creative process

Industrial Design Inspiration: Lotus Esira

abduzeedo — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:42:06 +0000

We love industrial design, it is everywhere, every object was conceived with a goal in mind. That goal, most of the time, is achieved through the design. We have also learned to admire beautiful industrial design work, especially the first phases of the creative process and prototyping. Jack Lamburn's Lotus Esira Concept exemplifies all of this and that's why we would like to share with you here in this post.

Jack Lamburn is a designer at James Park Associates. JPA work all over the world focusing their design output on commercial aircraft interiors, airport lounges and hotel interiors.

Lotus Esira

Personal mood board_

Sketch & development work

Model Making

Final Scale Model

About the author

Abduzeedo is a blog about design. There are all sorts of articles for those who want to look for inspiration. Also you will find very useful tutorials for the most used applications out there, with a special selection of Photoshop Tutorials and Illustrator Tutorials. You can get in follow us via Twitter at @abduzeedo

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Inspiring Creative Process Videos

marcos333 — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:50:44 +0000

I think one of the best ways to learn is watching other artists creating, some of the most awesome techniques can be revealed with a simple sneak peek into other artist creative process. I learned a lot watching this videos and I hope your learn something from it too. If you have some creative process videos like this, please share with us.

BLACK FLY X RISK X SMASH 137 X MIAMI from Willie Toledo on Vimeo.

TEDxBrooklyn by SARA BLAKE of the KDU from Cinecycle on Vimeo.

Tony Riff from itdrewitself on Vimeo.

SUPAKITCH & KORALIE - VÄRLDSKULTUR MUSEET GÖTEBORG from elr°y on Vimeo.

Ashab & Snub: Time lapse painting from delarge on Vimeo.

Jason Najarak Mural Painting Time Lapse from Seraphim Communications on Vimeo.

Time-Lapse Inking by David Lozeau (Zombie Wonderland) from David Lozeau on Vimeo.

"Write the Future : MADSTEEZ from MADSTEEZ on Vimeo.

Broken Crow Stencil Mural - 1 Day Time lapse - Lion Man from The BFC on Vimeo.

kwasten met de gasten for GVB / ipainteveryday 264 from ottograph on Vimeo.

Infiniti - 3D Mural Time-Lapse from Digital Hause on Vimeo.

THE WALL from BoCa on Vimeo.

Risk X Blackflys from Willie Toledo on Vimeo.

Broken Heart Wheatpaste - Time Lapse from Marcos Torres on Vimeo.

Beat13 / Lucy McLauchlan - Fame Festival 2009. from Beat13 on Vimeo.

"EASY" from LANDOMAN on Vimeo.

About the author

My name is Marcos Torres, I'm Graphic Artist from Porto Alegre, Brasil. You can get to know more about me by acessing my Personal Website or by following me on Twitter: @marcos333. You can also see some of my last projects at my Flickr.

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Abduzeedo Redesign Case Study

abduzeedo — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:09:20 +0000

After months of study, designing, and developing, the new Abduzeedo is up. I know it might sound quite dramatic but this probably was the design I put most thought into. I tried to define exactly how the user experience would be and also what I could do to make that happen without losing reference from the previous designs.

Now that the site is up, even though I am still fixing some minor issues and I know that will never end, I will share with you here a little bit of my creative process and what directed me to make some of the design decisions I made.

Goals

The first thing to do on any design project or anything you want to do is to define the goals of the project. For this new version of Abduzeedo I had tons of ideas and things that I wanted to do, but I am only one so I picked up just a few that I considered the most important, so the goals of this new design were:

SIMPLICITY
SHOW MORE CONTENT
EASY TO BROWSE

Simplicity

The design must be simple in all senses of the word, the UI must be almost invisible in my point of view for a site like Abduzeedo in which the content is what matters and the only way to drive the user’s attention to the content is to make the UI as simple as possible.

Show more Content

After almost 4 years we have an incredible amount of content, and the best part is that most of this content is atemporal, they are pure inspiration and they will always be, so we needed to find a way to make this content more reachable to the readers like even random articles.

