Team Branding

You may remember my previous article Gumboots Team Branding where I explained the benefits of getting a Logo Design project you really enjoy. Well here we are with Team Branded Hoodies for the Gumboots Rugby Team!

A really great quality hoodie and we love seeing our work printed and worn by the awesome rugby team. Scroll down to see a couple more photographs of this hoody instagramized (to cover up my poor photography skills).

For more information about Team Branding from Dark Design Graphics please visit our Logo Design Page or contact us.
Show your support to the Gumboots Rugby Team by liking their Facebook Page.

How Do You Draw Buildings?

I am often asked how I draw buildings, my answer? The same way I draw anything else. I am not an architect, I draw often by eye only and sometimes using techniques such as gridding. When asked to produce these drawings for Durham Cathedral, I assumed my challenge would be creating a multitude of different perspectives from outside the structure as a whole.

I began looking for inspirational compositions from around Durham, trying to find views of the incredible building which had not been drawn before (almost impossible). I was then told that I would be focusing on the inside of the building, more specifically the magnificent columns and arches that make Durham Cathedral a wonder to behold.

Researching Art

While researching this project I was given the rare opportunity to take photographs of the inside of Durham Cathedral. I believe I came back with somewhere around 150 images, all inspiring in themselves but with only a few good enough to use. When taking photographs for my Cross Hatched drawings I try to capture images with good tonal scale, by that I mean deep, dark shadows and strong light areas.

Essentially my cross hatching technique involves me only drawing the shadow, the darker the shadow the more hatching goes on. The light areas have less hatching and the really bright areas are left totally blank, this creates the form of the architecture. This is not of course specific to drawing buildings, I use this technique for all my Cross Hatched drawings.

Speed Drawing

Each drawing for Durham Cathedral will be Time Lapsed and sped up to create a speed drawing, these videos show the process I go through when drawing buildings like this. If you are interested in learning how to cross hatch please take a look at my Cross Hatching Tutorial and watch one of my speed drawing videos. Creating a speed drawing is a very useful way to critique your own work, you will be able to see exactly where you went wrong and pause at any moment to see exactly what worked and what didn’t.

This drawing is the second in a series of drawings for Durham Cathedral, to see my previous drawing take a look at Drawing Durham Cathedral – Inspiration Closer To Home. To follow my progress with this project keep up to date by subscribing via the links to the top right of your screen and if this project inspired you as much as it did me share that inspiration via the links below. To see some fully completed time lapse videos created by Alasdair and Dark Design Graphics visit our Youtube channel.

Written by Rebecca Jobling

Tattoos are becoming more and more popular with people getting them for many different reasons from emulating their idols and popular culture, or as a work of art. In this article I will give some insight into the different reasons our customers get their own bodies ‘inked’ and some advice from a professional tattoo artist.

Why Get A Tattoo?

I recently talked to Tattoo artist Susan James from The Ink Tree tattoo studio. She mentioned that there are different types of clients; those who have very definite ideas about how they want their tattoo to look, where it should sit on the body while putting a lot of thought into it and there are clients who would like their tattoo as soon as possible and who have an image with them they would like you to copy or want a piece of flash. It seems to me that a tattoo can either be a fashion accessory or a work of art.

What should you think about when choosing a tattoo?

Ideally the artist and client would work together on this with the artist’s knowledge and understanding of the technical side taking the lead. However there needs to be balance as the tattoo is going to be placed on their body and they have commissioned the work. Personally I feel that Tattooists are artists and when choosing my own tattoos I would look for artists with individual styles, I would choose based upon their own work as opposed to flash, although I have tattoos chosen from flash, I had the images changed to suit my style. Tattooist Susan likes to try to individualise catalogue images so that the client still feels they have something in some way unique if that’s what they want.

Designing A Tattoo

I have recently been asked to design a Tattoo for a friend. There are a few things to take into account when coming up with a design. Firstly the design is restricted by size, the tattoo is going to be quite small so I had to stay away from detail and keep the design simple and bold. The size also limits the colours that can be used, as darker colours will make the small design harder to see. One of the main things that affects the design is making sure it is what my friend wants; I sketched a few ideas first before she chose the one she liked. This is the design we chose, it just needs a few final tweaks from the tattooist… as they know best.

