Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/TCM1z29T7tg/business-card-designs-5132829

In the design world, a business card acts as a mini creative resume. Your business card should leave people with a powerful impression of your identity as a design professional, the best business cards are a brilliant marketing tool that help showcase your unique style and help you stand out.

A standard business card based on one of the business card templates is a wasted opportunity to reflect a piece of your personality, and will leave you instantly forgettable to potential new clients.

If all this talk of new clients has reminded you that your portfolio is looking a little tired, don't fret as we've rounded up the best portfolio examples as inspiration for a refresh.

01. Iris Compiet

Artist and illustrator Iris Compiet has made something truly special for her business card design. Inside the simple envelope lies an intricate concertina booklet depicting examples of her vibrant illustrations. To literally give out a portfolio as a business card is a fantastic bit of PR and shows real attention to detail.

02. Lush

For the best results, spread seeds then add lush. Genius

This brilliant business card design by Struck Creative cleverly doubles as a seed pouch for lawn and property management company Lush. Not only does it provide all the relevant information in a clear and concise way, it hold precious cargo, meaning it's much less likely to be discarded. 

03. Gong Kantapon

Kantapon covered a poster of a woman in mini cards that passers-by could peel off

New York City-based illustrator Gong Kantapon went all out when it came to getting his business card noticed. Kantapon covered a poster of a woman in mini cards, that passers-by could peel off and take away. It got everyone's full attention by leaving people wondering just what would be revealed when the cards were removed.

04. Lego business card

These Lego minifig business cards are customised to match their owner

Not only do the guys who work at Lego have a super-cool job, they also get these awesome Lego minifigure business cards. It's been reported that the company does its best to match each employee's features, even down to their hair and accessories. The individual's name, email and contact number are then printed on the figure's clothes. Best business card ever!

05. Bon Vivant

Ad agency JWT designed this awesome cheese grater business card design for Bon Vivant

We love this business card, which doubles as a tiny cheese grater, for Brazilian cheese store Bon Vivant. Created by ad agency JWT, the clever networking tool had proved extremely popular, with the owner having to tell customers to wait a few days before returning to take another. The awesome design also comes complete with a protective sleeve. All in all, a simply grate idea! (See what we did there? OK, we'll get our coats…)

06. Cotton business cards

These business cards have a hidden secret

These business cards from MOO may not look anything out of the ordinary, but they’re in fact made entirely out of offcuts from cotton T-shirts (the fabric left over once the pattern has been cut out). The company worked with Mohawk Fine Papers to reinvent one of the oldest methods of paper-making. 

The T-shirt offcuts are collected, turned into a pulp then dried and pressed into strong, flexible, naturally bright white paper, ready to be turned into premium business cards. Watch the video to see how it’s done.

07. Engraved

John T. Kim created this design by laser cutting and etching basswood

The clue is in the title of these 'Engraved' unique business cards by New York-based designer John T. Kim. Created by laser cutting and etching basswood, the woodgrain pattern makes every card truly unique. Engraved started life as a kickstarted project with a funding goal of $1,500. It ran for 30 days, and during that time garnered enough attention to raise nearly $24,000.

08. MODHair

This cool musical comb business card plays a rock theme

When its owner runs their fingernail along the teeth of this musical comb, it plays a classic rock theme. The innovative concept was developed by Amsterdam-based designer Fabio Milito for MODhair, a rock'n'roll hair salon in Rome. A brilliant way to encapsulate the brand's identity in a single card.

09. Bentply

This ingenious business card can be folded into a miniature armchair

What you see here is a neat letterpress business card and mailer for furniture shop Bentply in London that can be made into a mini plywood chair. The ingenious card was created by designer Richard C Evans and produced by Elegante Press in Lithuania. Just follow the instructions and the kiss-cut card can be folded into a miniature of the iconic 1934 plywood armchair designed by Gerald Summers.

10. Greek

A brilliant design by Draft FCB for Greek restaurant

OK, so these probably aren't the most practical business cards in the world, but the idea is pretty cool. Developed by Cape Town-based creative agency FCB, these creative cards were crafted for a Greek restaurant, and play on the traditional Greek custom of smashing plates. Made from broken pieces of pottery, the unique design is decorated simply with the restaurant's name and telephone number.

11. Yuka Suzuki

Hair and make-up artist Yuka Suzuki sells her creative skills with these brilliant business cards

The hair and make-up industry is a competitive one, so Yuka Suzuki decided to develop a business card that would make her stand out from the crowd. The clever design uses different coloured hair grips to create colourful hair styles, and the owner gets some free hair accessories to boot. Cool huh?

