If you’re a front end designer, presenting clients with mockups can be tricky. Emailing files can be cumbersome and lead to unwanted questions about how to view the image properly, and many image sharing services aren’t ideal for viewing full-size website mockups in their proper context.

Today we’re going to take a look at QwikVu, a web app that’s specifically built for designers who want to share web design mockups with clients. Is it the tool you’ve been looking for to make client presentations easier? Read on to find out.

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Meet QwikVu

The QwikVu homepage above sums up the service in a nutshell. Here you can sign up to try the service free for 30 days. This is a great way to kick the tires and test it out with a few clients to gauge its effectiveness.

Sign up for the service is quick and painless, you just need a name, email address and password and you’re up and running. Let’s take a look at what happens after you’ve signed up for an account and log on for the first time.

We’ll be going through the Pro plan today but there’s also a basic free service that allows you to upload and share individual images. Obviously, some of the more advanced features such as checking in to see if a client has viewed the mockup are reserved for the Pro service.

Setting Up a Gallery

When you sign into QwikVu, you’re greeted with a simple dashboard. Here you can view your client list, adjust your account information and access your galleries. I haven’t set any galleries up yet so there’s a brief message inviting me to do so.

Like pretty much everything in QwikVu, setting up a new gallery is a really simple task that will only take you a few seconds. There’s a lovely form that walks you through the process, asking for basic information like your client details and the title of the gallery.

As you can see, there are some really great advanced features here as well. You can choose a custom URL for the gallery, password protect it, assign a custom background color and choose how the images are aligned in the browser window.

Adding Images

Once you’ve set up a gallery, it’s time to add in some images. You can toss them in one at a time or grab them all in one upload. Once you’re finished uploading, the screen below allows you to rearrange, preview and edit each image.

Sharing a Gallery With a Client

Once you’re ready to share a gallery, click the “Finished” button in the screen above to go back to the gallery view. Here you’ll see a list of all of the galleries that you’ve created. On the right side of this list, there’s a strip of buttons and information. You can check to see if the client has viewed the gallery, see it for yourself, edit the images, etc.

The button we’re looking for right now is the “share” command, represented by a little envelope icon.

Clicking this image will bring up what is essentially an email window. Most of the contents is filled in for you automatically but you can customize all of it to your liking.

Once you’re finished, click the “Share” button and the email will be sent off to your client. Your work is done, now all you have to do is wait for the feedback!

Client Reviews

Once you’ve sent out the invite, the client will receive a simple, text-only email that contains your custom message along with a link to view the gallery. You don’t have to worry about whether or not they know how to properly view the file, it’s a fool-proof process where a single click gets them what they want to see.

The invite link opens up the gallery in a browser. Your settings before have defined the display behavior here. For instance, my image is shown centered on a pure white background. It looks and feels just like a website: I can scroll up and down and the image stays centered as I resize my browser window. You can see my example gallery here.

To make sure there’s no confusion with your clients, there’s a little information box that pops up when you click on the image that informs you about the nature of the mockup. You are told that the image merely represents a design so the buttons and links will not function.

The bar that you see at the bottom allows you to scroll through the images in the gallery, share it with someone else, and download the files.

You can also view the images in a thumbnail strip for easy navigation. Just click the little grid on the left side of the toolbar and you’ll get something like the window below.

Viewing On The Go

Odds are your client is going to receive that email and want to check it right away. If he/she is out of the office and on a mobile device, the viewing experience is optimized and shown in an online image viewer with a quick message to explain that it’s a non-functioning mockup.

The above image shows what the gallery looks like on my iPad. You can swipe back and forth between the pictures or view an automatic slideshow.

Worth a Look?

When the good folks at QwikVu asked us to take a look at their service, we were happy to oblige. It’s a great app that serves a clear purpose and works like a dream. The interface is quite attractive, the UX flow is so simple that anyone can manage it and everything works exactly as advertised.

QwikVu really is a great way to show off your flat mockups to clients. I love having the ability to display work centered in the browser at full size, just like I want it to be. Your clients will definitely appreciate the privacy side, password protected mockups are sure to give them a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that their secrets are safe from prying eyes.

Pricing

QwikVu is $9.99 per month or $99 for a year. To be honest, this is where things get a bit rocky for me. It’s a great app, but a hundred bucks a year for what amounts to slightly modified image hosting is going to be hard for a lot of web designers to justify, especially when they likely already have personal web hosting where they can upload their images.

Fortunately, there is a free component so if you do in fact get some great functionality for nothing. However, I would recommend augmenting the $9.99 plan with some awesome additional features such as the ability to define portions of the uploaded images as clickable links to make the mockups functioning wireframes.

Further, I think with a system like this you simply have to have means for client feedback (another great option that could be only on the premium plan). When a client views a mockup, it would be great if there were some sort of sticky notes feature that allowed for specific portions of the mockup to be targeted and discussed. I know the point here is to keep it simple and fight feature bloat, but simple and direct change requests could be implemented without adding too much complexity. There’s even an example page that unintentionally showcases how this system might look!

Conclusion

If you’re currently on the lookout for a better way to show off your non-functioning mockups to clients, QwikVu is a great solution. The result is far better than emailing a JPG, you really feel like you’re looking at the beginnings of a website in your browser. I highly recommend that you stop by the site and give the free trial a test run.

Have you tried QwikVu or any other service? Let us know your thoughts in the comment area below.

Almost. It seems innocent enough right? Surely there’s no evil lurking in those six letters. You might even see this as a positive word. However, as a designer, you should always be on guard when this word can describe certain aspects of your work.

Read on to see why “almost” can be a dirty word and how it just might be bringing down the quality of your work. We’ll also take a look at two underlying foundations of good design that provide ready solutions to solve your “almost” design woes.

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Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight

Design is an interesting topic. It’s something that, by definition, has to be innate and intuitive to a certain degree. Effective design is pleasing and logical to the beholder, so in theory, designing for mass appeal should be something that almost anyone can do because it leverages our common ideas towards aesthetics and information organization.

The fascinating thing is, finding and identifying those commonalities is a lot more difficult than you’d think. Lots of people know good design when they see it, but they lack the fundamental design education to point out exactly what separates the good from the bad, or even more to replicate the good design practices in their own work.

This type of information, the simple bits of knowledge that are hidden in plain sight, is my absolute favorite topic to explore. This discussion will cover just such a concept. One so simple that absolutely anyone can understand it, yet so secret that I see countless people, from laymen to professional designers, completely miss the mark with this principle on a daily basis.

Almost The Same Is Awkwardly Different

Enough suspense, why in the world, you ask, is “almost” a dirty word in design? It seems harmless enough right? Instead of telling you why it’s dangerous, let me show you.

Alignment & Size

The inspiration for this piece was a website that I was recently asked to critique. The design featured an image with a button below it that looked something like the one shown below:

When I look at this example, I immediately see a case where “almost” is wreaking havoc on the quality of a design. This is more clearly illustrated if we add in some guides:

As you can now clearly see, the button is “almost” the same size as the image, but not quite. This causes some conceptual dissonance and can even be a distraction:

“Did the designer intentionally make the two objects different sizes? It’s difficult to tell. Maybe this is a mistake! Surely the two are meant be the same size.”

Your user has now been thrown off course and instead of focusing on your content is now wondering whether or not you screwed up. Now, some might disagree and say that the above example is an alignment issue and not a size issue, the button should simply be aligned to the center:

Admittedly, this helps. When size discrepancies are present between two simple objects, a center alignment can prove useful. However, I still see the same problem. The two objects are too close in size.

The key to solving this problem is to ask yourself why you made the two objects a different size to begin with. If it’s an accident, then you’re simply being sloppy with your dimensions. However, if it’s an intentional decision meant to add differentiation, then attack this goal with new fervor and actually make the two objects look different:

There’s no doubt when I see this example that the button is actually supposed to be smaller than the image. Similarly, if you don’t really have a need for the difference, then just make the two objects the same width:

My point is, it’s up to you to decide whether or not the objects merit differentiation. Just make sure that if they do, you don’t wuss out and make them slightly different. Go big!

Typography

There are several places where this principle proves true in typography. The first that comes to mind is once again a size issue. The most common place that I see this arise is when a headline and paragraph look something like this:

Here again we run into the trouble that “almost” brings us. The body copy is “almost” the same size as the headline. Sure, you can tell that they’re different but it’s not something strong enough to really help present a clear informational hierarchy. When we drop “almost” and go big, the result is much better:

This image illustrates that there are other factors to consider as well, such as boldness. Consider the following example, which compares a minor difference with a major one:

Notice how the word “Big” is bolded in the first example, but the result is still so subtle that it’s ineffective. “Big” is almost the same as the rest of the sentence. By now we know that if this statement can be said, we need to be a little more extreme. In the second example, I made the typeface even bolder, then use all caps on the word and enlarged the font.

The same goes for the style of typefaces that you select. In this next example, I’ve implemented two different typefaces in an attempt to add some variation to my headline: Garamond and Trajan.

As you can see, these typefaces are so similar that they’re difficult to differentiate between. Do you think a non-designer will spot the difference between the two? I made the example and I can barely spot it!

This example is probably a little extreme, I’m sure you wouldn’t choose two fonts this similar. However, it drives home a point that is constantly missed by real world designers. Make sure your typefaces are never “almost” the same. Try varying the serif choice, boldness, etc. Take something simple and mix it with something more complex. The result is much more aesthetically pleasing:

The Underlying Principles

I could go on and on, but I’m sure you get the point. You can apply this idea to any area of design you choose. The basic idea is that “almost” is dangerous. Any time you find yourself approaching “almost,” just remember that it typically leads to average results. No designer should want to produce average work!

By now, faithful Design Shack readers have realized that I’ve tricked you into reading yet another post on contrast. Yep, this whole concept can be boiled down to that one magical word. Contrast is one of the main pillars of good design and learning to wield it properly will make you an infinitely better Designer.

The information here simply frames the idea of contrast in a different way that might or might not make the topic clearer for you: Different is good, almost different is bad.

This goes even deeper than that as well. Notice that the first example with the button presented an alternative that suggested making the two objects exactly the same width. This is of course the principal of repetition. When contrast doesn’t seem appropriate, repetition is your best bet.

Conclusion: Be Careful with Almost

Keep in mind that there are in fact plenty of legitimate uses for close similarities in design. For instance, subtle variations of a color can provide a nice and simple color scheme. However, even in this scenario you don’t want the two to be so close that no one can tell them apart.

The message here is not to completely avoid the “almost syndrome” all the time but merely to take caution when designing anything that approaches it and to ask yourself whether the result you’re going for can be better achieved with contrast or repetition.

Logos are one of the trickiest areas in the graphic design world. It takes almost zero talent to make a logo, virtually anyone can do it. However, making a good logo requires a lot of insight, artistic skill and patience.

Too often we see designers falling into the trap of rushing into a logo design project and coming up with ideas that are so overused that they’re downright cringe-worthy. Today we’re going to take a look at five logo trends that fit this description. Read on to see if any of your go-to techniques are on the list.

