Ivan's blog

Many readers suggested to set up a CreativeBits Forum. Hope you will like it and find it useful. Registration takes only few seconds and you don't even need to activate it through your email, you get instant access for all the features.

Here is my 9 step process that I developed for myself.

1. Brief
First I skip through the brief. Then I read it again properly.

2. Research
Usually I just check out what the competition is doing to make sure I'm not doing the same, etc.

3. Brainstorming
You need to prepare for this one. Take a piece of paper, write the name of the project and the main objective on the top of the page. Divide the page into 9 sections with 2 horizontal and 2 vertical lines to make 9 sections. Make 4 copies.

Check out cidoc.net - a new magazine about corporate identity documentation, corporate design manuals and styleguides. It has just started and they promise to have a lot of content soon! Give them encouragament.

Here is a related post about logos.

You probably read about Steve's recent operation that is reported to be successful.

You can wish Steve Jobs well after his cancer surgery here or by sending a mail to him to this address.

I'd like to recommend one great image cataloging software for heavy professional use but I can't. Each of the four softwares has it's strength and weaknesses.

iPhoto
This one is a great little app to download and organize your digital photos, but it won't be able to make much sense of your vector files.
$49 as part of the iLife package

I'm sure you heard about the Folding@home, here is a snippet from Team Mac OS X, which is the fastest Mac team:

When you see a male model with a perfect six pack, although you know he was only posing for five seconds for that picture, but he had to stick to a strict diet, he had to run in the morning and do weight training in the afternoon for month, if not years.

Same goes for you as a creative professional. You only need to shine for five seconds a day to come up with a great idea, but that takes hard work from you outside of the working hours. You need to nurture your creativity.

I like all Benetton advertising and I particularly like the famous Got Milk? campaign. But my favorite is the PETA campaign with the models posing nude, and it's not because they are nude. It's because nudity is used widely for so many ads, but without any connection to the product, just to sell through sex.

I'd like to congratulate the winners of the The 2004 Adobe Design Achievement Awards. For me the most interesting was the work of the print category first place winner G. Dan Covert from the California College of the Arts. He was looking for the reasons why our profession, Graphic Design is not appreciated.

By using OS X, that is based on Unix you're already part of the cool crowd. However, if you want to be a real geek designer, you need to be able to manipulate your images from the Terminal. Just learn this and watch the trainees eat from the palm of your hand.