Prescription Takes

Via the Typograp.her newsletter I discovered an amazing collection of type catalogs from American Type Founders. I love looking at old type catalogs, but I had never looked at one for lead type before and was struck by how all the things that we now do in Illustrator (and when I started my career, shot on a stat camera) were made in lead or brass and locked up with lead type for printing. As I was looking through the catalog from 1897, I ran across what they called Recipe Marks. It was the familiar ℞ from pharmacy signs, but why were they calling them Recipe Marks? It turns out recipe means take, or to take in latin. The symbol we now call a Prescription Take is used to say, “I want the patient to take the following....”

(The next page was full of nautical signal flags which seems awfully niche for a mass produced product even for 1897.)

Anyway, to read more about how the Prescription Take is used, head on over to the Wikipedia page on Prescriptions.

Blackletter for the Present

I subscribe to Robin Rendle’s newsletter all about typefaces and fonts (and you should too) and this week he was talking about blackletter type that has been rethought to work for modern readers. The whole newsletter is great, but what caught my eye and seemed worth sharing here was the product page for the typeface Elfreth over at JTD Type. The research and choices they made as they were designing Elfreth to make sure it feels contemporary rather than a throwback to traditional blackletter type are really interesting, and it is fun to see their research and inspiration.

What Brands Get Wrong About Logos

William Golden's CBS Logo

On the 16th of November, 1951, the CBS eye pictograph first appeared as an on air logo. A year later William Golden, then the CBS art director suggested to CBS president Frank Stanton that they try out some other logo ideas. Stanton reminded Golden of the advertising adage, “Just when you are beginning to get bored by what you have done is probably the time it is beginning to be noticed by your audience.” The CBS eye stayed.

When I was at the Seattle design firm Team Design (which later became Methodologie, then merged with Digital Kitchen,) we had an in-house branding specialist during the “empty container name” period of the mid 90’s. He drummed home over and over again that what a logo looks like is not the important part. (Needless to say, visual designers hate hearing that.) What is important about a logo is that it is applied consistently and with strict guidelines. A visually powerful logo that is applied haphazardly will always lose out to a mediocre logo that follows rock-solid, rigorously adhered to brand guidelines.

I thought of both of those stories last week as Slack rolled out its logo mark redesign. I’m not going to comment much on what it looks like since I wasn’t in all the client meetings and critique sessions and I have no idea what their creative brief looked like. I’m sure the team did a great job within the constraints they were handed. I do think the new mark is much stronger when paired with its new logotype (and by comparison, the old mark is weaker with its logotype) than when it is on its own, which brings me to a general critique of tech logos. On a spectrum of consumer recognition and market penetration, Nike, Starbucks, and a few other giant international firms can get away with just using a mark. Billy Bob’s Muffler & Tire Hut can’t. Most tech firms are much closer to the Billy Bob’s end of the spectrum than they would like to think, and while sure, the app icon is going to use just the brand mark, you shouldn’t make that the way you represent your brand on other materials until you have a ton of market recognition.

And that is my biggest concern with the new Slack logo. There shouldn’t be a new Slack logo. Someone got bored, or a charismatic new hire who had the ear of the decision makers wanted to shake things up, and all the visual brand recognition they had built up got thrown away. It probably was time for a refresh of the brand guidelines. They have grown a lot over the last 6 years of their existence, of course a lot of inconsistent usage has crept in. Doubling down on clean, consistent usage, and maybe some tweaks and refinement to their old logo, would have helped their brand grow far more than a shiny new logo.

Don't Take My Kodachrome Away

copyright and all that stuff by yours truly

I’m often trying to impress on my students the importance of being a good photographer. Not in the sense of using a camera, but in terms of being really good at framing and composing with space and light. This is the point of all the art history classes we make them take too. Design starts with visual composition and directing the eye, and if you don’t really understand what Caravaggio was doing with light, how good are you ever really going to be at laying out a page, much less designing a poster? And of course, the more you understand the old masters, the better your photography will be. You are not just taking a picture; you are composing the frame, controlling (or revealing) the light, and most of all, guiding the eye.

A place where not thinking like a photographer really shows up is in 3D renderings. To be fair, just getting those first few renders to actually happen at all is a huge victory, but once you begin to assemble a portfolio, you can’t just render. You need to make beautiful images.

 The key is to realize that rendering are never used in their raw form in the professional world. They are always adjusted in After Effects, Photoshop, or some other compositing program. The first round of adjustments are pretty much what you would do to a photograph. Levels adjustments, color corrections, that sort of thing. Then, it is all about giving the rendering life and atmosphere; the organic sense of light and air that a camera captures (with the guiding eye of the photographer) but that the sterile world of 3D is missing until we add it in.

 The basics of this post production are captured in this tutorial by Nick Campbell over at Greyscalegorilla. He demos the technique in After Effects, but you use the same techniques for still images in Photoshop. In a more recent tutorial, he takes those basic techniques to the next level and throws in some color lookup tables. And finally, a tutorial by Konstantin Magnus on creating atmosphere in architectural renderings gives a full tool box of techniques for making renderings anything but sterile.

