1) Abstract Is for Paintings

Your costume should be easily identifiable. Your devastating rendition of “Global Warming,” “Carter Administration Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams” or “Symptoms of America’s Moral Decline” aren’t half as clever as you think they are. Don’t overthink it; nobody should have to ask you what your costume is.

2) Pockets, Zippers and Other Modern Conveniences

When you’re throwing a costume together in 15 minutes, it’s easy to forget the amenities built into our everyday clothing. Many a mummy has suited up only to realize there was a reason the Egyptians drained their bodily fluids into urns. Remember, ghosts can walk through walls, but people dressed as ghosts can end up holding their car keys all night. Plan ahead.

3) Sarcasm Is the Lowest Form of Wit

Hanging a horseshoe around your neck and telling everybody that you’re a “Chick Magnet” wasn’t funny in 1972 and it’s not funny today. Don’t get us wrong, funny costumes are great, but leave the corny punchlines to Carrot Top and let your costume speak for itself.

4) Duct Tape Has 4,748,901 Uses (and Counting)

If your costume breaks in the field, duct tape can fix it. Wrap a couple of feet around a small pencil and slip it into your pocket (see rule No. 2). You will be glad you did.

5) Day of the Dead Decorum

If you wouldn’t want your mother or boss to see a picture of you in your costume, you probably shouldn’t wear it at all. Even though Halloween is a time for make-believe, real feelings can still get hurt. Dressing as a Nazi, Klansman, terrorist or pedophile priest is ill-advised at best. At worst, you could wake up in the ER.

Come see us at 4080 Erie Street right above Finestra Gallery in Historic Downtown Willoughby!

Styled out of broken pieces of crockery, this innovative business card design for a Greek restaurant is like the atmosphere of the restaurant on a piece of crockery.

2. Phil Kiel Badge Set

We all loved collecting pins as a child, and lets be honest, we all still do, and with this clever business card by Phil Kiel you get 6 reminding you just how easy it is get in touch with him.

3. State Systems Radio

Designed in the shape of a portable radio, this business card is not only fun, but also guaranteed to make sure State Systems Radio stand out from everyone else in their industry.

4. Reactor

Styled to easily fit into a wallet, these business cards have designed with a twist – the ability to pop up a silhouette of the person that the card belongs to. The only downside is there’s then no excuse for not recognising them next time you see them.

5. SheetSeat

Using the design for their wooden chair as the basis for this business card does a great job of not only providing people with contact details, but also to be able to see easily see what the product the company makes is like.

6. National Greyhound Adoption Program

Designed using a metal dog tag, as opposed to cardboard, as the base for this business card is guaranteed to make sure it’s the first place that comes to mind when you think about adopting a dog.

7. Corvus Design Studio

Probably one of the brightest business cards you’ll ever see, this card is sure to grab your attention when you’re flicking through your cards looking for a designer.

8. Asthma Allergy Centre

Another business card using an unusual material is this business card for an Asthma Clinic, which uses a balloon that requires you to pull it up to read it (isn’t that a bit mean though if you have breathing problems..)

9. Casbella Furniture

Designed to fold out into the shape of a sofa, this card for a furniture company shows how some simple cutting and folding can totally transform its look.

10. Egil Paulsen

Produced with folding instructions that turn this flat card into a piece of artwork sitting on an easel, this stunning card for Egil Paulsen has to be best artist card we’ve ever seen.

11. Mechanical Engineer Card

Brilliant at showing off how clever the mechanical engineer who designed this is, it does have one down fall – the fact that most of us would end up breaking it trying to put it together.

12. Marco Rosella – Web Designer

Designed using newspaper as the main material for the card, and then applying a sticker on top, this is a great example of how a great looking business card doesn’t need to cost a lot of

money.

13. Yoga One

Showing how flexible you could become if you went to their yoga classes, this card features a woman in an upside down yoga pose with two holes at the top of her legs for your fingers to poke through

14. Melvin Tool Card

Definitely one to grab your attention, this card is also incredibly useful as it also comes with 5 mini tools for you to push out and use!

15. Google Me Card

Let’s be honest if we want to find out anything about anyone these days we Google them, which is exactly what makes this final business card so cool!

This Article is Courtesy of :  http://www.queeried.com/15-creative-business-card-designs-youre-going-to-want-to-steal/

This logo appears to be very simple, but if you look at the white space between the “E” and “x” in “Ex,” you’ll find it is more complex than you thought. Can you spot the arrow?

