John K Stuff: graphic design

Showing posts with label graphic design. Show all posts

Monday, April 30, 2012

Simple Graphics with Pleasing Styles

Monday, September 27, 2010

Hawaiian Punch

This is some nice looking stylish and cartoony stuff. I wonder who designed and animated it.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Design Balance: Fitting one character's positive shapes into another's negative space

Japanese magazines have some really good layout in them.

These clusters of Dream Pets could easily have been cluttered disorganized messes, but instead they ad up to a pleasing and easy to understand design. The whole composition and arrangement invites your eyes to navigate easily accross the page.

The layout artist arranged all the characters very carefully to make them:

1) Read Clearly (functional)
2) To form flowing patterns within the larger scheme (To be hierarchical and aesthetically pleasing)

Here, the toys are arranged in a flowing curve that helps frame the curved Type.

Augie Doggie's head (below) is neatly framed by the wide spread crotch of the character above.

This is using one characters negative space to frame another character's positive space.

The penguin below is neatly framed by the negative spaces of the characters around him.

Here, there is a group of small characters forming a circular shape, next to a larger character.

If you study the whole-page spreads- Squint your eyes and look at them - you can see all kinds of clever patterns, forms and flowing shapes that make the whole picture easy to read and aesthetically pleasing. This is good design.

These margins are nice too. They help separate a different concept from the rest of the page.

Bad design is chaos and clutter, when all the individual shapes bash into each other or create awkward looking negative shapes between them.

Bad designers think of each small individual shape first and don't look at the big picture.

These concepts apply not only to page layout but to staging characters in a cartoon, or designing a beautiful building.

Design is functional and aesthetic.

Easy to see, organized and hierarchical in structure.

Here is a sample page I laid out for the Spumco book where I tried to apply some of these ideas.

The middle section of the 2 page spread shows Ren and Stimpy reacting to the unfolding horror story of the Children's Crusade surrounding them.

The panels of Ren and Stimpy are arranged on a flowing curve that relates to the flowing curves in Nick Cross' pan layouts of the children below.

Say no to chaos, I say.

I am working on a couple of projects that require this kind of clear and happy layout and I wrote this post to help the designers understand what I like.

Kristen McCabe is very good at this

So is George Clark:

See how one character's silhouette frames the other characters'?

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Simple Ad Layouts That Feature The Product

I'm nostalgic for old time simple generic product ad layout. I love these ads because the layout is completely functional. It's designed to show off the product. The products themselves are so much fun to look at that they don't need fancy layouts to distract from them.

http://neatocoolville.blogspot.com/2008/07/1960s-hanna-barbera-tv-guide-ads.html

I love the generic typefaces in the instructional text. The headings are much bolder and tell you the main point - they draw you in to read the smaller text. Hierarchy of importance and control of function and purpose. Alien concepts today.

Man, wouldn't you kill for this Howdy Doody skullless floating facial parts mobile??! What a great idea. I'd love to do this with some of my characters. Or my friends.

All this stuff is handsomely and carefully arranged with logic.

I sent away for this very ad and ordered all these breakfast eating accessories. You can't imagine the thrill I got when the package actually arrived in the mail. From then on I refused to eat breakfast in anything but my Huckleberry Hound Bowl and Yogi Bear mug.

Package Art Layout

The covers of old cereal boxes had more design in the layouts. The whole image was designed to be bold and have a non-ambiguous shape that you could see all the way across the store.

Bold graphically expert fun images tell you that the product is very tasty.

Compare to today's layouts:

Chaos Theory Layout

a lot of modern layout has no layout at all. Look how much harder it is to tell what you are looking at in this cluttered thoughtless box art. This sends a message that the food will taste like landfill.

Who is it that forces every box artist to put that crappy airbrush dirt all over the characters on every product? Is there some sort of Airbrush God that won't allow any variety in rendering cartoon characters? This style has to be the absolute worst way to render cartoons - ever. And it's all there is anymore! It takes all the cartooniness out of the image and makes the characters hard to make out. Somebody pleeeease explain this to me.

There's another theory of modern layout that drives me crazy - "book design". Ever buy a book about some vintage art, cartoons or toys because you actually like those cartoons and toys only to find out that the book has been designed so you never get a full image of any of the things you bought the book for? Or the images of the most intricately detailed toys are really small, and a tiny simple image is blown up far beyond what you need? Or there are acres of blank white space around tiny images and then 4 tons of text explaining to you why you should love these images that you can barely see?

That's layout that purposely competes for attention with the subject of the book or product , which is considered very stylish these days. I don't have any examples handy, but I'm sure if you are a collector, you've had this same frustrating experience.