Some studios offer custom only tattoos. Susan suggests this might be somewhere the more serious tattoo collector would go. He would possibly choose the artist based on a style or genre he would like and would have done research before booking his artist. Other studios offer both custom and ‘flash’ tattoos. In this case the client will be able to choose from a selection of designs or ask the artist to prepare something `custom`. She goes on to say “In my opinion both options are worthwhile. The important thing is that the client leaves the studio with their new piece of art feeling happy and that they have had a good experience.”

For more information take a look at The Ink Tree Tattoo Studio website and visit the Facebook page.

The Author

Rebecca Jobling is an illustrator in the North East of England, She enjoyed working as a teaching assistant in a primary school for five years prior to university, but has always had a passion for art. She achieved BA (Hons) in Illustration and Design at Sunderland university. She loves all things creative and enjoys experimenting with different media in her work.

Keep up to date with Rebecca’s blog

Business Branding In Newcastle Upon Tyne

Getting noticed by your customers is one of the most important aspects of any business and being a professional graphic design company we have decided to offer all PNE Group clients a 20% discount on all logo design and business branding projects! Keep reading to find out more…

Make Your Visual Communication A Good One!

Starting your own business is one of those daunting, life-altering events. With many questions on your mind about what could go wrong and if your potential customers will notice you. We know, we were once in the same situation. But we had help from the PNE Group who provide professional development and business solutions to SMEs, entrepreneurs, and helped us create our own business brand. With that in mind we decided we want to give something back and help those who are going through the same daunting process themselves.

Creating Your Brand

Your branding and logo design is often the first impression your clients will get of your company. When creating a visual identity for a company we are always thinking about the designs memorability, uniqueness and how this image is going to represent your business. Is this a lasting design and how will we make you stand out from the crowed? Our creative team will use our experience and skills to design a visual identity emphasising your company strengths! have a look at the links below to find out more information about what we offer and how the process works.

(Links open in a new window)

• What is involved in the Business Branding process?
• Benefits of working with Dark Design Graphics
• Business Branding Newcastle

For more information about Business Branding and Logo Design in Newcastle Upon Tyne contact alasdair@darkdesigngraphics.co.uk

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and help us spread the word of this awesome offer via the sharebar to the left.

Who Are The Gumboots?

The ‘Gumboots’ are a gathering of new and old mates from different corners of Scotland. Select sides such as ours are not always welcomed by the “traditionist” competitions as they prefer Club representation, but what we have enables the essence of rugby to truly come through, the purist of rugby through friendship and enjoyment of the game.

Logo Design Newcastle

It is not often Dark Design Graphics is given such a detailed brief for a brand design, having been given a visual graphic of what they wanted in their design, it was an opportunity not to be missed!

With an emphasis on retro Branding and taking inspiration from old school heavy metal visual designs and illustrations we started putting some sketches together creating a feel for the design we were developing.

Aesthetics

What we really needed to think about was how to keep all the elements together in the design without making it too complex. Working with our client we adjusted a few of the brands features to give a better fit in the overall visual identity. Continuing as with all our projects, once we were happy with the layout of the design the next step was putting it into illustrator and making a few final adjustments.

This was definitely one of the more enjoyable branding projects that we got to work with, we are all looking forward to seeing the designs on the clubs rugby shirts and we will be updating this soon with the teams facebook page.

You have been able to capture our requirements in such a way that our initial idea has been transferred into exactly what we wanted. We chose your services from the competition because your informative website and what also helped was to watch the ‘real time’ drawing video.
Your first contact and helpful explanation of the process reinforced our decision up front.

For more information about Business Branding from Dark Design Graphics visit our logo design Newcastle page or for some of the benefits we offer visit benefits of working with Dark Design Graphics

Creating a Business Brand

Seotiras is an Internet Marketing Agency in Cyprus with a mission to optimize websites for greater exposure. As most of you will probably know SEO is a highly competitive market and the brief we received aimed to create a modern visual brand that would represent their company tagline ‘Website Saviours’.

