Non-format

Non-format is a famous contemporary design team in London, the United Kingdom. Their works focus on book cover and music CD, DVD packaging design. Their style often bases on hand drawing and maximalism. Let's take a look at these works:

click on the picture to see the large images

Hand drawing is really an essential skill which they have applied effectively in their works. Also, they seem to adopt maximalism everywhere. We can see complex lines, shapes, textures in works above.

And this is the piece I like most:
Click to see the large image

The lines in this illustration are made by hand so they look very grace and very complex. These lines are mixed with typography to create attraction. The photos chosen are also very suitable and help to confirm the meaning of typography.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Format

http://www.non-format.com/

My panorama

Panorama is a photograph technique that use small images to create the big one. This technique is often used to capture the picture of a large area or landscape, such as a city, a mountain... I have always wanted to make a panorama by myself and below is the first one I made:
This is only the screen shot of my panorama. The real one is in the big size so I can not post it here. This image has the size of 10600x2521 pixels and is made from 8 images. Once I have made this image, it is very awful when I zoom in and see the small details of houses, windows and trees. I have used the amateur camera Fujifilm F10 to do this. I also used two softwares to stitch these 8 images together: Autopano for stitching and Emblend for blending images. These softwares are very useful, interesting and easy to use. If you guys want to use them, please contact me.

Keiichi Tanaami

Keiichi Tanaami is a Japanese artist who was working for a long time in many experimental fields of art, video and graphic design. He studied in the University of Art named Musashino. Although his works have a very wide range but he focuses so much on graphic design. His designs seem to be influenced by art and impressionism which make uses of visual elements to evoke the meaning and make viewers pay attention. He creates his own style with vivid colors and his special elements such as food, fruit, goldfish, curves, shapes... These elements make the illustration look like traditional Japanese painting. This style can be seen through the potrait of himself. In this he has used fruits to make his face:

Below are some poster made by Keiichi:


Keiichi also design for T-shirt, shoes and statue:



As I have said above, Keiichi Tanaami is an experimental artist so he always does new things. Therefore, his work and style have opened a new trend and notion of graphic design in which all elements can be combined into the composition.
Links:
http://www.kingofmountain.info/rolling_60s/index.htm
http://www.dnp.co.jp/gallery/ggg/gki/g241/g241ki_e.html

Orchid exercise

Below are two orchid cards I have created.
The first piece I choose pink as the color theme because orchidarium is a florish shop. I am also inspired by perfume ads. Although the texts are in white but I think they are clear enough for viewers to read. The manager's name is in the white space so I hope it will make attention.

The second card I used small images to make a different. I think the combination between flowers and letters will be good because it refers to the florish shop. I also put 4 flowers in 4 corners to make a frame. The texts are just left and center aligned, no special ideas.

Pixel art

If you often work with Photoshop you should know about this kind of art because it can create really amazing images. Pixel art, as its name evokes, is an elaborated art which deals with pixel level. It means that you have to carefully work with each pixel of the image to make a complete image. These images look like cartoon or comic and you probably see such these images before. Below is some examples of this:



http://linuxart.com/dir/stuff/misc/

http://isopixel.net/images/

http://www.justinziarko.co.uk/graphics/pixel/
This pixel work is absolutely time-consuming and you have to be patient to make the whole image beautiful. In addition, you have to create your own resource of textures, such as wall, grass, wood,... to enrich your image. In order to save time, you also have to own many samples of objects which can be used many times in many different works such as human, trees, tables, chairs, houses, birds... It means that you can place the same objects in a single layout without being noticed by viewers because there are so many details. Below are examples of the process of creating a pixel work, begin with a sketch, then colored:

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Zen Garden: the garden of CSS

CSS is an important part in web programming. It is like the instruction to build a house which represents a webpage. However, new web developers are often getting confused when working with CSS. I am also one of them. At first I think CSS is a bunch of problematic code and it can be used to create any beautiful things except fonts, color... But now with the Zen Garden, I have seen the wonderful things I can do with CSS.



