Saturday, October 29, 2011

i work because i love this shit

click here for image source

This is a little reminder for myself, and anyone else who is working or studying in the field that they are most passionate about. The next few weeks are going to be heavy, we have exactly one month until our graduate exhibition and there is so so much that needs to be done. But, as this little type sample says, I love this shit, so I'm going to keep focused and enjoy this process! The great thing is that our final projects (a design history one and a communication one) are both completely self-motivated, which means that I get to focus on the things I love doing and reading and writing about most. Some of these things include poster design, inky line drawings, cutting, pasting, painting and stamping...

This is going to be a good weekend.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

occupational hazards

Screw you, Scotchtape, with your stupid tartan clothing and your little serrated teeth.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

you know you're a graphic designer when ...


You Know You’re A Graphic Designer When …


You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport

You watch the superbowl just for the commercials

You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away

You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas

You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes

You are completely immune to subliminal advertising

You look upon a well-designed project with either:
sympathy OR extreme jealousy

Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse

You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride

You practically take caffeine intravenously

You have an appreciation for everything unique

You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.

“You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.”

“You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”.
(even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)

“You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am”.

“You know you’re a Graphic Designer when… you need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”

“…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”

“… when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what the mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..”

Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.

You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.

You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.

You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD

You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.

You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.

Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure

You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.

You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.

You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.

You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.

The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”

You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.

Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.

The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.

Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash

You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.

You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.

You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”

Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”

And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…

You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.

Apple+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.

You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.

You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.

You know that rivers are more than just water.

Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop

The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an
artist!)

Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.

Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.

You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.

when your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.

when you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.

If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.

You can understand everything on this list.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Glenryck Pilchards rebranding

can from all angles - click for a larger image





the full range - click for a larger image

This little story appears on the back of every can, in order to add some warmth and authenticity to the design

Hi there! What a mad week this has been (and today is only Tuesday!).

Here is the explanation to the Sailor Glen story from last week - my awesome design partner and friend, Stuart Bothma, and I have been working on a campaign to re-brand Glenryck Pilchards.
Our task was to reposition the brand as a top quality product, a tough job, since pilchards generally have quite low market value and are typically seen as the "poor man's protein". Apart from redesigning the labels, we also had to market the product to a new audience, single black south african mothers, from the age of 35 and above.

Our finished campaign proposal consists of the following: a series of print ad's, two television commercials, new package designs, billboards, instore promotions and a competition.

There are three 'flavours' or variations of products that Glenryck offer - Pilchards in tomato sauce, pilchards in hot chilli sauce and minced pilchards.

I got to design the labels and although this was pretty challenging, I really enjoyed doing it.
There are also some storyboards for the television spots, which I will upload a little later.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

on the cheek



Hello! I found this picture on Mr. Stephen's phone this morning while he was watching the rugby and I was trying to watch the rugby - anyway, it just made me smile so I thought I would share it... this guy makes me smile non-stop ... aah ok, i'll be quiet now before this post becomes any more lovey-dovey!

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

ahoy there


Hello, let me introduce you to a new friend of mine - 
his name is Mr Glenryck, or Sailor Glen, as he prefers to be named.
Sailor Glen is about to become the new face of a brand of tasty pilchards. 
Makes a lot of sense doesn't it... 
I promise to explain further very soon - 
sometime after Friday to be more exact.