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"

This post was created by a user and has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can post awesome lists and creations. Learn more or post your buzz!

Chrystal Goo

Chrystal Goo from Troy Johnson on Vimeo.

Normally I wouldn't post work that is a direct pick-up from a tutorial, but I was proud of this one since the tutorial was fast and complex and I was able to follow along in real time with just a few pauses to make esthetic decisions. The tutorial is over at Greyscalegorilla.

Motion Capture

Motion capture has gotten amazing. Gorgeous work by Method Design.

2016 AICP Sponsor Reel - Dir Cut

The Beauty of the Sun

Nothing I could say can compare with the beauty of these shots from the NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory.

Still from the NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory

Modernism vs. Hyperbole

It isn’t a mystery to anyone who has had my History of Graphic Design class that my biggest design influence is the Modernists. One of the facets of modernism that I am really drawn to is the feeling of inevitability in the solutions. Part of the inevitability of those solutions is that the text and the images not only work together, but that the text itself is straight forward and descriptive. The work is presented, “...through objective and impersonal presentation, communicating to the audience without the interference of the designer’s subjective feelings or propagandistic techniques of persuasion.¹”

What made me think of this is that I ran across a page of really silly images called, “If you add drunk people to fitness quotes.” Depending on your sense of humor, the images are incredibly funny, or generally horrifying, but what I thought was that the fact that they could be made at all represents a huge design failure for the fitness companies who are being parodied. Hyperbole, emotional pleas, motivational phrases, and even mission statements are, at their core, manipulative and not tied to specific images or content. They are generic, unmemorable, and ripe for parody. And they are bad design.

Words that are objective, audience focused, and free of hyperbole are inseparable from their context and that is the lasting power of modernist design.

¹Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. “Chapter 18: The International Typographic Style.” In Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. 5th ed. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

Being Who You Really Are

This is all awfully uplifting for a Monday morning, but since I managed to run across the same theme in a couple different places, I thought I would go ahead and share.

First off, I read an essay on a biography of E.E. Cummings on Brain Pickings, with the wonderful pull quote:

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

If you don't read Brain Pickings, you really should. Maria Popova runs the site and she consistently finds work and words that make you think.

http://www.casselliot.com/index.htm 

Then, not fifteen minutes later, Slacker Radio rotates in Mama Cass singing Make Your Own Kind of Music.



Mama Cass Elliot - Make Your Own Kind Of Music by Far_q


So,  go out and be you this week. Even on Monday.

The Importance of Capturing Movement in Design

Tony Zhou from Every Frame a Painting has a great post on how Akira Kurosawa used movement as a tool for story telling.


I think the idea of using movement to tell a story is one of the hardest to convey to graphic design students. Part of the problem of course is that so much of what we do as designers doesn't really move, but knowing where the elements on the page were before they got there, and where they are going when you look away, is key to creating tension and movement on a page or interface screen.

Another great video essay by Zhou is on the use of the Quadrant System.


More of Zhou's work can be found at his youtube page, and you can support his work and get extra commentary on his Patreon page.

Dance of the Quadcopters

An amazing interactive performance piece using quadcopters. Who needs CGI when you have Cirque du Soleil on your side?

Seven Seconds to Attack

William Morris: The Wood Beyond the World
Photo by Naoko Takano 

A couple links I kept from last week, both from the always thoughtful and readable Craig Mod.

The first is a great article on how online reviews could be made better, particularly on Amazon. What really struck me though was reading it on the same day that Apple announced their new products. Social media, and especially Twitter, were filled with snark and bile, almost all of it completely content free. Just hate for the joy of being a hater.

The reason we are upset by Amazon trolls is that their actions truly damage — both psychologically and economically. And yet these damaging acts themselves are devoid of rigor: Seven seconds to attack that which took 700 days to produce. 

With little effort the attackers attach their bile to something greater than that of which they are capable. This dissonance — venom effortlessly and thoughtlessly spat upon the diligence or precision of a work of art — is from where the tension is born. It’s what enrages us. Especially those of us who create. And so, the factor dividing the “good” reviews from the “bad” is very often, simply, the presence of rigor. Of being thoughtful.

Emphasis mine. The thing that struck me on Twitter, and made me stay away for the rest of the day, is that many of the people gleefully spewing bile, especially in light of their occupations and skill sets, could have made thoughtful contributions and critiques. But they didn't. Sneering for social points has come to take the place of talking about craft.

Which leads me to the next article. Lets Talk About Margins.

Thoughtful decisions concerned with details marginal or marginalized conspire to affect greatness. 

The whole article is a wonderful meditation on having craft matter. Matter a lot. Something I repeat over and over again as I am teaching, is that “The front of a label or piece of packaging will get you an interview. The back will get you the job.” Every mark we make effects every other mark (though, sometimes, the marks we don't make matter the most) and each requires our full attention. Everything, even the bar code (maybe even especially the bar code) and ingredients list, deserve the full attention of our craft.

One of the first lessons I truly absorbed at Methodologie (then TeamDesign) was about the importance of detail, and it came from a conversation about page numbers. The senior designer I was assigned to, Paula Richards, was putting what seemed to me in my inexperience, a huge amount of time into figuring out where the page numbers should go on an annual report. She walked me through the big considerations about where they should go, (the biggest being, don't put them under the readers thumb) and about making sure they were right there when you look for them, but not when you weren't, and then said what has stuck with me all these years. “Every element on the page should be polished like a jewel.”

What would our profession, and by profession I mean all of the disciplines that fall under the large umbrella of visual communications, be like if we all concentrated more on craftsmanship—on polishing each part of a page or screen or level or interaction or installation—than on polishing our snark to score points with our peers?

Why Blacksmiths are Better at Startups than You

Mastercrafts

A great post on Unicorn Free. Watching the transformation she talks about is what has kept me teaching all these years. Getting over yourself—and getting out of your own way—is the hardest lesson to teach (and learn.)

The Emotional Engineering of the Handspring Puppet Company.

"Puppets have to struggle to live."  A TED talk showing the amazing craftsmanship behind the horses in the stage play, Warhorse. I was amazed at how quickly I accepted the horse as real even though the whole discussion was about it being a puppet. Really gorgeous work and performances.