These popular party chips are a staple at many backyard BBQs, but chances are, you’ve never noticed the hidden celebration scene concealed within the letters. The second and third “t’s” are sharing a chip over an “i” that is dotted with a salsa bowl. Yum!

Named the world’s most famous and prestigious cycling race, bike-lovers and non-cyclists alike are familiar with the event’s emblem. However, you might be missing out on the logo’s most interesting aspect. After careful examination, you’ll notice an image of a person riding a bicycle; the yellow circle is the front wheel and the r is the body.

Amazon.com has become a go-to source for electronic commerce. Clearly there is an arrow under Amazon, but have you ever thought about its significance? Take a look at where the arrow begins and ends: a and z. This secret message seems to conveys that Amazon offers everything from A to Z!

The Kisses logo doesn’t have much to it, but if you look at it sideways, you might see a chocolate kiss formed between the K and the I.

There’s a slightly obscured bear within the Matterhorn Mountain if you look closely. That’s because the candy bar hails from Bern, Switzerland, a city supposedly named for a bear.

Penn State became the 11th member of this university athletic conference, hence the embedded “11” in this logo. That is, until the University of Nebraska–Lincoln became number 12, ushering in a new logo era.

Before merging with Delta, Northwest’s logo was one of the best in the industry. The N and W within the circle are fairly obvious, but did you know the circle also serves as a compass? And guess which direction the arrow in the upper-left-hand corner (or the beginning of the w) is pointing?There is the Baskin Robins new logo, in where the BR also creates the number 31 for how many flavors they have. I found it very clever.

What looks like half of a happy face is also a bigger version of the G in Goodwill’s name. It gives the logo an entirely different feel when you think about it that way.

Roxy is a company that specializes in clothing and accessories for girls who love snowboarding and surfing. The company is actually a part of Quiksilver. The Roxy logo is made of two Quiksilver logos that form a heart.

Mobile browsing is the next big thing as these days people have an access to internet via phones so why make an effort to go to your desktop for browsing.  Browsing through phones is getting easier day by day because of the immense popularity it has gained. This is exactly why all the famous websites are coming up with a mobile version of their website so that users can have an access to their website without any hassle.

If you are a designer, you must be aware of the fact that designing a normal website is a lot different from designing a website for mobile browsing. A normal website’s homepage consists of a lot of tabs, links etc. the mobile version of your website should be simpler, precise and task based. When a user is browsing via mobile, he would definitely want things to be quick, to the point and urgent. Mobile designs should be concise and to the point. Similar to a flyer printing run, all the necessary information should be included without too much clutter.

You must be thinking that staying too specific while designing a mobile layout might make your website look boring. This is exactly where you have chance to test your designing and creative abilities. Since you will be having less space, it is entirely up to your designing skills to make the most out of that space but remember, you should still be able to keep things interesting for a user. There is another complication that you have to go through; compatibility of your website with all mobile devices. It does not matter how great your website looks on a mobile device if it is not functional. You should be able to design and code your website in a way that it looks good on every phone instead of displaying different results on different mobile devices.

Following are a few tips that can help you in designing a website which would be accessible through mobile devices by users of any mobile device.

A Balanced Screen Resolution

Honestly speaking, designing a mobile version for website is not at all an easy task because of the variations available in mobile devise these days. Every mobile seem to have different resolution and screen size so coming up with a balance resolution is the key to success. The first thing you need to is research on the current available devices and their specifications.

Once you have learned about them, you can come up with a balanced resolution which is best according to your own judgment. It is not going to be easy to come up with a single display for all mobile devices as mobile developers have to create different pages for different platforms which will obviously increase your workload a lot.

Find out the most popular resolutions of mobile devices in the current year and work on them. For instance 320×240 is a resolution used for blackberry devices, android devices and Symbian phones. There is wide range of resolutions available as well for instance, 480×360, 480×800 etc. you need to find a perfect one for your website.

Like Small Meals, Divide Your Pages into Small Portions

Lengthy texts are hard to read on mobile screens so you need to divide the content of your website into small portions. Avoid designing a website on which user has to scroll the pages horizontally. For instance, if you are designing a mobile version of a printing company’s website, divide the products page into sub-divisions like flyers, brochures, postcards, business cards, posters, booklets, rack cards, calendars etc.

In order to place content you need to divide content according to high priority and low priority. You can display important headings on the main page and in order to read the complete article, user can click on the link which will redirect him to another page. Homepage of a mobile version should be simple and precise.

