The CreativePro Weekly Top 10, vol. 2
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More marvelous miscellanea for you to contemplate and click.
1. The ratio of quizzes to actual content on the internet seems to be reaching a rather unhealthy level. It’s gotten to the point where the wags at Slate have even published a Which Quiz Are You quiz. Still, betcha can’t resist clicking through the questions of What Font Are You? if only to reassure yourself that you are not Comic Sans.
2. The type foundry P22.com is selling a wonderful new script typeface with quite a backstory. P22 Marcel is named after Marcel Heuze, a Frenchman who was conscripted into a German labor camp during World War II. While in the camp, Marcel wrote many letters to his family in rural France, and those letters were used by designer Carolyn Porter as the basis for the font. P22 Marcel is available as a basic font or in a Pro version with over 1300 characters and many OpenType features. And along with the main Marcel typeface, there are two fonts featuring historical post marks and inspector marks, plus a roman titling font designed to accompany the script.
3. I spent the better part of two decades making textbooks, including plenty of science tomes. But I don’t think I ever came across anything so elegant and effective as the logos for famous scientists by Kapil Bhagat.
You can buy prints of them at Society6. Or you can just observe them and record how they make you feel. That would be pretty scientific.
4. Say what you will about this year’s Winter Olympics, with their packs of stray dogs and unflushable toilets. At least the logo doesn’t burn your eyeballs the same way the London 2012 logo purposefully did. In fact, in the context of the long-standing tradition of sucky olympic logos, Sochi’s is pretty darn good. So say I, and so says John McWade.
5. Studio Pro is a rather nifty-looking photo proofing app for iPads running iOS 6 and iOS7. You can use it for in-person photo presentations, proofing, and sales. You can crop photos, apply effects and borders, create custom layouts, and even make sales right in the app. You can even show clients what the photo would look like hung in the room you’re in by taking a photo with the iPad and using that as a background.
6. Neverland Space is a virtual exhibition space for digital artists who produce GIFs, animation, virtual sculptures, and videos. The effect of the current installations is somewhere between the iTunes Visualizer and a JellyWash mood light from Mathmos: soothing, mysterious, and undeniably arty.
7. Do you dress for Photoshop success? What you wear can influence the colors you see onscreen, and therefore the colors that end up in your work. fstoppers.com has a good reminder that it helps to keep your surroundings (and yourself) as neutral as possible when color correcting: Don’t Let Your Outfit Cause A Color Cast.
8. Take a heater, some lights, an aluminum frame, and few hundred pool noodles, and what do you get? Ginormous Koosh balls called Nuzzles, that actually function as fun warming huts on the Red River Mutual Trail in Winnipeg. Actually, the Nuzzles are just one entry in the Warming Huts v.2014: An Art + Architecture Competition on Ice. Check out warminghuts.com to see the other creative entries.
9. My favorite ideas are the ones that come across as elegant, head-smackingly simple yet totally effective. Stuff like the brilliant 1 to 100 posters by Mark Gonyea. You can get the four pack of posters (shapes, circles, lines, and dots) at Etsy.com for $45, or individua
l posters for $20.
10. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups notwithstanding, rarely to great ideas (or designs) instantly spring into existence wholly-formed, as evidenced by New York Times slideshow Book Covers: Before and After, wherein five designers discuss their work on recent book covers, comparing the initial concepts to the final products, and why they made the changes they did.
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