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Probably related to design but not fitting in another category.

Three by Three (3×3) Illustration Annual No.5

Mar 9th, 2009
by DRMark.
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I have in front of me the latest 3×3 Annual No. 5, published January 2009, it’s not even on their own website yet! The cover, as you can see is a splendid illustration of Björk.

3x3 Illustration Annual Number 5

3x3 Illustration Annual Number 5

Inside the book starts with an interview of Henning Wagenbreth, Artists/Educator of the year, who appears to be sitting in his back garden on a deck chair wearing a beach towel. I haven’t read it because I got the book for the pictures! The book has section of illustration in the following categories; advertising, animation, books, editorial, institutional, self promotion, sequential, 3D and unpublished. Finally there is a section of student submissions.

It’s all great stuff, nicely printed on decent paper and inspirational, sometimes. There is such a massive range of techniques and styles on show in the book and it’s all quite new so it’s a good indicator of up and coming or current fashionable illustration types. Next time I find myself with a blank document and a blank mind I’ll be dipping into this book for some kind of inspiration. I bought this at ‘Borders’ but you can probably get it lots of places; UK people can get it at Central Books. If you know where to get it on-line feel free to post a link!

Design Reviews T-shirt, Obama edition

Feb 16th, 2009
by DRMark.
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To commemorate the inauguration of the new president, Design Reviews has produced a special edition T-shirt with the bloke’s face on it. We probably should have done this a few months ago when people were making loads of money from Obamamania, but we clearly aren’t entrepreneurs here, we are designers & reviewers.

Design Reviews T-shirt Obama edition

Design Reviews T-shirt Obama edition

The quality of the design is only matched by the quality of the material! The shirt is made of 100% certified combed organic cotton, with twin needle stitching at the neck, sleeves and hem. AND it’s not produced in a sweat shop in a third world country either.

The design was lovingly created with a paid for commercial full copy of Adobe Illustrator, thereby keeping workers in the USA in employment. The fetching background Obama was realised with the help of the wonderful little program I have reviewed previously, Raster.

These shirts are a limited edition with no more than 500 being produced. One shirt costs 25UKP or 35USD, go to our merchandise page and order lots NOW!

Tunisian door arches

Jan 26th, 2009
by DRMark.
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I recently took a vacation in Tunisia, over Christmas actually. There were many beautiful sights to see, most of them belonging to mother nature. What caught me eye though, wandering around the town of Hammamet, in contrast to the bright white walls in the illuminating sun were the brightly coloured arched doors. By far, blue doors were the favourite of the people it seems.

Twelve Tunisian doors

What an inspirational image on which to base some pop art or arches based illustration using your favourite graphics package. I’m working on some imagery based upon the above, but I’m not sure if it’s best to concentrate on just one door, they’re all so interesting!

Lightscribe – line printing and grayscale test

Dec 6th, 2008
by DRMark.
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My previous article about Lightscribe has proved very popular, so here is an update with more information about the real practical use of Lightscribe labeling technology. In this test I’ve looked at the printing of fine detail (lines) at various angles (star shapes) and printed a grayscale test using swatches of gray from 10% to 100% in 10% increments. What more do you need? Let’s get a picture onto the stage and have a look at what results we have…

'Melody' brand gold Lightscribe disc

There you can see the result of the test. As it says, these are 96dpi images that should be on your screen at approximately life size for most people, except perhaps netbook users. If you are very interested in the quality and want a close up look of the print source file (300dpi TIF) and a scan of the disc done at 300dpi, then click the obvious links in this sentence!

What does it all mean? Looking at the picture above gives you a thousand words of meaning! But I must tell you how I created the source image and Lightscribed it so you know that it is a valid and useful test. I created the lines and shades test in Adobe Illustrator, obviously as vector/postscript data. The lines weights are measured in ‘points’ rather than something more commonplace like millimetres, just out of tradition, just as many programs use ‘points’ for type size nearly everyone is familiar with. The file set up as a 12cm square and I exported a greyscale TIF at 300dpi. This TIF was placed in the Lightscribe labelling program with no scaling/stretching applied, set to just crop off any bits that went over the edges. The disc image was burned using ‘Best’ mode.