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Who Cares About Being Unique?

Before we jump into some of the logo ideas that you might want to watch out for, let’s address the question of exactly why you should be aware of and perhaps avoid logo ideas that have become a cliché. The answer here cuts at the very core of why logos exist.

From a branding perspective, a logo is in many ways the face of your company. When someone thinks about “Nike” as an entity, they immediately see that famous swoosh, the same could be said of a million other brands such as Coca-Cola and Apple. This isn’t just true for global mega-brands either, who could forget the “Monster” energy drink with its claw mark “M”?

The reason you remember these marks so vividly is that they’re unique, and companies will fight viciously to protect that. Any time someone gets anywhere near a simple apple icon, the Apple Inc. lawyers unleash their fury with significant monetary backing.

Destruction from Within

If so many companies are willing to invest so much into their brand’s unique identity, don’t you think they see it as an important part of their success? Sometimes though, the most dangerous threat in this area comes not from competitors or other brands, but from people actually working for the brand itself! These individuals have the power to completely destroy a long held visual legacy and cause mountains of bad press for companies. The people I’m referring to are of course designers.

The past couple of years have been filled with long established brands attempting visual updates only to receive so much negative feedback and public outcry that they are forced to retreat back to their original but newly appreciated identity.

As a designer you wield an immense power over the public perception of a brand. You owe it to your customers to provide rich, unique identities that won’t be easily confused with 3,000 other similar attempts by other brands.

With these ideas in mind, let’s take a look at five logo trends that designers just can’t seem to get over.

Arc Over the Top

I can’t tell you how many logos I’ve seen use some variant of this idea in the last ten years. In concept, the idea isn’t a bad one. The arc indicates progress, movement, soaring over the competition; it’s a great symbol. However, it’s so overused in nearly the same exact way that it’s almost impossible to incorporate something like this into a logo and hold onto any semblance of a unique identity.

When you’re tempted to use an arc that looks like the one above, try to think about how you can drastically change the visual translation of the ideas you’re trying to represent. Surely you can come up with a few other ways to represent progress. As designers, this is our job: tying complex concepts into attractive and relatable visuals, not simply repeating ideas that we’ve seen a million times.

Helvetica

Listen, we’ve all done it so don’t bother denying it. At one time or another you’ve typed out a company name in Helvetica and thought “looks like a logo to me!” The problem here is that we completely lose sight of what a logo is all about, as I just ranted about in the opening paragraphs. Just because something is attractive doesn’t mean it makes a good logo. That’s an important concept so write it down in bold letters in your logo sketchbook.

Helvetica is a great typeface. I use it constantly and am certainly not in league with the anti-Helvetica crowd. Everything type lovers say about this typeface is true: it’s versatile and clean and works perfect as a blank slate that you can project ideas onto. However, without some major help, it can make for the most cliché logo imaginable. I’m not saying that you should never use Helvetica in a logo, just make sure that when you do, you have some really unique visuals to back it up.

I’ll keep reminding you of the Gap fiasco every time I can because it serves as an important lesson where a brand tried to “update” their iconic look with a fresh logo. The result was a disaster and led to weeks of public embarrassment (and oddly enough the positive result of everyone realizing they love the old logo).

Not Just Helvetica

While we’re on the subject, keep in mind that this idea doesn’t only apply to Helvetica. There are plenty of other typefaces that are just as cliché or worse. I think the designer’s rule for using Papyrus should be somewhere along the lines of, “only use this if your computer has just two fonts and the other is Comic Sans.”

Random Colored Dots

This is an odd one that I’ve been seeing a lot of in logo galleries lately. It’s not particularly attractive or appealing and often reflects a lazy attempt to represent diversity. It’s sort of like a bad re-imagining of a Wonderbread bag.

Some designers get particularly creative and actually take the time to arrange the dots into a symmetrical pattern, but the result is often just as generic and uninspired:

The meaning here is so vague that it’s lost. Further, you simply can’t get around the idea that you’ve seen this exact idea on a million other logos. It’s time to let the colored dots go. Rather than starting with some simple vector shapes in Illustrator, why not grab a pencil and spend a solid hour sketching out every idea that you can come up with? Trust me, at the end of the exercise you’ll realize that it was worth the time and effort.

Chat Bubble Logos

Four out of every ten logos created for social media sites have chat bubbles in them. I just made up that statistic off the top of my head but there are days when I would swear it was true.

Once again, we have a concept that there is nothing inherently wrong with. A chat bubble is in many ways the perfect way to represent social media. Also, it’s a good thing when you land on a symbol that immediately relates your concept. However, as a unique brand identifier, it isn’t an easy element to leverage without a result that looks like everything else on the market.

Can you use chat bubbles in your logo? By all means. However, be sure to take the time to experiment with how you can take this overused symbol to a new place.

The Double Letter Overlap

While the chat bubble is a fairly recent phenomenon that arose as a result of social media, this logo trend dates back several decades. In fact, for as long as their have been law firm logos, this idea has been going strong.

It can be used with almost any two capital letters but any time you have a double “L” you can bet good money that this idea is going to pop into your head. My advice: resist it with everything in you. It’s completely generic and is in fact the very first idea that countless non-designers would run to in this situation. Given that you do this for a living, I know you can come up with something a little better.

Notice a Theme?

Take a good look at the cliché logo ideas that we just went over. Notice anything similar about all of them? The answer is that they’re all super easy to replicate. The problem with many designers is not that they aren’t capable of coming up with great ideas, it’s that they’re too lazy and tend to run with the idea that’s quickest to bust out. Contrast this idea with something like the Starbucks logo:

This is a really quirky logo that looks and feels truly unique. The custom illustration uses beautiful symmetry and repetition and the siren is anything but a cliché icon. Ripping off the logos above would take any designer ten minutes or less. Mimicking this idea is much more difficult. Admittedly, this isn’t always the case with strong logos, the Nike swoosh can readily be drawn by any twelve year old with a paint program.

However, the moral here is that any time you find yourself with the goal of making a strong brand icon that is completely own-able, try actually investing some solid time into your creation. The odds are that as you spend more time tweaking and refining your idea, the more unique it will become.

What Cliché Logo Ideas Have You Seen?

Now that you’ve seen my top five cliché logo trends, it’s time for you to join the conversation. In recent years, are there any logo ideas that you’ve seen seen that seem to get picked up and used over and over again?

Also be sure to let us know if you’re guilty of replicating any of the trends above. Don’t be ashamed, we’ve all come up with and even used horribly generic ideas so we might as well all laugh about it and learn from the comedy of the situation.

With a new year always comes new branding attempts. Organizations want a fresh face to signal progress and ongoing evolution and branding is the vehicle that designers use to achieve this goal.

As we all know quite well, this is a risky venture with large entities. If it goes well, your customers (or fans in this case) love you for it. If it doesn’t, you’re setting yourself up for plenty of public ridicule. Today we’re going to venture into the world of sports and check out three new Major League Baseball team logo designs. Which teams are updating their look for the new year? Were they successful or is the result a surefire embarrassment? Read on to find out!

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The Florida Marlins Become the Miami Marlins

The Florida Marlins are a relatively young team in the MLB and were only established in 1993 (by comparison, the Cardinals date back to before 1900). In that time, their logo hasn’t gone through too many iterations. The one most of us are familiar with is shown below.

There’s a lot to like about this logo. It’s instantly recognizable and unique while maintaining that good old sports icon feel. It says everything it needs to in a nice compact icon: you’ve got the team name, the obvious mascot and even a baseball.

From a style perspective, there’s some simple, hard edge vector shading on the fish, but nothing over the top. The fish is depicted flying upwards in a classic pose, as if its shooting out of the water.

Overall, I love this logo. It’s a perfect mix of new and old world styles and has held up extremely well over time. It neither looks old and dated nor like a poor attempt to be modern through pursuit of a brief fad or cliche style.

New Stadium, New Name, New Logo

The Marlins have decided that it’s time for a change. They’re getting a new stadium and to go with it, a new team name and identity. They’re now the Miami Marlins and will play in Marlins Park in Little Havana, Miami, Florida under new manager Ozzie Guillén. Here’s the updated logo and team color scheme:

Don’t worry, if you think this is bad, check out the alternate version (home and away jersey versions perhaps?). I think the white is even worse:

I have to say, this is one of the ugliest brand updates that I’ve seen in a long time. The rainbow of colors melded into a faux bevel effect on the “M” and plastered next to their new bad modern art interpretation of a Marlin is just mindblowingly bad.

The trend in logo design is currently a drastic reduction of the over the top design styles of the early 2000s (we’ll see this in the Jays logo coming up), so I can appreciate what they were trying to do here, but the execution is a flat out slaughtering of their identity. It’s funny that this looks more like a 1990s design than the Marlins logo that’s actually from the 1990s!

Admittedly, I’m being purely subjective here. The fact that I think it’s ugly doesn’t make it a bad logo. However, if you can structure a sound defense for the visual choices made here, I’d love to hear it, because I simply can’t think of a single redeeming quality.

The Baltimore Orioles Get Friendly

The Baltimore Orioles were born in 1954 when the St. Louis Browns (St. Louis had two teams at the time, the Browns and the Cardinals) moved to Baltimore and took up the name of the official state bird of Maryland. The Orioles logo that we’re familiar with today only dates back to 2009:

The logo evolution here is an important part of the story. SportsLogos.net has a nice timeline depicting how the logo changed from its original inception in 1954.

As you can see, though the bird started out fairly cartoon like, the 90s brought many attempts to refine him into something more realistic. The Official Orioles Website outlines a closer look at how the “Orioles Bird” has changed throughout the years. This source notes that from 1966-89, each Oriole player wore the “cartoon bird” on his cap:

As we’ll see next, this was a major influence on the newest round of design.

Bye Bye Realistic Birdie

To celebrate the 20th Anniversary Season of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the Orioles have brought back the old cartoon bird on their helmets and caps. He gets a slight update, but the core character is very much the same as the old bird from the sixties.

I think the new cartoon bird does a great job of mixing together the best parts of both of the previous attempts. The 1966 version above looks a little chubby and has some sloppy curves. The 1975 version slimmed him out but took the friendly, relaxed face perhaps a little too far into ecstatic and hyper. Some of the shapes in the ’75 version needed work as well, such as the hat and confusing outer mouth line.

The 2012 version addresses all of these issues and puts the bird at a much better weight somewhere between the anemic ’75 version and the rotund ’66 version. His open beak is still a little difficult to figure out if you over think it, but it’s definitely an improvement from the previous version. I particularly like the new hat shape and the better branding with the “O’s” text.

Some will likely hate the new bird but I can easily go along with the direction they’ve chosen. This brings the team mascot back to its roots and makes it something that both old and new fans can more readily identify with. Rather than a cold, non-human icon, this is a friendly character that greets you with a big smile.

The Toronto Blue Jays Go Back to The Beginning

The Toronto Blue Jays date back to 1977 and are currently the only non-U.S. team in the MLB (the Expos are now the Washington Nationals). The original team logo was a lot like the Marlins logo: circular in nature with a baseball in the background and the team mascot in the foreground.

