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“The power of cartoons and caricatures shouldn’t be underestimated,” states writer Victor Navasky in his no-nonsense introduction to At War With War, Seymour Chwast’s comprehensive illustrated timeline of 5,000 years of war. How to draw and paint – 100 pro tips and tutorialsIt’s a supremely fitting statement for this little yellow tome, which uses the power of stripped-back visual narration to demonstrate the abhorrence of killing and lament mankind’s historical, current, and likely future propensity for large-scale organised killing. Chwast’s book runs with the subtitle “5,000 years of conquests, invasions, and terrorist attacks, an illustrated timeline,” and that’s pretty much exactly what it is. The designer has long used his graphics as a tool to promote peace and challenge the 'necessity' of war, and this is perhaps his most comprehensive distillation of that yet. Seymour Chwast has long used his art to make political commentsFor a rather wee volume, a lot is packed in: alongside Chwast’s gorgeously emotive woodcut-like illustrations and the chronological timeline, At War With War presents written passages discussing war (and peace) including 5th century BC Chinese military treatise The Art of War by Sun Tzu; 1521’s The Complaint of Peace by Desiderius Erasmus; and The State, an essay on the link between state and war, by Randolph Bourne. At War With War was initially launched as a Kickstarter last year, which proved the appetite for a considered visual exploration of war and terror (and, of course, another book by Chwast) when it raised well over its target – 784 backers pledged a whopping $112,754 to help realise the project. The video about the book that sat on the Kickstarter page is below. “Seymour’s desire was to present his reaction to war in its purest form…” writes Steven Heller, who edited the book. “To set aside his interest in colour and mixed media and use what would allow him to focus on the idea alone: marker on paper; just black and white. "His technique serves the content and the intention – to viscerally connect with the audience and bring front and centre the horror and waste that is war.” The illustrations are completed in marker pen, to put the focus on the challenging contentIn smallish, unassuming paperback form, the volume is a refreshing riposte to weighty, academic, frequently daunting tomes on war. Chwast presents atrocities in poignant, visual, bitesize chunks but makes them no more easily digestible. As At War With War points out, there is “no happy ending to this book." Buy At War With War here Related articles: 26 books every graphic designer should read 10 top design-related movies 10 great tools for illustrators View the full article

While using website templates for your website layout might have something of an iffy reputation among web designers and developers, there are plenty of decent examples out there, crafted by some truly smart designers. For creatives without a web design background, and for web professionals alike, these templates provide amazing web design inspiration. To illustrate the point, we've rounded up some good options that might open your eyes to the possibilities that templates have to offer – at least when they're created by people who know what they're doing. These web templates are designed for Bootstrap, HTML5, Adobe Muse, WordPress, Tumblr, Jekyll, Perch, SASS, Statamic and Ghost. At a range of price points (including some for free), there should be a template here that's ideal for your website. 01. Composer (WordPress) Composer's developers are keen to hear your ideas for new featuresComposer's not exactly cheap at $60, but you'll get a lot of use out of it. It spoils you for choice from the off, with over 70 ready-made demo sites for you to go to work with, covering just about every web design possibility, and it makes it easy to create your own layouts from scratch. It features ultra-responsive layouts and WooCommerce integration, comes complete with some free premium plugins, and the developers are always keen to receive suggestions for new designs and features. 02. Flaunt (Muse) Flaunt's hover effects will make your Muse sites come aliveIf you're keen on cool hover effects but you're using Adobe Muse and finding it a little difficult to implement them, Flaunt may be the answer to your problems. As well as being a simple and fully responsive template, it bypasses Muse's hover effect restrictions with some custom CSS. With over 50 slick hover effects for both images and text to choose from, you'll be able to create stand-out Muse sites without difficulty, and at just $16 Flaunt is a bargain buy, too. 03. Definity (Bootstrap) Definity's modular design makes it easy to play with layoutsA multipurpose single and multi-page template by Ocarine Themes, Definity is built on Bootstrap 3 and comes crammed with stuff. It's 100 per cent responsive with cool features such as video backgrounds, hover effects and parallax scrolling, and its modular design makes it easy to move sections of your pages around until you've nailed your layout. Priced at just $29, Definity features multiple website templates and shop layouts. 04. Enfold (WordPress) Enfold comes with plenty of demos to try outDesigned to be the most user-friendly WordPress theme ever made, Enfold is a versatile and fully responsive theme suitable for business sites, online stores (with WooCommerce support) and portfolios. Its drag and drop template builder is just the thing for creating your own layout, but it also comes with a stack of ready-made demos to inspire you. The regular licence will cost you $59, which includes future updates and six months' support. 05. Porto (HTML5) Porto is available on various platformsThe basic HTML5 version of Porto will cost you just $16 and features a stack of homepage styles as well as unlimited header layouts and a style switcher that enables you to customise your site on the fly. It's also available in WordPress, Drupal and Magento flavours, with an additional admin version so you can manage your site much more effectively with a swish dashboard and all the widgets and charts you can eat. 06. Maple (WordPress) Maple is easy to use and fully responsiveThere are six reasons you'll love Maple, say its developers: its bold and unique design; the fact that it's responsive and retina-ready; the way that it features light and dark styles; its parallax header backgrounds; its multi sidebar support; and how super-easy to use it is. With 15 layout combinations plus plenty of features and widgets, at $49 it gives you your money's worth. 07. BeTheme (HTML5) They can't all be zingers, but you can't go far wrong with BeTheme's selectionWhy settle for one theme when you can have over 210? Described as the most complete, comprehensive and flexible HTML template for business or personal websites, BeTheme is simply crammed with stuff. Fully responsive and retina-ready, with all the parallax and smooth scrolling features you'd expect, it's an absolute monster and the biggest headache it'll cause you is trying to choose from the enormous selection of pre-built sites. For $18 you can't go wrong. 08. NOHO (Muse) Designed for creatives, NOHO's perfect for portfoliosDesigned with creative professionals in mind, NOHO is built to be easy to edit in Adobe Muse, enabling you to get your agency site or portfolio up and running in record time. Its templates come in desktop, tablet and mobile flavours and in multiple layouts, and you'll find ample features such as image sliders, parallax scrolling and CSS rollover effects. The results are clean and eye-catching, and it's yours for just $22. 09. Jupiter (WordPress) Jupiter's not cheap but its output is gloriously fast and lightweightJupiter confidently describes itself as the world's fastest and lightest WordPress theme ever, and its latest version been completely reviewed and rewritten to deliver lightning-fast pages that won't thrash your CPU or drain your batter. It uses GPU rendering to deliver smooth parallax scrolling, it features adaptive image resolution to ensure that pictures look great regardless of devices, and it comes with over 85 templates in case you don't have time to build your own pages with its drag and drop interface. It's not cheap at $59, but the results are worth it. 10. Summer (Ghost) Summer features parallax blog background covers and author pagesDeveloper PXThemes specialises in Ghost template and themes, and Summer is one of its most popular offerings. For $19 you get a simple and clean template with plenty of options to help your content stand out, including author pages and full screen covers, parallax blog background covers, and Foundation 5 and Disqus integration. 11. Type & Grids (HTML5/Statamic) This website template offers speed and great typographyJeremiah Shoaf's seemingly on a mission to free people from complex content management systems, so Type & Grids embraces the notion of the flat-file CMS. The portfolio and marketing templates are extremely fast, boast a number of variations, and have some very smart typography. They'll work as-is, entirely for free, but Shoaf offers various tiers for pro use, and adds that Type & Grids works nicely with Statamic. 12. Ness (WordPress) An image-focused website templateA lot of modern themes concentrate on stark minimalism and type, but Ness is far more interested in imagery, aiming for people wanting to rapidly get a photo blog or magazine up and running. Priced at $39, it's Retina-ready and mobile-friendly, and in use feels like high-end photo journal app such as Storehouse. 13. Bootstrap (HTML5) Bootstrap defaults look pretty good in their own right"Um, hello?", you might be saying, given that Bootstrap's really a framework rather than a template. This is true, but as the examples section showcases, even the Bootstrap defaults look pretty good if you've a design idea in mind that utilises a lot of rich imagery and backgrounds. It's just a few tweaks from a beautiful minimal creation – and that's even faster if you peruse Bootswatch's free themes. Next: more top-class website templates 14. Yuga (Muse) Yuga boasts six themes and plenty of tutorials to get you startedIf you're using Muse and you want plenty of options as well as value for money, look no further than Yuga. Billed as a 6-in-1 creative multipurpose true parallax template, it comes with six themes with plenty of transitions and animation that are easy to implement. It has loads of online documentation, including step-by-step editing tutorials, and it's yours for just $25. 15. Halcyon (Tumblr) A bold and eye-catching website templatePixel Union is a team of designers dedicated to "reshaping publishing, self-expression and entrepreneurship on the web", which basically means the company creates templates and themes for content management systems. Halcyon's one of the team's top-sellers for Tumblr, a bold and eye-catching $49 responsive grid-based effort. 16. Avada (WordPress) There are tools of tools for refining this WordPress templateAvada ($60) claims to be the best-selling WordPress theme of all, and it certainly has a lot going for it. It might be a third-party template, but the underlying framework is flexible enough to enable the crafting of all kinds of design styles, and there are tons of user-friendly tools and options for subsequently fine-tuning the resulting site. 17. Vitality (Bootstrap) Build a responsive one-page site with this website templateVitality is billed as a time-saver for anyone wanting to rapidly get a versatile, responsive one-page site live. Just $10 gets you the licence, and the template boasts six sample layouts, three page styles, 10 colour schemes, a PHP contact form, and optional full-page image backgrounds and video background headers. 18. Huge (Tumblr) This website template is perfect for image- or video-heavy blogsThis $19 website template by Precrafted is aimed at people wanting a blog that is heavy in imagery and videos. Many elements can be fully customised, and keyboard navigation makes it easy to quickly jump between posts when using traditional keyboard input. The design also includes a fixed (but not distracting) menu and options for controlling how photos appear. 19. Red Cap (HTML5) Create 'coming soon' landing pages with this niche website templateThis one's a single-page HTML5 template, based on Bootstrap, boasting plenty of customisation options and a MailChimp subscription form. It's primarily aimed at people wanting to create 'coming soon' landing pages for upcoming projects or products, and for $7 it saves you the hassle of smashing together countdown scripts and the like yourself. 20. Mediator (Jekyll) A responsive, minimal website template for JekyllAnother creation that's heavily focused on content, Mediator is a responsive, minimal template for Jekyll by Dirk Fabisch. It's also available for free. It has support for featured articles, enables the use of header images, and includes FontAwesome, in order that you can easily work with icon fonts. 21. Oblivion Magazine (Tumblr) With over 100 customisation options, Oblivion Magazine has everything you needAimed squarely at journalists and publishers, Oblivion Magazine is a responsive Tumblr template that's crammed with customisation options, features and widgets. It includes a custom preloader and fancy loading animations, multiple authors, reading time info and SoundCloud player. Made by adraft, it's a steal at $24. 22. Valenti (WordPress) A website template that's great for magazine-oriented sitesWhere Valenti largely succeeds is in its flexibility and richness. This is a template primarily designed for magazine-oriented sites, and it's packed with options for vibrant home pages, full-background image styles, and parallax. Priced at $59, it's also high-res- and mobile-ready, provides alternatives for review ratings, and makes it easy to craft mega-menu navigation. 23. Free Minimal Responsive Theme (Perch) A good foundation on which to build a website in PerchPerch isn't a product that necessarily lends itself to templates in the traditional sense, but Laura Kalbag created a default some time back, as a starting point. Clift Walker's minimal theme comes from similar thinking, giving you a little extra help to get started. It's a simple, sleek foundation on which to build. 24. Muffin (SASS/Jekyll) A design-focused frontend website template that comes in four flavoursRichard Bray's Muffin is a design-focused frontend web template that uses SASS, Jekyll and Gulp. Aimed at the reasonably tech-savvy, the template includes colour variables, SASS media queries, HTML includes and SVG icons. It comes in four 'flavours' based around the kind of website you want to design, and it's free. 25. Lychee (HTML5) Lychee has great parallax effects and is also available as a WordPress templatePowered by Twitter's Bootstrap 3 framework, Lychee is designed as a professional portfolio site theme. It produces valid HTML5/CSS3 pages and features over 30 pages, six homepages, 20 portfolio pages and two blog styles, all of them perfectly responsive. Excellent parallax effects pair with a clean and professional design, and the whole package will cost you $15. It's also available as a WordPress template. Related articles: Best free WordPress themes The best free web fonts 50 brilliant design portfolios to inspire you View the full article