The greyscale (or grayscale) test is very useful for getting images ready for print to Lightscribe. It maps the colours you see on screen, and would expect on paper if you printed to a decent postscript printer using the source greyscale or CMYK file in Illustrator, to what you get on the disc. I’d say the dynamic range from 0% to 100% in your graphics program is compressed to approximately 25% to 75%. The 0.5pt lines are printed very well but the 0.25pt lines show a bit of break up so I would use a minimum line width of 0.4pt on future Lightscribe disc projects. Also I’m quite pleased that although the tonal range is quite compressed the shades are quite distinct between every 10%, especially at the lighter end of the scale.

What do you think? Be my guest and post a comment.

Cheers, Mark

CD cover for The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo

Nov 24th, 2008
by DRMark.
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The song ‘Russian Skidoo’ has been recorded since summer 2005, now I’ve only just got around to making the CD cover for it. I drew all the trees and snow textures on a background layer in Illustrator. Also in separate layers I drew the guy and the skidoo. That look a while, balancing the amount of detail to be sketched with what I wanted the finished article to be like.

Illustrating the shapes of the skidoo was no problem but it took three revisions to draw the helmet! The picture I was looking at had a guy with lots and lots of stickers on the helmet and I got too involved working close up and made something far too detailed, twice. This picture is of a guy speeding through the night in a snow storm so it’s not necessary at all to have that detail. Then when I finished I fired up Photoshop and used a combination of the motion blur and the wind tools. The snow wasn’t so tricky, inserting a new layer in Photoshop using the noise filter and distort filters to make it wavy, then altering the opacity of that layer.

The Ebbs (UK) - Russian Skidoo

The Ebbs (UK) - Russian Skidoo

I’m quite happy with the result, from the ingredients I started with. If I were to do it again I would focus on a detail of the skidoo, coming almost straight towards the viewer, perhaps looking like it’s about to run into the camera. Could do that for the back cover though… If it’s better it can be swapped with the front image! Sound clip here; The Ebbs (UK) – Russian Skidoo.

Cheers, Mark

Design for the music industry

Oct 2nd, 2008
by DRMark.
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If I’ve got the time and inclination/inspiration I like to design CD covers for the space-rock band “The Ebbs (UK)”. If you go to the main Ebbs Studio site, then go to the music section there are 3 CD covers there with an accompanying MP3; a sample from the CD. I’ve designed several Ebbs CDs but not got music samples prepared for the webpage so they aren’t uploaded yet. On the other hand there are a few Ebbs songs without any CD cover yet. The music section is a bit bare so it needs updating, but so does everything, all the time in this digital age…

The Ebbs music CD covers currently available

The Ebbs music CD covers currently available

If you are interested in CD and LP covers there is a great resource on the web which you might not know about – lpcoverlover.com. This is a great site with some of the most bizarre LP covers you have ever seen.

JPEGs and transparency

Sep 29th, 2008
by DRMark.
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Today I had to make a web banner, animated GIF, and it needed to be done in half an hour. That’s OK if you’ve got all the “ingredients” and know what you want to do, or have been told what the animation should do or say. I had a problem though, the client wanted a logo on a blue background but they only had a JPG of the logo, it was therefore in a white square because JPG doesn’t support transparent regions. The white background can be erased in photoshop but it’s not always a quick job. Anyway we settled on having the logo on the far left in it’s white space seperate from the rest of the blue backgrounded banner.

The best kind of logo for the studio to have is usually an “.EPS“, it can be scaled to any size and have transparent regions if necessary. Whoever created your logo originally should have supplied an “.EPS”, it’s also essential for print jobs where you might want to scale up the logo to fit the side of a bus, for example…

Various format images of logos placed on a background

Various format images of logos placed on a background

In the example above you can see the nasty results in full of an inappropriate file format for a logo! If you work in the design industry you’ve probably been supplied a logo as a JPG someone has pulled off a webpage somewhere. Then the client requires it placing on a complex photo background or enlarging to be printed on the side of a skyscraper. Two other side-effects you can see; washed out colours and rough clipping in Quark (or most programs that can auto-clip images/backgrounds).

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