PrintBench

JKF Festival For Youth Culture

Mike — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Zeitung für das Jugendkulturfestival Basel 2011. Newspaper for the 2011 festival, 32 pages broadsheet. Main Idea for this year was: Everything is unquare, such is youth. So we rotated every single element 45° to let the graphic cross borders. Graphic Design by Andreas Hidber, Valentin Pauwels and Anna Schorner.

Bar Aberto Refreshed by Coca-Cola

Mike — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:00:31 +0000

Coca-Cola has a unique space in the Dragon Stadium (of FCPorto Portuguese Football Club), located at the north end which was used for VIP guests. We had the chance to make this space a place that activates the brand in the context of happiness associated with football, an unexpected space open to all.

Opportunity

Coca-Cola has always tried to be present not only at the point of sale, but in people’s lives. This presence is based on creating moments of happiness that perpetuate the emotional connection between customer and brand, in a logic of “ritual creation”, “consumer focus” and spontaneous association with the brand. The space at the Dragon Stadium would be an opportunity to create a “bond” between the brand, the club and the fans, in a positive, attractive and special way.

Open to you

The name and the architecture of the space suggest a brand literally open. The identity developed refers to an imaginary bar atmosphere. The typography was created exclusively for Bar Aberto, as well as a library of dingbats that relate the space, the football club and Coca-Cola. The identity and dingbats elements are embodied in physical space by the use of various materials such as fabric, polycarbonate, black lights, neon, among others.

What Font Through Yonder Window Breaks?

Mike — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:12:32 +0000

The overbearing majority of people, when asked what would they rather give up between the gift of hearing and that of sight would, without hesitation, choose the former according to studies. And why not, seeing gives you colors and depth whereas hearing only brings music and communication to the plate and the latter can also be done in writing. In fact this type of communication is more important to designers who can’t always add audible parts to the projects they’re working on but those are, without exception, visual.

Over the course of years we’ve come to assimilate the fonts used for certain brands with the brands themselves. This is the case for Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Mountain Dew only to name a few sodas but if you think about it you realize just how important this tiny aspect is when trying to create a project from scratch. And then you see just the font you need in a picture or on a different website and you know it’s the one however short of contacting the admin you can’t really find out which one it is. Or can you?

Enter whatfontis.com, a website designed to help people in this situation through a very simple process. At any time you see a font you like you’re only three steps away from finding what it is and knowing what to do next.

Step 1 is feeding it the image or URL of the picture you want to decipher the font from. You can either upload the picture or just point the website where to search for it. Please bear in mind that you’ll also have to let it know if the background is lighter or darker than the fonts, it’s very important and I’ll show you why in just a few moments. When you click the Continue button you’re automatically taken to the next page and what happens between the two is that the website tries to select only the same type fonts and show it to you. If there are more than one available, it’ll give you an extra chance to make sure that you get the font you came after by letting you open the image in Pixlr so you can crop what you want. The same goes for what I mentioned earlier, the color of the background compared to the font, if not selected properly, can mess everything up.

Step 2 lets you type in the characters so it’ll know what they are in order for the website to run the search for you in its database which, by the way, is quite impressive with its almost 150,000 fonts. A minimum of 2 characters are needed for identification. If you don’t want to pay anything you can choose to have only the closest matches that are free to download displayed in the search results. Once you’ve made your selection you’re ready to move to move on.

Step 3 is a list of the closest 100 matches to the font you uploaded. As you can see in the example below, the one I searched for was the very first hit and whatfontis.com also provides a link to where you can buy or download the font from, in case it’s free.

Try it now and try it often because it’ll shave a lot of time and effort that can be spent doing something else for your project. And to bring it all back to where we started, this website is to typography what Shazam is to music.

Cats As Superheroes By Jenny Parks

Mike — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:00:37 +0000

Jenny Parks is a scientific illustrator that also happens to be a shameless nerd, with a penchant for drawing animals, dinosaurs, imaginary creatures… and occasionally, people as cats. Somehow, she found herself with a bit of internet fame with the illustration ‘Doctor Mew’, and has been baffled ever since. With a BFA in illustration from the California College of the Arts, and a graduate degree in Science Illustration from UC Santa Cruz, she now resides in San Francisco as a freelance illustrator, fulfilling her destiny to make a living drawing cute, fuzzy things.