Pixologic's new update to its groundbreaking digital 3D sculpting, modelling and painting software ZBrush, includes a variety of new features that are sure to please any user. Priced at $795 for a single license on Macs or Windows PCs, ZBrush 4R8's new updates are aimed at expanding the utility of ZBrush, most notably with hard-surface modelling by the inclusion of Booleans, editable primitives and new deformers. Pixologic has further expanded the options for organic modelling with the development of Multi Vector Displacement Meshes and Alpha 3D. 30 inspiring examples of 3D artZBrush 4R8 features and tools There are many other workflows and UI improvements as well. Gizmo 3D The most notable of these must be the inclusion of the long requested gizmo for object manipulation and a suite of deformers that respect the simultaneous manipulation of multiple SubTools. The new gizmo moves, scales and rotates objects in the ZBrush window. You can now easily set the object centre, move multiple SubTools at once and even utilise a variety of deformers to further manipulate the shape of your objects. The gizmo and deformers will even respect masking across SubTools. These additions provide a traditional method of moving SubTools in the world space and a powerful alternative to the Transpose tools. These updates offer something to excite any user with new possibilities and smoother workflows. Live Booleans The Boolean toolset enables the creation of complex shapes with unprecedented ease and speed using traditional Boolean operations. These Booleans are fast and fully editable until you choose to collapse them into new geometry. The Boolean operators will respect poly meshes, primitives, NanoMeshes and Arrays. Even noisemaker will be factored into the Booleans. Any SubTools can be set to add, subtract, union or difference in any order effectively allowing for highly complex forms. These Booleans are achieved through a rendering and display mode so they remain fully live and editable until the user chooses to collapse them into a final object, which will retain a highly workable topology. Booleans in ZBrush can be used with polymeshes, primitives, ArrayMeshes, and even NanoMeshes. One wonderful aspect of the Boolean toolset is the ability to group SubTools into subgroups now. This is very helpful for large models in which you may have a large variety of related tools (such as teeth, armour plates or claws) that you want to keep separate but would like to collapse in the display as to not crowd the SubTool menu. Vector Displacement Mesh brush The Vector Displacement Mesh brushes in actionOne new feature that is particularly exciting is the Vector Displacement Mesh. This allows complex organic forms, including those with overlapping parts and backfaces, to be stored as brushes for use on other meshes. This works by generating a vector displacement of the mesh and storing this in a custom brush. Think of this as a brush that uses a vector displacement map in place of an alpha. It allows for some fantastic new shapes to be sketched and eases the creation of highly complex surfaces. Multiple instances can be stored in a similar manner to the Insert Multi Mesh brush. This enables you to create brush libraries of a variety of teeth, horns, tentacles or any number of other complex forms you want to sculpt and store. These brushes are particularly useful for applying things like overlapping scales or feathers to a surface and seeing immediate feedback in real-time. Alpha 3D Alpha 3D, meanwhile enables you to store any 3D object as an alpha and retain the ability to edit the orientation of the alpha at any time, effectively changing the alpha shape. Lazymouse 2.0 A subtle yet wonderful addition, Lazymouse 2.0 and lazy snap enables you to continue a stroke or a pattern after stopping to rotate the model. You can also cross over a stroke without adding buildup to the previous stroke. This is invaluable for things like machine panel lines, for example. 3D Text 3D Text and Vector Shape Creator enables you to easily create strings of text in ZBrush as 3D objects and you can even import a SVG file to generate a logo inside ZBrush. Use this in conjunction with the Boolean system to engrave words and designs into surfaces. ZBrush 4R8 interface Beta artist Stephen Anderson created this FishBot image with new feature Live BooleansThere are a variety of other interface changes which will be highly valuable to artists as well. The IMM selector creates a new menu for brushes that can contain a variety of content such as the IMM or VDM brushes. Stored variant brushes are now visible along the top of the screen in a quickly browsable menu, providing seamless changes on the fly. It is also now possible to cut, copy and paste between brushes, making customising your library so much easier. These new features are rounded out with new support for multiple languages and text size scaling with your resolution to help support larger monitors and touchscreens. Buy ZBrush 4R8 from Pixologic here. This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 225. Buy it here. Related articles: Brilliant Blender tutorials 10 essential ZBrush shortcuts to improve your workflow 30 free 3D models View the full article

In order to be able to draw a realistic face without references, you need to know how to understand faces. So we'll explain a way of observing your surroundings and then show you how to make notes for yourself visually. You can use whatever drawing technique you’re most comfortable with, but don't use erasers while studying. How to draw and paint - 100 pro tips and tutorialsThe common problem with depicting faces and their volumes is that most people have no knowledge about the empty spaces between eyes, nose and mouth and all around them. You have to be in control of these flat surfaces, and know how they behave and fit together. If you could draw these empty surfaces then the main facial elements would be pushed into the right position automatically. But how can you draw something that isn't there? The answer is to translate volume information into lines and use them as a construction basis for your drawing. Here we'll give you one thing to observe for each step, that you later have to turn into lines. We'll also provide some examples of how to do it, using Photoshop for sketching and colouring, together with a Wacom Intuos graphic tablet. 01. Learn shadow language Notice the empty space between eyes and ears (click the arrows icon in the top-right to enlarge this image) Here are the main planes of the face. Notice the empty space between eyes and ears, and how small the face is. For the surrounding planes, use shadow lines – the area where light turns into shadow. Even under different lighting some shadows share the same lines. Some ethnicities have their own shadow language. Collect and use them. 02. Keep faces in proportion Don't skip the studying of proportions here (click the arrows icon in the top-right to enlarge this image) What we won't teach here is how to draw the eyes, nose and mouth. Rather, we add the idea of using mimic and gesture lines to locate the face. The base for the lines here are wrinkles, folds, mimic folds and highlights. Don't skip the studying of proportions here – take a ruler and a book and start making up your own rules. 03. Add shadows and volume Mimic lines make it easier (click the arrows icon in the top-right to enlarge this image) Here we ink the construction lines and add shadows and volume. Since we employed shadows and mimic lines as construction for the face, we can now use them to find the fitting rendering for the face. It makes life so much easier. If you study the face by yourself you'll know how to use these lines. Don't worry, you'll get there. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 110. Subscribe here. Related articles: Get better at figure drawing 20 best iPad art apps for painting and sketching Drawing techniques: 7 fundamentals of pencil drawing View the full article

Freelance life has many perks, but it's not all plain sailing when you’re fending for yourself in the graphic design world. That's why Route One Print has put together a Freelancer's Survival Kit to help you on the road to success as a freelance designer – and you can download it completely free! Whether you've already taken the plunge or are thinking about sacking in the day job and going it alone, this kit has everything you need to make it as a freelance designer. What's inside The free kit contains professional templates and guides to save you time and set you on the right track. All the templates are unbranded and will swiftly guide you through the process of writing the documents that will help nail that next client and keep projects running smoothly! Plus, there's invaluable advice from designers who have left agency life and become success stories in their own right – including T-shirt design specialist Brent Galloway and Ian Paget (who you might know as Logo Geek). This kit contains everything you need to go it aloneHere's exactly what you'll find inside The Freelancers' Survival Kit: Business plan template Just because you're a one-man band doesn't mean you don't need a master plan. This template is here to help you nail down your objectives and keep you on track to reach them. Client proposal template Winning over new clients is vital to building a name for yourself. Customise this proposal template to impress potential clients and secure work from them. Design brief template A thorough design brief template will ensure both parties know exactly what's on the cards, so everyone stays happy. Statement of work template When you're working alone it's all the more important to keep client relationships smooth and projects running like clockwork. A statement of work will help you ensure the client-designer relationship remains stress-free. Invoice template Late payments or missing payments are a headache you don't need. To leave your clients with a professional impression and ensure you receive your payments swiftly, you need a proper invoicing system. Handy ebook There's plenty you can learn from those who have been there are braved the transition themselves. This helpful ebook is packed with tips and advice from established designers who have managed to set up a successful freelance business of their own. Download the kit now The Freelancer's Survival Kit contains everything you need to prepare to take on freelance life. You can download the kit here. This kit comes courtesy of Route One Print, the UK’s largest trade printer. Its aim is to make trade-print easy for graphic designers and print resellers with white label packaging, reseller tools and a smooth order process that helps its clients' businesses grow. View the full article

Does your agency work feel like running to stand still? Are the constant overheads, overruns and client conflicts bringing you down? Perhaps you need to take a step back and have a fundamental rethink of how your studio actually operates. Is there anything you could do differently to cut bureaucracy, streamline processes and create a happier, healthier atmosphere for employees? These five design agencies all do things a little differently. Perhaps they could inspire you to do the same... 01. A "freelance +” experience Brown&co offers “the benefits of working remotely, with many of the benefits of being employed”Launched at the beginning of this year by Troy Wade, Dave Brown and David Bicknell, Brown&co announces on its homepage that “we're not just a new agency, we're a new kind of agency.” That’s because – as Wade explained in his Creative Bloq article The benefits of working remotely – it operates as a ‘virtual collective’, which means it has no head office, but collaborates with freelance talent from around the globe, all working remotely. “From the perspective of the client, there are obviously the savings of not having to support huge agency overheads like fancy office space and other associated costs,” says Wade. “Probably more important, however, is that our flexible workforce means we have a global pool of talent from which to find the perfect specialist for a client or job; we don’t simply have to make do with who is sitting idle in the studio or our own city. “Because people are working more productively – like in ways that individually suit them, and in spaces each day that are more relevant or inspiring – the quality of output should be better too.” He stresses that Brown&Co should not be thought of as just a freelance talent pool, but rather a full service agency that just happens to use freelance talent. “For our creative partners, we aim to provide a ‘Freelance +’ experience – the best of working remotely, with many of the benefits of being employed. For instance, collaborators have full freedom to work how, when and where they wish, are able to see projects through from start to finish, grow long-term relationships with clients, and meet and work with other collaborators.” Their aim, quite simply, is to attract and retain the best freelance talent in order to produce the best work for clients. “It’s about being physically healthy, being in healthy relationships, and getting the life clutter out of the way, so we can focus on doing the best work when we need to work. And new mothers can now continue having careers too.” 02. A virtual consultancy Becoming a one-man virtual consultancy has raised the quality of his work, says John SpencerSimilar to Brown&Co, Offthetopofmyhead works as a virtual consultancy, but with one crucial difference: it’s run by just one person – founder and creative director John Spencer. “This way, I can work on my own if that’s what a project requires, or bring together specialists if it needs a structured team with a variety of skills,” he explains. Aside from this flexibility, running a virtual consultancy benefits the quality of work too, he adds. “I bring in hand-picked specialists for each project so I’m not stuck with the same people day in, day out. We keep things fresh.” Spencer gets most of his clients through referrals, so he makes a big effort to socialise and network. “I often speak at conferences too – I like a captive audience. I’m rarely asked to pitch for work and I never do free creative pitches because I have neither the resources nor the inclination. “I think you dramatically improve your chances of winning clients by being approachable and friendly,” he adds. “Nobody wants to deal with an agency if they’re full of their own importance – and there are plenty of them around. Clients want to enjoy the experience and it’s up to us to make sure they do.” 03. Fewer layers of management Ascender Studios promotes a culture of enjoying work and having funAscender Studios is a New York web design and web development studio focused on delivering custom websites, apps, CMS and ecommerce solutions. Launched in January this year, it represents the coming-together of two long-time studios, Kindred Development and Bobira Studios, that had collaborated and complemented each other’s offerings for years. Culturally they’re very different from most agencies in the field, says co-founder Mike Aldinger. “We have artists, musicians, gamers, dancers and craft beer experts among our designers and developers, who have different perspectives that help in the way we think,” he explains. “We also frequently work for other agencies – as white labelled designers and developers – which is something most agencies don’t offer.” All this means they can be “nimble, original and unique in our approach to servicing clients, and can offer deep expertise across a variety of verticals.” Setting up as a new company has meant that “we can be extremely agile – tweaking our process, standards and products – without the burden of layers of management and approvals," he adds. "We work so closely with our clients; we really know them and they get to experience first-hand our culture that is focused on creating the best product for the client, but while having fun. It's important to us to laugh.” 04. A studio in their house Marc Gallanders and Klaire Walmsley cut out the commute by starting an agency in their own homeAfter spending two and half years as a lead designer for a media and marketing firm in Manchester, Marc Gallanders was a little fed up. “I was working long hours for the same mediocre salary and was still doing freelance work in my spare time, which quickly eclipsed the work from my day job in terms of satisfaction, money and recognition,” he recalls. His girlfriend Klaire Walmsley agreed that something had to change. “As we were both creatives and making the decision to live together initially, we knew we wanted a studio in our house,” she explains. “It was something we never really spoke about, it just sort of happened as our work was starting to cross over.” So they launched Fishbulb Studio in February 2016, and it’s been uphill all the way. “Being a small team of two, we’ve worked with an array of collaborators and freelancers from various creative backgrounds, from animators to furniture makers,” says Gallanders. “This allows us to operate as a large agency would, while working from our home studio. Converting our home into a studio means that we are able to work as and when we need to, so effectively we are able to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” And the work itself is more fulfilling too. “We combine traditional and analogue techniques, such as ebru and letterpress with new, modern styles and technologies to create a totally individual style,” explains Walmsley. “A lot of our work for clients is made up of one-off paintings or old packaging, type and design references.” 05. A design collective Frost*collective has a uniquely diffused organisational structureBased in Redfern, NSW, Australia, Frost*collective is a group of six companies all working together They are Pivot (creating “transformative strategies”), Urbanite (“memorable spatial branded experiences”), Frost* Design (“inspiring brands to life”), Nest (“simple. beautiful. useful. digital”), and Jack (“mindful packaging”). In the standard agency model, these would be departments within a traditional hierarchy, but in Frost*collective, these six parts each act as “a leader in its own right”, explains CEO Vince Frost. “Six individual and accountable business units create better clarity around the company’s specialist offerings, and deliver better results for clients,” he explains. “Together we have an immensely powerful offering. Clients benefit through collaboration, creative ideation and service delivery. Having each individual unit separate allows each to take complete ownership of their specialty and build strong brands in their own right.” And it’s not just the organisational chart that’s different, he stresses: there’s a whole different culture that’s geared towards “designing a better world”. “A business should have one big idea, the simpler the better; at Pivot, it’s making strategies that transform human systems. In our disrupted age, doing strategy well needs to encompass more than on-the-fly SWOT analysis and budgetary in-fighting. "It needs to build an inspiring case for change; to find ways to do more good than we often assume we can.” View the full article

