Clever Logo Designs.

Today I retrace my steps back to some Logo Designs. While fumbling on the internet
today, I found a batch of very clever logos.  Some of these I believe are legitimate
businesses and some are just design.

The negative space between the 'i' and 'l' combined
with the positive triangular shape create a pencil.

Not very complex, but interesting how this pattern
is cut up and made to look like a train.

The film reel almost doubles as a 'Scream' mask.

Logo for Food Writers. Unique idea with
using a pen nib and a spoon.

Wires create the shape of a coffee mug.

This one was shown in class the other day. I saw
it and figured since I liked it, I'd post it here.

If you haven't noticed, 'Eight' is completely made out of
chopped up segments of the number '8'

Speaking of numbers, the design cleverly
incorporates the number '18'.

Giraffe is created through the use of 'g'
and features of the animal.

Amazon's logo uses an arrow that looks like a
smile if  viewed at a different aspect

A bar code and a frothy beer are mixed
together to create a interesting visual.

A house on it's side appears as
a side profile of a dog.

Watch me DRAW!

No, sorry not me. I'm not pleased enough with my skills to have you watch me.. yet.
;) No, what I have here is a nifty little site called Sketch Theatre. If you haven't deduce
from my context, this websites shows artists in the process of drawing their masterpieces.
Maybe I shouldn't say masterpieces, it is just a sketch. But then again, everything starts
from somewhere.

 

[EDIT: Ok, apparently this video doesn't like to play sometimes. If it doesn't play visit this link here to see it]

 

I think I have a fetish with gas masks or something because I always tend to run towards
art that contains some element of it. *shrugs* Anyways, these videos can be a great tool
to learn from depending on your drawing ability. An artist as an Intermediate and up may
find this beneficial and in their range to comprehend whats going on. Personally I start with
eyes first, whereas this artist starts with the gas mask. I am bewildered. I guess I haven't
fully grasped the anatomy of the head just yet. Jealous.. Just means I'll have to try that out.


If you wanna check out some other videos from Sketch Theatre you may click here.

Just shuffling around.

Call this my lazy day. It's gloomy and dreary outside, and it's been raining off and on.
What a terrible day. I figured I'd check out the Gnomon Workshop, and to be honest
I am a bit disappointed. I was looking to do another post with the process of design and
concept art. Perhaps I haven't done a thorough enough search. Whatever.

But I did come by some interesting pieces done by Concept Artist Christian Lorenz
Scheurer. His art seemed pretty appealing to me, and I feel he steps a bit out of the
boundaries, as in terms of Character Design.

Fro's with antlers? I dig.

I can honestly say in fantasy-related games, I don't see many African American Characters, especially donning a pretty epic fro' with antlers. I like it. It steps out of the cookie cutter
shape of character cliches and it adds some flavor. I appreciate those who try
to keep things fresh.

Just beautiful. I wish I could post this on my wall. House wall, not Facebook.

This one also appealed to me. The details are just so intricate and just looking at this you
feel the warm tones that are emanating from the piece of art. Not much to say about this
one, but I could just stare at this all day.

I would so be a nomad if meant my house traveled on an underwater sea creature.

I thought this was an interesting piece. The lush home, laboratory, structure adds a bit of
excitement to this with it's earthy green tones. Aside from that, the idea where humans
are living life underwater make this even more appealing. (Appealing is my word of the day)
We get a sense of a nomadic lifestyle where there are families who live in houses that travel
on giant underwater sea creatures. Maybe it's the water equivalent of a trailer. Or maybe it's
a traveling brothel. Hey, I'm just saying. Interpreting this artwork is pretty fun, as you
can tell I'm having.

You can see a few other artworks done by Christian and a small bio here.
And you can check out the Gnomon Workshop right here.
Let me know if you find any design processes. I dig those.

Save your files in style.

I always run across some creative flash drives. Which sucks, cause I usually don't have my
camera on hand to get a picture of it. This post I'll just post some flash drives that seemed
pretty gnarly. They teach you how to make one actually.

Does someone need anger management?

Alright, you got me. I still play with Legos today. What? They're fun.

Seems like a refreshing slice of watermelon..

..USB WOO!

This Flash drive has an air pump inside and it gets bigger with how much you save on it.

Flash Drive bouncy Ball. You can make this one. The Link will be provided at the bottom.

Pressing the A Button will release the USB.

This unfortunately won't heal your chapped lips.

I really dig how it's see through.

I'll probably post up more later when I see some. There's alot of gnarly Flash Drives out
there. Also if you were interested on making that one flash drive, a simple tutorial can
be found here.