Easy to Browse

I love some iPad apps like Pulse for example because they are easy to browse through the content. Abduzeedo’s previous layout was very blog style with all the posts piled in a column. It was necessary to scroll down a lot to cover 10 articles. We needed to find a way to make that less of a hassle.

Defining Constraints

With the goals defined it was important to set some constraints so I would be able to start the labor work. In order to make a site simple my decision was to simply not use any graphics on the interface. The UI would be simply text and some gradients on the navigation to separate it from the rest of the content creating a hierarchy.

To be able to show more content the site would have to use more screen area and also be fluid for some resolutions.

Another really important thing in my case was the resources I had in terms of who would do what. Basically this was a project I did solo, with some feedbacks from Fabiano Meneghetti and a jQuery help for the User News form from my brother Eduardo Sasso, and I have to work with my available skills and also learn things that were necessary to make it happen, however I couldn’t try to reinvent the wheel because I wouldn’t be able to make it. It’s always good to know your limitations so we know where we can improve ourselves too.

The visitors statistics were really important to set some constraints in terms of browser and resolution usages, important areas and what to show to them.

Inspiration

As I mentioned before tons of things inspired me for the new design. First and foremost I wanted to change the grid style to a more magazine-ish grid style, therefore I could present more content.

Below you can see some of the references I took in consideration.

Before going to Fireworks I sketched quite a lot especially trying to come up with a fluid grid. I also did something that I think was very good and I will definitely do that more often. Before designing the UI in Fireworks I went straight to HTML first. So I played with solid colors and basic shapes in order to have a look and feel of the real deal and not a static mockup.

My first concept was a total fluid layout that would adapt to any resolution and fill the screen with content. I really like that idea, however after testing the HTML I noticed that in certain resolutions the main content was sort of weakened by the amount of content next to it on the sidebar. Once again, that was only possible after testing the HTML, because in my static sketches the idea looked killer but in reality it would be a flaw.

Below you can see some of the sketches and the first HTML concept.

Click on the image to see the grid in action. Resize your browser window to see what happens.

I also tried some jQuery plugins for fluid layouts like the Masonry one, which looked awesome in their demo pages, however once again, as I tested it with the real Abduzeedo content it didn’t work well. I mean, the plugin did what it was intended to do, what happened was that some content would radically change its position depending on the resolution, weakening the consistency of the UI. For example, in my computer the User News is in the top left and in my iPad it’s in the bottom right. That would make the user think too much in order to surf the page and what I want them to do is to get inspired and not to learn how the Abduzeedo UI works.

We use this plugin for the User News section.

Final Design

As you can see the final design is what your looking at right now. Just a few highlights about the design.

Header

The new header now uses much less of the screen, in the past it was like 250 pixels high, now we shrank it to 110 pixels. Therefore we gain more space for the content. We kept the original black style and added a gradient for the navigation bar so it differentiates itself from the content area.

Background

I am a huge fan of noisy backgrounds especially dark grey ones, probably because they remind me of the Atari 2660 console which has that rough texture very alike the noise background we have on Abduzeedo now.

Home-page and Section pages

The posts now have a smaller thumbnail with description and title. They are organized next to each other instead of piled up in a gallery style. We had this sort of style in the previous version but it was a different view option for the home-page and a laboratory for us :)

User News and Tutorial of the Week

This area is really important because every week we have a cool tutorial and lots of user generated content. In the former design the tutorial of the week was buried a day after it was published, which is really bad. Now it will be visible on every page till a new one comes along. The same applies to the User News...they will be visible on all pages.

Random Inspiration

This is a little experiment I wanted to do. We want to show you some random inspiration, let the odds show you what's cool and inspiring for you at any given moment :)

Footer

The tags are now in columns, the end of the tag cloud hehehe, and we have some other blocks with the link to our iPhone App, which wasn’t promoted in the previous design, and of course our magic mug for you to buy us some coffee because we are all human beings in the end and not aliens.

Resolutions

The site now has 2 layouts for different resolutions, so those with higher resolutions which represents more than 65% of our audience will have less scroll with the same amount of content.