Marvel Goes Geometric

Evan Varsamis — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:06 +0000

No, your eyes are not failing you. These Marvel Comics heroes are rendered in geometric blocks. Eric Dufresne has captured the essence of our favorite heroes in imagery that brings back memories of your childhood kaleidoscope. You can almost imaging the pieces of the artwork clicking into place to finally form the magnificent image.

And no, Eric is not biased. He has captured DC Comics heroes in geometric masterpieces, also. Currently he has created three sets of geometric heroes, two based on Marvel Comics and one on the DC Comics. You can see Superman, Flash, Wolverine, and all of your favorite heroes in kaleidoscopic perfection. There is no mention on Eric’s Behance pages if you can order prints. If they are not available already, you can be sure with the clamor of desire Eric will probably quickly make them ready to order.

Super Likes!

Mike — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:00:46 +0000

While Facebook is generally home to humans (and the occasional pet), Artist Jaime Calderón envisions a Facebook in which superheroes mingle with ordinary mortals.He created this series of clever designs which replace the regular Facebook “Like” icon with superhero versions. The series includes members of the Justice League and The Avengers. My personal favorite is Thing – because he’s really cooler than The Hulk, but never gets the same respect. Heck, the dude is made out of stone.

The Greatest Brandversations

Mike — Mon, 13 May 2013 06:12:33 +0000

They battle each other constantly so they could win our hearts… and money. Yet they have developed and transformed because of this constant interaction and state of conflict between them. Although they do not admit it, they seem to have become what their competition made them be. These antagonistic marketing wars between major internationally renowned rival brands will never decide a winner, but will engage the two sides into constantly transforming based on what the other is doing. This is not a war of the brands. It is a sort of constructive conversation between brands. A weird case of symbiosis. When I have started working at the first „Greatest Brandversations” series, back in 2011, it never crossed my mind that all you guys would enjoy this approach as much as you did. I was overjoyed to see that my perspective on the topic was shared by so many others.

It was a unique and beautiful experience, and I thank you all for it. Two years later, out of the will to develop this project even more, “The greatest Brandversations 2.0 – Into the Shadows” came to be. Basically, the idea stays the same: 10 posters representing some of the world’s most notorious brands by using their arch-competitor’s visual identity. Yet this time things take a different turn, with a more complex approach. The logo is but one piece of the grand puzzle called “a brand”. It is why, this time, I decided to portrait the sides involved using not only their competition’s logo, but other symbols, some of them obvious, other subliminal. Hope you’ll enjoy this new series as much as you did the previous one.

And the nominees are:

/ Nike and Adidas, the largest sportswear industry players

/Playstation and Xbox, the most popular gaming consoles

/Intel and AMD, two top competitors in the race for ITC supremacy

/Playboy and Hustler, the most notorious adults magazines,

/BMW and Audi, whom have ferociously battled each other in the marketing ring.

Typography Design By Peter Tarka

Mike — Fri, 10 May 2013 11:43:10 +0000

Design is a creative process—most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form— undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience. The term “graphic design” can also refer to a number of artistic and professional disciplines that focus on visual communication and presentation. The field as a whole is also often referred to as Visual Communication or Communication Design. Various methods are used to create and combine words, symbols, and images to create a visual representation of ideas and messages. A graphic designer may use a combination of typography, visual arts and page layout techniques to produce the final result. Graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created and the products (designs) which are generated.

About : Peter Tarka is a young (21 YO) graphic designer and illustrator from Poland (Wrocław). He has worked as an graphic designer since 2008. His works being featured in many magazines and sites about graphic design (Behance, Abduzeedo, PSDtuts and many many more). Peter sure knows how to deliver a strong creative typographic works.He has worked for all kinds of companies, Tarka is also member of the Slashthree, Keystone Design Union.

Happy New Year Poster from Beyond the Stars

Evan Varsamis — Wed, 01 May 2013 06:43:05 +0000

The initial idea was to design a greeting card that visualized the opening of a champagne bottle, with the cork shooting upwards, with champagne bubbles overflowing. However, the detail i wanted to show couldn’t be viewed with the maximum effect that I had imagined at greeting card size, so I decided to design it as a poster instead. With this larger size, I was able to fully illustrate the detail with the lettering and textures etc. To keep in the festive spirit, I used cream, gold and navy blue colours to compliment the vintage lettering look, along with the swirly motifs.