VGART BLOG

Internet: Civilization's greatest technology

Vlad Gorshkov — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:00:24 +0000

Check out this interesting fact-video about Internet's statistics put together in un-boring way.

Futurism

Vlad Gorshkov — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:09:27 +0000

There are great number of words in design that define a specific style. I want to focus on Futurism today. Futurism is nothing new. It started at the beginning of 20th century when the idea of technology taking over the world didn't exist yet. The industrial revolution gave a great inspiration and imagination to modern artists. With rise of new machines and large machines, artists looked away from usual, common nature scenes and looked into the man-made shapes. A great artist and musician from the birth of Futurism era, Luigi Russolo, gave birth to a theory of electronic music and collection of unnatural and abstact noise. His work often show shapes of a "noise machine."

A century later, and it seems like graphic artists are still obsessed with something unnatural and machine-like. But after all, human technology is just as natural as honey bee's creations. And who else is better to give an example of our obsession with shapes than Simon Page, a self-taught graphic designer from the UK.

Check out his great portfolio and his print shop as well.

Style Over Reason

Vlad Gorshkov — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:00:00 +0000

When designing a new logo for a brand, throughout the process, it is important to keep in mind that there has to be a reason for shapes, elements, colors and the overall mood. If you are a designer you should already know this by heart. But adding random swooshes to random typefaces that you though looked good on your Dell monitor is a wrong way to go and will not bring you success. Of course you can never please a client just with your own ideas, it has to be a collaboration and a compromise of thoughts.

Looking at the logo, I always think of what it speaks to me. In my experience:

logo has to be simple enough that the viewer can draw it by hand just from a short glimpse at it.
logo has to speak a simple and clear message
logo has to have a reason or idea behind it

You’ll be surprised how many huge corporations with huge marketing budgets don’t research or have a proper logo. A great example would be Microsoft’s latest failed attempt: Bing. Name itself has a great sound to it and would worked great with a simple shape. But, it looks like Microsoft was not thinking of the image, users, audience or the philosophy behind the brand. It was strictly profit. Microsoft had to fight Google. And for Microsoft, to compete is to imitate. Just as Google’s bland logo, Bing had to reflect that. Just like Google’s blend User Interface, Bing had to go the same way. Microsoft claimed that they spend $80Million on Bing’s marketing campaign. Really?

To end the post on a positive note I’ve found some amazing examples of swiss style logos by helvetic brands. There ARE great identity designers after all, and you don’t have to spend millions to find one. Just Google them.

Fonts (for free)

Vlad Gorshkov — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000

To be honest, before I knew anything about Graphic Design I never though someone had to pay for fonts. I though all fonts in the world magically appeared in Microsoft Word. ...WOW! Silly Me!

There are many free fonts out there. For young graphic designers coming right out of school it can be difficult to buy anything, especially fonts. After browsing the web and looking through my font library I though to highlight the ones that I think are very useful and can fool people into thinking that you have an original, expensive font.

Having an original, non-web typeface will make your new website look more interesting. And, it looks like slab typefaces are getting in style this year.

League Gothic

Calluna

Sansation

Simbo

Sketchetica

Sovba

Vegur

Fridays are for Bars ... and Graphs

Vlad Gorshkov — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:30:00 +0000

I am going to share my favorite designer of 2009 and perhaps of 2010. Nicholas Felton is a genius behind the super cool data collecting tool DAYTUM and a great inspirational designer. If you're a neat freak or have a mild condition of OCD then you might find his work absolutely amazing. Feltron (his creative name) loves to work with data. Take a look at his work and you will instantly see his devotion to graphs and charts. He tries to show data in new ways, in non-ordinary ways.

His work is only half of the story. Another genius idea that he came up with struck me by surprise: Personal Annual Report. Just like an Annual Report of a firm, grade card, or quarter GPA, it shows the overall status and an update of how things are going. He simply took interesting statistics and facts about his life from a certain time period and organized it in a very appealing way:

Of cource keeping track of your daily life in such detail can be very hard, but one of the tools that he came up with is DAYTUM. It's a really simple and minimalistic tool that can store any kind of personal data. You think of the data and DAYTUM will store it and show you progression or charts.

Efficient Currency Design

Vlad Gorshkov — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:56:48 +0000

Imagine if government actually took time and though about efficiency and ease of use. Well Mac Funamizu made an example of such government. On his blog Mac outlined how

travelers and other people who are not accustomed to the currency would be able to easily remember how much each of these coins is.

So Mac designed a simple solution, and I think he hit the spot.

See more examples of his currency design

If you have traveled to Europe, the first thing you'll notice is how different their currency looks from US currency. I would agree that US currency is not the prettiest or the easiest currency to understand. It looks very conservative and very imperialistic. It fails to reflect "young and free" ideology of the country.

Check out Mac Funamizu's work or follow him on Twitter. You'll find that simplicity is the answer to the most complex problems.

iPad User Experience

Vlad Gorshkov — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:30:00 +0000

The new Human Interface Guidelines for the iPad outlines 17 commendments of how to develop for the new User Interface. Here are few I found to be very interesting:

Classic Minds in Modern Bodies

Vlad Gorshkov — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:50:06 +0000

I love revisiting styles of the last century. After all, it was the birth century of graphic design. Just found a great illustrator and designer: Brent Couchman. Great example of "style and reason." His work reminds of of classic minds like Paul Rand and modern genius like Scott Hansen.

Click on the images to see his full gallery

Follow him on twitter | Or on Flickr

Design Laws

Vlad Gorshkov — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:53:26 +0000

There are recommendations, advices and lists of items based on everyday experiences. There are "10 major mistakes" and "7 golden rules," but no laws.

Orbiting Trash

Vlad Gorshkov — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:50:03 +0000

Just found an amazing graphic done by Michael Paukner. It is always amazing to find such heavy data pool and make a pretty geometric graph. I wonder how will the world take care of its trash out in space, since we can't even organize it here on Earth. Happy Cleaning!