Keep Things as Simple as You Can

Mobile users are not interested in seeing graphics and over the top creativity. They need a website which is easy to use and comfortable to navigate. So, keep things as simple as possible and avoid usage of tables and any other type of complex formatting. So, simplifying is the key to have a successful mobile version.

Allow Users to View Full Website

Apart from providing a mobile version, there should always be an option to view the full version of the website so that users can take a look at all the features your website has to offer. Full view website might come across as a little complicated on mobile due to the horizontal and vertical scrolling so in order to make things easier for such users, provide a ‘back to top’ link so that they can go back to the top page and switch back to mobile version if they want.

Positioning of Tabs

If you really want to satisfy your users, you need to understand the way their mind works. It also depends on the kind of website you have. You need to find out the way users will prefer while navigating your website. The main tabs and headlines should always be at the top of page. Also, if the visitor wants to take a look at new content instantly then you should place your navigation menu below the page. It should be all about correct placement of navigation bar.

Avoid Graphic Links

Your main website can contain anything and everything but your mobile website cannot allow you all this. Do not use images for links in a mobile version. Prefer text links because other links will require resources. Also, users will have to see a tough time because other links takes a lot of time in downloading. When it comes to a mobile version, you should go for text links.

Highlighting the Selected Link

As soon as you scroll down a website in a mobile, it highlights all the links which makes it difficult for a user to distinguish between the selected link and other links. You need to design a website in a way so that it can differentiate the selected tab. You can simple change the font color of the link which is in focus or you can add some padding around links.

Striking a Balance in Links

We all know that if we are browsing through mobile, we will have limited system resources. You should design a website while keeping this important point in mind. Make sure you balance links rather than making your user suffer by going through numerous pages to find the correct one. You need to keep a balance in between the number of links on pages.

Less Text Entry

Your user should not be forced to write a lot of text in mobile versions. Obviously they don’t have proper keyboards while using a cell phone so avoid anything which will increase the user text entry. You can simply list the important things so that they can select and click instead of writing an entire link. Not only this, keep the URL simple and short for mobile users.

Avoid Pop Ups

While using a desktop, pop-up ads can be really annoying. When it comes to a mobile version, they get a little more annoying. Mobile browsers do not support pop ups so try not have them in mobile versions. Also, avoid any kind of automatic refreshes and allow the user to refresh the page whenever he wants.

Final Thoughts

Keeping things simple is the way to go. Avoid any complexities in a mobile version. A simple mobile website is something users will love. They can go through multiple pages to find the desired information on a desktop but not on a mobile so keep things easy for them.

Article courtesy of: http://www.smashingbuzz.com/2011/07/designing-your-website-the-mobile-way/

Advertising is an art form. Being in the advertising industry, I pay special attention to advertising in general.  When I’m driving down the road – I name the fonts I see on signage, pay attention to color schemes, and look at logos (yes – I am a self admitted dork).   I actually watch commercials to see what the top dollar advertising agencies are coming up with.

Here are two of my latest favorites and why….

Heineken – The Entrance

Watch it Here.

Why I Love It:

Heineken is selling a lifestyle.  The main character is the guy that everyone knows and likes.  He passes up martinis for Heineken.  The overall setting is luxe and a throwback to the 70′s.  There is a “movie” quality element here  that draws you in — and the music is fantastic.  (I’ve already downloaded the song to my ipod.  Band: Asteroids Galaxy Tour, Album: Fruit, Song:  The Golden Age)  The overall message – if I drink this beer, this will be my life.

Volkswagen – Pinata

Watch it Here.

Why I love it:

This is hands-down the best product commercial I have ever seen.  It’s easy to relate to, it’s fun to watch – but the best part is the brand message. It’s very “in your face”…our cars are indestructible.  The message is again reinforced with the father picks up the bat.

A new generation is making street art that is conceptual, abstract, and even sculptural in nature by Carolina A. Miranda Say the words “street art” and chances are people will conjure up images that borrow heavily from graphic pictures inspired by comic-book art or Constructivism: Shepard Fairey’s omnipresent “Obey Giant,” the stark black-and-white visage of wrestler Andre the Giant, which the artist has pasted onto streets around the globe; British prankster Banksy’s cheeky portraits of people and rats; or the countless other icons by artists illicitly pasting their work on walls and traffic signs worldwide.

That trend is changing. Young artists are turning away from the figuration common in so much street art—not to mention the alphanumeric elements of spray-can graffiti—and producing works that are more conceptual, abstract, and even three-dimensional.