Layout for iPads, Mobile Phones, Netbooks based on 1024x760 pixels resolution

Layout for resolutions higher than 1024x768 pixels

Well there are many more new features like focusing all the sharing features to the Meebo Bar, the new post design with larger images, tons of CSS3 little effects and transitions such as the Not-found page and we are also working on new features while fixing some minor bugs the site might have.

I hope you all like the new design and feel free to send us suggestions, opinions and critics about it. Our goal is always to deliver the best content to you and to ourselves because we use the site for inspiration as well, so it's as much mine as it is yours.

About the author

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Thoughts on Creativity and Design Process

abduzeedo — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:11:34 +0000

I will start this post off by saying that everybody is creative and for some that might come as a surprise, but I believe in the idea of creativity as a means of solving problems; the easiest and most efficient way possible. When I say easy I'm referring to the timeframe that it takes to complete the task, and efficient to how well received the work is from the target audience. But the question is what to do when we cannot come up with any good idea or the so terrified creative block.

The creative process is something unique because it’s personal, we cannot teach someone how to come up with ideas but we can learn how to organize our thoughts in order to make our ideas easier to achieve in the form of a good design. At least in my opinion and let me explain why.

Overflow of Inspiration

We are bombarded with information all day long and even when we are sleeping we might dream and have ideas and therefore inspiration. That is good in terms of having lots of resources available but it’s really bad as well because with that amount of information it’s pretty hard to make a decision.

That’s why I believe that our decisions have to be made with goals in mind and these goals alongside with a clear idea of our target audience will help us filter this avalanche of ideas and inspiration.

...designers give form to products, interiors, and visual communications, and satisfy the functional, psychological, and aesthetic needs of users... http://design.osu.edu/dept_what.html

Create Constraints

In order to overcome this problem it’s really important to define some constraints. If we have too much freedom again it’s hard to make a decision because it tends to fall to our personal opinion and we can't rely that everybody will like the same things we do.

The book Making Ideas Happen covers this topic really well saying that in a specific research with designers, they were much more productive when they had more constraints in a project than those who had more freedom.

My suggestion to creating these constraints is to fall back to the importance of having a good design briefing before starting any sketch or firing up the computer. Talk with the client, try to understand exactly what you have to do and for whom you will do it. That is key.

Before starting anything I asked all questions I had and defined the constraints, that made the whole process a lot easier

Try, try and try some more

I've already said this in some speeches I gave, but it’s true. The only way to come up with something cool is by trying, testing, and evolving ideas. If you just wonder and never do, you will have nothing to evolve upon. It’s like the fear of the blank page. Once you start adding things to it, it's not that complicated anymore…it’s all about playing with the elements, right? Or like the inertia principle, once we get the object moving it’s hard to stop.

When I was in college I had an amazing professor and he used to make us sketch at least 150 variations for a logo project, he used to say that the first ideas we have are always based on something we saw and it’s already known and popular, that’s why we did it. Only after we run out of ideas is when we will start innovating.

Delivering

I tend to think that the next idea will always be better, which in reality most of the times is and that’s why I had so many projects that were never finished. As I mentioned in the last post we have external factors that might make us unsure and insecure of our ideas.

Now, I believe that we have to think of design as an evolving process that means once we have an idea and have gone through the creative process with the right constraints and we know that we did our best we must deliver.

Once we deliver we can start thinking on improving upon it. Seth Godin mentions that he is successful because he delivers more while other people keep postponing the delivering in order to finish a master piece which might never happen. He also talks about the last minute questions before delivering what he calls the Lizard Brain calling.

Amazing talk about delivering by Seth Godin

You don't need to be more creative, all of you are too creative.... what you need is a quiter lizard brain... - Seth Godin"

Creating something is always exciting, and having ideas is super easy that is why I am sure that everybody is extremely creative. Now the secret of success is making these ideas come true.

