Made a, fairy easy, chocolate cake for brother’s girlfriend’s birthday, and then stuck some mini-eggs on and created a combo-cake masterpiece. It’s pretty nice, if not filling as fuck. I even went fancy with a dusting of icing sugar. Yeah, look at all that fancy.
Boom. Combo bonus x2.
I should definitely be working.
(Recipe is from Rachel Allen’s ‘Bake’ book, which is pretty decent.)
I made a, stupidly quickly done, poster for this contest by Conquer paper. Title of contest is “Typographic Games”, bit of a play on upcoming olympics and stuff. Basically, if anyone out there would care to vote for me and massively increase my chances of winning some sweet-ass custom Nikes, I would appreciate it it mucho’s. La Link opening it full, or even better, bugging your friends on twitter & Facebook by liking it massively helps. Have a look through other entrants, there are some beasting one. Oh, and it’s open for a while yet so enter away.
(For some awesome reason, the black outline of some of the words has disappeared here. Awesome.)
Anyway link again here http://www.conqueror.com/typographicgames/#/gallery/511
Just a quick post while I’m trawling through my archives. Planning to start looking back at old work and trying to update it a little for the big portfolio prep ’12. This is from illustration class year, brief was to design a DPS for a book of nursery rhymes, aimed at modern market. I picked “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,”, for… some reason (I think I was just desperate to avoid eggs and mice.) As usual for illustration, initial idea was nothing like final thing. Went for a subtle approach, slightly side-stepped visuals.
I still like the elements, especially the main illustration which was just the result of a lot of experimentation (messing around) with magazine cutouts and acrylics, but I think the background, layout and typography need work. And the ‘three maids’ aren’t completely there yet. For some reason I’m thinking something geometric-y would help. Or maybe not. So yeah, I’ll post again once I’ve finished re-tweaking, and try to remember to take some ‘progress-montage’ shots to spice things up/make things duller. Any thoughts appreciated on this.
(Quick edit) Eeesht, for some reason the background green colour is way off when I’m looking at the image on the blog. It’s meant to be a bit tamer than that. More stuff to fix I guess.
Bad update/cake pun, sorry.
Most of the actual shark remains, mainly due it being solid icing and a bit much. And nearly impossible to cut.
But it went down pretty well, so might try stupid icing sculpture.
Trying to keep this post a little briefer. In my information design class I chose to do an info graphic poster about life expectancy. This involved taking a bunch of spreadsheets about life expectancy, mortality and the chance of someone born in 2011 of reaching 100 years old. Obviously, it’s not the cheeriest of subjects, so I tried with the design to keep things quite light.
Listed all the countries and adjust their length according to life expectancy, to give an interesting way to compare, and also highlighted the top and bottom 4. For comparison I also included the average world life expectancy, and the oldest recorded person.
Designed a band, featuring some of the elements of the design, to keep the poster rolled up. The poster in the mock-up photos isn’t quite right, which I only realised after printing, which was a bit, eh, costly. A lesson about double checking print files, and not going to the printers after a week of next-to-no sleep is the moral here.
So, the brief I picked for my typography class was for a ‘typographicaly-themed’ restaurant, which definitely fell into the unrealistic-college-briefs pile, but it was at least pretty interesting to do.
I started by focusing on typographic elements, to try and come up with a new name, as the suggested one (“Mutton Quad”) really didn’t sound like an appealing restaurant. Eventually, after abandoning some fairly bad ideas involving Brown-Foxes and ligatures, I settled on focusing on the ampersand, because who doesn’t love an ampersand. More playing around lead me to calling it “E&T”, as I felt this nicely mirrored the history of the ampersand (the latin for and is et, which became a sort of ligature and morphed over time) and also when pronounced says ‘eat’, which seemed relevant. I toyed with leaving the pronunciation purposely loose, but since this is a college project decided to nail it down a little more.
I used Nilland as I really liked the modern, sharp approach to a serif, even though it has an upper case i that I really hate. As Nilland is a free font, the kerning was not exactly spot on, so rather than drive myself completely insane, I decided to use Arno Pro for the body text, as the two went together nicely, a mix of classic and modern serifs. I stuck to a strict 3 colour scheme across my designs, to keep things sharp. I am beginning to waffle a bit, aren’t I? Feel free to completely skip this dodgy explanation.
For a promotional item, I went with recipe card flyers that I thought would stand a better chance of being retained, plus it’s always nice to get some function into advertising. The two I made were both for baking, but I think the format would support some short and simple dish recipes as well.
Now that the project is finished and handed in, I’m actually fairly pleased with it, which is a highly unusual for me. I’m hoping to expand it a little, and try a site mock-up, soon, which I’ll probably stick up once I finish struggling with.
Ok, I think that’ll probably do for a first “LOOK AT MY WAREZ” post. I’ll probably edit this continuously for the next day.
PDF: Typo_E&T
Information Design and Typography deadlines are done, and I feel a tiny bit free. I’m aiming to work on some older stuff to bring it up a little, but there’s a chance I might just watch Saturday Night Live all day. Anyway, I’ll chuck a couple of pictures of the work I’ve just finished up in posts, as I really feel I should do something with them while I can still half-bear to look at them.
Freedom feels sweet. And a little exhausted.
Twice I’ve written a post and hit cancel by mistake.
NOT AGAIN WORDPRESS.
Proper post soon. When it’s not half 3 and I have a crushing deadline looming.
I am not getting the hang of blogging.
Basically: here is the cake I made for my brothers birthday tomorrow/today.
(He’s 25, so the excess blood should be fine.)
Jonathan Hoefler talking at Pivot: AIGA Design Conference 2011.
Fantastic talk, mainly about webfonts, and the challenges designing them throws up. Covers some general typography stuff, as well as design process and differences to be considered when designing for print and the screen.
(I’ll post some actual content once I have got the other things I’m working on slightly more, eh, done.)
May I present: Microwaved Cake-in-a-Cup.
Not my exactly my finest baking experience, it tastes a bit better than it looks but I couldn’t manage more than a couple of forkfuls.
If you too are feeling redonkulously lazy today, and aren’t feeling particularly ‘taste-fussy’, you can find the recipe here, ingredients are all pretty find-in-cupboard, and as you’d expect, it ain’t too hard to put together.
Go forth, and try not to make yourself ill.