French-Spanish street artist Eltono, 35, for example, hand paints geometric mazes that evoke a stylized tuning fork—a riff on his name, which translates to “The Tone.” Gabriel “Specter” Reese, 32, a Canadian-American artist, fashions urban refuse into sculptures, installing them in forgotten public spaces in New York and Toronto. The American-born, Berlin-based Brad Downey, 30, digs up and rearranges bricks into geometric monuments. The pieces are part of a long-running series he calls “Spontaneous Sculptures,” a project he is compiling into a book.

“The initial idea, with graffiti, was to add something colorful to the city,” Downey says of his work. “Now I think that the best thing to do is to shift the meaning of what’s already there, to reorganize all that information.” As is generally the case with street art, much of this reorganization is against the law. Downey has been arrested numerous times.

Regardless of municipal vandalism codes, this new school of street art has attracted the attention of curators at an international level. In 2008 the Tate Modern featured a number of artists working in this vein in the exhibition “Street Art.” Last year, the Fundación Caixa Galicia in La Coruña, Spain, organized a citywide exhibition titled “Postgraffiti, Geometry, and Abstraction,” which featured artists working in an abstract-geometric vernacular. And, this month, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego wraps up a six-month show titled “Viva La Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape,” which included work by Akay, a Swedish interventionist who once crafted a small residence in the middle of a road divider.

Interestingly, the esthetic theories behind some of this art seem almost conventionally academic. (Studio artists like John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, and many others were doing uncommissioned works in public spaces back in the ’60s.) What sets this movement apart is that much of it is inspired by or has evolved out of a graffiti tradition. Most of these artists have at some point taken a can of spray paint and placed words and images on a wall—illegally. Having embraced this gesture, they are now developing it into something new.

“What these artists draw from graffiti are materials, technique, and attitude—it’s very ambitious,” says Cedar Lewisohn, the curator behind the Tate Modern’s street-art exhibition and the author of Abstract Graffiti (forthcoming from Merrell in March). “But the art is coming from a little bit more of an art background. They’re making art-historical referential work.”

Artists have arrived at these new forms in different ways. MOMO is a New York City-based street artist who, since 2004, has created colorful collages of paint and paper that feature candy-colored stripes layered over and under bright squiggles and geometric shapes. As with many street artists, he began by engaging more conventional methods—spraying his name on freight trains and painting portraits of acquaintances on derelict walls. (MOMO is a childhood nickname. Like some artists interviewed for this story, he preferred that his real name not be used.)

In early 2003, with the Iraq War looming, MOMO says he found himself increasingly uninspired by the imagery he was producing. “It was a moment when I felt like I didn’t relate to the public at large,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to appease them with figurative work. I didn’t want to inspire nostalgia.” As a result, his portraits became increasingly jagged and deconstructed. Soon, he was working with pure abstraction and placing his collages on the street. Since then he has created commissioned pieces at the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo and the Fundación Caixa Galicia, among other places. Like many artists working in this abstract and conceptual arena, he does not have gallery representation and survives largely on commission work at small galleries, kunsthalles, and museums.

Certainly the shift away from the figurative is related to the fact that many of today’s street artists have at least some formal training. Downey has a master’s degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Eltono has a degree from the Polytechnic University in Madrid. Others, like MOMO, have completed one or two years of art school.

“These kids aren’t just trying to ‘get up,’” says New York art critic Carlo McCormick, who has followed urban guerrilla art since the early ’80s. “There are much deeper roots here that make me think of artists like John Fekner and Gordon Matta-Clark, people who were going at it in ways that were really conceptual and activist.”

McCormick explores works such as these in his new book, Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, which he co-authored with Marc and Sara Schiller of the popular street-art blog Wooster Collective. “So much of what’s been done within street art and graffiti has been declarative,” he says. “What we can say about abstract art is that by not shoving a message down our throats, it can be more poetic.”

For many of these artists, moving away from words and figurative images is key. “This isn’t about imposing an idea,” says Madrid-based Nuria Mora, 36, whose angular street abstractions are occasionally laced with floral patterns inspired by textiles. “These are quiet works. I’m trying to create a bit of silence in the city.” For her most recent commission, for the Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa, she built a sherbet-colored found-wood structure within the museum, deconstructed it piece by piece, and re-installed it at various locations on the streets downtown—at times with permission and at times without.