This website is a collection of beautiful layouts and themes made by CSS. Especially, you can see the visual presentations of them by click on the theme you want to apply it to the webpage

These themes are made by Rose Thorogood, Carl Desmond and Timo Virtanen
The website's mission is to help graphic and web designers to learn and apply CSS into their work. Although only professional designers can join and create the theme in this website, we can also gain benefit from reading their code. The website allows us to download the html and CSS files.

You can visit Zen Garden at this link:
http://www.csszengarden.com/

Design Life Now

The popular event in design, the "National Design Triennial 2006" has been celebrated last year. This event happens every 3 years and has different names each time. In 2000, it was Design Culture Now, in 2003 it was Inside Design Now and in 2006 it was Design Life Now


The event includes many exhibitions which present the trends today. It also has the participation of many famous designers in many fields of design, for example Chip Kidd in book cover design, Joshua David in Graphic designs, Rick Valicenti, AIGA, Nicholas Blechmann, Tom Leader, Ron Gilad... You can visit the official website of this event:

www.peoplesdesignaward.org/designlifenow
Here you can also find the interesting interviews with some famous designers about their creative process which I think it is an important experience for us.
I also want to talk a little bit about design in Vietnam. The development of Vietnam's economy has lead to the strong development of advertising and design. The young people today has considered design as one of "hot" carreers. However, I think that the awareness of people about contemporary art and design is very little. Last year, I had chance to attend the Saigon Open City and almost people there are artists of designers and very few normal people . Recently, the Albb reading room and the publication of A.Art Magazines also suffer the same things. It is about art. Design also in the same situation. So what I want to say is that we need events like Design Life Now to raise the awareness of people and flatter famous designers as well as create opportunities for designers to exchange experience with others.

References:
http://ndm.si.edu/EXHIBITIONS/triennial/design_life_now.asp

My flash

This is the first flash game which I have tried to create . I took me a lot of time to do as I lack action script skills. However it is still uncomplete :-) So there is only one level to play. The objective of the game is that you are the murderer who use a rifle to kill the VIP. You have to avoid being noticed by the VIP's guardians. So you control the rifle scope to shoot the VIP and avoid the green vision of guardians. If you shoot at the green vision, it will turn into red and bigger. If you shoot the red vision again, you will be noticed and failed.

Current_ TV

Most of television channels today is a generation of one-way television. It means that all programs are made by the producers and audiences can not participate the process of making television program. However, the new generation of TV program has opened: two-way television.
At present, the domination of Internet and its capability to control the flow of information has emphasized the role of audiences not only in viewing and sharing information but also in creating information content. Youtube, blogs are some examples of the power of Internet users. Now this power is also brought to the traditional information mean-television, the field which is only created, affected and controlled by goverment, politics, businesses,organizations and companies. This is achieved through the new TV channel called "Current_ TV". This channel has about one third of its programs being made by audiences. All people over the world are now really able to create their own video clips, documentation films about any things which can carry a meaning message or can bring the hottest news about wars, disasters,...

This channel, owned by AlGore, the former vice president of U.S, is inspired by a program in MTV named UNfiltered which use cameras to capture the stories of viewers. Now this channel makes a further step when allowing audiences to create the content of TV program. In my opinion, it is really amazing and they are all thanks to the power of the Internet sharing information community.
The new era of information in which every person becomes the owner of information content has begun. Let's go and find something to share:
www.current.tv

Sun&Moon And Gestalt exercise

Below are my group's sketch of the Sun and the Moon illustration, the graphic illustration of them I have made by Illustrator by myself and the application of Gestalt concepts in texts and Images layout.

This is my group's sketch of the Sun and the Moon. This idea is the best of all three ideas of three members of my group. This came from the spirit of the angel in heaven and the satan in the hell. They are two different worlds which never meet together. The sun and the moon are the same. We also make a conventional choice which the sun is the angel because of its shine and the moon is the satan because of its mystery looking.

and this is my work in Illustrator. I have followed closely to the sketch. I also added some text and a background image to make the illustration more interesting. The background is a picture from the movie "Blade Runner".

and finally it is my Gestalt exercise . Here I have applied some Gestalt concepts. First I used closure. I used the mask to make images become the shape of the eyes. I also used align to make the text to be straight with the side of images. Finally, I have chosen the image of the yellow flower to be the center image to make the radial balance. I want to make viewer to focus on this image immediately when they see this picture.