The most comforting thing is that we start a project with at least 50% chance to succeed without even doing anything. Now try to imagine if we give it our best, how much that percentage would chance in our favor.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

About the author

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The Creative Process of Phil Dunne's Masterpiece Heist

GisMullr — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:28:10 +0000

Phil Dunne is one of those great digital artists that we really like to keep posted about. He is always surprising us with his pieces, talent and creativity. We mentioned Phil's work and ideas here a couple of times, check it out at: Interview and Showcase with the Great Illustrator Phil Dunne, A Desing is Finished when... 23 Pro Designers' Opinions and Design Inspiration: Tips and Secrets from 11 Famous Digital Artists. At this post he will show us all the creative process for his masterpiece Heist.

Besides all his talent, Phil is always very kind! When I talked to him about the possibility of doing the creative process for one of his pieces, he not only agreed but also got really excited about it and did this great case study for us. So here we are... showing you the steps of his creation, Heist.

Also make sure to visit Phil Dunne's incredible portfolio, Love The Robot.

Enjoy...

So, I present Phil's work and words!

When I begin to work on an illustration, I always have a rough sketch of it in my notebook. I carry a notebook everywhere with me, so I scribble out ideas that just pop into my head. I keep it beside my bed as I tend to get the most ideas when I'm about to go to sleep and when I wake up. I keep a small biro pen with the notebook so I can quickly rough out a concept. I always write notes beside each doodle because in my head, I'm planning out what coloring, layers and effects I'm going to use in Photoshop.

I keep a few gigabytes spare on my hard drive for a digital scrapbook. My digital scrapbook is a folder filled with jpegs, tiffs, pngs, scans, urls and mpegs from the internet of stuff I find inspiring, like a picture of a fashion shoot, a cool website or an old advert I've downloaded. I also collect a lot of clippings from magazines and books and take tons of pictures on my mobile phone camera, like graffiti, street textures and urban spaces to use as reference points in my illustrations.

Below is a screen grab of the pics that inspired me for this illustration. I think it was heavily influenced by the late, great Heath Ledger in the Dark Knight, and by my favorite DC Comic's character The Creeper.

I wanted to create something dark and mysterious; very moody and bleak...something I've never touched on before.

Also, this scene with Heath Ledger really inspired me...

As the embed is not available, here is the link to it.

The concept for the piece called 'Heist' was about a struggling artist who cannot afford to stay in his career because he has no money. Rather than give up on his one true love and passion, he decends into the underworld and decides to steal and gamble to pay for his art. This illustration was originally a personal piece, but I decided to submit it to the Depthcore chapter release called 'Heist.'

I roughly spend a couple of days on an illustration. When I think it's nearly finished, I leave it for a couple of days and go back to it, just to add touch ups and highlights...it's good to give yourself fresh eyes when viewing your own work. I also work on concepts before I work into a finished piece, like below, you can see where I wanted to go with the illustration in this never before released concept illustration:

Before I begin, I assemble what images and piece I need to work. For this piece, I placed a stack of miniature playing cards onto my scanner and I found an old photograph and used the back of it for the main image.

Then I work on the main illustration. I sketch my character's face using a set of technical pencils from 4H to 2B.

I work quiet large, into A3 to get the right amount of detail I need. I take my time drawing, it's important that I get everything just right. If a drawing doesn't look like it does in my head, I tear it up and start all over again. The eyes are the main focus of this piece so I concentrate on getting the mood and intensity just right.

When the drawing is done, I scan it into Photoshop at a very high resolution, sometimes it might be around 600dpi. I clean up the image slightly with the clone tool and adjust the brightness and contrast, to give it an aged look.

You can see the difference in the original scan to the final pic:

So here is where I begin to Photoshop everything! :D

I use a Wacom tablet, Intuos3 A4 oversized. Anybody who is even considering being a digital artist should buy one, they are a great investment, they speed up your workflow and you can add a lot more personal touches to your work. I work all the time in Photoshop CS4, I don't own any pirate or illegally downloaded versions. I bought my versions of the Creative Suites, always have and always will. It is best to stay up to date with the latest version of Photoshop. Learn the Save shortcut on your keyboard!!! This has saved my skin so many times, I press it everytime I create a new layer or add something new. And keep all your images as a multi layered .psd file. They will be big but you can go back months later and remember how you blended that colour or created your best illo.