You have to love that rounded inline type and proud to be Canadian appeal. This logo is perfectly 70s in every way. Over the years, there were a few major evolutions eventually leading to the 2004 logo (hat tip again to SportsLogos.net for the timeline).

Too Football?

This was no doubt cool in 2004, but the style definitely reflects a brief trend that didn’t hold out in the long term, especially in baseball. In fact, the heavily bevelled text and mean bird head make this logo look straight out of the NFL in the early 2000s. Though similar, baseball and football logos typically remain fairly separate in style, with baseball drifting more towards classic appeal and heavy script while football takes the intense, tough and always changing trendy look.

Back to ’77

Fans of the old logo will be thrilled when they see the newest iteration, which is very much a return to the 1977 look:

The name of the game here is pointy. The designers obviously started with the old logo and streamlined all the curves, both in the text as well as the bird. Notice that the inline text is used with more reserve here (a good call for any potentially difficult to read typeface), only “Blue Jays” uses this treatment while “Toronto” is written in a non-inline version of the same typeface. Also, the leaf has been moved off of the centerline of the baseball, a nice touch that makes each item more distinct.

For my money, this is the best logo update on the list. The Jays had come way off the mark with their branding, resulting in a bulky, ugly logo that while only a few years old, was badly showing its age. The new logo works because it once again says “baseball” and has a visual appeal that will hold up much better in the years to come. The key here is that it doesn’t necessarily jump on a bandwagon but instead uses a simple, easily-identifiable aesthetic that does justice to the team legacy.

What Do You Think?

The Blue Jays and the Marlins share a similar trajectory, we just don’t see the whole picture yet. In the Jays we see a team that took a bad turn with a really poor attempt to modernize their logo. This was ultimately answered with a drastic call back to the good old days. The Marlins are at the opposite point of their story, they’re at the beginning of their horrible attempt at a modern feel. This new branding is so bad that I suspect we’ll be seeing a revival some time in the next few years that brings the brand back to its roots. Let’s hope those poor Marlins fans don’t have to live with that logo on their gear for long.

The Orioles never really took that horrible turn because they never went overboard with cliché trends. Their logo has gone through a fairly nice evolution process with each step being logical and even attractive. The newest iteration is no doubt their boldest as it represents a very noticeable attempt to retro up the brand. Is this their bad move? Will this logo look horrible in a few years? Or is the retro strategy a good play that fans will love?

Leave a comment below and let us know about your thoughts on all three logo updates above. What do you think of the colorful new Marlins logo? Are you a fan of the realistic Oriole or do you prefer the cereal box like cartoon character? With the Blue Jays, do you think the big step back was actually a step forward or are they just following another lame trend?

You’ve been there a thousand times, staring at a big empty canvas that simply doesn’t seem to work with the photo that the client has provided. Perhaps you have a vertical space and a horizontal photo (or vice versa), or maybe the image is simply too small to resize without unacceptable quality loss. What now?

Today we’ll go over some tricks of the trade and teach you how to cope with images that don’t fit where you need them to. The next time you run into a problem, you’ll be ready!

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Our Example Image

This is definitely one of the trickier situations out there. Vertical spaces are super hard to fill when the provided image is horizontal. You toss in the latter and the former seems to go for miles, how are you going to fill all that space?

image source: Kate Fisher (photo 1, photo 2, photo 3)

The first step here is to find the subject of your image. Which part do you really want to focus on? Are there any parts that are not important? With this information in mind you can proceed to building an attack plan.

Find a Better Crop

If your subject is localized towards the center of the image, as in the case of this photo, you’re home free. All you have to do is crop the image differently so that it fills the space:

This is by far the easiest solution available. However, it’s not always going to be an option. For instance, I was working a very similar photo for a project the other day which contained four people occupying the entire horizontal space of the photo. This left no room for clever crops and I had to move onto cloning.

Clone Extra Background

Another trick that I would go to right away is cloning the background to extend the horizontal image into a vertical image. Unfortunately, this can be a troublesome approach. It works great with a fairly simple background, for example if our mad hatter above were on a solid or only slightly textured background.

However, in a case like this one where the background is somewhat complex, a curtain with fairly organic (non-uniform) folds and wrinkles, cloning extra texture can take a lot of time. If you really know your way around the cloning tool though you can pull it off. I spent about five or six minutes on the example below, cloning some extra texture on to fill the canvas.

As you can see, the cloning is really spotty and ugly. Another ten minutes of blurring, cloning and painting though and I’m inching towards a more realistic result:

Cloning large areas is all about time, patience and incremental improvement. Given an hour or more I could really bring this to a good place. Sometimes you’ll have this kind of time to spend on a photo, other times you’ll be rushing to meet a deadline. More importantly, it’ll often be the case when your photo simply doesn’t work with this method. In this case you’ll have to come up with some other ideas.

Remove the Background

Rather than mess with the cloning, you could simply remove the subject from the background. Depending on your skill level with selections, this could be easier or more difficult than our previous attempt. Fortunately, the selection tools in Photoshop have become quite extraordinary and make this job much simpler than it used to be.

Two minutes with the Quick Selection Tool and Refine Edge and I’ve got myself a decent selection on Mr. Hat.

From here I pulled out the background and added in something similar. The result isn’t as natural as working with the original background, but it’s an acceptable quick fix nonetheless. Note that when a subject is photographed, the natural background colors actually bleed and reflect through quite a bit, making it easiest to choose a new background that’s fairly similar. Otherwise you could run into some serious haloing issues.

Use More Pictures

Sometimes you have not one but several images to choose from. Your initial thought might be that you need to choose one good image to feature, but why not use several if you’re having trouble filling the space?

When you open up this door, all kinds of possibilities come to light. Suddenly, you’re limited only by your imagination and can surely think of a million different attractive ways to fill the canvas.

Repeat the Same Image

You might think you’re out of luck on the previous tip if you’ve only got one image to work with, but you can actually still use many of the same ideas, you simply have to be a little more creative and repeat the same image in a logically intentional manner.

Here are two examples where I’ve simply featured one instance of the image more prominently than its clones. This helps bring a clear focus to the composition despite the repetition.

Embrace Whitespace

All of the examples above share a fundamentally flawed assumption: the idea that you have to fill the available space. In many cases, there’s absolutely no reason for you to spend hours racking your brain to create a full bleed image. Instead, embrace empty space and use it as a design element.

Here the heavy use of whitespace provides balance to the layout and gives the entire piece a light, minimal feel.

Use a Type Mask

A containment device for the image will help you use the space creatively. This can be something as complex as a custom vector graphic or as simple as some type. Place your photo layer on top of the type and then create a clipping mask (Command-Option-G) and it will automatically conform to the space:

This technique can be tricky. If you really want a lot of your image to be visible, you’ll need to use bold type and create an arrangement with lots of surface area. Otherwise the image can get lost and the effect isn’t as successful.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post has given you quite a few tricks to try the next time you’re stuck with an image that doesn’t fit well with the available space. Obviously, every case will be unique, but you can still approach the problem with logical steps in mind that ultimately lead you to a creative solution.

Leave a comment below and tell us about your tricks and tips for dealing with images that don’t fit the space. Have you tried any of the techniques above? Which is your favorite?

If you’re like me, looking at your own design work from a few years ago can often result in some laughable or even cringe-worthy moments. Design styles have been steadily evolving and most of us can’t help but be affected by these changes. Who among us hasn’t piled on the cheesy Photoshop layer effects, all the while thinking the result was downright awesome?

However, some of us are a little slower to evolve than others. Today we’ll be taking a walk down memory lane and looking at five design trends that used to be super cool, but now simply tend to make your design look outdated and even ugly. If you’re currently still stuck on these trends, it might be time to move along! We’ll help you out with some modern alternative practices that you can use to bring your design skills into 2012 in a hurry.

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Let’s Make Fun of Design

We designers tend to take ourselves far too seriously. A post like this could easily lead to derogatory finger pointing and superiority complexes, but let’s go ahead and admit up front that we’ve all flirted with at least a few of these trends, many of us have jumped on board every single one of them.

The only way to escape this fact is to be a new designer, then all you’re doing is jumping on the trends of today. Don’t worry, you won’t regret or perhaps even acknowledge these decisions for at least another three to five years.

What Are Design Trends Good For?

The key to analyzing design trends is to remember that they aren’t inherently good or bad. Instead, they merely serve as a way to observe and remember the collective tastes of bygone eras.

In this way, they’re a fantastic history lesson on how styles have evolved over the years. Try to think of past design trends like fashion, something that was cool when you are young will eventually become deplorable, but don’t worry, by the time you’re old it’ll probably see a resurgence.

The practical lesson here is that by examining which design practices seem out of style and dated, you can avoid being that guy who still wears tie dye t-shirts on a first date. Is it the case that you should absolutely abandon all of the practices on this list forever? Absolutely not. Just like with that tie dye shirt, you can probably find a time or two where these seem appropriate, even if only ironically. And who knows? They could come back and become cool again before long!

Bevel and Emboss

I know it’s tempting. You open up that Photoshop Effects window and Bevel and Emboss is like a siren calling from the rocks, pleading with you to add a touch of realism to your design. Before you know it, you’re staring at something like this:

There’s almost nothing that screams late 90s/early 2000s design like a good old bevel treatment. We went crazy with these things and put them on everything we touched. Even beloved, age old brand logos weren’t safe from the far reaching effects of this trend.

Like that picture of you on Facebook with the skinny jeans, we now look back on this trend with a “what was I thinking?” attitude. Don’t knockout it though, you’ll do the exact same thing in ten years to whatever you’re working on today!

Do This Instead

These days the trend across the board is much more minimalistic that it was ten years ago. We’ve gone past faux realistic bevels and, for the most part, dropped them completely. Now objects tend to have simple, uniform edges with almost no effects apart from the occasional subtle shadow. The World of Adrian Le Bas is a prime example:

Web 2.0 Gloss

The bevel and emboss trend wasn’t suddenly abandoned one day in favor of minimalism. Instead, it had to evolve into something even more ornate before we decided to run in the completely opposite direction.

Bevels alone tend to give an almost clay-like look to an object. Add in some shine though and you’ve suddenly got some fancy plastic and glass effects:

This one still hasn’t effectively been killed off, you need not travel far to find its influences. I’ll even gloss up a button or two myself from time to time, though certainly not to this extreme. The problem is of course that stylistically, designers have largely dropped this and are moving once again towards more subtle choices. Implementing a heavily glossed web 2.0 style on your site is a surefire way to make a brand new site seem like it’s already due for a design refresh.

Do This Instead

The good news is that “attractive” buttons are even easier to make these days. All you need is a little border-radius and a slight gradient. The effect is a nice button style that stands out without being too flashy. Check out this example from Shopify.

It’s interesting to note how technology affects design trends. The Photoshop-centric effects of yesterday are giving way to CSS3 styles of today. You can expect this to continue as new possibilities come to light with pure code-driven design.

