T-shirt Design - I’d really appreciate your vote!
Posted by Jennifer Farley | October 24, 2008 | 2 Comments
This is a submission I made to the Threadless Loves Travel comp. Voting is now open and if you like the design, I’m asking for a vote. You can rate it from 5 (the mutts nuts!) or 1 (rubbish). Shown below is a mock-up of the shirt in red, but it can work in pretty much any colour.
New Logo - We Paddle
Posted by Jennifer Farley | October 23, 2008 | 1 Comment
We Paddle is a site (currently a work in progress) dedicated to all things water and paddle related i.e. kayaking and canoeing. I was asked by the site creators to come up with a logo suitable for the site, for stationery and for t-shirts and hoodies. The clients were very open to ideas and after some sketching, then beating the sketches into shape in illustrator, this is the logo I produced.
The logo consists of a fairly cartoony style kayak and paddle in red with a compass shape in the background - the compass conveying the idea of people paddle in every corner of the globe and in every direction. The font is a 50s retro style font from Font Diner and is called Mr Television.
To give an idea of how this might look on a shirt, I provided a mock-up.
Overall the clients are very happy with the logo. I’m currently working on their site which should be coming soon!
Grunge at the movies - Se7en Opening Credits
Posted by Jennifer Farley | October 20, 2008 | 9 Comments
Se7en came out in 1995 and I absolutely loved it, literally from the first second of the opening credits. I watched it again at the weekend. The opening credits are a grunge-design fan’s dream. The music is grungey (sounds a bit like NIN? please correct me), the images and the text are dark, dirty, scruffy, scary and perfectly convey the idea that we’re going to be watching a complete psycho at work. The typography is edgey and the background colours are black, browns and reds - really sets the tone.
So if you’re looking for a bit of grunge design inspiration, for print, web or motion, I think this is a great place to look.
(Brad is also pretty easy on the eye as Detective Mills in one of his best acting efforts)
Photoshop Tutorial: Adding Focus With A Blur
Posted by Jennifer Farley | October 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
There’s a great advertisement on TV at the moment for Sky, where they show a couple of scenes from movies – Pirates of the Caribbean - and sports – some football team wearing red – and the action is slowed down almost to the point of being stopped and the person in the foreground is sharp while the people or objects in the background are out of focus. It’s a very effective way to focus attention. In this VERY short Photoshop tutorial, I’m going to show you how to focus attention on part of an image by adding depth. It’s really easy to do.
1. Open up a picture, preferably an image that captures movement.
I’m using an image from a Formula 1 race courtesy of the Formula 1 Wordpress blog.
2. Using a selection tool, (I used the magnetic lasso and tidied up a bit with the quick mask) and select the foreground object – in the case the first formula 1 car.
If you are using this image, don’t forget to cut out the area at the back of the car where you can see the track.
3. Add about 10 pixels of feathering around the selection. Now we need to invert the selection. Hit Alt-Control-D (windows) or Option-Command-D to open up the feather dialog box.
4. Inverse the selection by hitting Shift-Control-I (windows) or Shift-Command-I (mac) and then apply the Blur (Filter>Blur>Gaussian).
The idea here is that objects farther away appear blurry and out of focus, while the objects nearer to the viewer are sharp. At this stage you can decide how fuzzy you want the background and other objects to be. To lightly blur, type in a low number, for mega blurriness, type in a high number.
With a radius of 9 pixels, my final image looks like this;
There is nearly always more than one way to do things in photoshop. This is one quick and easy method.
Design a Pepsi can
Posted by Jennifer Farley | October 16, 2008 | Leave A Comment
Having just slagged off the new pepsi logo, I, and everyone else now have a chance to put my money where my mouth is and take part in the “Design a can” competition on the pepsi website.
You can use the online pepsi designware (which I personally found a little bit confusing) or you can download a template and work your magic in Photoshop, Illustrator or your favourite image editing software.
New Pepsi Logo
Posted by Jennifer Farley | October 16, 2008 | 12 Comments
The Pepsi cola logo has had a number of face lifts over the years. The first logo was drawn by hand in 1898 by the multi-talented pharmacist Caleb Bradham, who also developed the drink.
Over the years the logo has changed fairly dramatically into a sophisticated typographic treatment in the early 1900s, with the pepsi “crown” appearing in the 1940s along with the addition of the colours blue and white to commemorate the war efforts of the U.S. In the 60’s the type changed from a script font to the now familiar bold sans serif. (My personal favourite is the 1973 logo. It’s so simple and attractive.)
So now Pepsi have updated their globe logo. Advertising Age has an article about the new look Pepsi are developing for their brand.
The white band in the middle of the logo will now loosely form a series of smiles. A “smile” will characterize brand Pepsi, while a “grin” is used for Diet Pepsi and a “laugh” is used for Pepsi Max.
Ehmm, what?
Here’s an example of one of the smiles - the new Pepsi logo;
When you look back at some of the lovely variations of the logo over the years, I think this is very disappointing. It looks like someone has been let loose with the liquify filter. It also looks very much like the Korean Air logo. 
.
What do you think about it?
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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 .
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