Inspiration Post : 3 Wonderful Irish (or based in Ireland!) Illustrators
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 31, 2008
There is some superb Illustration work going on here in Ireland and here’s 5 illustrators whose work I greatly admire. All images are copyright of the artists.
David Rooney has a unique illustration style and has won many awards.
Kevin McSherry has two websites and a blog. His blog features examples of his lovely work along with great step by step examples.
Annie West has illustrated over a dozen children’s books. She has a website and a separate blog, brilliantly named Kick, Bollock & Scramble.
Rearranging thumbnails and renaming files in Adobe Bridge
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 28, 2008
If you’re the owner of a digital camera, unless you’re very organized I’m sure you have a HUGE number of photographs sitting on your computer with names such as “PSC1000345” and the like. Not very easy to figure out which one is which.
Adobe Bridge first appeared with CS2 and allowed you to view thumbnail previews of image files. Adobe Bridge with CS3 allows you to view thumbnails of not just photographic images but also Illustrator files, PDF files, InDesign files and more.
One of the many great ways you can use Bridge is to view, rearrange and rename the thumbnails. It’s just like moving negatives around a light table. You can use the batch-renaming process to give image files much more descriptive filenames with just a couple of clicks. This is a job that could take hours to do if you went through each photo individually to see what it contained.
1. Open up Bridge from Photoshop and browse to a folder with your photographs. To group thumbnails together, all you need to do is click and drag a thumbnail and drop it beside another thumbnail. By re-arranging them this way, it makes it easier to see what you have and what you want to keep.
In this example I have a folder which contains images that roughly break down into three different subjects – Buildings, Animals and Roadsigns. At the moment they have non-descriptive names – in fact they are just numbers.
2. Select the first sign thumbnail in the group and then Shift-click the last sign thumbnail to select the entire group.
3. Choose Tools > Batch Rename.
4. Under New Filenames in the Batch Rename dialog box, choose Text from the Current Filename pop-up menu, and type in a name that you want to assign to this group of images in the text field. In my case, I selected the three photos that feature signs.
5. Click the plus button (
) at the far right side of the New Filenames area, and choose Sequence Number from the pop-up menu. Make sure the default, 1, is selected for the starting sequence number, or type 1 now.
6. Click the plus button to create a third criterion, and then choose New Extension from the pop-up menu. Type jpg (no fullstop is necessary) into the extension text field. (This preserves the .jpg file extension in the filename.)
7. For Compatibility, select the check boxes for other operating systems: Windows, Mac OS, and Unix. (The operating system you are using will be dimmed but checked.)
8. Review the sample in the Preview area to make sure that it reads "Signs01.jpg," and then click Rename.
9. Choose View > Sort > By Filename to arrange the thumbnails in alphanumeric order.
10. Using steps 1 – 8 again, I selected and batch-renamed the remaining photographs according to the subject matter pictured: buildings and animals. When you set options in the Batch Rename dialog box, type Animals instead of Signs to name the Animal images, and type Buildings for the building images. Otherwise, use the same options as in Steps 5–7.
The Batch Rename command behaves differently depending on what is selected when you choose the command: If no thumbnails are selected, the naming scheme you specify in the Batch Rename dialog box applies the name change to all the files in the selected folder. If several, but not all thumbnails are selected, the command renames only the selected files.
This renaming tool can speed up your work flow enormously, whether you’re a photographer or a designer organising comps or designs.
Twenty Stand Out Album Covers From The Last Ten Years
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 24, 2008
Favourite album cover lists pop up frequently around the web and they invariably include the likes of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and many bands from the 60’s and 70’s. And rightly so, the cover art was beautiful.
The last time I was in HMV I had a walk around looking at the cover designs and so many modern albums feature just the airbrushed face of the star or starlet, which I find quite boring really. I wanted to compile a list of modern album covers that I found visually appealing. This is purely personal and has nothing to do with the music (some of these bands I’ve never even heard their albums) – just the cover design. The main criteria for selection here, is that cover made me look twice or stop to look closer. Some covers have nice photography, some have nice scribbly images, some have nice painting and some are just clever. They have all been released within the last 10 years and most of them are fairly mainstream. I’d love to get your comments and hear which recent album cover art you found interesting.
So, in no particular order;
Thom Yorke – The Eraser
Gnarls Barkley – St. Elsewhere
Kate Nash – Made of Bricks
Bjork – Volta
Homogenic – Bjork
The Cranberries – Bury the hatchet
The Strokes – Is this it (There are two completely different covers for this album – the blue and yellow one for the US and the more ahem, risqué one for the rest of the world)
The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan
Franz Ferdinand – You could have it so much better
Gorillaz – Demon Days
Air – Pocket Symphony
Robbie Williams – Sing When You’re Winning
The Flaming Lips – Yoshima Battles The Pink Robots
Glen Phillips – Abulum
Moby – Play
Smashing Pumpkins – Zeitgeist (this is available in red and purple too)
Kanye West – Late Registration
Scissor Sisters – Ta Dah!
Blur – Best Of
Darklight Film Festival Ireland
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 23, 2008
The Darklight film festival takes place in Dublin from Thursday 26th - Sunday 29th June. The organisers are currently accepting submissions of work from film-makers, artists and animators. Eligible for entry are feature films, documentary, all CG animation, Flash, 3D etc., experimental video works, music videos, commercial work, motion graphics, game sequences, DV live action shorts and student work. Phew! So loads of options there.
You can find out more about the film festival and how to submit by visiting the Darklight website.
How to design a more interesting report cover
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 18, 2008
If you want to improve a simple report cover without adding images, you can use bold blocks of colour combined with alignment to create a statement!
I’ve put this cover together in Photoshop but this is something you could do in loads of programs including Word.
We’ve probably all seen (and made) covers that look a bit like this;
The text in the header is centred and set in Times New Roman. The bullet points are also centred and look fairly higgledy piggledy (to use the official design term) and the logo is up in the top right corner.
So here’s what I’m going to do to change it and make it a little more visually attractive.
- Change the alignment of the text AND the logo to left.
- Add a large block of colour behind the text
- Add a couple of white lines to the top and bottom of the block of colour to add a little bit of elegance. Also added a drop shadow below the block of colour
- Changed all of the text from Times New Roman to Trebuchet and reversed it out i.e. change the colour of the text to white so there is nice contrast.
- Put the bullet point text in small uppercase.
- Finally I added the company name to the report
And this is what it looks like:
So no fancy techniques or clever image manipulating, but I believe it’s a much more eyecatching cover report. This is something you could use for a school or uni report, or a business or company.
Another Free Stock Photo Website : Open Photo
Posted by Jennifer Farley | January 14, 2008
The Open Photo project is an open network of photographers sharing images consisting of pictures of animals, nature, landscape, architecture, still life, and technology. All the photographs on the site are shared and protected under the Creative Commons Licenses. As with most of the free stock photo sites the quality varies but there is some really good stuff available.
Here’s a nice example: photo © Andrzej G for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