Lots of Cursive Text

This one is a possible exception to my earlier statement about design trends being neither good nor bad from a purely objective standpoint. If a trend actually stands in the way of the success of a design, then it’s easy to argue that it is in fact an example of “bad” design.

I find this to be the case with big blocks of cursive text. For some reason, this is a trend that simply refuses to die. Following this trend is a double whammy of ugly design. Not only does it make your site uncomfortable to browse and read through, it also tends to reflect many of the typeface woes of the 1990s. If there’s one thing you don’t currently want someone to say about your site, it’s that it looks like something from when developers with no real design experience were first beginning to apply basic styles to websites.

Do This Instead

Instead of hitting your visitors over the head with overuse of that fancy typeface that you found free online, try instead sprinkling it in extremely selectively. Elementary school taught you that cursive is for professional communication; they lied. In design it should be used very selectively as an occasional accent to more readable alternatives. Here’s a beautiful example of this from Little Sea Warrior.

The Burst

This one has roots dating back to the early days of even print design. The burst is a tried and true way to grab your viewer’s attention. It says “hey, here’s some important information!” in a easy to implement and instantly recognizable way. The problem: it’s ugly and makes your design look like a marketing professor threw up on it.

My main problem with this is that it reflects a complete lack of thought and imagination. Instead of considering how to effectively integrate a logical and appropriate break into the design pattern, the designers who use this simply use the very first idea that pops into their heads. It would also be the very first idea of every non-designer as well, making it the most uncreative design element you could possibly use.

Do This Instead

The simple solution here is to put a tiny bit more thought into creating an element that fits with your overall design theme but still violates the page enough to grab attention. The price tag on Milk and Groceries might still be a little too close to cliche for my taste, but it’s a good step in the right direction and reflects an attempt to think outside the burst.

Retro Redemption

The real key to mastering design trends is to know what they suggest. Don’t implement a certain style just because you feel good about it today, instead analyze what it is that you want to achieve and what will work for and/or against that idea.

For instance, if you’re trying to create a modern e-commerce site that reflects current style choices in web design, you should avoid bursts like they’re an 80s rock-a-mullet. However, if you’re intentionally creating a retro look, then suddenly bursts once again become a perfectly legitimate and even attractive choice. Check out the Tom and Dan Show site below to see this idea in action:

Dramatic Drop Shadows

The story here is the same as that of the bevel. That Photoshop “Drop Shadow” layer style is just begging to be played with. If you start by tweaking the default effect, you’re likely to come up with something like this:

This shadow is big, soft, has plenty of distance and has a color that contrasts heavily with the background. Unfortunately, the result is a design that instantly reeks of cheesy fake lighting effects.

Do This Instead

There are still a million different popular ways to use drop shadows, the above example simply isn’t one of them. If you like the soft, feathered edge look, try blending the shadow in with the background so that it serves to make the text a tad more realistic without being a major distraction.

Another shadow treatment that’s popular right now harkens back to the days before it was common to use soft shadows. This effect uses a non-feathered drop shadow that has a little bit more of a retro feel.

You can take this a step further by layering the shadow with a knock section in between the shadow and the text. Once again, this is leaning towards a refined aged feel.

Conclusion

The examples above should serve to illustrate the idea that following antiquated trends can in fact have a negative effect on your designs and the impressions they leave on your viewers. Once again, the main principal I’m trying to communicate is intentionality. As long as you know what it is your design style of choice is communicating, and that concept or time period is exactly what you’re going for, then you’re on the right track.

Also keep in mind that design trends wouldn’t evolve at all without pioneers that go against what’s currently popular and blaze their own trail. Don’t be too eager to jump onto the overused tricks bandwagon if you’re working on a project that merits some innovative thought. Go your own way and let everyone follow you!

If you enjoyed this article, leave a comment below and tell us about some of the trends you followed in years past. Which things bug you the most when you go back and look at your portfolio from ten to twenty years ago? Which styles do you wish would make a comeback?

“Synergy” – In business this is a term that has been so often abused that it has become a meaningless buzzword. Some of you may cringe just at the sound of it.

However, in design synergy is a powerful weapon that, when wielded properly, can make your designs much more interesting and creative. What is synergy? Where can we find some solid examples of synergy in design? How can you use synergy in your work? Read on to find out.

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What Is Synergy?

If I look up the word synergy on my Mac, here’s what I get:

According to this definition, synergy is “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.”

The key principle here that I want to focus on is the latter part of the definition. The idea that an object can be greater than the sum of its parts is counterintuitive. It presents a logical thought problem that tells us that one plus one can equal three.

If you present this problem to any typical educated and intelligent individual, they’ll tell you without a doubt that one and one together will always be two. However, if you present the same problem to a designer like me, you’re likely to get an answer like the one below:

It’s a dirty trick isn’t it? I turned the existential problem of two objects actually being three objects into a simple visual puzzle. I made two ones out of basic pieces and then reassembled the same pieces to represent a three. Looking at it a different way, I made eight shapes combine to equal one symbol:

The child inside of you that learned to strictly abide by the principles of fairness is screaming “you cheated!” but the creative person inside you has to admit that it was a clever solution.

The trick that I used was visual synergy. On a basic level, every design you create uses synergy. You take separate elements and place them together into a cohesive whole. However, sometimes you can wield those individual pieces so well that the whole is a particularly impressive example of creativity and holism.

Synergy in Logo Design

One of the most popular places that I see really excellent examples of visual synergy is in logo design. Logo designers are often tasked with using very basic elements to tell a story or communicate a concept. Backed into this tight corner they impressively manage to come up with a lot from a little.

For instance, designer Nastya Dovgal was given the name “Advance Inform” to work with; fairly vague as far as company names go. According to Nastya, this company is “engaged in the work of Land Management – topografichno-geodetic, mapping, research, work on the surveying of lands, the administrative division of lands, etc.”

She started with some basic triangles:

Separate, these don’t look like much. However, when placed together the result utilizes synergy to paint a much more impressive picture.

Suddenly, these three triangles are telling us a lot. We see a clear arrow shape. This communicates the concept of “advance” from the company name. The shape of the arrow reminds us of something we’d see on a compass or map, which ties into the purpose of the company.

However, we’re still not done. The power of synergy takes the logo one step further when you realize that the triangles also clearly form an “A” shape, which reflects the initial letter in the company name.

This is a heck of a lot to accomplish with three simple triangles! This is the beauty of synergy. It makes a design come together and work, often better than you would’ve even thought possible.

Negative Space Tricks

All of the talk you see of using negative space in logo designs ties back into synergy as well. Here two simple skewed rectangles become an “H” only when combined with the “E”.

Synergy In Web Design and Multimedia

Tricks with visual synergy are easy to find in logo design galleries, but with web design it’s a bit more complex. As I stated above, every design uses synergy to a degree so it’s not easy to find and identify examples that clearly stand out as those who combine their parts particularly well to equal a whole that is something more than you’d expect.

One awesome example that comes to mind is The Wilderness Downtown, a Google Chrome experiment that combines the music of Arcade Fire and the power of HTML5.

This unique experience integrates Google Map satellite and Street View data with live action video, vector motion graphics music, and an automated browser window opening, positioning and closing process to create something completely original that is truly much more than the sum of its pieces.

All of these technologies gel together into this almost sci-fi like event where you feel like you’re actually in the video. A cloaked, faceless person that you can project yourself upon is shown running down a street, your street as it turns out. Your house and neighborhood take center stage as both the visual and auditory sensations play with your emotions and sense of reality.

This is synergy wielded powerfully and impressively. It doesn’t always have to be so complicated though, sometimes it can be as simple as an image:

Or perhaps its something that leverages interesting web technology such as a parallax effect, media queries or scrolling tricks. For example, the following site uses two different background images to tell a funny little story as you scroll down the page.

Conclusion

“Synergy” is a fairly abstract term when it comes to design. There’s no single use of synergy that can adequately describe the concept in its entirety. Instead it’s a mindset and an approach that can help make your designs seem more clever, integrated, and engaging.

Synergy is what you make of it. As you approach your next design project, consider the examples in this post and let them inspire you to question how you can push yourself towards more interesting techniques that make your end product more effective.

Christmas is nigh upon us. You’re likely rushing around like a crazy person this week trying to get all your work done, finish up your shopping, preparing to travel, etc. Let’s take a minute to slow down and absorb some solid Christmas-themed design inspiration.

In this post we’ll take a look at over twenty-five clever and/or funny Christmas ads. Some will make you laugh, others might earn an approving nod or even a roll of the eyes. All are definitely worth a look and are sure to get your brain in a creative mode.

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Silly Santa

Obviously, when you’re given the task of creating a Christmas-themed ad, Santa Claus is going to be an idea near the top of the list. Below we see some predictable ideas such as a crashed sleigh for drunk driving but there’s also some really creative stuff. The faded Santa suit is a great idea to convey the importance of color-preserving laundry soap and the “Beware of Dog” sign on the chimney is a nice play.

Omino Bianco Washing Powder add-on: Laundry before Christmas

Inbev: Merry Christmas

Cultura: Christmas

Pedigree: Christmas

Heineken: Santa

PRO BTP Builders Insurance: Christm-ass

Unlikely Manger Scenes

The manger scene is always a bold move for several reasons. It’s more overtly religious than a tree or Santa, which some brands love and others shy away from. Further, putting a twist on the manger scene is a risk because some of your intended audience could be offended given that this is a very important piece of their religious beliefs that you’re screwing around with as a marketing ploy.

Sometimes though the potentially offensive ads are the best kind and I really enjoy these interesting takes on the manger scene. My favorite is the Renault ad with the broken down van, which simply has a brilliant setup that’s used to communicate the idea that the company is open during Christmas. One that I wasn’t quite sure I liked is the hospital ad. It’s pretty creepy and unsettling. However, it was largely an internal piece that was sent from the premature infant department of the hospital to other departments… in October. Given this information, it’s pretty clever.

Edith Cavell Hospital: Little Premature Xmas Card

Mercedes Benz: Be there first

Renault: Ranch

Compulsory Auto Insurance of Puerto Rico: Nativity

Crazy Christmas Trees

One of the most prominent themes that I came across was the Christmas tree. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. It’s an instantly recognizable symbol that effectively conveys the holiday message. Its basic and playful shape can be easily abstracted, which makes it an incredibly versatile symbol that you can create with pencil shavings, tire treads or even cigarette butts!

One of my favorites here is the one with the hole cut in the wall and the Christmas tree outside. It completely confused me at first but once you realize that it’s an ad for a chainsaw then it’s instantly funny.

Mercedes-Benz: Christmas tree

Pepsi: Christmas

Publicis: Christmas

CreAds: Christmas Pencil

Stihl Chainsaw: Merry Christmas

Suzuki Swift: Christmas

Pfizer: Ashtray

FedEx: Holiday

Network Rail: Xmas construction

Random And Good

These ads didn’t necessarily fit into any of the themes above but they’re all really good. I’ll address what I like about some of these individually below.

Brain Candy Toys: Scrooge

This one is a thinker. It’s not immediately apparent to everyone what’s going but if you’re familiar with the scrooge story, the symbolism here is perfect.