The Two Sides of Fame

Personally, I absolutely love Lady Gaga. I enjoy her music, and she is an outstanding person. She is extremely creative and eccentric, and intelligent. I respect her as an individual and she is someone to definitely look up to. (You don't necessarily have to dress ridiculously however :P) For these reasons I scavenged for reasons on how I could realate her to design. It's actually pretty easy, but overwhelming. From her outrageous fashion to her music videos, Gaga's sure has a plethora of design aspects she carries. But I shall keep it simple as it would surely make your head explode as well as mine.

Lady Gaga came out with her first album 'The Fame'
I won't get into the nitty gritty on how the songs on this album relates to Fame
itself, but I can assure you she has underlying tones of fame in her music. She
wouldn't have called it 'The Fame' for nothing.

I wonder how useful those sunglasses are..

Above we have the cover art for 'The Fame'. What I personally pull from this is that the diamonds on the sunglasses signifies luxury, an aspect you may or may not run into when you acquire fame. Of course we have Gaga wearing these sunglasses. These could have just been set on a table and been the cover art. Artists and Bands are not always on the cover of their own work. But significance of Gaga wearing them is that she is walking into the door of what we call fame. I deduce this since this is her first album, and she isn't famous yet. So she is on her road to it, whether she follows it correctly or not will determine her fate.

From design perspective her face is centered and nicely bordered by her hair, a jewel (disco stick?), the highlight of her hoodie, and the red type at the bottom. The red text really pops out at you since there aren't many intense colors here. The Fame text is nicely placed on the sunglasses and somewhat reinforces my idea.
I also would like to note I don't necessarily feel my concept in paragraph is actually correct, it couldve just been "Oh this looks nice, lets use it".

Now onward to..

..The Fame Monster

A huge change in tone from 'The Fame'. The coverart shows no jewelry or "luxries" that seemed apparent in the last cover. As the title suggests, we get a sense of dread and darkness.  Monster could stand for the deluxe compilation of the 8 new songs she introduces and the entireity of the previous album, or the downsides of Fame. I like the second better. Even though "Fame" didn't have alot of color going on,"Monster" is just completely monotone, creating an entire different feeling you get if you had seen it in color. It also strengthen the Gothic style we feel. Another cover for "Monster" shows this even more.

It's almost unsettling.

Both covers reflect on the change of tone in the music presented on the album. It's darker, still dance, pop, but the overall tone is just vastly different. I feel as though Gaga is showing she has reached her Fame and has it, but it comes with its consequences and she reveals them in her music. 

 

;)

I absolutely love drawing faces, especially coming up with crazy expressions. So emoticons
are definitely favorite when it comes to, lets say.. "pop" art? Mm.. no. Not really sure. But when
I see expressions (Not people photographed, drawn) on billboards, ads, products, I instantly
like it. Somewhat like this.

I have no Idea what this taste like, or if it's even good. But I WANT IT.

Created by Swedish Designer, Amore, the first thing most people will see it the winking face located in the white section of the canned drink. It was the first thing I saw. After seeing the face, I wondered, "Who the hell would name their product 'der'"? I thought it was funny, as I think 'der' relates to stupidity. But I sure felt stupid when I realized that Winking face, yeah, it's a "C" and an "i". This means I'm an idiot, and the product is called 'Cider'. Very clever use of the letters to create a fun logo. The colors also really add to the excitement of the can. Really wish I could provide a link on where you could get this. I've never seen it before and I really would like to try it.

Power up your meal.

They come in a battery-like package. Sweet.

I smiled when I saw this. I just thought it was kind of humorous, yet very clever to make a Pepper and Salt Shaker resemble D-Batteries.

They take the idea of the battery and make it into a Salt/Pepper Shaker. Completely designed to look a D-Battery, these shakers make use of the concept of the power strip that used to cover many batteries long ago. Instead of showing the remaining power left, the "batteries" show how much salt and pepper are left. I'd like to find these and take a few photographs of these. I'm pretty sure I could come up with some clever ideas.

Creative use of the idea of the battery.

One block at a time.

Ok, ok, I'm sorry. I'm not done just yet. As soon as I saw the Helvetica 'bot' I ran across
this guy.

BAM!

I know, it's ingenius right? Alright, maybe not, but it's pretty clever. Just a simple take on
evolution in lego form. It works pretty well. I thought maybe the legs, or head could have
been worked in earlier somehow, but it gets the point across. Besides I gave it thought
and as far as legos go, it cant really be done, at least effectively. Yellow is an obvious
choice for our Lego Man here, and with the standard green lego base, it brings alot of
nostalgia. The dark grey background is what really makes this shirt work. It makes the
green, but mostly the yellow, pop right out at you. Very contrasty. I like it. $40 poorer.

