The Wise Design Blog

Just a bit of a random illustration for this week’s topic on Illustration Friday, ‘Contained’.

This is my first post for Illustration Friday. The topic is ‘Resolve’. Much like many before him, this panda has resolved to diet in 2009 and much like many before him - he’s not happy about it!

This post might not be for everybody but the popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices is undeniable. Therefore, I would hope that enough readers find this list of Apps useful as a graphic designer or anyone else in the creative industry for that matter.

Oblique Strategies - Free
This is an inspiring application that is based on a deck of cards that was created in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each card contains a phrase or remark to help in creative situations when you are stuck and need an escape by drawing on a card and following its advise blindly. The cards are now in its fifth edition.

Color Expert - $12.99
This is an interactive colour wheel and swatch library that helps designers to identify, translate, capture and showcase colour. The colour wheel features multiple colour schemes and palettes and you can also search through PANTONE, Web Safe colours and HTML colours.

ColorTilt - $1.19
This is more of a fun, creative App than anything else. It is a virtual finger painting application with the ability to change brush size and opacity. It could be used to create a quick colourful sketch of an idea that popped into your head while you’re riding the train maybe?

Palettes - $8.99 (Lite version is available for free)
Palettes allows you to make and maintain colour palettes useful for creating colour schemes. You can grab colours from a photo, website or add colours yourself. You can also import/export colour palettes from/to Photoshop, Illustrator, via email, GIMP, Paintshop Pro and OS X Color Chooser. You can also import colour palettes from colourlovers.com

Air Sharing - $5.99
This is used to mount your iPhone or iPod touch as a wireless drive on your Mac or PC. You can then drag and drop files between your device and computer.

ZeptoPad 2.0 - $12.99 (Lite version available for free)
Zeptopad is used as a note taking and portable whiteboard application. It is great for creatives as a mind-mapping tool.

Fontshuffle - Free
This is a great source of typography inspiration. There are hundreds of font families sorted in categories by visual similarity into a visual family tree. You can browse through similar font styles using visual criteria. A great application for any typographer or designer.

Cliqcliq Colors - $3.99
This app allows you to discover, convert and manage colours. It is recommended for designers working with CSS, HTML, Flex, Flash and other media related technologies. You can save favourite colours and concert between RGB, HSB and Grayscale. Camera integration and the option to email palettes are also useful features of this app.

CameraBag - $3.99
This App is used to edit photos using classic camera and film simulations. Some examples of styles offered are ‘Instant’ for a Polaroid style snap, ‘1974′ for a faded and tinted effect, ‘1962′ for a dynamic black and white photojournalist look and many more. You can also add layered effects by loading a saved photo with an effect already applied and adding another. This is a funky App that can be used for a bit of fun and show off your creative side all from your iPhone/iPod touch!

I’d love to hear anyone else’s Apps that they find useful or enjoyable. Not necessarily design related. I can never have too many tools on my iPhone!

Since uni has finished I’ve found the time to finally get the blog back into action with a post dedicated to typography. Recently, I’ve been intrigued to learn more about typography in design. Being heavily into illustration, typography has always been a mild interest of mine but it has only been up until recently that I’ve truly appreciated the essence of typography as a paramount element of design. Since my interest in typography has picked up I’ve been looking into some examples and I thought I’d take the opportunity to share them with you here, name dropping 10 amazing typographers that I’ve come across as I explore this admirable medium of typography.

1. Daniel Gordon’s Smoke + Type Studies, 2007

2.  Alex Trochut

3. Gunawan Alifianto aka ‘Alfone’

4. Craig Ward

5. D0rn (Deviant Art member)

6. Go Media - design studio

7. Pablo Alfieri

8. Pete Harrison

9. Si Scott

And to finish off on a festive note, of course…

10. David Arias

I believe there’s some great talent in this list and I’m looking forward to being inspired with more great pieces as I continue exploring typography. Feel free to comment and suggest some other typographers out there that you believe have some quality works.

Hi and welcome to the first post of The Wise Design Blog!

To begin with, I thought a great way to introduce myself and the blog to the people of the Internet is to give anyone interested an understanding of part of my own design processes. This will not only give you a better understanding of who I am but of how I work.