Denver Center Theater Company: A Christmas Carol

Another Christmas Carol ad with a great illustrated style. The thing that caught my attention here was the graphical theme on the ornaments. Representing the three ghosts and consequently Scrooge’s entire journey with three simple symbols isn’t the easiest task and the designer here pulled it off very nicely. I love the use of arrows and clocks to tell the story.

Stihl: Happy Christmas

This is another ad in the same Stihl chainsaw series as the one we saw above. I love the look on the guy’s face given that he got a hunk of wood. It speaks to a very specific audience and there are many chainsaw owners who immediately identify with the joy of slicing through a log with a brand new, super sharp Stihl.

British Airways: Embrace

HBA Health Insurance: Window

DealerTrack Holdings: Squirrel

I liked this one not only because of the clever photo and headline but because it’s a perfectly holiday-centric ad but in a much more subtle fashion than most of the other ads shown here. It could really be used any time of the year but the nutcracker and color scheme are highly suggestive of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

IKEA: Decorate for the holidays, 2

CCT Advertising: Holiday card

Have a Good Holiday!

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or Festivus, we here at Design Shack would like to wish you a very happy holiday season. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think of the ads above and tell us if you’ve seen any others worth sharing.

Today we’re going to discuss how design projects often require you to take a step back from who you are as a designer and forget your own personal taste while taking on the personality of a given brand.

The companies who hire you will have vastly different brands, strategies, and most importantly, customers. This principle is displayed quite prominently in the brands of major guitar manufacturers. Let’s dive in and see how Taylor, Fender, Dean, Gibson and more target the right customers through design.

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Taylor vs. Dean: A Tale of Opposites

Guitar companies often have richly developed personalities that arise from decades of consistent brand strategy and extremely loyal customer bases. It’s a fascinating market, one that I’ve personally been following as an amateur guitarist for over twelve years.

Guitarists are a mixed bag. The shape, tone and purpose of these instruments vary dramatically and therefore so do the people who play them. This is of course something that the brand managers for these companies are intimately aware of.

These ideas become extremely evident in a simple glance at two very different guitar brands: Taylor and Dean. We’ll start with Taylor, my particular favorite guitar manufacturer.

Taylor

Taylor Guitars is a brand that just about every guitarist is familiar with. If you walk into a guitar shop full of merchandise sitting out and welcoming you to sit down and play, Taylors are often the guitars sitting in the back locked in a glass case. Like Martins, these acoustics easily reach into the multi-thousand dollar category.

These are premium instruments whose owners take pride in solid craftsmanship and beautifully rich tones. When a Taylor man or woman picks up a guitar, you’re much more likely to hear Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” than something from Dream Theater or Rush.

Given this knowledge, their branding makes perfect sense. Here’s a snap from the Taylor website.

The design here is simple with lots of white space, a heavy emphasis on the beauty of the product and an aesthetic that is an interesting mix of classical and modern. New world stark white backgrounds like the one above are intermingled with old world lifestyle product shots like the one below.

Taylor sells guitars like vineyards sell fine wine, the verbiage on their site speaks of “tonal flavors” and “renowned playability,” clear indicators of a sophisticated audience.

Dean

One look at the Dean Guitars logo above and you can probably tell that this company will stand pretty far from Taylor as far as branding. Where Taylor’s logo conveyed an almost country western appeal, Dean’s is adorned with outstretched wings, a common visual idea in the world of rock and roll.

The screenshot below of the Dean website confirms our suspicions about this brand, the logo definitely fits with this aesthetic:

In place of whitespace and clean product images we find thick, heavily populated design spaces adorned with terrifying creatures of myth and men with questionable hygiene flaunting long greasy hair and faces full of piercings.

The typography is grungy, chiseled bevels are everywhere, black is the color of choice for just about everything; you can practically hear the wailing guitar solos just by looking at it.

The customer here is obviously a very different one than Taylor’s. Dean has some great high end stuff, but their bread and butter seems to be affordable guitars for hardcore rockers. Some Taylor fans, myself included, might look at the Dean website and think that it seems like a big mess, but I’ve personally witnessed several guitarists drool over this site and its products.

Even when Taylor ventures towards the market of electric guitars, their clean design style prevails and is nothing like what Dean is doing above.

The folks at Dean know the type of people that buy their guitars and they’ve set up their brand to clearly target these individuals. In countless ways, this site is aesthetically perfect when you consider the target audience.

This is a key to being a good designer. Given the opportunity, could you design a new website for both Taylor and Dean while maintaining each of their unique personalities? Opening your mind to such a task makes you a more versatile, and therefore more valuable, designer.

Other Guitar Brands

Now that we’ve gotten a feel for how different guitar brands set themselves apart and target different portions of the guitar purchasing market, let’s take a look at a few more popular guitar manufacturers and briefly discuss their design styles and goals.

Fender: Every Man’s Guitar

We’ve all grown up with the idea that Fender is one of the coolest companies on the planet. As with countless other individuals, my very first guitar was a Fender Stratocaster, the quintessential electric guitar whose trademark design is the very stereotype of what an electric guitar looks like.

Fender is the great American guitar brand, and their style reflects that image:

Everything about it is middle of the road. It’s classic but not grungy, clean but not too minimal. Fender wants you to know that they sell guitars for every man, woman and child that dreams of standing on stage in front of a screaming audience.

Their image is a blank slate that you can project yourself onto. They somehow seem retro, modern, rock, country and blues all at the same time. Whether you’re 55 or 12, you can’t help but like Fender.

The Fender brand identity is one we can all identify with in our own way. It’s not an easy feat to pull off, but they do it with style and grace.

Gibson: The Apple of the Guitar World?

Planning out this topic, I definitely didn’t expect to compare Gibson to Apple, but it turns out their two sites are remarkable similar:

Keep in mind that there is way more to brands than their websites, but these do in fact typically serve as decent indicators for a brand’s visual style and conceptual personality (as we saw above).

Through this lens, maybe Apple and Gibson aren’t really that different after all. Both appeal to customers with great taste from all walks of life. Neither brand is necessarily out of reach for middle class America and yet they both ooze style and class.

Also like Apple, Gibson stands on a rich history while looking steadfastly at the future. They value innovation, unique perspectives and award-winning product design. Perhaps the Les Paul could even be considered the Macintosh of electric guitars (I’m probably stretching with that last part, don’t over think it).

Gretsch: Reveling in Retro

Like Dean, Gretsch is a brand that firmly embraces its product design aesthetic and directs that towards a target market. The Gretsch website and brand is undoubtedly retro.

Their guitars are aimed at people with a taste for the beautiful curves that appeared in guitars, cars, men’s hairstyles and everything else in the 1950s. In sharp contrast to the crazy looking mad men on the Dean site, the guys on the Gretsch homepage have slicked back hair and wear suit jackets that haven’t been in style during my lifetime.

The vintage appeal of their product line extends well beyond guitars that B.B. King would be proud to hold and into just about everything that they create:

The great thing about Gretsch’s style is that it’s not really as constrained as you might think. People of all ages and walks of life love retro. From teenage hipsters to the aging baby boomer generation, it’s difficult to find someone who wouldn’t love to have one of the amps shown above, whether for actual use or mere decoration!

Conclusion

Despite appearances, this article isn’t really about guitars at all. It’s about developing a brand image that says what you want it to say and nails your target market in an effort to maximize exposure and acceptance.

As designers, we too often get caught up in the latest trend or our own personal aesthetic leanings. Instead we should focus on who are clients are and niche of human beings they’re seeking to appeal to on a personal level. This is how unforgettable brands are built.

For all you guitarists out there, which brand do you play? Have a look at their website and other communications and tell us why their brand appeals to you in the comment section below.

I’ll show you a quick way to make a software screenshot more interesting, how to create awesome vector grunge textures and a super fast way to build a vector starburst.

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Breakout Screenshot

When you’re designing a website for a web or desktop app, you’ll inevitably end up incorporating a few screenshots into your design, which is great because they make for attractive graphics that are super easy to create. Simply bring up the app on your attractive but minimal desktop, hit a keyboard shortcut, add some text and you’re done!

This is definitely a beautifully simple way to create artwork for a website, but it’s worth the extra effort to put some thought into how you can go further and make the graphic even more interesting.

One super simple way to do this is to have the screenshot exceed the boundaries of the background image. This quick and easy trick makes your design seem more alive and layered.

Now, the long and difficult way to perform this trick would be to mask out part of the background on your screenshot, but that’s a real pain. It’s far easier to simply create a transparent PNG of your app window that contains no background, which you can then place over anything you want in Photoshop.

To do this on a Mac, hit Command+Shift+4 to bring up the crosshairs that will let you take a screenshot of a selected area. Then place your cursor over the app window and hit the Space bar. The crosshairs should transform into a camera icon and the window you’re hovering over should be highlighted. Simply click to create a file on your desktop containing that window and its shadow on a transparent background. Windows users can follow these steps for snapping a window screenshot.

Once you’ve taken the screenshot of the window, then grab a background to place it on and open them both in Photoshop.

From here, it’s easy to crop the background so that the screenshot peeks out of it. Notice that I took the opposite route on the bottom of the screenshot, which is tucked into the background image.

In The Wild

This trick is very common in web design right now and can be seen on any number of desktop software and web app sites. One shining example is the current Sparrow for Mac website.

Easy Illustrator Starburst

I hesitate to teach you this trick simply because I generally hate starbursts in design. However, I will accept that there are in fact some legitimately cool uses for them. More importantly, I know a pretty cool trick for making them that I love to show off.

To start, open up Illustrator and draw a circle. Then set the circle’s stroke to a dashed line. The parameters don’t matter too much at this point, just make sure you have something that looks approximately like this:

Here comes the fun part. Take the stroke weight on your circle and crank it way beyond anything logical (into the hundreds). Finally, set your first dash and gap values to be identical. The result is a nice perfect starburst.

The awesome part is that this trick gives you full control over the width of the lines and gaps. Here’s a slightly tweaked example that’s a little more spread out.

Take it even further and add some random values to some of the other dash and gap spaces. This will start to give you some really creative results, here’s a nice little pattern that reminds me of a peppermint.

Expand It

Now, working with a funky stroked item like this in the long term will get messy so once you decide on your general shape and patter, I recommend going to Object>Flatten Transparency. This will give you a nice, expanded vector starburst that looks like you built it the hard way (outline stroke gives some weird results). Just be sure to delete the original circle’s stroke to keep things clean.

Grungy Vector Textures

Photographic grunge textures are easy to come by, vector grunge textures, not so much. Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to create the latter through the use of the former.

Let’s start with by hitting up Flickr Creative Commons to find a decent grunge texture. Here is a great one from D. Sharon Pruitt.

Now, I intentionally picked this one because it contains light scratches on a dark background, which seems like it would be much harder to work with but really isn’t at all.

Open up the texture in Photoshop, hit Command+I to inverse the colors and suddenly you’ll have a nice white background with black scratches. Then use a basic Levels adjustment to bring up the whites and down the blacks. The result should look something like this:

Now save the image out as a JPG and open it up into illustrator. From here, we have some really basic shapes that can be Auto Traced with relative accuracy. Run the Auto Trace command and set your parameters to something like those shown below. One critical step here is to make sure you click the “ignore white” command so that Illustrator only traces the black parts.

