Inspiration

Melanie D is one of StockLogos's best selling designers. Here is a selection of her work for your inspiration.

Glossom seems to have hit on the right blend of providing inspiration and the opportunity for self-promotion. The appeal of it is the ability to create a portfolio of images or videos in such categories as Photography, Illustrations, Graphics&Design, Fashion and Arts, which is displayed in a visual wall composed of thumbnails. You can simply browse these collections of thumbnails or check out the curated selections that site staff create for the various categories, all available for viewing either on the site or via a just-launched iPhone and iPad app.

British freelance filmmaker, cinematographer and editor Danny Cooke recently created a short film about letterpress printing, shot with a digital SLR video camera. One can only hope that the dedication to craftmanship so evident in the work of the small letterpress workshop featured in the film will always be with us.

Christmas Cards have pretty much vanished but New Year's resolutions seem to be going strong. .NET magazine has come up with its list of 10 that are geared to web designers but hold true for just about any design-related profession. Case in point — 3. Stop trying to save bad work. Ouch.

With the exception of its name, which apparently is a Spanish word related to the root of the word "average." Dan Sayers' choice of this for his new font makes sense, given that the font is derived, through somewhat tricky manipulations, by averaging the character outlines from all 725 fonts on his computer. You'd think the result of this would be a horrendous muddle but to most eyes Avería in fact can provide a pleasing effect (okay, the lowercase m is a bit dodgy, I'll admit).

Sayers followed up his first effort by generating Regular, Bold and Light variants with Italics, followed by a serif family and a web font, which will soon be available from the Google Web Fonts directory. Dubious? You can try it out for yourself, since Avería has been released using the SIL Open Font License.

Adapted from POP: How Graphic Design Shapes Popular Culture (Allworth Press)

By Steven Heller, Tom Brokaw

Since graphic design is not a licensed profession, we can call ourselves anything we want, with the exception of maybe doctor or monsignor (although Monsignor Dr. Heller has a nice ring). Likewise, anyone else can claim the graphic designer mantle (or “graphics designer,” which is the dead-give-away that you’re not a graphic designer), without an iota of schooling, simply because they made a letterhead, newsletter, or Web site on their home computer. So, if our nomenclature is this fungible then it stands to reason our bona fides are in question too, at least in the eyes of the outsider looking in and even the insider looking out. A designer by any other name may still be a designer, yet make no mistake, what we call ourselves is key to our professional health and well-being. As professionals we are hired to be clarifiers, organizers, and even namers for our clients. So, if we don’t know what to call us, who does?

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Adapted from Smashing Logo Design: The Art of Creating Visual Identities (Wiley)

By Gareth Hardy

A creative design brief is a joint agreement between the designer and the client on the specifications that will lead to a successful solution. Many people think that the client provides the design brief, and the designer follows it. In a sense, the client does provide the brief, through the information that you gain from them, but the client shouldn’t write the brief without your input (besides, they probably don’t know how). You’re the one who will be using the brief, so you need to make sure that it’s written clearly and that there’s no room for confusion.

In what follows, I outline all the basic elements of a creative design brief. Your brief may have more information than I’ve listed here, but it should at least include these pieces.

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Adapted from Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design (New Riders)

By Maggie Macnab

Anthropologists don’t know exactly how human beings originally came to make meaning through art, but at some point in prehistory our ancestors had the brilliant idea that a two-dimensional mark could conceptually represent a three-dimensional object without the necessity of its presence. This led to imagining events that hadn’t yet occurred by projecting a range of possibilities into the future. It was a crucial step to use nonlinear time as a key component of conceptual thought and symbolize ideas, things, or future scenarios. A circle could be the sun or a cycle; a spiral could express life in the form of a persistent plant tendril or be a series of connected, transitioning seasons that occur year after year. The highly simplified and abstracted nature of the symbol is exactly why its meaning is relatively stable anywhere and anytime. The power of a symbol is elegance at its most supreme. The human ability to make the intellectual connection between a two-dimensional mark on a surface and a three-dimensional object in reality—or in the imagination—changed everything. Design is based precisely on this ability. You must weave elements, structures, and imaginative ideas into the fundamental basis of the message you want to express in a way that at a minimum makes sense to most people, and at best inspires involvement or action.

Variable star V838 Monocerotis (Greek for “unicorn”), a nova-like variable star, and its unusual surrounding “light echo” lies near the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy about 20,000 light-years from the sun (left). Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI). An alchemical engraving of an ouroboros devouring its own tail from an engraving by Lucas Jennis in De Lapide Philosophico. Published 1635 CE (right). Source: Wikipedia, Ouroboros.

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