unclesamgraphics-blog

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Packaging Design I saw this package the other day and it really catched my eye for it's creativeness and smart concept. Packaging Design is one of the most import tasks a Designer can do for it's clients, you're not only leaving your mark but secure that people will buy the product because they find it attractive, and that'’ what's most important in the business, looking good.

We all seek for quality and good products but as Designers a lot of times we find ourselves buying products for it's packaging, just to comtemplate it, study it, see what worked so well to catch your eye. We have done a project about packaging in our first semester but definitly I'm excited to explore it more and do more projects like this in the future, although it can be stressful to come up with something that is different from other packages and being creative but if we are successful in the end, that's all it matters, because it fulfills our designer ego and upgrades our experience.

Coconut Milk

Advertising Agency Leo Burnett, Toronto has created beautiful packaging for Grinning Face Coconut milk. The drink is best enjoyed shaken. Because Grinning Face Coconut Milk is fresh pressed and has only two ingredients: coconut and water, it separates and needs a good shake. They embraced this in their design, using jumbled letters to educate and encourage the consumer to shake it. The simple, white-on-white colour palate reflects the brand’s minimal approach to ingredients.

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And Then They Killed My Father

I recently watched this movie,  that portraits a cambodian family happily living their safe lives in the city, until the Vietnam war broke out and changed their lives for ever.

This true story talks about how the vietnamese army and rebels would take all the civilian's  assets to finance their war and most terrifying they would take the children and train them as soldiers. You can see the journey of a little girl that loses her family and gets through the worse of situation a human can go, but she is able to save a reunite with her siblings later on. It's a movie everyone should watch for it's rawness and incredible story that will touch you.

As a designer, we all love movies and have a perticular interest in film making, edition and film plans. The way this movie is portrait is incredible, from the landscapes to the director's amazing perpective of plans. Half way of the movie, it turns black and white with some purple effects that are represented in the movie cover and poster, this part really catched my attention with the incredible contrast and emphasis of the scene, this was created on purpose I suppose to get your attention.

A lot of times movies gives us, designer, some inspiration for future projects, with it's plans, colors, contrasts or scenarios, and this was definitly one of them.

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Motion Graphics One thing that really interests me in Graphic Design, and yes I spell it with capital letters because it matters, is Motion Graphics. There's a big variety and types of Motion Graphics that I'm keen to explore.

I've seen this in a few flyer/poster promotion designs a few years ago and I found it so cool and insteresting. Put together a poster and then grab its elements and make them move, that's the next level and comtemporary design at the moment. I see it everywhere now, and it gets me more and more hyped to try it out and explore my possibilities, but I haven't tried yet as I've been busy with other projects, work and a bit of procrastination to the mix, but I'll definitely will search for tuturials and tips soon because we are done with uni and I need something to entertain myself.

I hope we get lectures about this in second year and experiment with it in the next modules because this is great for promotion and branding nowadays, I haven't seen advertisements lately with just standard logos on it, they always have some motion graphic to its promotions and it's always a new and good skill to add to your carreer. 

Pluvial 

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Poster Design

One thing I love the most to do is poster design! I’ve been doing it for 4 years now, since I moved to China and lived there for 3 years I’ve made a lot of network for freelancing works.

Most of my friends there are DJ’s, artists, promoters and club owners, and they always loved my works and they keep asking me to make their visual communication. I’ve been working with this club/bar/restaurant called Aurora that my friends opened in Beijing and I design everything for them, menus, posters, signs, flyers and all promotion stuff since the beginning.

It’s always good to work with different people with different concepts because you really need to know what’s behind they stand for and what they want to transmit for you to make good works for them and make them come back for more. I like to design posters for parties specially it’s always fun, sometimes they already have the idea for it but most of the time my clients trust me enough to come up with something and they usually love it. It’s always warming to get good feedbacks from clients and the public for my works and specially when I see my works around the city.

Of course not always it’s sunshine and flowers, many times I get tough and picky clients that take me quite a few drafts to come up with the final version. Other times we get forgetful and confused clients that always change things, specially at last minute and it’s super annoying but it’s something that every designer has to deal with. But overall, I love to create posters and share my artworks, I have some knowledge after this time but everyday I learn something and get new ideas, it’s always good to see more and explore more to do more.

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Second Year

I’m excited to start the second year, see what kind of lectures and projects they are planning for us. After a long break from the second semester it will be good to come back.

As I mentioned before, this 1st year was kinda easy for me, as I already have a few year of experience in the field, although the coding part was definitely a challenge, therefore I’m willing to learn more, practice and get a basic knowledge of it because having skills in coding will benefit for my future career in many ways. I’ve heard that in the second year we will do more coding and a lot of group works, that makes me a bit hesitated for the experience we had in this last semester, not everyone is really here for this and a lot of them don’t care about the projects, getting good grades and progress as a designer, they are happy with average scores which is not my goal.

