Category Archives: Design

Spontaneity – and Tedium – in A Street Concert Broadside Design: A Dissection

A review of the design, illustration and production process for a laser-printed, street concert poster (broadside) by Bruce Colthart Creative LLC

Create or improve your avatar to better reflect your personal & business brand.

Regardless of which networking sites you frequent, your avatar or profile photo says something about you. We both know how you get when you choose your clothing prior to meeting a client or a heading out for a date – you may have pulled out the killer shirt or blouse, but if it’s been wrinkled…

Real Creativity, or My Wife’s Clever Christmas Idea

This year, this Christmas, cash flow is a problem. But that’s another story, and shortage of cash is just one aspect of a less-than-ideal Christmas for us. The other is that we never quite feel relaxed around the holidays. Speaking for myself, there’s always anxiety about gift-giving. An avid non-shopper (living in Paramus, NJ, the…

Visual brand vigilance

You as a businessperson may speculate that only a designer would care about such [insignificant] details as the alignment of elements or the indents and paragraph spacing on the company’s letterhead. Maybe you’re right. If that’s true, I wonder what else are you not caring about? What other customer, industry and media touch points are you simply leaving to chance?

What is this man doing?

If you know what he’s doing, I may be able to guess your profession and even your age…

Animated Infographic Excellence

Thanks to a mention in Graphic Design USA, I just enjoyed a few short web films from the reel of production company Superfad. Turns out I’ve seen at least one of their 3D animated tv commercials, for Playstation, in the last year. These three are quite different, are for Sprint, and really have me infatuated…

Hand Crafted Confessions

My wife Jennifer (who I really should have write the beginning of this post, at least) returned this week from a few days’ vacation in Baltimore, with our son Ian. Aside from the delicious blue crabs, her life-changing hot & spicy chocolate gelato, and the totally satisfying U2 Imax movie, she was most vocal about…

Design Farts, Mad fold-ins and interactive nostalgia

Thanks again to the good folks over at Very Short List for opening my eyes to some great material. They’ve pointed out an interactive feature by, of all people, the New York Times. Not surprising for anyone who has already enjoyed their site, all the free content, but also the nice streamlined interactive featurettes frequently…

Clever, elegant and useful design on wine label

Ben Terret over @ Noisy Decent Graphics, whose blog I authentically stumbled upon (versus finding it with the Stumble button in the Firefox StumbleUpon plugin) recently featured this sweet little find – a wine label with a perforated, tear-off stub to help you remember your recent jollification… or at least what wine you drank that…

Print versus online media: if Nelson says it’s true…

I’m not a journalist (no, I’m not fishing for compliments), but there’s a shared seismic shift that the publications world shares with the print design world. As a graphic designer and a producer of B2B printed literature, publications and other marketing collateral, I see and hear constant reminders of the ground that the print medium…