You're reading Designing Responsive Search Forms: Tips & Trends for Web Designers, originally posted on Designmodo. If you've enjoyed this post, be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+! Every modern website should use a responsive layout. This makes it easier to browse on any device but it makes the page trickier to design. The beloved search field is one example of a tricky page element. With responsive layouts on the rise web designers have new trends for search forms making them both accessible and […] View the full article

If there’s one graphic design book this month that’ll make designophiles swoon, it’s The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design. With a hardback cover in look-at-me red and more than 300 colour illustrations, it’s a veritable behemoth of midcentury magnificence. Buy The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (UK): £40 Buy The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (US): $45.65 Penned by Steven Heller (he’s clearly been very, very busy lately) and graphic designer and writer Greg Donofrio, the book takes the form of a series of profiles of around 60 key designers whose work across magazines, books, record cover, advertisements, posters, packaging and more shaped the contemporary graphic design landscape as we know it. Catalog cover, Paperboard Goes to War, Container Corporation of America, Chicago, 1942. Credit: Permission of Juliet Kepes StoneRefreshingly, the authors have been keen to make this not just another graphic design boys’ club: among the women designers that grace its pages are Lillian Bassman, Jacqueline S. Casey, Elaine Lustig Cohen and Tomoko Miho, among many others. Naturally, these sit alongside the big guns: Josef Albers, Saul Bass, Lester Beall, Herb Lubalin, Paul Rand, Lance Wyman, and so on; as well as a number of names getting the recognition they deserve for the first time. Poster, Knoll International, New York, 1967. Courtesy of Beatriz Cifuentes and the Vignelli familyMany of the designers featured in The Moderns emerged during the postwar period that shook the world in every sense, but for them, this manifested through visuals. “Modern” design, for them, symbolised a severing of ties from the greyer, Depression-era world their parents inhabited; it heralded a brighter (often literally) new movement where graphic design was becoming a bold, artful, and frequently conceptually based force to be reckoned with. What’s so deliciously striking while flicking through the pages of The Moderns is the breadth of the work, and the unanimous sense of innovation and experimentation, even in work for the most apparently straight-laced clients. As the book’s introduction points out, Modernism is a vast and loose concept, one “composed of disparate movements” from the early to mid-20th century that “shared the same philosophical and aesthetic currency.” Book jacket, All That Fall, by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, 1957. Credit: Arden Kuhlman Riordan But what was that philosophy? “... dissatisfaction, even disgust, with the antiquated ideas about art and design.” In that sense, it was a sort of punk-like drive for newness in the face of staleness; but without any sense of nihilism. Instead, graphic design was being used to drive and create a new approach to aesthetics that suddenly placed graphics in a sense of wider societal and cultural concerns. These were the designers that realised that the visual was all part of a far wider tapestry – they understood the power of graphic design, and its capacity for not only sales or persuasion, but for good, and for freedom. Buy The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (UK): £40 Buy The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (US): $45.65 Related articles: 5 must-read books for design students 3 design books we'd like to read this September 10 incredible online art schools View the full article

Whether you're just getting into graphic design or you're a seasoned pro looking to expand your existing creative kit, here are the essential tools you need to work smarter and more creatively. Remember, being a good designer isn't about having the latest hardware or software: ideas and execution are far more important than shiny new equipment. But it's worth investing in the best kit you can afford. Here are 12 must-have tools to get you started... Gone are the days when Macs were the only choice for graphic designers (just see our second pick below for proof). Nevertheless, this 2017 refresh of Apple’s iconic all-in-one – with its updated CPU, Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and brighter display – is a powerful, fast and brilliant-value midrange machine for designers. The 21.5-inch iMac comes in three versions. The basic option has a 2.3GHz processor; mid-range comes with a Retina 4K Display and 3.0GHz processor; and the highest tier bumps up to a 3.4GHz processor with a Retina 4K Display. So what's so good about it? Well, for a start, the screen is fantastic: it's bright (43 per cent brighter than before, says Apple) with deep blacks. And if you want more screen real estate, two new Thunderbolt 3/USB C ports can drive an external 5K display at 60Hz with support for 1 billion colours, or two external 4K UHD displays at 60Hz with the same colour support. The mid-priced 4K iMac comes with a Radeon Pro graphics card, which makes tasks like video editing and 3D graphics faster than previously. (If you’re likely to be working in 360 video editing or VR, though, you’ll need the 27-inch 5K iMac.) Also, the iMac’s peripherals are excellent. It ships with a wireless Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse 2, and a Lightning cable is included in the box. Overall, the 21.5-inch iMac – and indeed its more expensive 27-inch counterpart – is a fantastic desktop option for any graphic designer. The Surface Book is, from first pickup, an amazingly high-quality laptop. Build is stellar; the flexible, accordion-like hinge is a masterpiece of industrial design; and the screen – well, the screen! It’s absolutely stunning. Microsoft’s PixelSense tech means that it's thin, bright and hugely responsive to touch and stylus control. The term 'Retina display' is bandied around a lot due to Apple’s excellent marketing, but for its 13.5-inch size the Surface Book packs in an incredible 3000x2000 pixels at 267ppi (Apple’s MacBook Pro is 2560x1600 at 232ppi). The Surface Book is a hybrid, which means you can detach the screen and use it in Windows 10 Tablet Mode. Apps such as Illustrator can be used in Tablet Mode as well, so the Surface Book is not only a super-powerful machine for video editing and 3D, it's also the ultimate sketchbook. As someone pushing say, Adobe CC, to its limits, you’re gonna need top specs in your laptop. And again, the Surface Book delivers. Big style. We tested a mid-range model and whilst it cost a meaty £2,699 you get a 512GB SSD, an Intel Core i7 CPU running at 2.6GHz, 16GB of RAM and a discrete GPU (with 2GB RAM). Fork out £3,149 and you’ll get a 1TB SSD. Read more: Surface Book review The best laptops for graphic design 201703. The right software for you (and your budget) Adobe’s Creative Cloud is the industry standard for design professionalsAdobe’s Creative Cloud is the industry standard for design professionals – the range and depth in its suite of tools unrivalled by any other company. But it comes at a cost. As an individual designer, prices for the entire suite start at £50 per month if paid annually or nearly £80 per month if paid on a monthly basis. It’s a lot of cash. Still, you get Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and loads more. If you’re looking to be truly multi-disciplined and are confident of the work rolling in, then it’s the way to go. But if your work revolves purely around vector design (illustration, logos and so on) and photo-editing/manipulation, there’s another option you could plump for. Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are both excellent tools from Serif – believe us, they even top Photoshop and Illustrator in some areas – and they only cost around £50 each. No monthly subscription and free updates. What’s more, superb file compatibility means you can work with others using Photoshop or Illustrator with very few problems. When it comes to drawing, using a mouse isn't natural. After all, when you learn to write and draw at school you don’t just move a pencil around with your wrist. That's where a graphics tablet comes in. We've covered the seven best drawing tablets for designers and creatives in our best graphics tablet buying guide, but our top pick here is the Wacom Cintiq 13HD . Balancing cost and quality, this is a serious piece of kit. As well as a responsive, pin-sharp and highly accurate screen, the Wacom Cintiq 13HD is very comfortable to use. And despite the 13HD Touch's party trick of being finger-operable, the star of the show is Wacom's bundled Pro Pen, which comes with six nibs and offers 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity and tilt recognition. You’ll get pressure-sensitivity in Photoshop, Illustrator and the like, but more importantly you’ll be creating in a more intuitive, natural way. Plus there’s health benefits – using a stylus rather than a mouse is proven to reduce RSI. Read more: Wacom Cintiq 13HD review 05. Pantone Reference Library The only way you can really get an accurate idea of how your special colour will print is to invest in a Pantone Reference LibraryIf you’re doing a lot of print work, you’re likely to be asked to use (or want to use) a fifth colour at some point. The only way you can really get an accurate idea of how your special colour will print is to invest in a Pantone Reference Library – a series of swatch books and folders containing chips that show you a printed representation of each colour. So not only will it show you how the colour you select in say, Illustrator or InDesign, will print, but it will also enable you to tear a swatch out and pin it to your proof for the printers – so everyone’s clear on what colour you need. There are also swatch books that enable you to match a fifth colour to a CMYK value – perfect for situations where your client’s budget doesn’t stretch to a fifth colour for a certain job. The Pantone Reference Library isn’t cheap, however: It’ll cost you over $1,400. That's for all 14 books plus a storage and display stand, though – you can buy books individually if you just need, for example, a metallic colour guide. And you can always add the individual cost of a book to a particular job if needed. 06. Top-end smartphone Samsung has two fantastic rival phones to the iPhoneGalaxy let loose two powerful Android smartphones this summer: the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 – both cracking choices for creatives thanks to their generous screen real estate and excellent cameras. The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 sports a 6.3-inch 1,440x2,960 Super AMOLED screen, while the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus comes in at 6.2-inches (same resolution). The most impressive camera comes with the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, which boasts a 12 MP dual-lens that opens up a whole range of fantastic features – including a bokeh effect and the ability to take two pictures at once (a close-up and wide-angle shot, for example). By comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus has just one rear-facing 12MP f/1.7 camera with optical image stabilisation - but it takes fantastic photos. (And it has a larger battery too.) New iPhones The iPhone has long been the choice for designers And of course, Apple introduced three new iPhones in September: the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and the astronomically priced iPhone X. The most affordable is the iPhone 8, which offers a small update on the iPhone 7 with an improved, sharper Retina display, some internal upgrades and improved external hardware. Battery life is boosted, thanks to the new A11 Bionic chip, and the iPhone 8 boasts convenient wireless charging too. Unfortunately the 12MP camera has only received a minor upgrade, but photos are still superb. Certainly if you’re coming from the iPhone 6 or 6S, then the iPhone 8 makes is a decent, more financially accessible option. For a little more cash, the iPhone 8 Plus is also worth a look. It offers more screen real estate than the iPhone 8 due to the larger body, improved battery life again, and an upgraded 12 MP camera with two sensors, a telephoto lens and Portrait Lighting mode. Next page: six more essential graphic design tools... 07. Calibrated monitor The Datacolor Spyder 5 Pro hangs on your monitor and creates a unique colour profileFollowing on from the Pantone Refence Library, it’s vital that your colour workflow is as accurate as possible. The last thing you want is for your hard work to look completely different at output than it did during the design process. Calibrating your monitor isn’t hard, but it does require a specialist tool. One of the best is the Datacolor Spyder 5 Pro. This tool hangs on your monitor and creates a unique colour profile (or the profile your printers are using) adjusting the monitor’s brightness level based on your room lighting. Calibrating your monitor is the only way to guarantee complete accuracy when moving from print to screen – so you should invest as soon as possible. 08. Variable desk Sitting down all day is just not good for you. In fact, it’s terrible for you. Whilst we’re not suggesting a Silicon Valley-esque treadmill desk or anything, using a desk that can raise up so you can stand or sit down depending on your preference is a no-brainer. Varidesk is the undisputed king of, er, variable desks, and offers a few different models depending on your equipment. Just stick the Varidesk on your own desk, pop your laptop and/or desktop on it and you can raise it or lower it with sublime ease. Expect to pay in the region of £400, but your back and health are worth far more than that, right? 09. Ergonomic chair Comfort is critical, so get hold of a decent chairWe all know designers work long hours – hands up if you've ever pulled an all-nighter to meet that deadline! With more and more cases of back pain and RSI occurring in office environments, it's hugely important to have the right chair. And the Herman Miller Aeron chair is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to offering ergonomic comfort (adapting naturally to your body and seating position) in a stylish design. The one drawback? Some models will cost you over £900. 10. Compact system camera Compact, beautiful, water-resistant and rugged, this CSC will do you for all of your creative needsThere was a time where we’d say ‘go for a DSLR’ but the times they are a-changing, and compact system cameras are now almost on a par. Plus, there’s a raft of uber-stylish retro CSC cameras on the market from all the big players – and us designers love a bit of retro styling, right? Just take a look at Fujifilm’s X-Pro2, for instance. Compact, beautiful, water-resistant and rugged… and with a 24.3mp sensor it’ll do you for all of your creative needs, even if you need to take some pro shots for a client job. It’ll cost you around £1350, but it’s a great investment. 11. An (interactive) sketchpad With the Bamboo Slate you can move your handwritten notes into Photoshop or IllustratorA sketchbook is the staple of every designer – whether it’s for creating quick wireframes, doodles or simply taking notes. You may want to opt for a Moleskine or product from Field Notes if you’re a traditionalist (and we wouldn’t blame you – they’re beautiful) but there’s another option – which combines the fluidity of a traditional sketchbook with the ease of getting your ideas into a digital format. And the option is Wacom’s range of smartpads. For instance, the Bamboo Slate is a sketchpad that enables you to move your handwritten notes to files that you can open in Photoshop or Illustrator with a touch of a button. The Bamboo Slate comes in A4 or A5 sizes and will only cost you around £100. For that kind of productivity, a ton is nothing! There are plenty of other innovative options, too. Take a look at our roundup of 5 alternatives to traditional sketchbooks for one that suits you. 12. Reliable solid-state storage Get a reliable, fast hard drive that you can quickly back up toHave you ever lost files due to a creaking hard drive or because your computer failed without you backing up? If so, you'll know how soul-destroying this can be. Our advice is to get a reliable, fast hard drive that you can quickly back up to – either manually or using automated systems such as Mac OS's Time Machine. Solid state drives are still relatively expensive, but because there’s no moving parts they’re less likely to fail. And in the case of Samsung’s T3 range, they’re portable enough to take anywhere – kind of like a mahoosive thumb drive. Related articles: 21 innovative business card designs 8 great examples of graphic design portfolios How design can boost clients' profits View the full article