Now as some of you may be aware, I’m a university student currently in my fourth and final year completing a Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication) degree at the University of Western Sydney. For one of my units, called Communication Design Major Project, I am working on a major project (funny that..) to be showcased at the Graduation Show later this year. This project is meant to be a yearlong project with research taking place in the first semester and creating and fun stuff in the second semester and until recently I was working on an animation project but I had a change of heart and turned my focus onto print design. My project is now a print based project so I’ve got a bit of catching up to do. It is a booklet telling the story of 4 characters and is set in a fantasy world of orcs, wizards, sorcerers etc (yep, I’m a video game geek and yep, I MIGHT have dabbled in a little World of Warcraft in my time…). Well, in this post I’m going to show you my processes into making one of the pages of my booklet that is of one my characters, Zaah the Orc.

The Process

1. Do my research and get inspired.
   By visual researching, I usually get inspired by what I’m researching and this was definitely the case here. Since I was illustrating an orc, I wanted to to research how others have designed their orcs. I looked into a book I own - How to draw wizards, warriors, orcs and elves by Steve Beaumont (man, I’m starting to sound like a real geek to you people already aren’t I?) I looked online of course into various sites but I’ve got to say that DeviantArt was a great inspiration. By looking into how other people have illustrated their orcs, I got a great sense into the typical characteristics of an orc like big teeth gaping out of their mouths and usually green, blue or brown skin..Not the most attractive guys going around.
2. Sketch up the orc
   Once I had a great idea of what an orc looks like, I did my own rough sketch of one. Since my scanner isn’t hooked up to my computer at the moment, I drew straight into Photoshop using my Wacom tablet and here is the result…
   
3. Import sketch into Illustrator and do my thing
   Since the visual style of my booklet is vector characters incorporated into more realistic backgrounds/environments, the next step was to vectorise the orc. I imported him into Illustrator and started off with the basic shapes such as his head and made different layers for his hair and facial features and a separate layer again for the details such as highlights and shadows. To make shadows for his face and neck, I simply picked a slightly darker shade of his green skin and applied different opacities to create the effect of depth in certain areas. I also used gradients with a few shadow areas (one example can be found in the hair) to blend the darker shade back into the original colour. Here is the result…
   
4. Creating environment in Photoshop
   I opened up a new Photoshop document to the dimensions of what the page will be in the booklet. I already had an idea of what I wanted the background behind the orc to look like. Since, the page is going to be pretty much a dominant image of the orc’s head, I simply wanted a dark sky type environment behind him and nothing too fancy to detract from the orc. To do this, I unlocked the default white background layer and gave it a gradient overlay in the blending options. The gradient overlay consisted of a medium blue, dark blue and black and is radial and scaled to 150%. The next step was to create a cloud type effect. There’s many ways to do this as I’m sure many of you know, however, I went with creating a new layer, filling it with white, making sure I have white/black in the foreground/background colour options and applying Filter > Render > Clouds and then Filter > Render > Difference Clouds several times. I then set the cloud layer to overlay and lowered the opacity to only 10% for a subtle effect.
   I imported the orc vector image by copying all of him in Illustrator and pasting him as a SMART VECTOR OBJECT in Photoshop. For those that don’t know, pasting as a Smart Vector Object allows you to later edit your vector by simply double clicking on the thumbnail of the layer in the Layers window, this will open up the vector object in Illustrator and you can make and then save any changes you need to and those changes will be applied to that same vector object you opened from Photoshop.
   Once I had my orc sitting in Photoshop, I needed to blend him into the environment a bit so he didn’t seem so out of place. There’s probably other ways of doing this but my lazy method is to select the outline of the vector image, make a new layer, pick a colour from the background and fill the selection in with this colour. I then get the Eraser tool and using a soft round brush with a big diameter, I erase most of the fill leaving most of the edges. This creates a light reflecting effect as if the orc is actually in that environment so the dark blue sky is subtly reflecting around him. The big soft brush used with the Eraser tool, leaves a feathered effected and softens the reflection. Here is my final result so far..
   

Thanks for reading and if anyone has any suggestions on ways to improve this image, I’m listening! This project is pretty important to me so if there’s ways that I can make it better (that are in my capabilities) then I’m keen to give it a try!

Holly.