of, especially if you’re into Anime or cartoon illustrations.  The software/program is called Paint Tool Sai, and it is from Japan. Paint Tool Sai costs around 50 USD.

One of the reasons I love this software is that, although it doesn’t have as many tools as Photoshop, it is really great for outlining scanned drawings and creating ‘lineart’, and I believe is cheaper than buying Adobe Photoshop. This software is meant to create, edit, and enhance graphic images or photographs. The interface is pretty simple to navigate through, but it might take some time to get used to where things are, as well as trying out the different paint tools. However, once you get the hang of it (and there are plenty of tutorials out there on DeviantART or YouTube that you can look into to familiarize yourself with the program) you can create some pretty amazing art. 

One of the things I like most about this program is how easy it is to manipulate lineart, where you can get precise contours when outlining your scanned drawings (I recommend using the 'Curve' lineart option). I sincerely love the ‘Pressure’ tool, where you can change the thinness of any anchor point on the lineart you’re making, and once you have the entire lineart done you can use the ‘Weight’ tool to change the thickness of the stroke too. The lineart ends up coming out crisp and clean.

Some great perks about Paint Tool Sai is that it supports file formats like PSD, BMP, JPG and PNG, so if you feel like you limited yourself with effects on this software, all you have to do is save it as a PSD and bring it onto Photoshop where you can make changes and touch up on your art; Sai has layers like Photoshop, so when you save it as a PSD it’ll configure and open up on the program just as any document created on Photoshop itself. A downside to this program is that it doesn’t support Mac, only Windows PC. Sorry Mac people, but hopefully they’ll make it available in the future!

Here are some examples of brushes and their strokes, as well as some of the settings for them that you can manipulate to your liking. If you’d like to give it a try at this software, you can download a trial period of 1 month from Softonic.