Tethered is a critically acclaimed third-person strategy game, designed for VR. It launched on PlayStation VR in October last year and was later released on PC with support for all major VR platforms. Most recently, the game has been adapted to support an ultra-glossy non-VR mode boasting a dazzlingly beautiful 4K 60Hz native presentation. Inspiring examples of 3D artYou play the role of a Spirit Guardian, a protector of the world. Your quest is to rid the lands of a nocturnal evil, free the other imprisoned Spirit Guardians and restore balance and nature to your sky-borne world. You do this through your population of industrious and adorable 'Peeps'. Tethered was developed and published by Secret Sorcery, an indie studio formed in 2015 by a group of senior developers formerly of Sony Evolution Studios (Driveclub, MotorStorm and Wipeout). With an established background in VR prototyping, the team set out to explore new avenues for their creativity. With rapid prototyping firmly ingrained in the founder's dev ethos, the team chose Unreal Engine as their weapon of choice, which offers an unparalleled toolset out of the box for video game development. For this project, the world that the colourful little Peeps inhabited, with surrounding vistas, were crafted in a hand-painted style using Unreal Engine 4, ZBrush and Substance Painter. The following steps outline various techniques we used to create this breathtaking and enchanting world. 01. Research the purpose Creating game worlds that are both fun but serve the needs of the game means a lot of thought and planning are needed With the initial concept art and style setting the general tone of these idyllic lands, provided by Alan McDermott, creative director of the project, we set out to research the nuts and bolts of this world, from flora to technical necessities. With the gameplay mechanics of Wild and Tame, the landscape for Tethered had to have multiple states, trying to push the contrast where possible to provide the visual feedback that was necessary for the players' experience, which is of course of utmost importance. 02. Find the design Levels were built so they could be tested and iterated easily Levels are designed in block-out form by the level designer. The key here is the ability to test and iterate designs effectively. Using Maya, a single polygonal mesh is created and imported into Unreal Engine 4. The aim was to get into VR quickly to get the godly feel just right. If the scale isn't quite working, the team can quickly iterate, tweak layouts, move cameras and get back in VR fast. 03. Refine the design Rigorous play-testing is vital to make sure the levels are up to scratch Once the proxy layouts are approved and meet the game level's core-design criteria, it's time for some rigorous play-testing. All navigation paths are optimised with blocking volumes as much as possible to prevent the characters from wandering aimlessly. The mantra for VR is test, test and test! Working in this manner allows the team to evaluate level designs, the VR experience and quickly make improvements if required. 04. Balance frame rates with visuals Maintaining frame rate is essential in VR The prototype goes through several stages of iteration before it's finally ready for a detail pass. With a library of pre-made rocks available on an Insert Multi Mesh brush, these could be placed efficiently but also made to blend harmoniously within the landscape – an exercise in efficiency without compromising quality. With agreed technical budgets for the in-game geometry, rock materials are kept in one draw-call, with just one 4K texture with a simple material to help us to achieve that all important frame rate. 05. Batch texture rocks A Substance Painter template is perfect for texturing a load of rocks Once sculpted, a template file is created using Substance Painter. By layering up tones using MG mask builders, the goal here was to highlight the rock edges, with tints of green within the occluded areas to help push the forms of the bold rock surfaces. With this template file setup, all rocks for subsequent levels can then be batch processed for efficiency and continuity by simply changing the project mesh, high mesh and re-baking. 06. Generate the custom landscape Unreal Engine's landscape system is full of navigational benefits With the landscape layout locked down, we can now use Unreal Engine's landscape system for the raft of navigational benefits that it can offer. The proxy terrain is imported into ZBrush and with the level that's been viewed top-down, the document is ZGrabbed to create a heightmap. The heightmap is then imported straight into the Unreal Engine 4 landscape system and, with a bit of tweaking, it creates an almost identical layout as the proxy mesh that was provided. From here the sculpting tools within the landscape system can be used to refine any areas that didn't quite transfer correctly. 07. Trim the perimeter After compiling, the landscape perimeter needs to be trimmed back With each of the island's key components ready, it's time to compile them into Unreal Engine 4 to ensure that they all fit well within the geology, and any issues are addressed and any unnecessary landscape patches are deleted. In fact, due to the nature of these islands, the perimeter had to be trimmed. In order to do this, the landscape shader is placed into the "landscape hole material" slot found within the landscape shader. This also allows any entrances to caves to be opened up. 08. Create a landscape and foliage system Foliage can be computationally intensive but plays an important supporting role as part of the environment With the rocks and landscape in place, focus is set upon dressing the play area with a catalogue of foliage applied, and we can do this by using the foliage brush system and the new in-VR editor. First of all a foundation is laid, where small shrubs and pebbles will help bed in the occluded areas and placed in the terrain. Foliage is then subsequently built up in layers with a rhythmic flow and compositional balance in mind in order to create a simple and bold asset that ready to supplement for a VR scene. 09. Design unique buildings Tethered's buildings play an important role in the game The buildings play a major role in Tethered, each with their own distinguishing features. By tethering your Peeps to the various structures, you can activate that building's unique function. Initially, buildings could change states to support the Wild/Tame game-play mechanic, but with the benefits of VR it became apparent that the experience could be enhanced by pushing depth in other ways. 10. Design a voxelisation process Tethered uses a voxel system to create large-scale effects Ian Moran, technical director at Secret Sorcery, explains how he captured scene assets so that they materialised in front of the player. "We have multiple states for objects and environment, initially we had buildings that morph from one state to another, something that looked great when the player was closely observing the transition, but in VR, large-scale effects are what catch viewers' attention. "We wanted an effect that was much more spectacular and far less subtle, so we thought 'What if we were able to move objects into the domain of particle systems?' – then we could form objects particle by particle and have objects exploding into dust. "For this we engineered a process that would capture polygonal and sculpted models into a point cloud in a way that's similar to a 3D laser-scanned real world object. We could even choose the number of particles/voxels, which would allow for levels of detail and performance to be rationalised too. "Models were 'scanned' from several cameras using the results of a deferred buffer capture. With this we could fuse a positional point cloud with colour and normal data enough to suitably represent an object. "Point cloud was then rendered using a custom shader that would form at each point along mathematically calculated paths. "With additional voxels joining with pre-existing buildings as performance allowed, voxels overlay the existing structure for a dramatic result. Buildings could then form from thousands of particles, falling in patterned, mathematically defined paths from the sky." 11. Make sure there's no waste If a scene's not hitting frame rate, it needs to be tweaked until it is In the land of VR, optimisation is key, and profiling tools are essential to ensure your scene is as efficient as it can be, checking for areas of complex overdraw and so on. Performance in VR is a requirement rather than a flexible ambition, to hit target frame rates is paramount. The statistical reports make this something that artists can tune their work to directly, rather than leaving content to be culled by programmers. 12. Make VR-friendly water Unreal uses nodes for many tasks, which makes for an adaptable and powerful workflow Moran explains how the water was approached for Tethered: "With welcomed additional performance courtesy of PlayStation4 Pro, we could develop refractive and reflective water. "The refraction of the riverbed through water flowing over it was initially implemented using screen-space techniques. This looked impressive, but it actually suffered from artefacts that broke immersion in VR. "By using a simple parallax-like shader technique to address the riverbed texture, this didn't require direct sampling of the scene and didn't have the artefacts. This created significantly higher performance, which is always welcome for a VR title." 13. Play with parallax Tethered uses parallax effects to add atmospheric depth With the archipelago of floating islands surrounding the player, much time was spent structuring their rhythmic formations, with foreground structures purposely overlapping within the planes of depth contained within the vista, using parallax techniques. VR allows for a visual voyage of discovery and the production of the environments for Tethered were developed to take advantage of this and exploit the medium to its fullest. This required some old-school ingenuity that may not be all that obvious, but with a significant jump beyond the flat gaming platforms that we have all grown up with, the VR rule book is still very much being written. This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 225. Buy it here. Related articles: 20 tutorials to help you use VR in your design work 37 brilliant Blender tutorials 5 ways to create more immersive VR experiences View the full article

Industrial manufacturer Siemens is encouraging users running devices that use its Ruggedcom protocol to apply firmware updates this week. The updates resolve a serious and remotely exploitable vulnerability that could let an attacker carry out administrative actions. View the full article