Hopefully we will learn new stuff, specially me, techniques and things I haven’t learn before, it would be exciting to play around again with typography, learn motion graphics and more deep into branding design. Since the time passes fast, I’m taking the most advantage of my time here by using the facilities that are provided to us and it would be exciting if on the second year we would spend more time in printing studios too to develop amazing artwork.

Let’s do this!

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My first year

The first year has come to an end, fast as a block on an eye, soon we’ll have the submission dates and be free for a while until October.

I feel sad in a way, because we’ll have too much free time until we start the second year, this break is too long and most of us won’t do much as a designer in the meantime. I work as a freelancer so everyday I have works that I have to submit to my clients, but I’ll miss the uni projects, that give me motivation to produce more and do better.

I feel a bit disappointed with the first year, I didn’t learn much, as I’ve been learning design by myself for the past 5 years and most of the assignments were kinda easy for my level of design knowledge. I’ve learned a couple of techniques and a few more technical names and language of Design. But overall it was amusing and interesting, this makes me be more and more sure that this is the the path I wanna persue.

It was great to experiment different design approaches and had the opportunity to try out cool workshops and live the studio life for a few days, had a blast producing my own pieces with Lino cut, etching, screen printing, letter press, sublimation and laser cut. Not only that but we had this interesting module about collage that I really enjoyed! Typography was one of my most exciting modules to be, but didn’t quite reached my expectations. We had great lectures with a great teacher and we had a lot of fun in classes, although it was missing something, like techniques and approaches to how to produce typefaces, I understand we all should get our own ideas, aspirations and typographers that really understand our style but we could’ve done a bit more, and the concept for the creation of our typeface wasn’t that great either but I had fun producing mine.

Finally I leave here my most fun experience that was the artist book! That assignment was literally blood, sweat and tears, as I’ve put it together in 2 months, working on it day and night. I used so many different media, from photography to typography to Lino cut to collage, etc... and did a Japanese style single page binding with wax tread on wood that toke me fun 10 hours, with a lot of blood shed. But the out come was very proudly accomplished a few days before the deadline. This was all worth it with the high grade I’ve obtain with it, so I’m excited to see what the second year will bring us!

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My First Design Inspiration

When I was younger I used to skateboard and back then Immediately noticed that skateboarding has a big relationship with graphic design and branding, when you look at all the brand logos, skate deck graphics and all merchandise in general. I skateboard for long time since 2007, and my most favorite brand of all time was TOY MACHINE.

I just thought that their logo was so attractive and specially their graphics and artwork line in general was amazing. So I started to get familiar with who made it and what were they trying to transmit. Ed Templeton is the man behind all this, he’s a professional skateboarder, photographer, graphic designer, artist and the brand owner, he started this brand due to his passion for skateboarding and art by representing his daily visions and society interventions on his deck graphics. His artwork is so good and different from the rest of the brands that really caught my attention for graphics and design.

When I started to notice his work and other artist’s work my interest for design started to grow more and more that I really wanted to start my own brand back then, although I ended up not doing it for a wide variety of reasons but standing today, I feel happy that I’ve gain skills to make artwork like this by myself.

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Chris Ashworth

Since I discovered Chris I immediately start following his work, he’s a graphic designer that at the moment is the creative director for Getty Images, worked with the magazine Ray Gun, MTV and many other collabs and works that really gives his portfolio a solid stand out.

He’s influenced by Swiss design and decided to create his own style that he calls “Swiss Grit” which implies a lot of bar codes, the use of multiple colored and translucent layers, hyper details that you can really see in all his works, horizontal lines and textures.

His works are absolute stunning, Chris carries a passion for collage and textures, just like me, and he brings out these great artworks by using a wide variety of tools and elements, one of my favorite elements are the fonts and letters that he play around by using resistente letraset sheets that you can transfer fonts from it to other paper, a old school way. Then he brings out the textures with different tapes, liquid paper, pritstick, technical pencils, biro, tipex, cartridges papers and many more. Most of his works are inspired by music themes or photography that Chris shot beautifully.

Not only Chris Ashworth is an artist but a collector, he has a huge variety of archive that he’s not shy to show us, mainly vintage and retro artworks and tools that were beautifully made a long time ago. Chris really inspired me in last semester for my artist book, because he loves the same this I do, minimalism, textures, letters, contrast and the use of different element to balance establish a great hierarchy in the artwork.