Visual Identity

‘The word sotiras in Greek means saviour, so with a little word play – sotiras – seotiras’.
Our idea was to incorporate the imagery of saviour into the visual design whilst keeping a modern feel, after some initial ideas we agreed on the use of the sun to replace the ‘O’ in ‘SEO’, this is to represent growth and a positive feel for the companies branding.

Drawing inspiration from the saviour idea and trying hard to not end up with too much of a religious logo, we decided to add a halo to the design. The halo creates an expressive and bright design that gives the brand an optimistic feel and an edge to the companies visual identity.

A few minor adjustments, a change of colours and styling and we have the final design! Check it below or on the SEO Agency Website.

Dark Design Graphics really captured this idea. This is basically our mission: To save websites. People spend lots of money to build good (or sometimes bad) websites, but they don’t think much about their online presence. They don’t understand that there are millions other websites out there and so they need a way to enhance their online presence. So we are here to help them stand out from the crowd.

Written by Rebecca Jobling

Digital Illustration In Recent Years

Over the recent years digital illustration has become more popular and more accessible. It has even been suggested that it might cause non-digital illustrators to become obsolete. So what is it that has made illustrators turn to digital work apart from the pressure to keep up with demand? After looking in books such as ‘The Fundamentals of Illustration’ and ‘Hand to Eye, Contemporary Illustration’ It looks like a lot of people seemed to turn digital because it can be faster and easy to change and manipulate your work the artist is always free to reposition elements of their work, as well as re-colouring and re-touching. This means that the final piece of work can always be altered. The computer allows us to get rid of an area of pure labour. For example the design below was achieved easily on the computer; I just made a quarter of the image then duplicated it. The image would have taken me much longer by hand to complete.

Obviously being able to create work quickly and make changes so easily is an important point for illustrators but there other benefits of digital illustration you can achieve things that probably aren’t possible if you work non-digitally and there are some amazing digital artists out there. Technology has the advantage of reaching a wider audience and making creative work more accessible. Working digitally also allows you to access things that you otherwise may not be able to use; software today allows the artist to simulate a huge variety of tools and media. The following digital images show how effects like acrylic paint can be simulated digitally, they even react the same way when mixed with ‘digital water’ etc.

Why do people still prefer Tradition Illustration

But there are illustrators today that still prefer working the old fashioned way and spend all day every day on their work even though they could probably achieve a similar outcome much quicker using technology. With Digital methods being so fast and convenient, why would illustrators still choose to work non-digitally? When I looked into this I found that some illustrators feel that traditional illustration has something ‘unique’ about it that cannot be captured in a digital image.

I asked a group of student illustrators what they thought and they agreed that non-digital illustration has a different feel completely compared to digital work. Most of them didn’t like the fact that with digital illustration their work only exists on a screen and there is no physical outcome. A lot of them also said that the process was more enjoyable and that with non digital work you can see the time and care that has been put into the image they all said that it was the flaws and mistakes in the non digital illustrations that made them special. Most of them said that they would only use the computer occasionally as a tool to alter their work etc. but a lot of them wanted to avoid it.

Mixing Digital Illustration with Traditional Illustration

Even though I prefer working traditionally I see the computer as a valuable tool to help with my work adding tints and changing brightness etc. For example the following image was created with inks then after scanning I added the white reflection in the eye and the block purple background.

And the following Image was created in separate layers then put together in Photoshop. The background is ink splattered paper I then created the trees by using cardboard cut-outs and taking photos of their shadow on the paper, the white rabbits were drawn separately and dropped in on top, I then added a mask and created the fade into black.

When I carried out this research I was looking to find out what the future might hold for traditional illustration as it seemed to be getting lost in this digital revolution. And I think it’s safe to say that we won’t lose it. It looks like we might reach a balance of the two methods and there seems to be a lot of interesting hybrid styles appearing today.

The Author

Rebecca Jobling is an illustrator in the North East of England, She enjoyed working as a teaching assistant in a primary school for five years prior to university, but has always had a passion for art. She achieved BA (Hons) in Illustration and Design at Sunderland university. She loves all things creative and enjoys experimenting with different media in her work.

