Archive for April, 2010

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New Sochi 2014 logo


2010
04.30

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Many people are complaining how awful and ugly the new sochi 2014 logo looks. In my opinion I really liked it, its quite modern and fresh because it uses only typography (except for the Olympic Rings logo).

I understood that the designer used the “2014″ under the “sochi” to show reflection, symbolizing mountain and water. Which Sochi is known for since its a very popular resort destination. However, I do understand some people feeling that the new logo is a bit too much with the “sochi.ru” (which is the actual website address). I agree, I don’t think the “.ru” was necessary and in fact having it as outline produces even more distraction. I also feel the olympic rings logo was a distraction as well, especially with its 5 different colours. However, I guess that is a requirement for the Olympic event. But I feel that maybe the rings can be all the same blue as the “sochi” text, so that would seem to work with the rest of the logo, rather than feeling like it was the olympic rings logo just slap into it in the last minute because it needed to have the Olympic emblem on it.

Overall, I liked the new Sochi 2014 logo, I think its much better than the London 2012 which is a hideous fusia coloured shapes in a seizure. I do feel the Sochi logo do have a lot of elements which makes it a bit distracting – sometimes in design… less is more.

Sochi 2014 site

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The Value of Design


2010
04.27

Posted in Design Industry | No Comments »

 

This week is Design Week in Vancouver, the whole theme is entitled, Design Currency: Defining the Value of Design. Which makes me wonder … what is the value of design now a day? I mean in the past Graphic Design was an excellent and well respected profession. Is that still the case now?

Computers have revolutionize how we produce and see design. In some ways it opens the door to a greater array of creativity, challenges and inspiration and broadens the industry to include Web Design, New Media Design, Flash Design, etc… But has it open the door to the point that it brings the discipline down? Meaning now a days anyone can easily learn Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash and can call themselves a Designer regardless if they have any formal training in design or not. And in many cases we see websites full of complicated and functional interactions, sounds and videos, however, design wise are quite hideous. This whole revolution has lead to a large amount of individuals calling themselves “Designers”, which has saturated the market (at least in Canada). Especially in the large cities like Toronto and Vancouver, where there are many designers in the market and not enough jobs.

This is also due to many companies who want a design that is cheap and quick. Sometimes it appalls me to see some job posting looking for a Designer who can do print, web, video with many years of experience and the salary they are willing to pay is 30K a year! 30K is a salary for someone who is entry level graphic design. The worst part is some designers are even taking this which in some respect degrades the profession and lowers its value. But in some sense I cannot blame these individuals because they need the work and the experience.

Unfortunately, many designers in Canada are becoming “pixel pushers” and not designers. “ … graphic design requires judgment and creativity. Critical, observational, quantitative and analytic thinking are required for design layouts and rendering” as defined in Wikipedia. Meaning they are not given the opportunity to use their creative and marketing skills, but instead just their knowledge of graphical and web technology to help aid someone else’s concept and ideas – many of which are not train or have experience in the marketing and design principles.

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Adobe CS5 – coming soon


2010
04.25

Posted in Design Applications | 4 Comments »

Adobe CS5

 

Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) was launch on April 12, 2010. Hopefully it will be out in about a month time. There are rave excite over this new release due to many of its new features.

One of the most anticipated one is with Photoshop and the automatic retouching called, Content Aware Fill. This feature will allow the user to select an object to be remove from a background and intuitively recreate the background that the object used to occupy. Another is the Puppet Tool that allows the user to bend and distort an object such as raising up an arm or turning a head. And finally a much better and refined selection tool for those extremely difficult objects such as the selection of the hairs on people.

Not to be overshadowed by Photoshop, Flash CS5 now has a much better interaction with mobile devices such as androids and blackberries, unfortunately, still not working with iphones (which was more due to business politics than technical), a much improve text engine that would allow print-grade lettering including kerning, ligatures and leading. And code snippets which can speed up your time because they can be quickly added to your design.

With the new Illustrator you can now have variable width lines through the usage of points, while in the olden days the user had to create the lines, outline them and manually manipulate the points which can be time consuming. As well as a new tool to enable perspective drawings.

After Effects is now better integrated with Photoshop where the user now can import PSD files straight to the program and an auto key framing that automatically saves alterations to your objects as keyframes

Most Dreamweaver’s updates are more towards the programming side that includes PHP coding hints and flag up any script that may be errors, support for PHP-based content management systems that allows the tweaking and testing live sites based on WordPress and Drupal or any other PHP-based deployments from within Dreamweaver, and a better CSS support with more CSS templates available, and better CSS visualization tools, which include features such as padding, border and margin.

InDesign’s new features include a multiple page sizes now users can add gatefolds, inserts, etc.. to a document without the need for crafty workarounds. There is also a change tracker, that can track all the changes, perfect for groups of individuals where are working on the same document to track what has been updated in the document and by who.

Fireworks now has an improve stroke control allowing better editing, creating and customizing strokes as well as an  enhanced properties panel so now users can constrain object proportions, edit gradients and adjust stroke alignments using the Properties panel, with a single action.

Finally Premiere has an integration with Adobe Story, Premier uses scripts written using online writer’s resource Adobe Story as metadata for each scene to be edited. Tapeless workflow enhancements, supporting an expanded range of direct-to-disk formats including Sony XDCAM HD 50, Panasonic AVCCAM and AVC-Intra. RED R3D files are also supported.

There seem to be a lot of improve and many new features to this new release. Many of which I have not even mention, if you would like to find out more about them you can learn more at : http://cs5.org/ (more…)