If you’re a graphic designer looking to start adding some 3D elements to your designs, you may have dabbled with the 3D capabilities of Photoshop CC or Illustrator. But neither of these compare to the power of using a true 3D application to get the job done. Learning a new software, though, is intimidating. While there are many 3D applications out there, Cinema 4D is great for graphic designers as it's closely tied with the Adobe products. In fact, if you have Adobe Creative Cloud, you have totally free access to Cinema 4D Lite with your CC subscription. Let's get started. Get Adobe Creative Cloud 01. Fire up Cinema 4D To open Cinema 4D Lite you have to first open After Effects. If you’re not an After Effects user that’s OK, you don’t need to know much. We will, however, use AE for a few steps at the end, to take care of rendering. In After Effects, go to File > New > Maxon. You'll be asked where you want to save your new project, and then Cinema 4D will open. 02. Add some text Use the spline option labelled text to write something (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Let’s start easy with some simple text. At the top of the interface, you’ll see what looks like the Pen tool you’re used to. If you left-click and hold you’ll see many other options available; these are called splines. In Cinema 4D a spline is just like a path you’d create with the Pen tool or some other shape tool, but they can exist in three dimensions rather than just two. Click the spline option labelled Text. Three things will happen next. In your perspective view with the floor grid, you’ll see a Text spline appear. If you look over to top-right panel (the objects panel), you’ll see an object that kind of looks like a layer in the Adobe applications. That’s basically what it is, although there is more to the objects panel than just that. And lastly, if you look in the bottom-right panel (the Attributes panel), you’ll see the word 'Text' and have lots of controls to play with. 03. Adjust your text Use the Attributes panel to type (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Click where you see the word Text in the larger field at the top of the Attributes panel, and type in whatever you'd like the text to say. Click outside of that field to update the text. Right under that field you’ll see where you can choose your font. If you’d like to rotate around your text in 3D space, hold Alt/Option and then left-click and drag around in the perspective view. You’ll notice there isn’t any depth to the type at this point, it’s just the outline of the text. To give it depth, we need another type of object. 04. Give your word depth Just to the right of the Spline tools you’ll see a green box. Left-click and hold on that box and you’ll see more options. Select the extrude object. You’ll now have an extrude object just above the text object in the Objects panel. The way the objects panel differs from many other traditional layer approaches is that it is hierarchical. We can make the text the child of the extrude object to give the text depth. Left-click and hold the text object and drag your mouse so it hovers over the extrude object. Only release the mouse when an arrow pointing down appears. Now click the Extrude object. In the Attributes panel you’ll notice a few tabs just under where it says 'Extrude Object'. Click the 'Caps' tab. You’ll see a start and end fields that both say 'Cap'. Change them to 'Fillet Cap'. A Fillet is like a bevel – it’s a great way to liven up your text. 05. Add some text features Adding slightly rounded edges to text will make it catch the light (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Let's customise the look further by adjusting the Steps and Radius. Just above the perspective view, you’ll see a little menu list that says: View, Camera, Display, Options, Filter, Panel. Click Display > Gouraud Shading [Lines]. This will allow you to see the subdivisions in the type. Now go back to the Attributes panel for the text. The 'Steps' option here means how many subdivisions the fillet contains. The default is 1, but you want to change yours to 4 for both the Start and End Caps. Then turn the Radius down from the default of 5 to 3. You can also now turn 'Gouraud Shading [Lines]' off now if you wish, and go back to plain 'Gouraud Shading'. Notice how the text catches the light much more subtly on the slightly rounded edges. This customisation is one small reason why Cinema 4D is a superior choice to the 3D capabilities of the other Adobe apps. 06. Give your text a material Drag and drop a new material onto the text (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Now let’s add a material to our text. You’ll see at the bottom underneath the playback area a long narrow blank panel with a little menu above it that reads: Create, Edit, Function, Texture. Click Create > New material. There’s a lot we could do in Materials, but that's more advanced. Simply drag that new white material onto the type. 07. Include a backdrop Add a backdrop for your text (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) We need a backdrop. Middle-mouse-wheel-click the perspective view and you’ll see four boxes. Pick the box that says Right in the upper left-hand corner. Grab the Pen tool from where we earlier got the text spline and draw a sort of S-shaped curve, side-one to the text (as shown in the image above). This is a perfect spline for a backdrop. Middle-click again in the Perspective view and middle-click in the upper-left box to go back to your typical view. 08. Adjust extrusion movement Once you've added extrusion movement, it should look like this (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Add another extrude object with the newly drawn spline as the child. Select the extrude object in the Object panel, then go into the Object tab within the Attributes panel. You’ll see a Movement property with three fields reading 0cm, 0cm, 20cm. The 20cm value is there by default and denotes extrusion movement within the Z axis. We want our movement in the X axis, so set the 20 to a 0 and set the first field to about 1250cm. It should look like the image above. 09. Add lights Lights add a professional quality to your 3D text (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Drag the same material we used on the text to the background. Now it's time to add lights. At the top, where we’ve been getting all our objects, you’ll see a lightbulb icon. Left-click and hold that, then choose Area Light. You’ll get a light that looks like a square with a little starburst in the middle. Use the Select, Move, Scale and Rotate tools to position the light in space. 10. Duplicate the light Position your lights like so (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Click on the light in the Object panel and go to the Details tab in the Attributes panel. Increase the Size X from the default of 200cm to something around 700, which will make it more rectangular. Duplicate the light in the Objects panel by selecting it and copy-pasting it (cmd+C and cmd+V). You want to make two copies. Position your lights to look like the image above. Next page: Add shadows, position your camera and render out the image 11. Change the colour of the lights Mix the colour of the lights (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Select one of the lights on the sides, go into its General tab, click the white swatch in the Color property. It will open a small window; choose a light blue colour. Repeat this step for the other side light but this time push the light’s temperature closer to the orange warm side of the spectrum. 12. Add some shadows Shadows are key (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) In the original light’s Attributes panel, navigate to the Shadow tab. Change the Shadow from None to Shadow Maps Soft. Repeat this step for the other two lights. Navigate around the Perspective View to centre and zoom in on the text until you can’t see the edges around the backdrop. Your image should be look like the one above. 13. Render your image Once rendered, your 3D text should look like this (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Now for our Render, which you’ll see in the menu at the very top, above the Perspective view. In the Output tab, change the Width and Height to 1920 x 1080. Skip down to Anti-Aliasing and change the setting from Geometry to Best. Let’s see how everything looks. At the top of your window you’ll see three movie slate icons. Choose the one on the left, Render View. It should look something like the image above. 14. Add a little more shadow To ground the type a little more in its shadow, use Ambient Occlusion. On the bottom-left of the Render Settings Window you’ll see a button that says Effect. Click it and add Ambient Occlusion. Do another quick Render View – you’ll noticed a marked difference in the darkness of the shadows in the tightest spots. 15. Position your camera We now need to create a camera so our image will work in After Effects, where we’ll do the final render. Go up to the top and click the camera icon. Next to the camera in the Objects panel is a little icon that looks like arrows pointing in different directions in a box – this is the look-through camera icon. Click it to activate (it will turn white), then position your camera as you want it for the final render. 16. Switch to After Effects Pop into After Effects to save the design (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) To save our design we have to jump back to After Effects. You’ll see the little Cinema 4D icon and the name of your project in the the Project panel in the top right. Drag that onto the Create a New Composition button. You’ll notice the preview looks like a wireframe. To get it ready for render, look in the Effects and Controls panel and you’ll see an automatically applied effect called CINEWARE. In this effect under Render Settings where it says 'Renderer' change the setting to Standard (Final). This will change the quality so the image looks just like it did in Cinema 4D. 17. Render the final image Render one last time to finish (Click the icon in the top-right to enlarge the image) Go to Composition > Save Frame As > File, choose the output location desired in the Render Queue and hit Render. If you don’t want to go back into After Effects and you don’t mind a lower quality render, you can also always just screenshot the render in the Cinema 4D window, to use in your other design software. About Pluralsight Pluralsight is an enterprise technology learning platform that delivers a unified, end to end learning experience for businesses across the globe. Through a subscription service, companies are empowered to move at the speed of technology, increasing proficiency, innovation and efficiency. For a free trial and more information, visit www.pluralsight.com. Read more: 50 top typography tutorials Top Cinema 4D tutorials Inspiring examples of 3D art View the full article

