Graffiti is… what? “Graffiti is a creative art form.” “Graffiti is destructive vandalism.” “Graffiti is gang-related.” “Graffiti is about individual expression.” Which of these statements is true? The reality is one, some, all or none, depending on which particular graffiti you’re talking about. Yes, there’s a lot that’s just territory marking, but there’s also work…
Author: Keith Martin
Hanging in the (white) balance
White balance can make or break a shot, so take the time to understand its foibles When is white not white? That’s a trick question, by the way. I’m not about to try and prove that white is black, but this is a serious issue. What colour something is – or, more precisely, what colour…
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Airline safety card designs
A form of standardised international illustrated instruction? On a recent trip to Turkey I realised something: there’s one thing that you’ll find on every commercial airline flight you’ll ever take. No, not dodgy food (some flights don’t serve any, which can be a hidden blessing), I mean those airline safety instruction cards that are tucked…
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Digital sketch books – can they work?
Can the iPad really replace the designer’s traditional paper sketch book? If you’re a designer, the odds are high that you use a sketch book. If you don’t, you should. Sure, you can use your Mac to throw together all sorts of ideas, but there are two important reasons why Illustrator, Photoshop and whichever DTP…
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Design a new character for a typeface
Designing the character behind the face. Of all the design discipline specialities, typeface design is probably the most monastic. Creating a new font takes skill, serious attention to detail, and a perseverance that a medieval monk would respect. Not only do you have to consider the aesthetics of stroke weight, overall form, and the effect…
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Art Therapy for design block: The CD Cover game
A creative challenge for you… What do you do if you find yourself staring at an empty page, unable to get your creative juices flowing? Design block is no fun, and it happens to all of us on occasion. Fortunately, one of the best ways to shake people out of a creative slump involves a…
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Freelancing and internships
Negotiating the minefield of how much to charge and judging the morals of working for nothing. This is the time of year when new graduates are waking up to the fact that they’ve finished their courses and are starting to get worried about that big question: what do I do now? You have your portfolio…
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Paper facts and recipes for discerning designers
Get hands-on with paper Graphic design processes are almost always about putting marks on surfaces, and those surfaces are almost always paper. We take this medium for granted, but do we really know much about it? We talk about ‘dead tree publishing’, reject the paperless office concept by consuming tons of the stuff, recycle it…
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With resolution, size does matter
When I teach I constantly have to remind myself that things that seem simple because I learned them years ago weren’t always easy to grasp the first time around. Image resolution is a bit case in point; understanding the relationship between a bitmap image’s resolution, pixel dimensions and printed size is simple once you know…
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Cover design challenges in the digital world
Is it possible to design sophisticated magazine covers that communicate and sell in the virtual newsstand when all we can show are low-resolution thumbnails? “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” We all know the saying, but do we pay any attention? Of course not. And that’s why we also say that first impressions matter….