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Malibu Ninjas

I wanted to leave here a shout out and a small presentation of this duplet of creative guys. They are 2 friends of mine from my city, Lisbon, that have a background in art schools, creative thinking and graffiti lifestyle for quite some time, both of them have studied illustration and animation and after quite some time thy decided to come up with this nice concept “Malibu Ninjas” which try to stand out the Lisbon’s subculture of graffiti /street art/ street lifestyle.

Inside the brand they explore endless possibilities such as digital illustrations, paintings, video, photography, screen prints, posters, graffiti murals, political intervention art, street art, clothing, artist books, kids books etc...

With all this, it makes me happy that people push boundaries to keep this culture alive and come up with cool ideas and works for the public to see. It also give me motivation to work on my personal projects as well, knowing that I have tools for it, I can always ask them for opinions and we can discuss good ideas for maybe future collaborations.

On the other hand, I’m always more than happy to promote young artists from my city that give to the culture and inspire other to do more without putting yourself limits.

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Today I’m writing about feedback, good, bad and neutral feedback.

Every semester around the 6/7th week we always have a few days for feedback of our assigments, to improve and make sure we follow the brief guidelines.

To be honest I don’t really like to have feedback from my peers because it’s never consistent and deep throughout my work, it’s always something like “it’s cool” “I like it” that’s not enough for me. I prefer to have feedback from the lecturers and staff because they are more professional, they can see what I’m missing out on my work, they can advise and make an overall deep crit of it. And with those advices it’s way easier to improve my work and grow as a designer to keep in mind those mistake for the future.

Sometimes it’s hard to hear some feedback because we don’t necessarily agree with the other person or , simply , we don’t want to hear it but we just need to keep it in mind always and try to see in different perspectives to improve yourself. Any feedback is good, we need other perspectives and opinions in every aspect of our life’s, because what we think it’s best not always it is.

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Screenprinting

Yesterday I had my first screenprint experience, and it was great! Despite being harder then I thought, I think I did ok.

This type of print requires a long and delicate process, that rewards in the end, however you have to be careful and precise for the artwork to turn out has you want but luckily we have great studio conditions in our university that allows us to experiment and practice.

I did Lino cut and letter press before that are similar printing methods and I just love all of them and bring in the studio, it really brings out my creativity and motivation.

After this workshop I’ll definitely be in the studio more often to work on my personal art works and experience more in this amazing field.

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TYPOGRAPHY

My passion for typography started when I started doing graffiti back in 2010, when I discovered this amazing lifestyle that has become my life, that for many is vandalism, destruction and crime. But for us is art, beautiful, addictive and fulfilling. This type of art is such a rush when you’re wondering the streets searching for the best and the right spot to leave your mark and it all starts in a black book paper, where you sketch your piece. In the beggining everyone does terrible pieces, but with practice, you’ll eventually catch up with your own style,this is when you really start looking at letters and number differently, looking at their skeleton and form, own to modify it and transform it and being legible at the same time. Most graffiti writters end up doing typography, calligraphy and graphic design, because it’s all in a beautiful connection.

When I started to get comfortable with my letters, I started to draw different ones and challange myself to do better and explore more, eventually, I ended up loving letters, each one of them, and i really wanted to create my own typeface, make digital art with my own lettering and practice different approches and midia to it.

I hope more people would appreaciate letters like we do, appresciate the typefaces in logos , shops and everywhere around the city and specially the amazing letters that graffiti writters bring to us.

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Wednesday Talks:

We are fortunate to have great designers coming to our university for talks every Wednesday and one of my favorite talks until now was with Craig Oldham, a self made accomplished designer with a lot of “fucks” thrown every time he opens his mouth. Even though there’s a lot of cursing, this is a great great with a great heart and dedication. He put everyone very comfortable since the beginning and talked about his path until he stands here today, with a lot of changes in life, ups and downs, he toke us through a journey of a designer’s life, showing us that big corporations and agencies are not the sun and flowers that they seem to be how they block us artists/designers from developing a full project by ourselves by passing it around from worker to worker with different set of skills within the company and using our full creativity, how these commercial jobs can make your feel worthless and tired and another robot in society. Being unhappy with this, Craig decided to be independent and work on all projects he could get his hands on until he got a name that stand out in the field. This way he was able to produce work that he wanted and be more creative with it, as an example, he showed us a book series that he’s developing with other designers about 80’s/90’s movies, a book that is interactive and catches the gems behind these movies that is worth to watch both the book and the movie. Craig is also a writer which he made it clear to enjoy very much doing, as a results, he as a few books published about design that anyone can purchase. This was a very honest and refreshing talk, raw in its content and shower that this field is not all roses, and this was what caught my attention.