12. Choko La

Clients get two treats with this design; a delicious chocolate and a brilliantly creative business card

This candy wrapper business card is, unsurprisingly, a popular design. Another entry by ad agency FCB, this time to promote a range of delicious chocolates. This design incorporates two treats; a chocolate and a brilliantly creative business card. Genius.

13. Techkeys

This business card design certainly ticks the ‘innovative’ box

We've come across what might be the world's geekiest offering; it's a business card that also doubles up as a computer keyboard, created by Techkeys. "This PCB with on-board re-programmable ATMEGA16U2 allows for full flexibility for hackers, tinkerers, and makers," says the company. "Take home one of these as a project, keycap display, switch tester, or a shortcut to yours truly, TechKeys.us."

14. Martyna Wędzicka

A personal and handmade approach makes these business cards unique

Polish designer Martyna Wędzicka has created these gorgeous business cards to highlight her hands-on approach to projects and design in general. The clear canvas allows Wędzicka to add a personal touch with some brilliant doodle art.

15. Elfriede-Lilly Friedeberg

The letterpress business cards capture Friedeberg’s aesthetic

Elfriede-Lilly Friedeberg is a Berlin-based illustrator and graphic design student who creates inspiring, colourful and cute characters and patterns that are guaranteed to raise a smile. Packed full of pastel tones and handmade style, these brilliant business cards sum Friedeberg up perfectly.

16. Cerovski

London-based agency Bunch was responsible for the business cards

These business cards were created for Cerovski – a Croatian print production studio that revels in the challenge of “nebulous finishing, microscopic editions, absurd materials and crazy deadlines”. London design agency Bunch was responsible for developing its entire brand – which included a custom logotype and typeface – but it's the business cards that we've fallen in love with.

17. Doctor Zamenhof

These business card designs will make you drop your jaw in awe

Spain-based design studio Doctor Zamenhof aims to 'diagnose' design problems and prescribe remedies and solutions. Continuing this medical theme, the team has designed this rather brilliant set of business cards that mimic tongue depressors. The stick shape features all of the design studio's contact information and will certainly stand out from other business card offerings.

18. Vitor Bonates

Vitor Bonates combines work and play with these creative business cards

How cool is this personal buisness card for designer Vitor Bonates? A self-confessed lover of music and vinyl, Bonates based his card on classic vinyl records, replacing track name and details with his own and finishing off the design with a sleeve that holds the replica record. A simple but brilliant idea.

19. BDH Millwork

Leftover wood from BDH Millwork provides the material for its innovative business card

Canadian advertising studio WAX are the team behind these sophisticated buisness cards for cabinet-maker Brad Haniak of BDH Millwork. On a tiny budget, the WAX team came up with the idea of rubber-stamping Haniak's business card information onto pieces of leftover wood, available in abundance at his carpentry workshop.

20. Powell Peralta

We love the design and attention to detail in these skateboard business cards

We're a little in love with these miniature skateboard business cards for American skateboard company Powell-Peralta. The design follows true skateboard style, made of thin wood and featuring grip tape on one side surrounding a skull design. Created by the talented bunch over at Jukebox, all it needs now is a set of wheels!

21. Ritornell

This is one of the coolest business cards we've come across to date. As an integral part of its set list, Austrian duo Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private music boxes. Katharina Hölzl designed the very special business cards, with the aid of laser-assisted milling. They feature nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell's contact information applied to a long music box paper stripe.

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Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/web-design-agencies-are-you-using-these-life-saving-tools-resources/?utm_source=rss

This sponsored article was provided by our content partner, BAW Media. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Digital design technology is forever changing. Design trends come, and design trends go. Some design tools keep pace with the latest trends, and some don't.

An effective way to keep a competitive edge is to maintain an awareness of the best tools and resources. You need to know where you might be able to use them to your advantage.

There's a problem with that approach. It's that you'll find yourself having to sort among an embarrassment of riches. Not all tools and resources can qualify as being top-of-the-line of course. To find the best of the best can involve quite a bit of searching.

We've pulled together a nice little collection of top site, tools, apps, and resources. All of them are designed to make your work easier, and keep you up with the times. They can help you maintain that competitive edge.

Starting with:

The post Web Design Agencies: Are You Using These Life-saving Tools & Resources? appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/sitepoint-premium-new-releases-clojure-npm-gulp-django-more/?utm_source=rss

We’re working hard to keep you on the cutting edge of your field with SitePoint Premium. We’ve got plenty of new books to check out in the library — let us introduce you to them.

Professional Clojure

Designed for professional devs, this book explains how to parse the difference between functional and object-oriented programming, how to understand Clojure performance and capabilities, how to develop reactive web pages using ClojureScript, and how to adopt an REPL-driven development workflow.