In the pic below, you can see where I've added in the scans of the playing cards and adjusted their brightness and contrast accordingly. The playing cards layer is just on a normal blending mode, as I will add all the messy effects onto the layers above. I add two layers of spray paint brushes I created and set them on the color burn blending mode, the colour I used for these was a dark blue from a full saturation colour pallette. I also add in a small amount of red sprays to give the image balance and to tie it to the playing cards.

I then add in the scan of the old photograph which will be the background for the drawing. I adjust the brightness/contrast to bring out the decayed look of the photo and add some random splashes of colour and dirt. I also add a slight drop shadow to the layer which accidentally gives me more gritty effects on top of the playing cards.

Also mess around with Photoshop while working, the amount of mistakes I've stumbled upon that have gone into finished pieces is just countless at this stage.

I then add in my drawing, which is set at the 'Multiply' blending mode. Usually I take out the drawing out of the page, but I left in the page to give it more of a darker quality. I rotate and adjust the drawing layer until it is just right!

Colour!!!!! Colour is always the most important of an illustration. It can make or break it in my opinion. You need to select colour swatches that are vital to the concept you are going with. Pick around 10 colours and stick to them. You may not end up using them all. In Photoshop CS4, I use the Luminosity Full Saturation set of swatches. These colours give my work a unique look and make it really bold on screen. I begin to add in the flat colours to the drawing, on a normal layer mode set at 40% opacity. Then I add another set of flat colours on another layer, but this one is set to the multiply blending mode. It starts to give me light and shade and eventually it looks more tonal.

Highlights! This is where the image begins to look like a finished piece. But don't fool yourself into thinking so ;D

I add another layer, set on normal blending mode at 55% to add the white of the character's eyes, the highlights of his clothes and skin and hair. As I said before, I wanted a grim, gritty, mysterious feel to the piece and I feel like I'm not there yet. I add another layer to the illustrations, to darken up the eyes and make the tones stronger in the image.

I then add bright sprays of colour and extra grit on seperate layers to the image to beef it up.

So now I stop!!!! This is where I take a breather from the piece, let it simmer for a day or so and come back to it.

But during a deadline you might not have a day so it would be a couple of hours! I always go back the original inspiration and ideas I had for the piece, I flick back to my sketchbook and read my notes to see where I wanted to go with it.

I reopen the file, with everything intact and add more touch ups, like making the white brighter in the highlights and adding the map at the bottom of the image and more dirt and grit.

And then below is the final piece. I was so happy with it, it was probably the best illustration I had worked on.

When I create my pieces and put them out onto the internet and blog them etc. I always examine the feedback I get from people and measure up what worked in my illustrations and what didn't. I always try to learn from criticism and see what are the good parts from a new piece that I can carry onto the next illustration I work on.

Final look:

About the author

Someone with a bachelor degree in Foreign Trade that really likes technology, design, photography and creativity. A person ‘digging’ a new way as a ‘geek apprentice’, blogger 'wanna be' and a communication lover! Current location: Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil
Twitter user: gismullr

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Creative Process of Maxime's Quoilin Final Year Project

GisMullr — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:37:08 +0000

Maxime Quoilin is a 21 years old that will soon be graduated Computer Graphic Designer. He is from Belgium and although he is pretty new to the game (as his own words), for this last year he has increased even more his design interest. He really likes digital design and wants to end up doing advertising posters since that's what he likes most. To graduate, Maxime had to work on a big project where he created a fictive energy drink brand. He presented the project this week and we will show it here to you.

I first bumped into Maxine's piece when searching for my daily inspiration images, and I actually mentioned his work at our Daily Inspiration #220. And 2 days after I mentioned the piece he contact us to post the image as an inspiration, so I told him that I had already publish it and ask if he agreed on showing us the whole process of the work since the piece was so nice. Maxime agreed and here we are, showing you the creative process of his final year project.