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BERLIN

I’m a person who travels quite often, although I thought europe wouldn’t surprise me anymore, but here I’m perplexed with this trip. I fell in love with this city, from the the heavy architectural buildings, the old and rich past history that you can still feel it in the air that creates this amazing atmosphere to the night scene and art. This city as passed through so much that the people have found a big variety of ways to express themselves. There’s so much to see, do, and explore in Berlin, from historical buildings and museums of course never to miss the Jew museum with a fantastic light and sound room show that brings emotions to your skin, it really captures the anxiety these people passed through back then, it was great experience. The east side gallery where you can see a big extension of the wall still standing full of art exhibitions and graffiti, which was one of my favorite parts to see, a part from that you can see many parts of the wall with guard towers still standing as well, very interesting and quite intimidating as well. This city is so versatile that you can see graffiti everywhere and breathtaking mural paintings in buildings, which in my opinion it’s amazingly beautiful, if you’re a true explorer don’t be afraid to go thought the small alleys full of graffitied they will guide you to galleries, bars, studios and independent shops with great art and crafts to sell. Fortunately we lost the group in the morning and we had the chance to explore the city this way, to the unknown and we found treasures in this city! Moving on to the design perspective, this city doesn’t let you down at all, from handmade and unique typefaces creates for each shop around the city that amazed me, to a huge poster culture with great artwork to the studios that we visit, the people received us with great enthusiasm and we all had a great interaction. This is definitely a city that every designer wouldn’t mind to live in, there’s so much to see and so much inspiration everywhere. Downside is ... very expensive, prepare a fat piggybank very you go.

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SHOOTING WITH 35MM FILM:

Where do I begin? Since I got interested in Film photography, I knew I had to get a camera, but I didn’t know which one, so, in my first testing’s I used a Nikon FM3A that I loaned from the university shop, which is a great camera to start, although my first adventure wasn’t so great and rewarding as I expected! When I went to the shop to develop my shots, all the rolls were blank, but well, we live, we learn. This just gave me more motivation to learn more about this delicate and interesting way of photography, because in the end, this is a lifestyle.

The more my interest grew, the more I wanted to test different cameras and film rolls, because the ISO, Bodies, and color vary a lot in the final result.

The photos I attached here that I captured were taken with a black & white film shot with a Canon T70, a fully automatic camera great to play around from a friend, which we had a great afternoon shooting with.

Analogic film photography just captures the boring scenario around you and turns it interesting, cinematic and very dramatic. If you learn how to use and take control of your film and camera, you’ll never be disappointed once you develop those photos, because in those 24 or 36 shots, most of them will probably be breathtaking.

Each brand brings something to the table, some take shots more bright, some with a lot of grain, some with horror dramatic kinda feeling, others crispy and sharp photos and the list goes on, so I decided to buy a Canonet QL19, which is one of the best cameras to begin, and lets be honest Canon never disappoints. So I got this beautiful piece and I took it to berlin, which I took great shots and I can’t wait to develop them.

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I feel that this blog is easy to make, due to the variety of subjects in discussion, a wide range of topics that have a correlation to design practice, so it’s easy to talk about what you love. It’s been a while since I wrote something, since I was away in Berlin, which I’ll write an article about it by the way, and that trip gave me lots of inspiration. Everyday I learn something new and I grew bit by bit as a design thinker, I see the world in a different perspective and I structure my life in a different way as well, more organized and more efficient, work smart, not hard!

These blogs have helped me question and answer myself about my works and everything I see around me, it has been useful in some way, but in another way, I would prefer to have this module to learn more about typography. But I understand that, in the professional world, we will have to write a lot in our future jobs.

I don’t update my blog that often, out of being busy and sometimes lazy, but as I grow as a person and a designer I need to teach myself to follow patterns and be consistent in my works and schedules, I try to write between 2 to 3 posts a week, about important stuff that caught my attention to write about.

This can be very helpful as well to get together my interests, my favorite artists, what type of work I like and my inspirations, in this way, when this blog start to be consistent I can see what I look for in my work as a designer. And on the other hand, makes me do, the more I do, the better I do, and sometimes I forget that, even though I can be tire, I need to produce something everyday, ideas are always on my mind, but not always on paper, and that’s the worst I can do, it’s one of my flaws, but lately, I’ve been highly motivated to create and hopefully I’ll stay this way for long time.

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After a long past lecture about typefaces in the 1st semester, which we happened to discuss about this great font known as Johnston created by Edward Johnston, I was wondering in London’s underground and just appreciate how beautifully it was made and for the subway purpose. Simple, easy to read and minimalistic just as a sans serif font should be. After we talked about typefaces I started to pay more attention to the fonts and typefaces that we see around town and think to myself what works and what does work. Johnston is just a perfectly made work, I was on a long way line going to meet my brother and I just couldn’t stop looking at all the typographic communication around the underground using this typeface. Makes me more appreciated and interested in typography and it’s past.