Read Professional Clojure.

A Beginner’s Guide to npm, the Node Package Manager

Learn how to use npm, the command-line tool for interacting with a huge repository of Node.js projects. Discover how to install packages in local and global mode, as well as delete, update and install a certain version of a package. You’ll also see how how to manage a project’s dependencies.

Read A Beginner’s Guide to npm, the Node Package Manager.

Django 2 Web Development Cookbook Third Edition

Create fast, robust and secure web apps with the Django Web Framework and Python 3.6. Discover solutions to a variety of web app scenarios. Understand URL routing, models, forms, templates, and RESTful services with Django 2.14. Test, deploy, and scale your web apps efficiently with AWS.

Read Django 2 Web Development Cookbook Third Edition.

An Introduction to Gulp.js

In this guide, we’ll introduce Gulp.js. We’ll start out by installing Gulp and using it to carry out some basic tasks, such as compressing images, and then move on to using it for more advanced tasks, like populating a database.

Read An Introduction to Gulp.js.

Handbook of Usability Testing

This book digs into how to make products user-friendly, with guidelines on testing, factors that limit usability, choosing and training test moderators, collecting and reviewing data, reporting results and making recommendations, user-centered design principles and practices, and much more.

Read Handbook of Usability Testing.

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We’re releasing new content on SitePoint Premium almost every day, so we’ll be back next week with the latest updates. And don’t forget: if you haven’t checked out our offering yet, take our 7 day free trial for a spin.

The post SitePoint Premium New Releases: Clojure, npm, Gulp, Django & More appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/sTqLCodcOX0/know-your-sht-with-these-pantone-style-poo-swatches

The bright, fan-like Pantone colour swatches are a familiar part of a designer's toolkit. However you probably won't want to use these lookalikes to choose a colour scheme. That's because this pair of Pantone-inspired colour guides are all about, and there's no way around saying this so apologies if you're about to have your lunch, poo.

Released by Penguin, these two secretion swatches were designed by Anomaly creative director Matt Roach and illustrated by Douggy Pledger to help familiarise readers with their waste matter. Specifically, one tells parents all they need to know about their baby's nappy fillings, while the other one is an informative guide to help adults understand their excreta.

As well as being humorous, the two guides have been medically approved by a gastroenterologist and a paediatrician. So if you've ever been baffled by what you've left in the toilet bowl, think of these swatches as the Rosetta Stone of your stools.

How to master colour theory

Poo can’t be blue… can it?

Answering all the burning questions that have probably puzzled you at some point or another, these swatches explain why floaters float, why stinkers stink, and the secrets to doing a poo like a pro.

Parents will also find heaps of helpful insight as to whether or not it's normal for their baby's poo to look like Dijon mustard, what they should do if the nappy looks like an oil spill's hit it, and why their newborn's doing dumps at all hours of the day.

Is that a BONE in one of those swatches?

All in all, a whopping 35 different types of poo are covered in these swatches. Perfect for parents and adults with a sense of humour, these guides can be traced back to 2015 when Roach created a POOTONE guide as a gift for Anomaly art director David Lawrie when his first child was born.

This baby swatch guide proved so useful that Roach decided to run it by publishers. The adult poo guide came out in the summer of 2018, while March 2019 saw the release of the new baby poo guide.

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/v0y2pb4glpA/how-to-draw-more-realistic-figures

In this figure drawing tutorial we will focus on the torso and breasts, particularly on how the breasts change shape due to compression and the effects of gravity. On first impression these simple forms look easy to draw, and for that reason they’re often drawn poorly. 

A common mistake is to treat them as solid globes, instead of shape-shifting mounds that move, fall, bounce and flatten out. Another common error is drawing them as if both are facing front like a pair of eyes, when in fact each breast sits on the curve of the ribcage. I’ve chosen this pose to demonstrate the changing shape of the breasts due to their shifting weight against a solid rib cage, and the pull of gravity, evident even on a young, physically fit woman.

How to draw: the best drawing tutorials

Above, you can watch the accompanying in-depth video tutorial of how to show compression and gravity when drawing a female figure, or, read on to find a step-by-step guide to how to draw the breasts and torso of a female figure. 

For more general advice on figure drawing, check out our guide to how to draw a figure. 

The effects of shifting forms

Learning proportions is important for the figurative artist but stay flexible

In the photo above, I’m measuring Alana for an online classroom. I measure the forms by eye, compare their shapes – their boxy or tubular nature – then draw the biggest shapes first and measure on the pinch side of the figure where shapes are closer together. Learning proportions is important for the figurative artist, but I don’t see it as an inflexible rule.