This shirt goes for $19.95. Just like last time you can buy the shirt here.

[EDIT: You can also get this as a hoodie for just $10 more. Gnarly.]

March of the Helboticas!

Okay, maybe it's not as cool as transformers, but this shirt is pretty awesome.

I thought it was rather amusing when I came across this T-Shirt design. Not
only because it's got a quirky sense to it, but we were talking about Typography
in class today and saw a few glimpses of Animals made entirely out of font. Here
we see a goofy looking robot. And at first glance that's all we see. But like I previously
noted, if we look closer we'll find that the robot is completely made out of font. To be
specific, the Helvetica font. Nicely named the Helbotica. 'R's are the feet, "+'s are located
on the sides of the head, and commas are cleverly used in a few spots to give detail. Theres
alot to find in this, and there's no need for me to try and point out everything. But overall it's
a splendid design, I find it pretty nifty too. I can see myself definitely throw the $20 it costs
to own one of these.

If you dig this tee you can check it out here. It comes in a few other colors rather than just
the red I have shown here. But personally the black and red are my favorites.

Character Design in Mass Effect 2

Aside from art itself, another hobby I enjoy would have to be playing video games
(to be general).In History class I know we are to look for design we find in
magazines, papers, store, clothing, etc. I decided to take a different approach
in my first post and show design as a process, and how its used to create a personality.

Mass Effect is easily one of my favorite games of all time. I won't get into that,
but it has interesting characters and luckily I ran across one of these nifty articles
online (which I'll post a link to below). The character we will be observing is
Thane, A reptillian, frog-fish-guy to put it straight.

See he's not that silly looking, right?

Above is the final product of Thane. A deadly assassin with a suprising zen-like attitude. Thane is actually

very religious. This was the final Thane however. He wasn't as fleshed out from the beginning, and from the start the idea was just he was a "career assassin". The start of the process was asking many women on what

they liked in a guy. What features? What celebrities do they swoon for the most? The perfect guy concept was slowly building up. This led to a few preliminary sketches.

The Upper left face with black face paint was loosely based on Jude Law. One of many brought up celebrities by the women who were on the development team of Mass Effect 2.

The design team's concept ideas of Thane as the "perfect man". The women disagreed.

The design team had listened to the women, however to only a certain extent. The male mind doesn't like
to completely trust women on their views of men. We know what we are. The women dejected their concept ideas of Thane and thought he was "creepy", the designers needed to go back to the drawing board. The design process continues.

Thane had a reptilian descent. So the concept needed to be there, while at the same time pleasing the female
audience.

Thane with Reptilian features. Check. Appealing to the female species. Nope.

Another roadblock was hit with the next batch of sketches. The women did not agree with the fact that (in the game) that men get voluptuous all-female alien race, while women get " a guy with a fish head". They wanted someone who was more handsome. The design team began to focus in on the 3rd Face on the bottom last row.

Thane Finished Concept.

“Once we got to this stage we were very happy with the way his nose looked. We liked how his eyes were very big, and the reptilian ridges on his head. We almost went with more of a snake-like patterning for his skin. You can see these three metal earrings on the side of his head, we never actually put that in the final model. We forgot. I noticed it a while after we finished the model, and I was like ‘where are those earrings?’ But it was too late and we said, ‘screw it.’"

Once they finally got the facial features down pat, it was time to work on the clothing.
Now it came to preference, and when I say preference, I mean Thanes. The clothing,
on just what and how he will wear it, can break or make him. Dressing Thane in a
pretty pink Tutu will probably break his character considerably. The clothing was
just as important as the profile.

The first concept was done. The outfit showed a considerable amount of skin, 

slightly resembling overalls, the concept was abandoned. It was probably done

in thought to have sex appeal, but in the end designers thought he just looked like 

he was from a boy band from the 90s. 

"We weren't very comfortable with the amount of skin. We thought he looked like he was from a boy band.”

On the right road.

Opting not to show so much skin, the team quickly covered every area of skin. Above you can see the progression of the outfit. The team thought since he was an assassin, perhaps camouflage was an ideal material. Slowly but surely the camo was dismissed and they made the outfit more airy and open; Cutting out pieces here and there to get closer to their finished product.

Close to the final design.

Almost finished, they played with color schemes and finally came up with the finished product.

Final Design.

And there you have it. The design process of Thane. If your interested on the article
I pulled this from, visit Game Informer for all the details.