The brain of mouse!

Have you ever had troubles while trying to come up with some ideas for your designs? I think the answer is Yes because it is the creative process of designers. Brainstorming ideas will be the ultimate solution for this problem. However, even a professional designer also meets difficulty to find a starting point or how to connect ideas or how to give them some meanings. Now this difficulty is solved by an amazing tool called "Mouse Brain". It is actually used for advertising but you can also make use of it to find ideas. You can find it at http://www.kennieting.com/mousebrains/

The program will ask you information about your product, what it is used for, what your customers are and how people like or hate it. After you click get Start, the program will generate a lot of sentences which contains the words you have typed. These sentences often have some meaning so you can sometimes be surprised and interested when reading a funny sentence about your product! Ok, let's try it.

The sun and moon exercise

As Mrs Madeleine has told us, I carry out the research on the Internet about Sun and Moon symbols. In my opion and my research, I come up with a conclusion that these symbols most appear in religion and art. In Design, they do not show up frequently. There are many and many great illustrations of the Sun and the Moon and they limit, in some aspects, my creative thought because I am affected by them. However, this is an important process in design so I have to get used to this. The Soon and the Moon do not appear so much in design so I want to deeply search about it. Here are some pieces I found:


www.pacapages.com
www.logo_design99.com

www.dma.fi.upm.es

www.designnotes.com

The first two pieces are made from simple shapes with bright and young colors. They both look professional and make us comfortable. The third is a very fine texture which makes use of the sun structure and shape. The last is a design of a student. The teacher has gave it a good comment about its strange radial balance.
And below are some moon designs:


www.purplemoon.com



www.burstein_design.com

www.flikr.com
The first piece is a design for a woman jewelry, it has beautiful and elegant texture. The second is a kind of lamp in the shape of the moon. The last is a design for a T-shirt.

Pan your camera

I like photography but for some reasons I can not take a full course of photography. Instead, I try to learn by myself. So I want to share with you a interesting technique in photography called "panning".
When you see a moving object, for instance, a dog running on grass and you want to take a picture of it. If you take a normal picture, the background is as clear as your dog and the whole image look good but not impressive. Panning is a trick to make the background blurring but keep your moving object still clear enough to become the center of the image. With this trick, your image will become dynamic and lively.
Firstly you have to set up your camera like that: low ISO for slow speed and little noise, small aperture to get a widest depth of field and a shutter speed number according to this aperture. The shutter speed should not be fast because it will make the background clear, so you need a slower shutter speed, for instance 1/80s is good.

You don't need the tripod to do this. You should only hold your camera by hands. Firstly, you adjust the focus point on the place the object will move to. Then you hold the button to take the focus and waiting for your object. When it moves to your place, you move a little bit following your object and take a picture very fast. You can try many times to get a good image so be patient.

This is an example of this technique taken by David Kaspar, he also teachs some other photography techniques which you can learn: (blog.davidkaspar.com)

I hope we will share photography and other experiences with each other because this is the best way to learn

Mixing and Matching

Well I am in COSC2284 course in the third semester! I hope I will get good result in this course. Now I would like to tell you about an useful technique in advertising design: Mixing and Matching. This is not an new technique. Many advertisment has used it as its main strategy. Now I will explain it to you.
As the meaning of its name, this technique uses objects, shapes,colors and other visual elements and match them together in some ways to create the meaningful context. The result always make viewers surprise and interested. These initial feelings will help the product's images to go into customer's head and make them remember the brandname. I particularly like these kinds of advertising because it often doesn't use so many words to introduce the product. Below are some examples:



The first piece is the advertisment of a noodle product, the second is an ads of BMW car and the last is about a beauty salon where you can come to correct your nose!!! This technique requires the designer to observe everything very carefully and find the connection between unrelated things. You don't need high technologies or special skills to do that, it is the most amazing thing. For example in the advertising of pizza above, you only need two images and a robe to make a very interesting and sufficient ads.
So now begin to observe everything and find the connection.
References:
http://ad.splinder.com