From here you simply hit the “Expand” button in the menu bar. This will give you 100% scaleable and easily applicable grunge scratches.

We can combine this trick with the last one and we have an awesome retro piece of vector artwork. Pretty cool!

Conclusion

These quick tip posts are meant to expand your bag of tricks so that you have a larger pool of ideas to pull from on your next design project. I hope you’ve learned a thing or two and have been inspired to come up with your own unique ideas based on the information above.

Leave a comment below and let us know about any techniques you’ve seen around the web but aren’t quite sure how to replicate. We’ll take a look and see if we can help in the next design tricks post.

But if you’re not fond of learning Xcode and programming Objective-C, Photoshop may hold more interest. Below I’ll offer some of the tips I’ve picked up for designing killer iOS app mockups. And since there are always new trends emerging the design community is constantly redefining how to create apps. Think of this as more of a beginner’s resource guide to designing for Apple devices.

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Proper Document Settings

Before even considering elements on the page, you should understand how the iPhone graphics are created. In the newer retina display on iPhone 4/4S models the screen is still physically measured in the same size. However the display in pixels is actually doubled from the original – meaning we use 640×960 at 326ppi resolution.

Additionally the iPhone 3/3GS icons were generally 57×57 pixels. iPhone 4 and 4S screens use 114×114 by default (but will scale up for older resolutions). Thankfully the icon design process is fairly detached from creating a UI layout. But as a designer it never hurts to build both skills.

If you’ll be using these settings a lot I recommend saving them as preset document size. In the new document window for Photoshop you’ll see a button labeled “Save Preset…”. Just give it a name and you can select this from the dropdown list every time you create a new doc.

Instead of creating the iPhone UI elements manually a blog Teehan+Lax offers a free UI kit download specifically for Photoshop. This includes an iPhone 4 render, top bars, buttons, keyboards, and tons of other useful stuff. Definitely grab this first and save it to a local directory where you have easy access to these elements.

Customize the Bars & Buttons

Both the top and bottom area of your app will likely contain menu bars. The top is used for labeling the current view, along with back and edit buttons. The bottom is generally navigation and most commonly uses tabs to accomplish this.

Teehan+Lax uses some really generic examples for these. But they are much easier to customize with your own colors, textures, and whatever other eye-candy you’ve got. So as an example let’s take the Group layer Bar (Grey-Blue) and drag it into a new iPhone-sized document window. Then click the small triangle to the left and open open another sub-group labeled Bar Top. At the very bottom is a background layer with an overlay effect for the gradient.

Open FX on this background layer and double-click on gradient overlay. I removed the default colors from Apple and have set (from left to right) #3478a7 to #5eb0e7. Also the two buttons will have to lose their gradients – for these I used the values #052b50 to #044a8e for a rich dark effect.

Fun with Textures

You can tell just by these small gradient changes that customizing your app is a fairly simple task. For just a bit of detail we can add a texture or pattern over the bar gradient area. We’ll go with some slanted stripes for this demo example.

Start by creating a new document 7×7 pixels with a transparent background. Then set your pencil tool at the smallest scale (1px by 1px) and connect from the top-right corner into the bottom left corner. I’ve used black HEX#000000 but it shouldn’t matter since you can always change the color later. Check out the screenshot below if you don’t follow:

Now hit Edit -> Define Pattern… and give it a name, then hit save. Feel free to close the window now (without saving) since all we needed was the pattern. Now back into the bar top group create a new layer above background. CMD+click or CTRL+click on the vector mask which will select all of the background gradient bar.

But make sure you click back onto the new layer just created so it’s highlighted in blue. We’re going to fill it with this new pattern but we only want to see stripes over the top bar gradient (and below the buttons). In the top menu go to Edit -> Fill and select “Pattern” from the dropdown menu. In the box below you should select the last dotted pattern and hit OK.

The lines seem fairly rigid at first. So in the layers pallet drop the fill down to about 20% value. Also we could change the blending mode to Overlay so the bars will flow with the gradient colors. Zoom back out to 100% and check out the awesome effect!

You can build another sweet texture by setting up a 3px by 3px doc and filling in a plus symbol. I added an example above of how this changes the look of our top bar gradient so dramatically. You may also try changing the color from pure black to pure white #FFFFFF.

Tab Bar Icons

The navigation buttons found at the bottom of your app are crucial to the overall user experience. Users need to figure out where to edit settings, how to perform tasks and what to do in your app quickly. Otherwise they often grow frustrated or bored and quit trying. So as one more tip let’s spruce up the nav area in the bottom bar.

Using the same iPhone 4 GUI PSD file locate the “tab bar” group. Remember you can do this by CMD/CTRL+clicking on the block in Photoshop. Similar to the top bar we can edit the background FX gradient for some matching styles. But alternatively the black default gradient does go well with most color schemes.

For some icons I highly recommend The Working Group’s retina set which come in 24px, 48px, and 64px. Each of the icons from the GUI PSD have FX layer styles applied – basically a light drop shadow and an overlay gradient. These small bits of detail really add up to a terrific design, so pay close attention to your pixels. Try using this color scheme designer if you’re having troubles.

You should think about how text labels will affect the user experience. If you feel the tab icons are enough on their own then label text may just get in the way. However it is important to keep your options open and play around with a few different ideas. Try to get the opinions of friends and co-workers to see which method is best for your app.

Another fairly popular technique is for app designers to create a center button splitting the tab bar into 5 slots. I have seen a lot of really creative applications using this design to save space and add some elegance into the navigation. Formspring is one example, I added the screen below.

Helpful Links

• Glyphish Icon Set
• Design an iPhone Bank App in Photoshop[Tutorial]
• Design iPhone Applications in Photoshop[PDF]
• Useful Collection of iPhone/iPad App Developer Tools and Resources
• iOS Usability Tips and Resources for iPhone and iPad Apps
• How To Create Your First iPhone Application

Conclusion

These strategies for working with iOS apps and Adobe Photoshop will come in handy as you further develop your design senses. Mobile applications are a whole different ballgame compared to websites and logos. Keep this in mind throughout the process since you’ll constantly be learning new techniques.

Along with the links added above you should feel much more comfortable moving forward with app interface design. Layout mockups are always difficult and require time to build and study. But if you have enough dedication the mobile market is possibly the most prosperous area to be. If you have additional questions or comments please let us know in the discussion area below.

Join us as we look back at some of the most well known logos around and uncover some of their unbelievable secrets!

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The Chevy Bowtie May Have Stolen

This story centers around a man named William Durant, who has a long and crazy history with Chevrolet. In the early 1900s, this guy was all over the automobile industry, buying and selling companies like Buick, major shares of GM and even putting in a failed bid for purchasing Ford.

In 1911, Durant started Chevrolet through a partnership with Louis Chevrolet. Given the name of his partner, it’s quite obvious where the title of the company came from. However, the origins of the company’s longstanding logo, the Chevy Bowtie, are greatly debated.

By 1913, the logo was being stamped on Chevrolet products and Durant, who apparently enjoyed logo creation quite a bit, was credited as its creator. But where did he get the idea for the distinct shape? The answer it turns out, depends on who you ask (interestingly enough, no one thinks it came from an actual bowtie).

One simple solution is that the cross-like shape is meant to mirror the Swiss flag as an homage to the birth place of Louis Chevrolet. However, there are at least three other accounts worth noting that might ring closer to the truth.

The Chevrolet Story: Wallpaper

According to the 50 year anniversary issue of a publication titled “The Chevrolet Story,” (1961) Durant spotted the interesting shape in 1908 in a repeated pattern on his Paris hotel wallpaper of all places!

Supposedly Durant liked the shape, sketched it down and showed it to several people as a potential car logo.

Durant’s Daughter: Dinner Time Sketch

Margery Durant, William’s daughter, wrote a book about her father that was published in 1929. These pages contained an entirely different account of the logo’s origins.

According to Margery, she saw her father sketch the logo at the dinner table after eating a bowl of soup! There’s obviously no way to know if he was once again thinking about his wallpaper revelation or if this was indeed the genesis of the idea.

Durant’s Wife: A Newspaper Ad

Even Durant’s own family seems to be divided on the origin of the Chevy Bowtie. In seeming contradiction to his daughter’s dinner table story, William’s wife Catherine claimed that “Billy” had spotted the logo in a newspaper ad while vacationing in Virginia and instantly thought it would be good for the Chevrolet logo.

So what did Bill spot in the paper on that fateful day? Historian Ken Kaufmann found a major clue in the form of a “Coalettes” ad that ran within days of incorporation of Chevrolet. Check out the Coalettes logo compared to that of Chevrolet.

We can’t be completely certain if Durant ever saw this particular logo, but the similarities are plentiful. The heightened center suddenly makes sense given the enlarged “E” and the italic lettering seems a much better fit with the slanted sides than the Chevrolet text, which is rarely, if ever, shown italicized inside the bowtie.

Sources: Chevrolet.com, Jalopnik and The New York Times

The BMW Logo is an Airplane Propeller… Maybe

Bayerische Motoren Werke, also known as Bavarian Motor Works or simply BMW, began life in 1917. Today, we know this company for their legendary luxurious and sporty automobiles and perhaps even their motorcycles, but the company originally had a different focus: aircraft engines.

In 1918, BMW was actually forced to cease production of aircraft engines and subsequently switched to motorcycle and eventually automobile production.

However, the company’s heritage is still reflected in its logo. Like me, you’ve probably seen this icon a thousand times without a second thought as to what it means. It turns out that the four quadrants are meant to represent a white airplane propeller against a blue sky.

This idea can clearly be seen represented in this illustration:

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This is how the story traditionally goes, and it’s a great story! However, in 2010, an official spokesperson from BMW told the New York Times that a 1929 BMW ad like the one above might have been the inspiration for this tale, while the original logo is really just meant to mirror the blue and white that represents the Bavarian Free State. The logo is undeniably similar to a cropped section of the Bavarian Flag.

The Pontiac “Dart” is a Native American Arrowhead

Chief Pontiac is a Native American Chief of the Ottowa who became famous for his involvement in “Pontiac’s Rebellion” agains the British in the early 1760s.

In 1926, the chief served as the inspiration for the name of General Motors’ Pontiac Brand. The original Pontiac logo, shown below, was a much more direct representation of the chief:

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By the 1930s, the logo had evolved a bit and was popularly shown with a sort of shield or arrowhead behind Pontiac’s profile:

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Eventually, the head was removed altogether and the arrowhead went through several iterations until reaching “The Pontiac Dart” that we’re familiar with today, which undoubtedly resembles a downward facing arrowhead.

The Mustang Horse Runs the Wrong Way

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This is another tale that might be a tall one but makes for some fun conversation. In 1964, Ford introduced the Mustang, thereby giving us one of the most popular line of automobiles in history.