Getting a tattoo is a big deal. Whether it’s a classic or unique design you simply love or a picture or symbol that marks a meaningful event in your life, bagging the best tattoo design is a long and sometimes difficult process. Here, we’ve pulled together some inspiration that’ll help you choose the tattoo design that’s right for you. To make things simple, we've split the article into themes: flower tattoos (this page), tribal tattoos, mandala tattoos, dragon tattoos, cross tattoos, skull tattoos, geometric tattoos, anchor tattoos, animal tattoos, and couples' tattoos. (If you're interested in watercolour-style tattoos, check out these 13 incredible examples). Each of the categories contains more traditional tattoo designs, as well as quirky original ideas. You can navigate to the section you want using the drop-down menu above. Click on the images to see more of each tattoo artists' work. Doodle art: 52 great examples01. Rainbow roses tattoo Morag at Purple Rose Tattoo This rose tattoo steers away from the standard red colouring, marking it as a classic design but with a modern twist. The intricate shading and delicate leaves add to its realistic execution. 02. Monochrome tattoo Hannah Louise Kyle This black and white rose tattoo again steers away from the classic red, offering up an elegant black-and-white design. The heavy line work keeps it to a traditional tattoo style. 03. Pink rose tattoo Esme Loasby The bright colours is what makes this flower tattoo design stand out, especially when you look closely at the clever colour gradient. Adding more than one flower always makes for a special piece. 04. Wildflowers tattoo Esme Loasby Speaking of choosing more than one type for your flower tattoo, this beautiful botanical creation proves that you can put a lot of elements into one piece and it’ll still work, provided you use a tattoo artist who knows what they're doing. 05. Rose and dagger tattoo Tom Butts If you’re looking for a more traditional design, this rose tattoo could be just the inspiration you’re looking for. The inclusion of the dagger adds an edge and makes it a bold, stand-out piece. 06. Red rose tattoo Sascha Roth A bolder choice is this rose tattoo design, with clever colour work placed just away from the careful lining. Including so much black might not work for some tattoo designs, or tattooees, but it works here. 07. Geometric peonies tattoo Mark Jelliman The linework on this trio of peonies is crafted with such elegance, it makes a real statement. It just goes to show that keeping things simple can often be the best approach when it comes to tattoo design. Next page: Tribal tattoo designs These great tattoo designs are all inspired by tribal artworks from around the world. Some of these stick to common themes from native American tribal art, for example, while others give them a contemporary twist. As before, click on the image to go to the tattoo artist's website or Instagram page. 08. Tribal mask-inspired tattoo Manu Dermagrafics This stunning leg piece was crafted freehand, and with its bold shapes, colour-blocking and seamless line work, it’s a tribal tattoo worth showing off. The shape itself compliments the shape of the leg, too. 09. Subtle shading tribal tattoo Paxii What makes this tribal tattoo design stand out is that through the thick line work and colour-filled shapes, there’s a subtle shading that brings it to life, adding new dimensions. 10.Thick framed tribal tattoo Mike Schwalger This custom Polynesian tribal tattoo sleeve is able to include a variety of different shapes and lines without making it look too busy. The thick line framing adds a more artistic flair. 11. Pared-back tribal tattoo Leo Braz Sometimes tribal tattoos can be simple. This piece signifies the serpent in the Marajoara tribe, with the back placement proving to be the perfect place to show it off. 12. Repeat pattern tattoo Sunset Tattoo Keeping with the simple theme, this half-sleeve tribal tattoo offers an intricate yet uncomplicated design. And with such a clean design, the pattern is as mesmerising as it is timeless. 13. Tribal collar tattoo Margaret River Tribal tattoo designs often demand a bold placement and this visayan tribal collar is a breathtaking example of how simple line work and intricate patterns can make a statement. 14. Modern twist Daniel Matsumoto This work, by Daniel Matsumoto, manages to put a modern twist on the classic tribal tattoo design. Mixing thin lines with block colour is a simple but unique way to make it pop. Next page: Mandala Tattoos Mandalas are peaceful, spiritual symbols in both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. With their intricate, nature-inspired patterns, it's no wonder they're a popular choice for tattoos. As before, click on the image to go to the tattoo artist's website or Instagram page. 15. Pointillist mandala tattoo Ricky Williams With its circular shape, placing a Mandala tattoo around the ear is a great way to make the most impact. The pointillism aspect in this design is stunning. 16. Hidden mandala tattoo Ricky Williams Mandala tattoos come in all sizes and this delicate design could be just the kind of thing you’re after. Sleek, delicate work that gradually moves into darker colour is a special touch. 17. Bold mandala tattoo Jayne Rogers The thick lines on this half-Mandala tattoo design make it the perfect way to go if you want to make a statement. Choosing to do a half design is also an option if placed around the ear. 18. Layered mandala tattoo Niky Brown Opting for a layering effect on this Mandala tattoo design enables it to take on a more 3D-design effect. Adding it some point work really makes this one inspiring. 19. Colourful mandala tattoo Mors Tattoo Taking on a more classic style, the colour work enables the Mandala tattoo to make more of a statement. Adding colour to the leaf exterior makes for a seamless execution. 20. Shaded mandala tattoo Renette Hammer Mandala tattoos circular shape enable them to be placed almost anywhere but the chest provides a nice canvas to really show them off. Pointillism is also a great way to add depth and subtlety. 21. Stained glass mandala tattoo Skylar Rose Wasserman If you’re after a Mandala tattoo design with a more colourful, unexpected twist, you could go for something like this. The stained glass window colour effect allows shades to blend into each other. Next page: Dragon tattoos Dragon tattoos might show the world how brave and fiery you are, they might celebrate your cultural heritage, or they might just exist because you think dragons are really cool (you're not wrong). Whatever your reason for wanting a dragon tattoo, check out these designs for inspiration and click on the image to go to the artist's website or Instagram page. 22. Whimsical dragon tattoo Alice Badger Sometimes, it’s best to look to the world of TV and movies for your tattoo design inspiration. This one featuring Haku from anime classic Spirited Away is a great place to start. 23. Fierce dragon tattoo Lydia Bruno Dragons are also the perfect way to start off a sleeve, thanks to the variety in which they can be presented. This colourful example leaves room all around for more designs. 24. Oriental dragon tattoo HH Orlando Tattoo Speaking of sleeves, this Japanese style dragon tattoo offers colourful inspiration. The detail on the scales is a particularly nice touch, as is the juxtaposing, delicate flowers underneath. 25. Symmetrical dragon tattoo Joe Fletcher If you love the idea of a dragon tattoo but you’re wary of getting the whole form tattooed onto, opting for the head could be a great way to show your beast appreciation. 26. Linework dragon tattoo Heritage Tattoos A dragon's serpentine body can make it a great option for a head tattoo. This simple, black-and-white linework tattoo design offers elegant inspiration if you’re willing to take the leap. 27. Abstract dragon tattoo Dámaris Argüelles Pérez A more experimental tattoo design could be just the dragon you’re looking for. This puzzle-like piece keeps it modern while also harking back to more traditional tattoo styles. 28. Etchwork dragon tattoo Byron Barker This etchwork dragon tattoo design harks back to a neo-traditional style of tattooing and works best when placed on the side of the body, allowing lots of detail. Next page: Cross tattoo designs Meaningful and beautiful, cross tattoos also come in a variety of styles. Choose a style that's right for you with these great designs. As before, click on an image you like to go to the artist's website or InDesign page. 29. Botanical cross tattoo Reny Tattoos Cross tattoo designs don’t always need to be in a standard, straight line. This example shows that cross tattoos can be moulded with another style to create something really beautiful. 30. Pretty cross tattoo Bruno Diego Another way to amp up a cross tattoo design is with layering. This delicate design incorporates illustrations of love hearts in an elegant and original way, making for a special piece. 31. Symbolic cross tattoo Hegotme This clever cross tattoo design references the crucifixion in a minimal but impactful manner. Adding the nails into the design is a great way to do this. 32. Curvy cross tattoo Kelly Kossuth Maybe you’re looking for a bolder cross tattoo design and this one from Kelly Kossuth shows how you can be both bold and minimal, thanks to thick line work. 33. Minimal cross tattoo Tattooist Uzi If minimal is more your style, this delicate cross tattoo design could be just the inspiration you need. Delicate line work and zero colour can still make an impact. 34. Shaded cross tattoo Slicecrust This classic cross tattoo design works well thanks to neat shading work and clean, thick lines. It’s a perfect design if you want one placed on your arm. 35. Artistic cross tattoo Steven Gilliard If you want to combine your love of being a designer or artist with your cross tattoo, then this clever piece could be right up your street. The dot work makes it pop. Next page: Skull tattoo designs If dragons weren't tough enough for you, how about a skull tattoo? Some of these skull designs are pretty scary, but others are actually really beautiful, and even cute. We're sure they'll all serve to inspire your scull tattoo design. 36. Skull and rose tattoo Phatt German Sometimes you want to add a bit more depth to a skull tattoo design. This skull, which has a rose design incorporated into its cap, does this very effectively. 37. Multi-layered skull tattoo Charlotte's Web Tattoos Another way to incorporate depth into a skull tattoo is this half-dead design, which sees a skull merged with a crying face. The addition of a clock makes it extra creepy. 38. Mexican skull tattoo Barbie Lowenberg If you’re wanting something a little less creepy, this cute skull tattoo – complete with floral decoration, in the style of Mexican Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) skull masks and decorations – is the perfect way to show off your love of the dead. 39. Delicate skull tattoo Uvethekid Sticking with the floral theme, this skull design offers a more freehand approach, with wavy lines. The difference in line thickness and the dotted shading is what makes it great. 40. Gruesome skull tattoo Kelly Violet If you’re looking for something truly bold, a half-sleeve skull tattoo design is one of the options you could go for. This one, illustrated with medieval weaponry, is jaw-dropping. 41. Baroque skull tattoo Siren1 Sometimes two skulls is better than one and this detail tattoo design effortlessly places them together without making it look crowded. Perfect for placing it on the arm. 42. 3D-effect skull tattoo Bali Namaste Tattoo Studio This small skull tattoo takes a different approach when blending two skulls together, giving off a 3D effect with a minimal and cute design – perfect for small spaces. Next page: Geometric tattoo designs For something a bit different, why not get an interesting tattoo featuring geometric shapes and patterns? They can be as colourful or as big as you like, as these great designs show. 43. Artistic geometric tattoo Expanded Eye Expanded Eye is a duo known for its incredible geometric tattoo designs. With splashes of colour, clever shading and breathtaking structure, this is the perfect geometric tattoo design inspiration. 44. Prisms tattoo Malvina Maria Wisniewska The great thing about geometric tattoos is they can be formed of simple structures but with a detailed execution. The interweaving line thickness on this design is a great example of that. 45. Honeycomb tattoo Miriam Frank Mixing shapes and colours into your geometric tattoo design can make for a pretty amazing final piece. By adding just the red to this piece, it ensures the design doesn’t go overboard. 46. Golden Ratio tattoo Michele Volpi The Golden Ratio describes the perfectly symmetrical relationship between two proportions and this geometric tattoo design is a gorgeous and clever way to pay tribute to its perfections. 47. Pared-back geometric tattoo Sarah Lu The simplicity of geometric tattoos also means that the hand poking technique can work really well. This simple but effective design puts a different spin on the arrow. 48. Kaleidoscopic tattoo Diego Favaretto If you’re wanting a larger geometric piece, this tattoo is a great example of one that works well when placed on the back. The never-ending detail on this one is particularly impressive. 49. Colourful geometric tattoo Sasha Unisex Of course we couldn’t feature geometric tattoo designs without mentioning Sasha Unisex – the tattoo artist who has become renowned across the world for her stunning, colourful geometric work. Next page: Anchor tattoo designs About as traditional as tattoo designs get, anchor tattoos are enjoying a retro resurgence. But, as these designs prove, a traditional theme doesn't have to result in a stale old-fashioned design. Click on any image to discover the tattoo artist behind the innovative design. 50. Anchor and heart tattoo Patryk Hilton If you’re after a classic tattoo staple, an anchor design is one of the best options. This traditional style piece is a great way to make a statement. 51. Exotic anchor tattoo Sam Ricketts Anchors can also act as a frame for a tattoo design, with this example proving particularly impressive. By using a simple anchor as your base, you can embellish it to your heart’s content. 52. Anchor and bird tattoo Sami Tutch You can always embellish your anchor tattoo design but in a more subtle, sweet way. This little anchor features cartoonish characters that make it perfect for a cute arm piece. 53. Watercolour anchor tattoo Tracy Burton If you want a splash of colour on your anchor tattoo design, adding in wave-like watercolour is a great way to include your love of anchors in the sea. 54. Sketchy anchor tattoo Elena Aiello Continuing the watery theme is this cute anchor tattoo design, that adds splashes of colour in a simple, hand-drawn style. The loveheart is also perfectly incorporated in the design. 55. Monochrome anchor tattoo Ecke Wunderland The detail on this tiny anchor tattoo design is so perfectly executed, it almost deserves more space. The inclusion of the paper boat is a delightful touch, finishing off the piece beautifully. 56. Geometric anchor tattoo Aracely Ramírez Ponce If you want the colour to be the main focus of your anchor tattoo design, this watercolour, geometric anchor is a great way to show it off. Next page: Animal tattoo designs Another popular choice, animal tattoos might honour a beloved pet, serve as a reminder of a great experience, or show part of your personality through your choice of a favourite animal. These animal tattoos again vary wildly in style, so if you find an art style that you like, click on the image to go through to the artist's website or Instagram page to see more. 57. Fox tattoo Lotte Vanns This simple, hand-poked design is the perfect way to pay tribute to your favourite animal. Thanks to this fox's long body, placing it around the knee is a great way to show it off. 58. Greyhounds tattoo Daemon Rowanchilde These racing greyhounds are stunning in their own right – thanks mostly to their meticulously drawn anatomy – but by placing them within another design, it makes the whole piece pretty breathtaking. 59. Dinosaur tattoo Kimsany The cartoonish colour-blocking on this brachiosaurus makes it truly unique. Complete with intricate line work and the perfect long arm placement, this is one way to get noticed. 60. Elephant tattoo Adrián Desgracia This sketchy design is great if you want to go for a sleeve design with a difference. The surrealist aspect of the elephant is also reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s work. 61. Whale tattoo Raphael Not sure what style to go for in your animal tattoo design? This is one solution: this unique killer whale design combines two different styles in one, with the animal's middle section drawn as shaded scales. 62. Bird tattoo Jason Corbett Pointillism is a beautiful option when it comes to bird tattoo designs. This one, perched just on the shoulder, keeps it simple with minimal detail and colour. 63. Dog tattoo Ricardo Romero Rios Lots of people get their best pal tattooed on them. This one, depicting man’s best friend, is a cute way to illustrate your love for your furry friend – and there's a sweet Up reference to boot. Next page: Couples' tattoo designs Not just the preserve of drunken nights out, matching tattoos are a popular way to mark your commitment to your other half. While some of these designs go sickeningly all-out of the slush factor, others are more subtle, fun, and perhaps even be tasteful enough to avoid the laser, should you break up (not that you will, obviously). 64. Pizza tattoos justinsams There’s no better way of combining your love of your partner with your love of pizza. This cute design may be a little cheesy for some but perfect for others. 65. Sun and moon tattoos Jessica Leigh Ozimek If you’re getting married, you might want to make things even more permanent with ring finger tattoos. This sun and moon tattoo design is a sweet way to show off your love. 66. Chatty tattoos Dream Tattoo Your best pal is always there to listen when you need it most. When you’re far away from each other, this simple tattoo design will remind you that they’re always there. 67. King and queen tattoos B9 Tattoo Studio Be the king and queen of all couples with these minimalist playing-card inspired tattoo designs. It’s best to keep it simple, especially when placed on the hands or wrists. 68. Foxes tattoos Farbenfroh Tattoo Art These playful partner tattoos are great if you’re thinking of getting a couples' tattoo on your leg. The hand-drawn, sketchy style and clever shading make these particularly beautiful. 69. Colour mode tattoos NYC Adorned If you’re looking for something with a designer twist, you couldn’t opt for anything better than these cute colour mode pieces (you might recognise these as belonging to Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer). If you're screen-based, go for RBG, while print designers are more likely to favour CMYK. 70. Heart tattoos First Class Tattoo Studio How about combining your couples tattoo design with your favourite show? This Game of Thrones-inspired piece is a great way to show off two of the things you love. Read more: 23 designers and their awesome tattoos What happens when tattoo design meets illustration 13 incredible examples of watercolour tattoo art View the full article

