It really is a case of letting the pictures do the talking. But before I insert all the pictures into the post I’d better explain to the less observant and well practiced in ‘spot the difference’ that each pair of photos has one difference. Some obviously asymmetric element, an ‘imperfection’ perhaps, of course it’s a beauty spot. You can actually get one for yourself here in the UK, with prices starting at £75!!!

In chronological order let’s look at the beauty spot lineup.

Marlene Dietrich in 'Destry Rides Again'

Anne Francis as 'Honey West'

Lynsey De Paul

Now you might be confused looking at these beautiful women whether the beauty spot makes any difference at all, so I’ve thrown in a wild card. This might help you decide whether beauty is enhanced by the mark or not.

Beastly is in the eye of the beholder

Now I really want to encourage readers to make imperfections within their design work, whatever that may be. But never go the easy way of making imperfect things straight off the bat, first you have to achieve something you believe to be perfect and THEN give it some Wabi Sabi Sauce! It’s a sacrifice isn’t it?

Finally, in corporate work where you might need to use a © or a ® you might be able to use it as a beauty spot, but probably not… The next blog post won’t be about wabi-sabi principles, but I am going to re-visit this subject and it’s application in day to day logo and illustration work soon.

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!

The Design Reviews logo + 'Raster'

My first review here on Design Reviews is of a FREE graphics utility (for Windows only, sorry Mac users). It might be free but it’s fantastic and fills a gap not addressed in any of the Adobe suite such as Flash, Illustrator or Photoshop.

Do you like sometimes to use halftone patterns as fills? It’s quite easy to do solid colour (same size dot) patterns but what about variable dot sizes corresponding to lightness and darkness of the images you want to create.

New Jordanian Bridge

The program in question is called Raster, it creates dot or square halftone patterns in a vector format which can then be used in your favourite design programs with all the advantages of a vector file (mainly scalability and editability). Now I know there is a Halftone Pattern filter in Photoshop but it’s not at all the same as this. The Photoshop filter doesn’t create vector output, also the dot or line styles are uniform. In Raster the dots size vary with intensity or depth of colour. So for instance with a simple linear gradient the dots will fade from large to small where the gradient would fade from dark to light. Before this program I used to try and do the effect ‘by hand’ which was neither convenient or satisfactory.

Try it for yourself, if you’ve read this and made some Pop Art using Raster and your favourite vector editor please leave a link in the comments below.

Raster Screen Grab

Cheers, Mark