Nearly every source available tells the story of the logo going through several iterations before a final was chosen, but they differ when it comes to why the finished horse is depicted running from right to left.

Some claim that Phil Clark, a major player on the design team, was left handed and therefore drew the logo in a way that seemed natural to him. Others claim that the galloping horse “is shown running the opposite way that trained racehorses run around a track” to represent the free spirit of the car and its customers.

Most interesting perhaps is the story that the logo was originally drawn running from left to right, but was accidentally reversed when converted to a die that would be used to mold the actual physical emblem (sources: Mustang Pedal Cars and Ford Mustang History).

No matter what the reason, the Mustang’s logo will always challenge our instincts and run freely to the left.

The Toyota Logo’s Many Hidden Meanings

The Toyota Motor Corporation (originally Toyoda) began life in 1937, but the Toyota logo we know today didn’t come around until 1989, when it debuted alongside the Lexus brand logo. The interesting shape is very intentional and clearly forms the letter “T”.

There’s more to it than that though. According to Toyota, the “T” is formed from three distinct ovals, each with its own meaning. The two overlapping ovals in the center represent the relationship and trust between the company and its customers and the encircling oval represents the global expansion of Toyota and endless opportunities ahead. The logo also forms a steering wheel, representing the car itself. Even the negative space in the logo is meant to represent the “infinite values” of the company.

This is where fact ends and lore begins. Some say that the logo pays homage to the fact that the Toyota Motor Corporation was a spinoff of a company that produced looms and sewing machines. It’s said that the logo resembles the eye of a needle.

Finally, in addition to the obvious “T”, many claim that indeed every single letter of the word “Toyota” has been intentionally hidden inside of the logo. Here’s my rough interpretation of this idea:

Conclusion

From the borrowed Chevy Bowtie to the wayward running Mustang, automobile logos are simply packed with interesting history. These days we see far too many logos simply typed out in Helvetica so it’s always a pleasure to have a look back at some emblems so rich in meaning.

Leave a comment below and let us know about the history of your favorite logo. Is there a hidden message or a refuted past? We want to hear it!

If you’re at all interested in infographic design, read along as we take a look at some of our favorite examples and discuss some important do’s and don’ts for creating compelling and effective graphics.

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Create One Strong Focal Point

Infographics too often turn into a complicated mess of graphics and text. As a designer, it’s very easy to get carried away and ultimately come away with something that’s more overwhelming than helpful.

One way to reign this tendency is to rely heavily on one central graphic that strongly communicates your overall theme or message:

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As you can see, the main corn graphic here is by no means the only attractive visual on the page, but it does eat up most of the available space. This helps pull you in and gives you the sense that you can easily digest the information depicted.

Once the main graphic has pulled you in, you can then choose to move your attention to the flanking information, graphics and textual information.

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Can You Read it at a Glance?

Remember that, just like any design, an infographic should have a set of underlying goals that it is meant to accomplish. Typically, the point of an infographic is to take complex information and make it easier to take in through graphical reinforcement. Your goal then is to create something that can be consumed as quickly as possible. Not every little scrap of information needs to be communicated in an instant, but the overall gist of the data should at least be perceivable in under a few seconds.

If you don’t keep your eye closely on this goal, it’s easy to miss the mark. The result is something might be a small improvement over raw text, but fails to truly present the data in an engaging and easily consumable manner.

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I can’t help but think that this infographic is unnecessarily difficult to sort through. As you design, think about the number of eye movements it takes to take in a data point. In the example above, you’re eyes are darting all over the place to decipher the layout on the horizontal point on the grid, the vertical point on the grid, the colors and how they all tie in together. Simply put, it’s too much work!

Use Applicable Metaphors

Some of the most engaging infographics take boring, complex information and apply a graphical metaphor that’s so perfect that even laymen can almost instantly understand what is being stated. The infographic below serves as an excellent example.

The designers were tasked with communicating fifty quarters of comparative positive economic growth among 14 countries. In a plain old chart, this is enough to put any high school student to sleep. However, with the race metaphor, it’s an entertaining, conversation starting graphic that even an elementary school student can grasp on a basic level.

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As another example, take a look at the graphic below. Here the influx of immigrants into the United States is depicted as a series of bar charts that make up the American flag. It’s a quick read that’s made that much more engaging by the familiarization of the data’s shape.

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Take a Slice

Sometimes infographics aren’t merely used to jazz up raw data points but to communicate a real world situation. Under these circumstances, one popular go-to strategy is to illustrate a scene using three dimensional graphics that almost look like a scientific sample has been taken from the world similar to how a scientist would sample a tree.

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As you can see, the result of this technique is a remarkably interesting illustration that very quickly relates the issue. What would typically take several paragraphs or even pages to explain is condensed down to one helpful graphic.

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Data Can Be Beautiful

Sometimes infographics take a handful of data points and put them together for a quicker read, other times the point is to visualize a huge mound of data. In these situations, it’s simply not always a realistic or even desirable to make each individual point an area of interest.

Instead, the big picture is the primary focus: What can we learn from taking a step back to take in the data all at once? In these circumstances, designers often creatively plot the data in such a way that a beautiful piece of art results!

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If you follow the link and take a close look at this chart, you see that there are simply too many pieces of information to attempt to take in. However, the infographic is still an excellent resource as it has turned painfully dull information into something truly remarkable that clearly depicts certain trends.

Rethink the Bar Graph

The designer who taught me most of what I know told me something that has always stuck with me: “Your first idea is probably your most generic.” In design, it’s likely the case that the first thing that pops into your head is the first thing that would pop into another designer’s head as well, which isn’t always bad but can lead to a lot of unoriginal work.

In infographics this concept frequently takes the form of a bar graph. Sure, it’s an incredibly useful tool that genuinely improves data visualization, but it’s also a bit generic and unimaginative from a design perspective.

The next time you start to create a bar chart, think about how you can put your own unique spin on it. The infographic below is a perfect example. Here the designer used 3D stacks of cards to depict Americans’ opinions of their allies. The higher the stack, the more favorable the opinion. At heart, it’s just a bar graph but in practice it made for a much more interesting graphic.

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Use Repetition

Repetition is one of your core design tools and should be used in just about everything you create. This tool is especially useful and appropriate for infographics where the same data points are often shown repeatedly in different contexts.

Below I chopped up the Envato Remote Staff Infographic to show how the designer repeatedly used the little Google Maps markers to represent staff members. Since the charts are all about location, this is a perfect metaphor and the repetition makes for a familiar schema that we instantly pick up on mentally and don’t have to reinterpret with each new section.

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Tell a Visual Story

This tip has the same basic concept behind it as number two above. Since the goal of an infographic is to make for a quick read, your design should tell a story in an instant. Infographics should be very visual experiences that don’t necessarily rely too heavily on the text. It should be there for those that want to take the time to read it, but your pictures should carry the burden of communication fairly well on their own.

In the infographic below, I get a ton of information without reading a single word. Instantly I know that the point is to show cell phones over the years and I really get a feel for that evolution from the pictures. My eyes drift up from the phone pictures and I see hanging weights, a clear indication of how the physical weight of phones has progressed over the years.

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Once you’ve got a working design in place for your infographic, try stripping out all of the text and showing it to someone who hasn’t seen it before. Can they tell roughly what’s going on? Is there anything you can do to improve that visual communication?

Carefully Visualize Comparisons

This is pretty much infographic design 101 but it’s an important point that you should give a lot of thought to. One major aspect of infographics is not only the representation of data but more importantly the comparison of data. Typographic art is quite popular at the moment but simply typing out big numbers in a nice font doesn’t really convey a sense of scale or reference. For this reason, designers turn to charts, graphs, illustrations and whatever else they can think of to convey the story being told.

I mentioned above that you should consider rethinking any bar graphs that you use, here I extend this idea to any data visualization you employ. Your job is to show someone what 14.2 trillion looks like compared to 6.95 billion, how are you going to accomplish that? What tools and tricks can you use to take that unimaginable scale and bring it down to something that we can comprehend in two seconds?

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Pour on the Visual Hints

Let’s say you do resort to using a plain old bar graph, which is perfectly acceptable. Your job then is to consider how you can make it even more readable, even to the point of redundancy.

Consider the little flags on the bar chart below. Now, since I am capable of reading a bar chart on my own, I don’t really need those little flags on top of each bar depicting the value. However, this trick does add some visual interest to the design while reducing the amount of work necessary to interpret the data. This one little touch could’ve easily been left off, but the designer took the extra time to make doubly sure the information could be read quickly.

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More Infographics

Can’t get enough infographics? Check out the links below for more awesome design examples.

• Style and Flow
• Good.is
• InfographicGallery
• Visual.ly
• Cool Infographics

Conclusion

You probably noticed that many of the tips above boil down to a single point: make data user friendly. As designers, we love to talk about the “pretty” aspect of infographic design and the art that is involved, but the prize to keep our eyes on is user satisfaction.

Infographics are one of the purest examples of graphic design that you’ll ever come across. We see here that design is so much more than fonts and colors, design is the creative organization, styling and presentation of information with the goal of increasing interest, readability and comprehension beyond that of pure text.

Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts on the infographics shown above. Which are your favorites and why?

Today we’re going to have some good old nostalgic fun and take a walk through cereal box history to look at some beloved characters that have been with most of us since we could chew.

Keep reading to see what your favorite cereal box mascot looked like years ago versus today!

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Why Cereal?

Why the heck are you reading about cereal boxes on a design blog? The simple answer is, I happen to love cereal. The other day as I was chomping down on some delicious Raisin Bran I found myself doing what everyone does when they eat cereal: looking at the box. This led me to realize that I’ve spent a healthy chunk of my life simply staring at cereal boxes while I eat breakfast (or lunch, or dinner, or a late night snack).

When I was a kid, I used to mostly play the games on the back and compare the nutritional information with the cereals my brothers were eating (the higher numbers always win). These days I tend to gravitate toward design while I stare. The typography, the photography and most of all, the illustrations. On the rare occasions when I neglect to purchase an “adult cereal” in favor of something sugary, I always think about the characters on the box and how they’ve evolved over the years.

As a designer, understanding generational trends is an important skill and cereal boxes provide an excellent study in retro illustration styles. Thinking about these characters will help you mentally define what makes an illustration seem modern and what makes it seem aged.

Then the next time a client asks you for a retro design, I guarantee you’ll find yourself thinking about Tony the Tiger or Cap’n Crunch!

Tony the Tiger

They’rrrre great! Who doesn’t immediately think of Frosted Flakes upon hearing that exclamation? Tony the Tiger was originally created in 1952 by Eugene Kolkey. The original design is quite different than the character we know today, have a look:

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As you can see, Tony (or perhaps this shows Tony Jr?) used to look a little more like a cat than he does these days. Granted, the last time I checked tiger heads weren’t shaped like a football, but the concept still holds true. Compare this to the very human-like character we know today:

Just look at that guy! He went from a cute cat to a superhero! Tony is a perfect example of a trend that you’ll see over and over throughout this post: anthropomorphism. This is a big, fancy word that simply means to take a non-human and impose human characteristics upon it.