The shift to a different kind of work also represents an attempt to create something that will stand out amidst the plethora of illicit marks that seem to cover every available city surface. For years, Eltono tagged the train tunnels around Paris, but when he arrived in Madrid in the ’90s, he found a city saturated in graffiti. “To add my name to that,” he says, “just didn’t make sense.” It was then that he developed the colorful geometric box patterns for which he is now known. (Today he works primarily as an installation artist, and his commissioned work has appeared at the Tate Modern and the Miró Foundation in Barcelona, among other places.)

Cultural attitudes toward some materials have also played a role in this evolution. In many cities, spray paint is associated with the most destructive acts of vandalism. Eltono says he switched to hand-brushed latex paint not only because it gives him a bright, defined line, but also because “on the street, spray paint is the devil.” But if you paint with a brush, he says, “no one bothers you. It’s not considered aggressive.” Often it allows him to hide in plain sight, because few people take issue with someone brushing paint on a wall.

The illegal nature of so much of this work is a non-issue for most of the artists interviewed. They view what they do as an interesting way to have a dialogue with the urban fabric. Skewville is a New York City-based duo whose wry three-dimensional pieces play with the very architecture of the city. (Their work has been exhibited in galleries and art centers in London, Dublin, and Lille, France.) They dangle carved-wood sneakers on power lines and fabricate sculptures out of electrical tubing, which they bolt onto the sides of buildings.

“If you’re going to do this so-called ‘street art,’ then I think it should be more about the street and less about just putting up art,” says Ad Deville, 38, half of the pair. “For us, it’s about keeping it real—but literally, by playing with real city materials to blend into the landscape.”

Reese, whose work has been shown at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, says that he began his foray into more conceptual, three-dimensional works after a stint spent working for an architect. For his 2010 “Canner Tribute” series, he constructed towering pieces out of shopping carts, bottles, and plastic crates as a way of paying respect to the anonymous men and women who recycle aluminum cans. He installed the works without permission in underutilized urban spaces along bridges and busy roadways in New York. “I wanted to create a piece that was an homage,” he explains. “But I also like the esthetic of it. I would lie if I said it wasn’t about that.”

As their work expands beyond the established parameters of graffiti and street art, there is debate among artists about what to call it. The term “street art” is generally regarded as uselessly broad. “I struggle with the idea of ‘street art,’” says Patrick Miller, 34, a member of the New York City-based collective Faile, a graphic duo that began doing stencil work in the ’90s before making the jump to three-dimensional installation. “The street is just a vehicle, not the art.”

In 2009 Faile installed on Brooklyn streets two three-dimensional prayer wheels laced with carvings exploring ideas of consumption and greed. In form, they were inspired by Tibetan prayer wheels (they were made of wood and could be spun). On the street, the works offered an unusual juxtaposition: a sacred object bolted—illegally—onto a battered urban landscape.

Overall, Faile’s work straddles the lines between guerrilla and fine art, pop and conceptualism, sculpture and architecture. The duo continue to place pieces on the street in illicit ways. But they are also the only artists interviewed for this article who have gallery representation, by Perry Rubenstein in New York and Lazarides in London. Their silk-screened collages on wood are often priced upward of $60,000. Last year, the pair completed a massive site-specific commission—a faux-historical temple at a plaza in Lisbon—as part of the festival Portugal Arte 10. “It’s a blur between street art and public art and public intervention,” says Patrick McNeil, 35, the pair’s other half. “It lies somewhere in between.”

Javier Abarca, a curator and critic who teaches at the Complutense University in Madrid and writes about graffiti on his blog, Urbanario, says that it’s time to rethink the street art taxonomy. While “graffiti” remains the chosen term to describe spray-can tagging, “street art”—with its everything-on-the-street implications—has become unwieldy. Abarca says he uses the term “post-graffiti” to describe any type of iconic mark-making on the street.

Historically, this would include figures like ’80s pop artist Keith Haring, who created a distinct visual vocabulary that was inspired by graffiti but did not imitate it. Today postgraffiti might include the work of artists like MOMO and Eltono (as well as Fairey and Banksy), who have developed readily identifiable visual symbols. For more site-specific works, such as the one-offs created by Downey or Reese, Abarca uses the term “intervention”—which refers to a piece within the context of a very precise environment.

Naturally, it’s not always clear who belongs in which column. Almost all of the artists mentioned above cross over from one category to another, from the street to the gallery, from graffiti to postgraffiti to intervention, eluding categorization.

“The interest for me is in this gray area where words aren’t speaking quite perfectly,” says MOMO. “If we’re having trouble with the words, it means that something new is forming.”

Article courtesy of:

http://www.artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=3158