Every now and then, graphic designers need to recharge their creative batteries – and there are loads of fantastic books out there that offer words of wisdom, design inspiration and refreshers on key principles and techniques. There are, of course, classic books from the great names of graphic design, but there are also plenty of books you might be less familiar with. Whether you'd like to know more about logos, go further with type, or get to know more about your favourite graphic designers, this list of great books for graphic designers has something for you. Get Adobe Creative Cloud01. Logo Modernism by Jens Müller Jens Müller compiles the greatest logo designs of the last century and their modernist influenceTaschen produce some truly spectacular books, and this one is no different. Bringing together approximately 6000 trademarks, registered between 1940-80, Jens Müller examines the distillation of modernism in graphic design and how these attitudes and imperatives gave birth to corporate identity. Müller includes a variety of logos, organised into three chapters: geometric, effect and typographic in order to both educate you as well as provide a comprehensive index of inspirational logo designs to inform your own work. 02. Two-Dimensional Man by Paul Sahre Paul Sahre tracks his exceptional 30-year career with a personal touch and plenty of humourPaul Sahre is one of the most influencial graphic designers of his generation and has operated his own design consultancy since 1997. Working out of his office in New York City, his clients have included The New York Times, Google and Marvel Comics and he lectures graphic design all over the world. His book, Two-Dimensional Man is part monograph, part autobiography, part art book and part reflection on creativity; combining personal essays discussing the realities of living creativity during his 30 year career and proving that throughout highs and lows, humour can be a saving grace. 03. Show Your Work!: 10 things nobody told you about getting discovered by Austin Kleon Kleon manages to condense all his helpful tips and tricks into one pocket sized manualIn his follow up to New York Times best-seller, Steal Like An Artist (another must-read), author and writer, Austin Kleon reveals what can be the most challenging part of your career as a designer - how to get your work seen. Kleon is full of helpful hints and tips on how to become findable, how to appeal to the community and use the network to sell your work. If nothing else, it's a useful little pocket guide to remind you to be open, generous, brave and productive! 04. The Graphic Design Idea Book: Inspiration from 50 Masters by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson A visual design bible to inspire and refresh your fundamental knowledgeThis book covers all the key elements of great design, featuring seminal works from acclaimed designers such as Paul Brand, Neville Brody and Stefan Sagmeister it's sure to spark inspiration and keep those creative juices flowing. Honing in on those professional techniques, author Steven Hiller and graphic designer Gail Anderson refresh your knowledge on colour, narrative, illusion, humour, simplicity, ornaments and more. 05. How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy Big names are featured in this packed bookSound advice from Adrian Shaughnessy on gaining employment, setting up as a freelancer, forming a company, dealing with clients, pitching and loads more. As graphic design books go, this is insightful, intelligent, accessible and simply full of great advice, with the author calling on such luminaries as Neville Brody, Natalie Hunter, John Warwicker and Andy Cruz to help pull together his ideas. 06. Just My Type by Simon Garfield The history and power of typographyGraphic designers are trained to look at type faces, but Simon Garfield's book will encourage you to look even closer, taking in the rich history of fonts, as well as looking at their powers. A well chosen font communicates to the reader on an almost subliminal level and it can make (or break) a design. 07. The Little Know-It-All: Common Sense for Designers by Silja Bilz Perhaps the most useful book a designer can ownDon’t judge this by its cover or size - it’s possibly the most useful book you’ll own as a designer. Everything from light, colour and perspective to law and marketing are covered in succinct, beautifully carved chapters. It’s the kind of book that you never stop reading once you start; the kind you’ll always refer back to, making it a winner on pretty much every level. 08. Illustration Play by Victionary The cover is gorgeous – and actually a good indication of what's insideFirst up, Illustration Play has one of the most beautiful, special and intriguing covers you’ll see, each one being individually stickered by hand. This is to echo the explorative approach taken by all of the illustrators featured in the book - looking at new ideas and ways to realise concepts within contemporary illustration. A lovely object. 09. Graphics Alive 2 by Viction:ary Graphics Alive is full of inspirationExploring the omnipresent power of graphic design and illustration in today’s society, Graphics Alive 2 (the first book also being great) is not only beautifully designed in itself, but also packed full of highly inspirational T-shirt graphics, shoes, signs, wallpaper and other everyday objects and ephemera that top designers have lent their eye to. An intense, head-hurting experience. 10. The graphic language of Neville Brody Neville Brody's book is on the reading list of every self-respecting design courseYou'll find this book on the must-read list on every self-respecting graphic design course, and with good reason. Neville Brody may now be president of D&AD and head up Research Studios' global studio network, but it was arguably his 1980s heyday that had the biggest impact on contemporary graphic design. First published in 1988, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody explores the thought process behind some of his best-known work, including his genre-defining art direction of The Face magazine. 11. Designed by Peter Saville Peter Saville's monograph covers The Factory era in detailLike Brody, Peter Saville famously built his reputation in the 1980s with iconic album artwork for Factory Records-signed bands such as Joy Division and New Order - but this 2003 publication was the first to chronicle his career. Starting in 1978, it inevitably covers the Factory era in detail but also explores Saville's design and art direction for the fashion and advertising industries, taking in brands such as Dior, Stella McCartney and London's Whitechapel gallery. 12. Love Song by Non-Format Modern Studio Non-Format's 2007 monograph is packed with imagery and insightAn iconic studio for the modern age, Non-Format is a fruitful transatlantic collaboration between Oslo-based Kjell Ekhorn and US-based Brit Jon Forss. This 2007 monograph is packed with awe-inspiring imagery and insight into the duo's creative process over five years between 1999 and 2003, from advertising work for Coke and Nike to stunning art direction for The Wire magazine. 13. Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far by Stefan Sagmeister Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far revolves around 21 thought-provoking phrasesAustria-born, New York-based designer Stefan Sagmeister has hit the headlines a couple of times in the few years with his nude promotional shenanigans, but his two monographs, published in 2008 and 2009, are all about his creative approach and output. Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far revolves around 21 thought-provoking phrases, transformed into typographic works for various clients around the world and has been since updated. His second text, Made You Look, is fully illustrated with a red PVC slipcase and spans 20 years of his graphic design in depth. The two complement each other excellently. 14. The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher The Art of Looking Sideways questions the way designers thinkAlan Fletcher, the legendary co-founder of Pentagram, penned various thought-provoking tomes during his illustrious graphic design career, but The Art of Looking Sideways is perhaps the best known - questioning the way designers think about everything from colour to composition. Once you've digested his seminal text, give Picturing and Poeting a go, exploring the link between imagery and meaning through a series of visual mind-teasers, games and visual puns, assembled from his personal notebooks and diaries. Another great work by Fletcher, Beware Wet Paint, is a more conventional monograph, looking back over 35 years of inspiring work and putting it all in the context of Fletcher's remarkable thought process. 15. A Designer's Art by Paul Rand A Designer's Art probes the process of graphic designHeralded by many as one of the fathers of modern branding, Paul Rand has several inspiring books to his name. Design, Form and Chaos is unfortunately out of print, but if you can track down a copy it's worth it to immerse yourself in his talent for simplicity, and to explore the thinking behind some of his best-known identities. A Designer's Art, meanwhile, probes more deeply into the process of graphic design in general: why it's important; the impact it can have on society; what works, what doesn't, and most importantly, why. 16. Perverse Optimist by Tibor Kalman Perverse Optimist is a weighty tomeWritten by Tibor Kalman and edited by Peter Hall and Michael Bierut, this is another notoriously hard-to-obtain volume which, like Rand’s Design, Form and Chaos, is sadly out of print. Dedicated to the visionary editor-in-chief of Colors magazine and creative director of Interview, Perverse Optimist is a weighty tome by any standards, and packed with high-impact images and insightful analysis of the art direction process behind them. 17. Pentagram: Marks Pentagram: Marks reproduces 400 identities the agency has createdUnsurprisingly, given its status as arguably the world's most famous design agency, Pentagram has attracted its fair share of monographs over the decades: seven so far and still counting Marks simply reproduces four hundred of the hugely diverse identities that the agency has created since 1972. An incredible cross-section of design history. 18. M to M of M/M (Paris) M to M of M/M (Paris) chronicles two decades of stunning workIt was a long time coming, but this definitive 528-page monograph of the iconic Parisian duo Michaël Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, aka M/M (Paris), was worth the wait. Chronicling two decades of stunning work spanning the worlds of music, fashion and fine art, it's presented as a reshuffled alphabetical dictionary, starting and ending with M. The studio's highly distinctive, unique approach to type, print design, drawing and photography shines throughout. 19. Palette No.4: Neon, New Fluorescent Graphics by Victionary An ode to the neon colour palettePicking the right colour palette for your design work is always a difficult decision. Whilst some favour the more understated, others opt for the bold and bright. This beautiful 296-page book showcases the applications of fluorescent colours in the design world, examining where they work best. Including branding, interior design, and fashion, a total of 110 loud and colourful projects, by designers across the globe, are featured. 20. A Logo for London by David Lawrence All about the London tube logoLondon's Underground system is over 150 years old, and this book tells you all you need to know about the famous London Transport logo design. A Logo for London celebrates the instantly recognisable bar and circle, also known as the bullseye. With 250 colour illustrations, this charming and informative tome charts the history and development of the symbol from the early 20th century to the present day. 21. Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe by Tim Leong Your comic book questions are answered with an array of infographicsWhat is the Joker's favourite question for Batman? Are there more deaths by human or by zombie in The Walking Dead? Those are just some of the questions answered in this book via an array of inspirational infographics. Even if you're not a comic book fan, the variety of infographic styles on offer will bring you tons of inspiration. 22. Geometric Two by Kapitza Geometric Two is another book in Kapitza's inspiration bowKapitza is a multi-disciplinary design studio run by sisters Nicole and Petra Kapitza who share a passion for print, pattern, nature, minimalism and colour. Geometric Two is a pattern book that showcases their love of all things bold, bright and symmetrical. It's a treasure trove of new ideas for the colour and pattern enthusiast - ideal for print and pattern fans, art book lovers, students and professionals alike. 23. ExtraBold by Serial Cut There's even AR content with this bookEstablished in 1999, Spanish design studio Serial Cut has become renowned for creating slick, bold, homogenous artworks from seemingly opposing aesthetics. And these are beautifully presented in this attractive tome. The agency persuaded nine internationally renowned artists and studios to create exclusive work for this release - special remixes of Serial Cut's playful and energetic creative work. Ever-trailblazing, the studio has paired this, its first monograph, with a special augmented reality app. The ExtraBold app provides easy access to additional multimedia content for the 150 Serial Cut projects featured in the book, including 3D virtual figures, 'making of' videos, commercial videos, zoom images, and navigable websites. 24. Tangible: High Touch Visuals Exciting spatial and visual work by young creativesWe love the cover, the content… in fact, we love the whole idea behind Tangible, which is: "Graphic-inspired design, objects and spaces by creatives that are producing striking visual and spatial work". Although some of the work featured is bordering on bizarre, for the most part you’ll find a glorious exploration of a contemporary art form that’s as technically brilliant as it is thought provoking. 25. Left to Right by David Crow Visual communication rests on the power of semiotics, a concept that David Crow examines in expert detail within this seminal text. Dealing with the principles of written communication and its relationship to imagery, and rounded-off with an examination of audience understanding, Left to Right is a valuable assessment of academic yet essential design theory. 26. The End of Print: The Grafik Design of David Carson by Lewis Blackwell The End of Print: The Grafik Design of David Carson provides great insight into the iconic designer's processIf Brody and Saville defined the 1980s, Carson conquered the 1990s with his unconventional approach to page design, using distorted type and fragmented imagery that played with notions of legibility - particularly during his tenure as art director of Ray Gun. He went on to work with a stellar client list that includes Pepsi, Nike, Armani, Levi's, Sony and MTV. While the approach outlined in The End of Print is very much of its time, the insight that the book provides into the iconic surfer/designer's process is unrivalled. Liked that? Then read these next: Best free fonts for designers 25 logo design tips from the experts 10 top design-related movies View the full article