The goal of the original illustration seemed to be to take a tiger and make it more friendly, less ferocious and slightly more human in the process while still keeping much of the “cat” identity. Today, Tony has been completely rethought so that he has the basic muscular structure of human being. It’s almost as if this Tony started human and was given Tiger-like characteristics, the reverse of what we saw before.

There are definitely some other trends as well. Notice the use of gradients in the new Tony to add more depth and realism. 1950s illustrations definitely have a flat look to them by comparison. Tools like Photoshop and Illustrator have made it easier to add these kinds of details to artwork and I would wager that printing technologies had something to do with it as well.

Also notice the shape of the eyes in the new Tony: they’re oval and quite elongated. Many of the other characters we’ll see started with oval eyes, but they’ve become even more elongated over the years which gives a more interested, excited appearance to the characters.

Finally, the overall line thickness of the underlying character framework has increased pretty dramatically. Occasionally, older characters had little to no noticeable outlines and were just defined by colors and patterns. Today we really emphasize the thick, marker-like strokes of the basic line drawing.

Toucan Sam

Toucan Sam was created by Manuel R. Vega in the early 60s as the official mascot of Froot Loops. Can you spot any similarities and trends that we discussed before with Tony in the original Sam?

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Once again, we can definitely notice a lack of black, defining lines. For the most part, Sam is comprised of solid color fields (no gradients) that sit right up against each other. Notice that Toucan Sam isn’t a very high fidelity drawing but is instead composed of extremely simple shapes.

Don’t make the mistake of ever thinking that artists simply weren’t as talented back then, they were more than capable of drawing a realistic toucan! Instead, it was a stylistic decision to keep these characters simple in nature.

Here’s a look at Toucan Sam as we know him today:

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The transformation of Toucan Sam is conceptually almost identical to that of Tony the Tiger. First, notice the anthropomorphism: his body shape, wings and feet are much more human and less bird-like than they used to be. The colors and shapes are also no longer simple, instead we see gradients, highlights and a more complex structure.

We can clearly spot the underlying lines as well. They’re more subtle than we saw on new Tony but still much more defined than the old Toucan Sam. Finally, take a look at the eyes. The original Sam had oval eyes but they weren’t nearly as elongated as they are in the new Sam. This definitely gives him a more hyperactive and excited appearance, which is furthered by the action that has been infused into the scene. The old bird was pictured standing still while the new one swings into the scene on a jungle vine to present you with your breakfast.

Cap’n Crunch

Horatio Magellan Crunch, more commonly known as Cap’n Crunch. He’s been selling overly sweet breakfasts to children since the early 60s and is now in fact owned by another of my favorite sugar peddlers: Pepsi.

Long ago, Cap’n Crunch seemed a bit more fragile and old than the robust sea captain that we know today:

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Notice though that this particular illustration is quite modern in its characteristics, we can see how illustration styles are evolving into what we know today. The old Cap’n has thick lines and even some impressive shadows!

There’s one particular aspect of this illustration that catches my attention immediately: the eyelids. Notice how the inclusion of eyelids onto this character has given him a old, droopy-eyed look. This is actually pretty common in cartoon characters around this time period, especially for character who were supposed to be old or lethargic. Let’s look at today’s Cap’n.

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Notice the new Cap’n has no eyelids. It’s also interesting to note that the recently released retro Cap’n Crunch box featured the old Cap’n design, sans the eyelids!

Here we also see gradients taken to the extreme, and eyes that form much taller ellipses. There’s an odd sense of overlap too: the eyes overlap each other, the eyebrows are pushed much further up into the hat, etc. Have you ever thought about how ridiculous it is that Cap’n Crunch has eyebrows over his hat? I sure have.

The Trix Rabbit

Joe Harris created the Trix Rabbit right before the start of the 60s. If you haven’t noticed, a clear pattern is emerging here. The early 60s were apparently the height of cereal mascot creation, that golden age when advertisers realized that they could use cartoons to target children and sell more food.

The original Trix Rabbit is a lot like old Toucan Sam in that he’s an incredibly simple drawing. As a curveball this time though, he has a remarkably thick outline:

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Compare this rabbit for a moment with today’s Trix rabbit and you’ll get a perfect picture of what the 90′s did to cartoon characters:

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Once again like Toucan Sam, The Trix Rabbit went from being fairly relaxed (despite the skates), to looking like he was just released from the cereal mascot loony bin. Notice not only the eyes this time, but the wide open mouth. Now go back and look at the other mascots and see if you notice a trend: Toucan Sam and Tony the Tiger both went from closed mouth characters to those with wide open jaws. Even today’s Cap’n Crunch has a much bigger mouth than the original.

Finally, despite the fact that our strokes are actually lighter this time around, the darkness is definitely more pronounced and we’ve scrapped uniform lines for more organic marker strokes with plenty of contrast between the thicks and thins.

More Characters

Now that we’ve discussed some popular illustration trends, let’s finish of with a quick look at some more characters. Can you spot the same trends in these the evolution of these other characters?

Lucky

image source

Snap, Crackle and Pop

image source: left, right

Buzz

image source: left, right

Sugar Bear

image source: left, right

Further Reading

If you’re interested to hear more about how these characters came to exist and even see more old/new comparisons, check out Accelerator Advertising’s great article on the topic: Top 10: Cereal Characters.

Conclusion

I hope this walk down memory lane has gotten you all teary eyed longing for the golden age of cereal. More importantly, I hope you’ve learned a thing or two about illustration styles in the 1950′s and 1960′s and how they differ from popular styles today.

Leave a comment below and let us know who your favorite cereal mascot is! How many can you name off the top of your head without checking Google?

A Note About Images: I discovered during the writing of this post that cereal images are incredibly difficult to find. I’ve tried to be respectful and link to the original sources for the various images in the post, but the true original sources are often impossible to hunt down. If I’ve used an image that you own, leave a comment and let me know if you’d prefer that I give you credit or take it down.

Today we’re going to explore a super easy design trick for combining text and photos in interesting ways. I’ll teach you four methods for using the directionality of a photograph to determine a corresponding design layout.

This one will be fun and is sure to challenge the way you think about images in your designs so sit back and come along for the ride!

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No Rules

I’ll preface this article with a brief admission that the following tips do not represent hard and fast rules that you must follow in your design work. Instead, it’s simply one method (in four parts) that you can use to align various design elements in relation to the content of a photo.

Obviously, considerations like whitespace often have a primary effect on where you place text on a photo. Keep this in mind as you work with your own images in this manner.

Why Do This at All?

Though it’s not necessarily a requirement, I strongly encourage you to always take a good look at the hard lines in a photograph that you’re trying to combine with text and graphics. Repetition is one of the most important design principles and this is a natural implementation of that idea. By analyzing the photo and following its directionality, you find incredibly easy ways to make your graphics and text look truly integrated, as if the image was created expressly for the purpose you’re using it for, a great illusion if you’re using stock.

So what do I mean by suggesting that you follow the existing lines in a photo? Let’s take a look.

Literal

Our first method for using the lines in a photo is the most simple and direct. All you have to do is analyze the image’s content and use any hard lines to help align your artwork in a very literal fashion.

The first step in this process is obviously to find the right photo. Not every image will lend itself to the techniques in this article, as a prerequisite, you must be using something with clear and hard edges. The following image from photographer Stephen Heron is a perfect example.

As you can see, there are plenty of distinct, large and solid colored areas. The framework of the buildings provides naturally separated sections that can act as containers for our content.

In the modified version below, I’ve added some graphical cues to the image so you can start to think about the flow of the lines as something that stands out and can be easily utilized.

With these guidelines in mind, we can place our content right in line with these existing lines. The result is quite nice. On it’s own, this layout would seem erratic, but with the image governing our placement, it works perfectly.

Too obvious right? You didn’t need an article to tell you to place text in the most natural spot in a photograph! This is merely the starting point of our conversation, we can use this logic to go even further into some placements that may not jump out at you quite as much.

Extended Literal

In the previous example, we took our text and graphics and placed them directly on the existing lines and edges in the photo. However, it’s often the case that a busy photograph will prevent this from being a natural placement. For instance, in this photograph by theklan, placing text right over the stairs would make for some difficult to read content.

The natural area of whitespace is on the right side where we have a large empty wall to work with. Now, we could haphazardly toss our text in this space and call it a day, or we could be a little bit more intentional about our placement by considering the existing guidelines that the photograph is offering us.

Notice how I’ve drawn the lines to coincide with the steps, even though they don’t extend all the way across the page. The steps serve as the primary focal point of the image and they have such nice hard lines that your eyes will tend to follow them. If we then use these lines, our text should theoretically have a very natural placement that seems to fit really well with the image.

Notice that, from the top to the bottom, every single piece of text has a very intentional placement that coincides with the image’s preexisting directionality. These lines aren’t only governing where I set the text, but even the size of each piece.

This time our resulting effect is much more subtle. Most viewers won’t even notice what you’ve done, and yet there’s a definitely feeling of rightness to the way the text is placed.

Repetition

Remember our good friend repetition? This time around we’re going to leverage this principle heavily in light of the existing lines in the photo.

The following image of birds on a wire, taken by Lali Masriera, provides the perfect canvas for this experiment. The lines here are crystal clear and there’s a good deal of whitespace to the right that we can use for content.

This time, in placing my lines, I did something a bit different. Not only did I place lines that correspond to existing elements on the page, I actually used those as the starting point of a pattern or grid. I’m taking some liberties and adding my own lines, but they directly mimic those already in place. Once again, this is simply going to make our placement a bit more natural than if we defied this directionality with a perfectly vertical placement.

With those lines in place, we have created clear and usable sections. Note that these didn’t necessarily exist in this form in the original image as they did in our first example, instead we used the existing content as inspiration for a repetitive shape.

Keep in mind that you can take this principle to the extreme and actually rotate your text to further mimic the directionality of the existing lines.

Inspired Symmetry

For our last example, we’ll be using a method that’s very similar to the repetition method above, but in a more complex manner. To start, I grabbed this awesome image from photographer Daniel Zedda.

I really love this image, the composition is incredibly solid and uses a technique often found in European renaissance art. If we think about the strongest natural lines in this photo, they don’t really stretch across the image like those in the previous examples. Instead, we see a very defined pyramid take shape.

We can use this shape as inspiration for how we place our text on the page, just as we did with the bird photo. To do this, draw the lines that make up the triangle, then copy that triangle and place it in the area to the left. Finally, use this new triangle as a guide for text placement.

Notice that, in the final result below, I didn’t actually continue the pyramid shape all the way to the bottom. Instead, my lines of text seemed to naturally conform to an almost diamond shape, and that’s completely acceptable. Once again, you’re making the rules here so feel free to distort and rethink the natural lines in the photo rather than simply taking them so literally.

Conclusion

The goal here is to not to follow my suggestions exactly but instead to simply become more aware of how the existing content in a photograph can be used to guide and inspire you to create unique designs that break away from the cookie cutter mold that’s so easy to fall into.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of these examples. Do you think about the directionality of the content in a photograph before adding elements to it or is this a new idea to you?