Boston Public Library (Great Resource)

Posted by Luke on May 31, 2009. One comment.

I love the layers of colour in this poster for 'Motoring in Germany'

If you’re looking for some inspiration, the Bostom Public Library has a fantastic Flickr account with lots of classic posters. They’re all licensed under Creative Commons and for available at a reasonable size (unlike many similar resources).

I really love the style of these old travel posters. The colours they’ve used and the hand-painted texture gives them a lot of character that is often difficult to reproduce digitally. The scans, with their subtle paper texture, creases and folds, only add to that. I particularly like the layers of colour in the poster for ‘Motoring in Germany‘.

As well as the travel posters, there are WWI and WWII propaganda posters, old manuscripts, postcards and photos. The whole account is a great resource for colour, texture and general design inspiration.

MSN Live Messenger to Illustrator

Posted by Luke on May 13, 2009. No comments.

If you’re anything like me, you can often communicate better visually with images, rather than text. When chatting on MSN with my trusty Wacom tablet, often half the conversation is in drawings, especially when the other person enjoys drawing as much as I do.

MSN Live Messenger drawn-conversation in progress

The problem with these drawn-conversations is that it can be difficult to keep a record of what has been drawn. Sometimes whole comics or detailed pictures are drawn with no way to save the images… unless you have Adobe Illustrator. Here’s how.

Next time you have a drawing in MSN that you want to save, open up Illustrator and simply drag and drop the drawing into the Illustrator workspace.

Drag and drop the drawing into Illustrator

The beauty of using Illustrator (rather than just taking a screen shot) is that it saves the drawing in full vector detail.

So whether it’s a comic that you’ve been able to get just the right expression on or just a funny picture you want to save, you’ll be able to retain all the detail and enlarge or refine the image further in Illustrator. Or even export it to Flash and animate it, or print it out and give it to the friend you were talking to (things seem funnier in print).

Right: Vector outlines in Illustrator. Left: A custom brush applied to the strokes.

Illustrator is the only program that seems to be able to capture the vector data properly. If you know of any other programs that work, let me know!

Project 365 – the first 4 months

Posted by Luke on May 12, 2009. No comments.

My Project 365 is going well – haven’t missed a day so far.

January

February

March

April

2009 Calendar

Posted by Luke on January 5, 2009. 6 comments.

I decided to participate in Project 365 this year. Only 5 days in and I can already see it’s going to be difficult to keep track of which number day it is in the year. You can see my Project 365 photos here.

I meant to get myself a calendar today but forgot, so I decided to make one myself, which shows on each day what day of the year it is.

Details

There are two versions: one with a “notes” section on the right and one with the “scavenger hunt” items for Project 365.
Each version has 3 pages in the PDF: Full colour, Black and Economy. This is to let you choose which you want to print depending on the capabilities of your printer.
Made in InDesign in a surprisingly short amount of time.
Formatted for A4 paper.

Download

Project 365 Calendar 2009 – Notes version (PDF ~38kb)

Project 365 Calendar 2009 – Scavenger hunt version (PDF ~53kb)
Continue reading 2009 Calendar

Wallpaper: Colour Wood

Posted by Luke on December 22, 2008. 29 comments.

The wallpaper I’ve been using on a couple of computers for the past couple of months is “Darker Wood” by PaulEnsane. It’s a very soothing, neutral and natural wallpaper.

While I’ve been happily using it, I wanted something with a bit more colour, but still with the natural wood. I stumbled across this colourful wallpaper, which turned out to be “Catch the Beat” by StaredownStudios, and wanted to combine the colours with the wood.

This is what I came up with:

Download

Update

On some computers I prefer the colours to be at the top rather than the bottom. So I made a flipped version. I think i prefer it to the original in some ways.