My apologies for this deceptive title. This ain’t really a tutorial but more of compilation of production screenshots and notes I took when I designed my latest poster, gms2009. I don’t do photoshop tutorial too often. Maybe because I always end up skipping from step 3 to step 22 and then wonder why nothing works. I am not saying it is a bad thing to do them but I prefer reading, watching, bookmark, and going back to specific steps when I encounter a technical problem.

For those reasons, I decided to do this “tutorial” a little bit differently. I have always been more interested in the development and process of my favorite artists rather than knowing the exact settings of the ’satin’ layer styles they used. In this document, I tried to cover the main steps of my process. It is not hard, but you should be armed with patience and already know your way around photoshop because I am not covering the basics( i.e. explain how to use the pen tool).

If you want me to explain a specific step more in detail, let me know in the comments and I’ll post a video update.

See notes:

or download pdf here

The Vignelli Canon is a short reference book on communication and typography by Massimo Vignelli, the founder of Vignelli Associates along with his wife Lella in 1971 . Probably most known for such work as the signage system for the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, the corporate identity for American Airlines and package design for IBM. If you have seen the documentary Helvetica you most likely remember Mr. Vignelli as the first designer interviewed in the film. The Vignelli Canon shares theories and principles  of typography extracted from over 50 years of Mr. Vignelli’s experience as a graphic designer.

If you haven’t already already downloaded the book, provided free in PDF form from Vignelli Associates, I highly recommend getting it. It is a concise 96 pages and can be read easily in one or two sittings but still retains a great deal of depth despite its relative brevity. I would gladly read a book three times in length but still this an amazing resource offered for free so I have no reason to complain.

Download The Vignelli Cannon

Continue reading The Vignelli Canon

NOTE: Hi, this is repost of an entry that I wrote back in December. While this entry is a bit old I still think that it is interesting.

Today during lunch I was reading about some “drama” about comments made by Big Spaceship’s CEO and founder Michael Lebowitz. After reading everything I could find, I visited the Big Spaceship website since it had been a few months since I was last there and explored some recent of their more recent work. Inside of their Labs section they posted something of a production diary showing the process behind the development of their MAX 2008 for the Adobe events website. I was really impressed and think you should check this document out for the interactive media techniques used for the smoke and northern lights dynamic assets, that look good enough to make believe that they were meticulously animated by hand.

Note that you need Acrobat 9 to view this PDF due to the embeded swf’s. So I guess that you should have an updated version of Flash Player too. Hell just update everything Adobe on your computer.

Continue reading Big Spaceship’s Production Diary, and a little drama after the break.