Make sure to check out Maxime's portfolio at Behance.

I also would like to thank Maxime for his attention and kindness during the process of putting this post together. Enjoy!

So, I present Maxime's work and words!

First of all, let me explain that we were free to do pretty much whatever we wanted as a final year project. Friends of mine made the whole design of a fictive music festival, a magazine or even some kind of basketball event. For my part, I decided to create an energy drink because it allowed me to work on various domains such as branding, creating a corporate identity, packaging, or even creating advertising posters. I’m going to try to summarize my reasoning as much as possible.

So I wanted to create something rather fresh, rather new and with a clean image. I wanted to avoid several clichés associated to energy drink brands such as an aggressive image (bulls, monster claw, etc) or a not-so-healthy image. I’m not a chemistry master but I was thinking about something without taurine or guarana.

Therefore, I was going to use some guidelines for the logo and the entire stationery or advertising job. I used the blue color (color of harmony and trust, but that also symbolizes the water and the freshness) and the white color (color of cleanliness and purity). The drink is still an energy drink, so I still had to give an image of power. I did that by using a certain amount of simplicity, to give a clear message without any distractions, a quiet strength. I also displayed that image of power in the advertising posters. So, it was very important to me to play with that duality in all my design. I used a contrast between purity and strength. I’m not really studying marketing, but 65% of energy drink users are below 35 years old, so I thought I should target these 65 percents, of course, but also the remaining 35 percents, more adult and more conscious about the health issues. That’s why a duality between strength and health was so important.

As for the name, I went in a Latin dictionary, and I found the word “valens” which means strength and healthiness, no need to say it suited perfectly my product. I added the tag-line “powerful water” to target a little more my product. Since it’s “new”, I thought it was needed.

Now, let’s look at the logo. I tried to totally skip the aggressive image most energy drinks logo use. The idea was to use a representative element of the water, and to give it a more subtle and more dynamic look. A droplet was the most obvious water representation I could think of. Then, I applied a trend called VariDot, which consists into using multiple dots of different sizes or color, to form a whole. This trend gives an artistic (and thus intriguing) dimension to the logo. The general size of the dots increases with the sense of reading, which implies a certain amount of dynamism. The size still varies a lot, it’s pretty random, which represents some kind of nervousness (even if I tried to give a healthy image, the product still was an energy drink). I applied 3 different blue colors to the pictogram. The font is ITC Avant Garde, which is a simple and readable fond, used by Adidas, notably.

The can, the packaging and the paper bag use the same design rules. A strong simplicity, almost minimalistic, to represent a clean image, without any distraction. I think that this minimalism also gives a more luxurious image to the brand.

The stationeries, the advertising products and the identity guidelines document use these rules again. A strong simplicity, some small characters to focus on the space and the cleanliness, contrasted with a strong blue, putting in evidence the logo or the final product.

Being a huge fan of Peter Jaworowski’s work ( http://behance.net/thehejz ) I tried to apply what I love so much in his advertising posters, the way he uses visual elements to give such a strong image to the product or the brand he works with. When I applied this idea to my product, I tried to think about what concepts, what image I wanted to display. The final product, the can, is the centre piece of the creation. It fades into water, and you can see a surfer, sharks and fishes, coming out of it. The idea was to represent healthiness (the surfer, the sport, the water), strength (the surfer again, the sharks, the dynamic water) and a touch of luxury (exotic fishes). I added a few details such as a lighter blue gradient, to add some depth, some drop shadows so the can doesn’t just “fly” in the poster, or even the packshot. The packshot is made of the logo. I thought it wasn’t useful to add the can, since it’s the main piece of the poster anyway. What’s nice with this ad is that you can change the elements to have a different atmosphere, a slightly different image. I illustrated that fact with a yacht in the “sea”.

I think I’m done with the general summary of my project. I’m still a student, so maybe this doesn’t reach a professional level and my explanations might not be fully relevant for everyone. But I surely learned an amazing lot, doing this project. You can also see the full project here: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/valens-Energy-Drink-Identity/238512