Keep up to date with Rebecca’s blog

 A wise man once told me ‘You’re only as good as your last piece of work’ I like to keep this in mind when im working on projects.

Those of you who read my recent article Drawing The Colosseum will know all about the trials and tribulations that came with that illustration, why I nearly gave up and why completing the cross hatching was the best thing I could have done. This drawing from the Durham Cathedral Cloisters is the first in a series of drawings designed to express how magnificent this building is and why I was so inspired to draw it.

 Art Inspiration & Drawing Ideas

It was only after drawing the Colosseum and visiting Durham Cathedral that I asked myself how have I not  even considered drawing this amazing AD 1093 building regarded as one of the finest examples of Norman architecture. Living only 20 minutes away from it and passing it regularly by train or car, this has got me thinking, what else is near by that I take for granted. Next time you walk around your local area, look around with artists eyes. Take your camera and go for a walk early in the morning, photographing what you see, do the same in the afternoon when the sun is going down and see those same views in a different light (literally).

Using The Cross Hatching Technique

This drawing is looking through one of the windows from the Cathedral Cloisters at the towers, created using the cross hatching technique with a 0.1 Fineliner Pen and Indian Ink. Time Lapsed to create the speed drawing above, when you are as inspired to draw something as I was for this, motivation is not a problem.

Get Inspired

What do you do when you just can’t think of something to draw? How do you get past ‘Artists Block’? Let us know at Dark Design Graphics what you do when you are itching to create, but you just don’t know what to create. Add your hints and tips in the comments section below, or tell us what you have taken for granted in your area.

The second drawing for this project is drawing Durham Cathedrals columns, see a quick preview of the time lapse video below. This will be a two or maybe even three part video as this drawing is being done on portrait A2 paper, only the bottom half is visible so far…

To follow my progress with this project keep up to date by subscribing via the links to the top right of your screen and if this project inspired you as much as it did me share that inspiration via the links to the left. To see some fully completed time lapse videos created by Alasdair and Dark Design Graphics visit our Youtube channel. To see Alasdair’s shading technique have a look at our tutorial on cross hatching.

There are hundreds of Logo Design companies out there, all vying for your attention and competing for your custom. We are no different so we decided to explain to you, our potential clients, why Companies and Organisations often chose Dark Design Graphics over the other Graphic Design companies and Freelance designers. To see the process we go through to create your Visual Identity just have a look at our recent article How we design your Brand. So now you have seen the process involved in Logo Design but what are the benefits in choosing us.

Free Business Promotion from Dark Design Graphics – Once you are satisfied with your logo design and have implemented it onto your website and products Dark Design Graphics will write a unique article with a full description of what your business does. This is a free service providing you with free advertising and a description of how we went about creating your brand. To see our recent article for Team Branding visit Gumboots Rugby – Team Branding. Each article can create up to 150 page views per day and with a link to your website or details of how to contact you, we are providing a free promotional service.

SEO Link Building from Dark Design Graphics – If you link to us, we link to you. For all reputable business and within reason Dark Design Graphics will add a link to your business website or social media page once you have linked back to us. These links appear on all our pages (apart from our home page) in the bottom right sidebar under the ‘Friends’ heading. Dark Design Graphics receives thousands of visitors per month, this figure improve monthly for each article we write and each back-link we receive. So when you help us we help you.

New Business Opportunities with Dark Design Graphics – we are always looking for the next business opportunity and like to create good working relationships with our clients and customers. Can you give us an offer we can’t refuse? Every business starts of small and has to work hard to compete with giants that are already there with Dark Design Graphics being no exception we are happy to look at your proposals and create deals that will help us both. If you are interested please email alasdair@darkdesigngraphics.co.uk or find us through one of the many follow links on the right hand toolbar.

Whats On The Fringe was created as a place for off west-end and fringe theatre to get reviews and listings. With the London fringe theatre scene being so vibrant and more and more productions and venues appearing they became frustrated with the inability to find anywhere that focused on providing reviews for these theatre companies and theatres.

Dark Design Graphics has provided me with excellent work throughout the duration of this project. They worked well alongside me to develop concepts based on the initial brief and kept me updated with their progress. The finalised images were delivered on time and as requested. I am very happy with the work and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to others.