(Bonus: 6 methods for making vignettes in Photoshop)

“The Bear”

This advertisement won a Film Craft Grand Prix along with a bunch of other Lions at Cannes in 2012.
br /> I ran across it in the latest installment of “Best Ads Ever” on Adweek. Peter Nicholson who is profiled in this installment also picks the “The Bear & the Hare” which I featured here way back in 2013 (the timing of my writing this post is a fun coincidence since I taught the Frank Stanton quote featured in that post in class yesterday.)

Color Backgrounds

A sidebar from my upcoming book on portfolios for visual designers. This is from the section where I talk about the four main colors you can present your work on: Black, White, Grey, and Ivory.

Color backgrounds

A color background—or even a palette of colored backgrounds—could work in certain situations and for certain visual designers. This is both really hard to make successful and hard to maintain though, so it is not listed as one of the choices. Like all things in the visual arts, rules are made to be broken, but things tend to be rules because they are really hard to break well.

It Takes Practice Grasshopper

Jakub Rozalski

howling at the moon

Jakub Rozalski’s portfolio demonstrates one of the most important aspects of being a visual artist, and probably the most elusive aspect to teach. Its not color or form or subject matter or any particular hand skill. Those all have their own challenges when it comes to teaching, but they also have demonstrable solutions. And, to be fair, those feel hard enough most of the time, both for teachers and students. What Rozalski’s portfolio shows, on top of a huge amount of skill and talent, is quantity. He has put the time in to master his craft.

Even though the 10,000 hours of practice meme has been disputed and clarified (it's really about intentional practice rather than number of hours) it is still a useful and very true concept. You only get good by doing. For visual communication students, this means that they graduate with a solid set of entry level skills, and—probably important for their confidence as they begin their job search—very little idea how far they are from mastery. This is true even for the best portfolios presented by graduating seniors. There is always more to be learned and it can only be learned by doing.



When I teach a portfolio classes, a theme I return to again and again is that you need to prove you can create a certain sort of piece over and over again to solve different problems. If you want to be a packaging designer, you need to show a lot of packaging. UX folks aren't going to get a job without showing how they connected the experiences they create to their users in multiple types of jobs. Illustrators need to show that they can successfully solve visual problems in a consistent way. An illustration portfolio with one water color, one digital painting, one cartoon, one pen and ink piece, and so forth, isn't going to to be successful. They need show mastery of medium and problem solving. Mastery of multiple mediums runs a distant third if its important at all. A whole portfolio of digital paintings, in a consistent style, is way more powerful than showing a lot of one off pieces. You need to prove that the piece in your portfolio that is in the style your client wants wasn't a fluke. Potential clients want to see a whole portfolio in the style they want to hire you for.

On top of that, if you want to achieve mastery, you have to be in it for the long haul. Underneath all our efforts as educators and mentors as we focus our students’ efforts on skill building, problem solving, and audience driven work, is teaching sustainable practice. What is the process that will not only turn out quality work, but will adapt to work with other people and teams? How do you stay focused on the prize in a world where “entry level” means five years of experience and a bunch of shipped or published work?

“You get good by doing” sounds good, and everyone believes it, but students (and I suspect everyone trying to learn a new skill) struggle with how much of their lives need to be devoted to doing in order to reach their goals. This manifests in a lot of ways but the warning signs of not doing are like flares to those of us who teach. Not researching audience and competitors. Visual direction research that consists of a Pinterest board that is created and never looked at again. The grudging creation of the absolute minimum of thumbnails and preliminary sketches. Students see cutting these corners as good time management—they have a lot of other work to do. We know they are sabotaging the path their career will take as well as the ability to stay on that path until they are established.

Striving to master one thing doesn’t mean ignoring all the other things you could do. It is fun to play in different styles and that may be how you discover the next thing you want to master. But a portfolio that attracts clients shows big chunks of work in each area that you are strong. Look at Rozalski’s portfolio again. Do you have any doubt that he would be able to handle concept work for a military fantasy game or movie or book covers? Make sure your portfolio, no matter what you do, makes potential clients feel as confident in your mastery of your skills as his does for his clients.

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An Interview with Simon Stålenhag's

I love Simon Stålenhag's work and this is a great interview with him.

Simon Stålenhag Shows and Discusses his Fantastic New Sci-fi Paintings

Next Page " Step 1 Following our look at Simon Stålenhag's then-latest set of digital paintings, I got in touch with Simon to learn more about his art - and him as an artist - and between summer breaks I asked him about his influences, his approach to art and just what the hell is going on in his paintings.

Bear Hug Bakery—September Render 1

My first completed piece for September. I learned a lot about optimizing files for render with this one. I got the final render down from 2.5 hours a frame to only half an hour (with a lot of help from Tim Clapham's tutorial at Helloluxx) but the end result still had a flicker in the blurry reflections, so I see a stack of Mac minis in my future to create a render farm. Oh, and just fyi, you can buy a Bear Hug Bakery t-shirt at my t-shirt shop:

Bear Hug Bakery

Mmmm. Baked goods. ___ 100% jersey knit 6oz. fabric weight Pre-shrunk Seamless, double-need ⅞" collar Taped neck and shoulders Classic fit Your...

Title Cards

Very cool title cards, and they get better and better as the series goes on.

Community Post: All The Title Cards From "Batman: The Animated Series"

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