Apart from drawing the illusion of soft flesh against a hard surface, we’ll also deal with relationships of form. Although the ribcage expands when we breathe, the hips and ribcage are basically solid, with all the twisting done by the abdominals and obliques (the waist side muscles). These hard shapes against soft shapes cause pinching flesh, most noticeably at the waist. 

01. Learn to really see

Create a basic structure of the body to help focus your work

When it comes to drawing the figure, I think of how the basic structures work together. Making structural drawings such as this one helps me understand how everything locks together. Learning to see structure as a form of simplified anatomy is the key to drawing with confidence.

02. Direct with the power of Austin

If you’re directing a photoshoot, think about how you do so

In this photoshoot I direct Alana using emotional themes. I call out, “Cruelty, spite, anger, joy, elation!” while Alana moves from one pose to another. As fun and Austin Powers-like as this may sound, it works. With this sorcery pose, Alana becomes a raging symbol of creation. I’ve often found that enthusiastic and confident art direction results in an energetic, productive photo session.

03. Act suspicious

You don’t have to copy your photo exactly

I draw lightly using a small piece of willow charcoal. As usual, I treat the photo with deep suspicion. The arms look too long and the head feels too small. I want the body to be flying rather than lying over a support, so I lengthen the foreshortened midsection.

04. Chase the echoes

With our motivational theme of ‘creation’ in place I think about what kind of supernatural being Alana is as I draw, and decide she is a witch conjuring spells. I name the drawing, The Wake of the Black Witch. With a title and motivation the drawing gains a driving force.

I smudge tones around using the charcoal that I’ve already laid down on the newsprint paper. It’s important in the early stages to keep the drawing light, because this method allows for changes. I’m chasing the echoes of similar forms as I go, blending nature’s rhythmic shapes down the body.

05. Create a sense of movement

Add in darker lines once you’re happy with the lighter drawing

I step back from the drawing and take time to evaluate before committing to darker lines. I feel the overall drawing has solidity, and more importantly, a sense of movement. I lay in darker lines, placing a sheet of paper under my hand to keep the surface clean. 

06. Consider the effect of gravity

Draw the breasts after you draw the ribcage

Add gravity to the situation and the breasts change shape. See how each breast is slightly different – because they always are. Note also how the nipple changes shape as the breasts stretch or flatten out. Take time to study these ever-changing forms. I’d advise drawing the breasts after you’re happy with the shape and position of the ribcage, rather than draw them first.

07. Draw the hands

Take care when drawing the hands, they’re tricky

When drawing hands there are notes to keep in mind, for instance, the forefinger and middle finger take up more than half the width, and the little finger splays outward more. Drawing the little finger and thumb first also makes it easier to plot and place the other fingers.

08. Blend and draw

Make sure you think about your light source

There is enough charcoal on the newsprint paper for me to blend with a paper stump, and I improve the forms as I push the charcoal around. I also dim the torso area by lifting off some tone with tissue. This suggests a central light source that draws our eye.

09. Make use of leftovers

Use excess materials to create further forms

I blot texture down with tissue dipped in charcoal powder. You can buy charcoal powder, but I use the stuff already on the sandpaper pad left over from sharpening my pencils, which saves money and a trip to the art store. I then use a kneadable eraser to pull out highlights.

10. Use your imagination

Use swirls to suggest sorcery 

With the figure work mostly behind me I come back to the story of the witch casting spells. I use swirls to suggest sorcery afoot and engage my electric eraser to suggest crackling energy. This also frames the figure and adds contrast, bringing the figure more into focus.

11. Erase into the swirls

Use a rubber to enhance the swirls

Using a large compressed charcoal stick I draw large swirls, twisting the stick as I draw for thick and thin marks, I then use a Faber Castell grip eraser to change the swirls into more interesting shapes. Note how the figure appears brighter now against the outside dark tones.

11. Add the small stuff

Know when to stop your drawing

Putting in the small stuff is always a danger, because we tend to tinker and lose sight of the big picture.

I’m feeling that it’s time to stop before the drawing suffers. Was this drawing better than the step before? Perhaps. The main thing is we explored further and by exploring further we get to feel when it’s time to stop.

Gravity and Compression study sheet

Learning to see the breasts as soft forms compressed against a hard, curved surface will help us draw forms that convey both weight and movement. Lots of life drawing will help further as we have the chance to study how the breasts change shape as the model changes their pose.

This article was originally published in issue 169 of ImagineFX, the world's best-selling magazine for digital artists. Buy issue 169 or subscribe here.

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