A new festival dedicated to celebrating GIFs is about to take place, and with it come 50 exciting and rather artistic animated GIFs that are sure to have you entranced. GIFs are of course a great way of communicating an emotion or sharing a reference (or for extra social media points, both at the same time), but few people would consider them an art form. Noise x GIF Fest 2017 aims to change this by celebrating the artistic worth of GIFs. Get Adobe Creative CloudThe event is well timed. Earlier this year GIFs hit a big milestone as the format turned 30. Traditionally for us humans, turning 30 is a big deal accompanied by appropriately epic celebrations. So it seems fair that GIFs, which have brought so much joy to us over the years, should be treated to a party in the shape of a festival, too. Adeline Tan (aka @yell0w)'s GIF goes on and on and on seamlessly Running from 4 October through to 11 October, GIF Fest is a festival inspired by the theme 'Spellbound'. It's billed as Singapore's largest GIF event to-date (we'd be intrigued to see how much competition it faced) and aims "to capture the richness of the GIF as an artistic medium and explore its role as a form of digital art, entertainment and creative communication." Entry to Noise x GIF fest is free As well as recognising GIFs as an art form, the festival will showcase 50 GIFs created by graphic designers, animators and photographers based on the event's theme. Over 500 GIFs were submitted to the festival following an open call for submissions, so the 50 chosen are a shortlist of the best around. “GIF Fest seems to have captured the imagination of a whole wave of artists and amateurs," says the founder and curator of the festival, Steve Lawler. "It’s been exciting to see them experimenting with new techniques and taking their work to the next level. Inspiring.” Lawler (aka @mojokoworld) even had a go at making a GIF himself, as his Instagram post above shows. RIP your eyes (GIF by Ella Zheng, aka @designerinsingapore) Dani Newman, community director at GIPHY, particularly loved Ella Zheng’s GIF (above). Newman says: “This GIF shows the potential of what is possible in just four frames of a GIF. It is beautifully designed and I couldn't help but to open up the file to enjoy each frame on its own and to keep from getting hypnotised.” Singaporean street photographer Aik-Beng-Chia (@aikbengchia) made this GIF ahead of his workshop The festival will host activities such as workshops, live performances and talks. The programme includes a workshop hosted by Aik Beng Chia, one of Singapore’s most followed street photographers on Instagram, on how to bring photos (like his cinemagraph above) to life. The talent on show is impressive. There's even, appropriately, a performance planned by indie-electronic musical duo .GIF. Get inspired by browsing some of these artistic GIFs by clicking left to right in the gallery, below. The GIFs will be showcased through large projections, large screens and secret rooms for attendees to marvel at in full glory. Related articles: The ultimate guide to GIF design 95 top Photoshop tutorials How to draw and paint - 100 pro tips and tutorials View the full article

The macOS Keychain attack, Signal's new private contact discovery service, the Deloitte hack, and a handful of mobile stock trading app vulnerabilities are discussed. View the full article

How often do you think about the skills you wished you spent more time on? Lucky for you, you can teach an old dog new tricks. You just need the right resources to continue learning, and there are few better tools for that than SitePoint Premium. Get a lifetime subscription to this valuable service on sale today for just $39.99 (approx £30). When you sign on to SitePoint Premium, you will find tons of courses and tutorials on the most important web programming languages, with actionable lessons waiting for you to dive in. These expert-taught lessons reach across the spectrum of skills that the tech-minded would love to master, from coding languages JavaScript and HTML to powerful tools such as Github and WordPress. New lessons are being added all the time so you'll never run out of new skills to learn. A lifetime subscription to SitePoint Premium usually retails for $450, but you’ll pay just $39.99 (approx £30) thanks to a special price drop. That’s a massive saving for endless access to lessons you'll love, so grab this deal while you can! Creative Bloq deals This great deal comes courtesy of the Creative Bloq Deals store – a creative marketplace that's dedicated to ensuring you save money on the items that improve your design life. We all like a special offer or two, particularly with creative tools and design assets often being eye-wateringly expensive. That's why the Creative Bloq Deals store is committed to bringing you useful deals, freebies and giveaways on design assets (logos, templates, icons, fonts, vectors and more), tutorials, e-learning, inspirational items, hardware and more. Every day of the working week we feature a new offer, freebie or contest – if you miss one, you can easily find past deals posts on the Deals Staff author page or Offer tag page. Plus, you can get in touch with any feedback at: deals@creativebloq.com. View the full article

Researchers at Duo Security are expected today at Ekoparty to reveal data and a paper that shows Mac users are not receiving EFI firmware updates at expected. View the full article

So you want to create better editorial designs? From grids and layout to font pairings, contrast, pace, visual hierarchy and more, the decisions you make as a designer dictate the way information is presented, shared and understood – whether you’re laying out a book, magazine, newspaper or digital publication. If there’s one thing we know from editorial design icons like David Carson, it’s that rules are made to be broken. But you have to know the rules first… Get Adobe Creative CloudHere, I’ll walk through some best-practice tips for improving your editorial designs. I tend to ignore whatever 'rules' exist, but I’ve developed the following opinions through nine years of mag-making alongside full-time agency roles. I'm a big believer in the importance of attitude alongside ability, so my 'rules' are a mixture of both... 01. Enthusiasm every time In the relaunch issue of The Recorder I commissioned one of my all time faves Neasden Control Centre to bring to life a tricky future-focussed featureNothing creates better work than passion for the subject. Of course not every project will speak to you personally, but I know my best work is done when I'm engaged with the subject. Find some enthusiasm for whatever story you're working on, the design will be better for it. If the subject isn't your cup of tea, find something in it that speaks to you and let that develop in you an appreciation for the content. 02. Let the grid guide you I find a blank page as intimidating as the next person, so having a flexible and well considered grid in place means there's always a 'way in' to begin the design... Think of it as a structure for aligning elements against, as and when you want. Grids enable you to stay organised, keep consistent across issues, and can help to enhance the legibility and readability of body copy. The human eye is finely attuned to spotting discrepancies in patterns, so when you chance a design and misalign an element or two, even if it isn't immediately obvious, it'll likely feel a little 'off'. A great grid will help you maintain cohesion throughout your layouts, helping multi-page articles hang together. Lastly, grids are also generally a gateway to good editorial design practice – gutters, margins, columns, baseline grids and so on. Also read: Mastering grids in InDesign CC 03. Types of type For the London issue of Boat Magazine we used Seb Lester’s Soho family, which he - via Monotype - kindly gifted usMagazines are a marriage of pictures and words. If fonts are the clothes that words wear, it stands to reason you'll want your text suitably attired. The right fonts can make or break a magazine, and pairing type is a art in itself. It's ultra-rare to commission bespoke type (like the 29 styles and weights Henrik Kubel developed for the 2015 NYTmag redesign) so for the vast majority of us its a case of figuring out how many fonts you require to do what you need. If in doubt, three is a great starting point. Fonts have distinct personalities: serious, casual, playful, elegant. Match the mood of your type to the purpose of your design. Create intentional visual hierarchy by pairing a display face for headlines with a more legible family, or two for body copy (perhaps a sans and a serif). Don't forget to check when investing in new fonts that extra features such as italics, extended or condensed versions are included or available (not to mention full punctuation and glyphs) to give your typographic voice maximum range. Also read: How to choose the right typeface for a brand 04. Collaboration or bust Few magazines are created in isolation – they're usually a product of teamwork – even if its just a partnership of art-director and editor. To be able to care deeply about a publication while allowing others to input into it means walking a tightrope of tensions! Be generous with each other, patient and encouraging, prepared to compromise – but stand your ground when required. Always try to see the bigger picture, and decide which battles to fight. Keep communicating or the work suffers. 05. Covers and mastheads The latest issue of The Recorder features a unique cover collaboration with Penguin cover designer David Pearson, finished with a spot UV varnishThe main event, the signature, the first and last thing people will remember! Covers have always been important but I'd argue they play an increasingly important role now, much like the album cover can represent a body of work, so too can the mag cover. Steven Gregor, aka GymClassMag, wrote brilliantly about how a carefully orchestrated cover can propel an issue to new levels of notoriety. If you have the opportunity to design a magazine cover from scratch then the masthead – or logotype – is the cornerstone to which everything else relates. With the ever decreasing importance of the physical newsstand and the ever increasing role of the digital thumbnail or jpeg – scale and legibility of your mags title is paramount. This shift also frees up new possibilities for positioning, no longer fighting to peep over the top of other titles on shelf, you can stick it practically anywhere! 06. Compromise carefully It can sometimes be seen as a dirty word, but most editorial projects are real 'client' work – not self-funded vanity projects. This means there are client concerns to accommodate, and often important commercial aspects to consider – so compromise is vital. Maybe that spread needs to be replaced with an ad? Or perhaps your branded content isn't branded enough? Whatever the compromise, make sure you're always answering the brief. The happier the client, the stronger a relationship you'll make and the more permission you'll have to do progressive things down the line. 07. Contrast is cool As powerful as contrast is, sometimes complimentary works just as well – like this Masqualero typeface mimicking the hand-drawn type of profiled superstar Gemma O'BrienThis is another obvious one, but it’s something so easy to overlook: visual contrast is one of the designer’s most powerful tools and easiest to deploy (although not always easy to get right). Take a look at titles like YouCanNow and Port to see what I mean – contrasts in scale, colour and tone can result in powerful covers and dramatic spreads. If you want to make an image loom even larger, reduce the title size – if you want to really shout about something – blow up the text till it falls off the page. 08. Setting the pace From grand masters like Carson and Brody, through to (slightly more) modern day marvels like Leo Jung and Matt Willey – there are countless examples of pace-makers controlling how we feel by clever control of visual pace. Slow a reader down by injecting a double page spread of imagery, speed things up by type-setting narrower columns, change the mood by inverting type or chill things out with generous leading... 'Editorial design 101' ideas they may be, but they genuinely work. 09. Illustration matters I've commissioned illustrator Zoe Barker for all three titles: she nails it every timeI've been fortunate enough to commission illustrators and every time I'm reminded of the classic formula and how it applies here: crap in, crap out. If you bumble a brief, fail to provide any insight or direction, or rush a deadline, you run the risk of losing not only goodwill but also quality of output. Illustration can bring to life an article when photography is impossible or inconvenient, and can go places a camera cannot – to new worlds, micro or macro, anywhere imagination can take you. Be prepared to learn new levels of diplomacy to get the best out of your contributors, and to spend copious amounts of time writing emails when you'd rather be designing. 10. A picture is worth… If you have the luxury of a photo editor your task is probably to maximise their talent – but presuming you don't – it's probably to learn to think like one. That means either art-directing shoots personally – or commissioning them – and then handling, editing and placing imagery to maximum effect. This role requires a mixture of conceptual and craft skills, to both understand what photography will move an audience and then the ability and confidence to style, crop and lay out photography to maximum effect. Everyone knows a picture can be worth a thousand words, so treat photography with the care and attention it deserves. 11. God is in the detail hese clean layouts for a profile of poster designer Jessica Svendsen in The Recorder featured 'throw-out' pages and a zingy spot colour neon green inkIf you're in the rare and privileged position to be producing a magazine about a personal passion this applies less – but when working on an editorial project that's rarely the case. The better you can understand your content, the more sensitive and nuanced your design can be. The more you know about your audience, the smarter you can be with your delivery. The deeper your knowledge of great editorial design, the quicker you can call on inspiration when trying out ideas – or know which cliches or tropes to avoid. Spend time with the content and you'll be able to put together the work much more intuitively. 12. Designing for the content This one might be up for debate, but I'm all about letting the content help shape the look of an article. WIRED UK is a superb example of this. Andrew Diprose and team bring to life the content of a story and investigation through a masterful interplay of dramatic type, image and layout. Hardly a new approach I know, but many of the big sellers of recent years have taken a more stripped back or formulaic approach. When there's an idea behind the work, it's much easier to know when it's done. Being aware of visual trends is helpful, but work with meaning has greater integrity and will hold up better as time passes. 13. Designing for the reader Another highlight from Issue 5 of the Recorder is this colourful illustration work by hot talent Bráulio AmadoPerhaps it shouldn't need saying, but designers can forget that they're not the totality of the demographic buying their work. Magazine audiences can be very broad, socially, geographically, age-wise, and as such some might not appreciate adventurous layouts or challenging typesetting. Adapting your style and producing legible and accessible work is vital to engaging your audience; the same goes for decisions around paper stock, page size and count, and so on. Every design decision should be made intentionally with the end user in mind – not design award judges or your designer mates on twitter. 14. Designing for yourself Lastly, but vitally, do what you feel is right and what you'd love to put your name to. Editorial can be one of those rare 'pure' design experiences where you can really shape a piece of communication and therefore totally affect the audience. When you produce something you're proud of (presuming your taste is good) it means you've probably nailed it. Learn to trust your instincts and be brave enough to push your design to an exciting new place – and of course, enjoy it. You could be digging holes in the rain for a living, but you're not. You're designing freaking magazines. My final takeaway? Don't forget to make the most of every editorial opportunity you get. Design should be fun, even if the content isn’t. Related articles: Create balanced page layouts: 7 pro tips 23 steps to the perfect website layout Best laptops for graphic design View the full article

The world’s most famous logos are designed to be memorable. From Apple to McDonalds, the logos of the biggest companies across the globe are meticulously crafted to conjure instant brand association. 25 logo design tips from the expertsSo how ingrained are these logos in our minds? To find out, custom signage firm Signs.com asked over 150 Americans to draw 10 famous logos from memory as accurately as they could in half an hour. The results range from close to comically skewed, with brand elements repositioned, re-angled and reimagined with fabulous freedom. To qualify as nearly perfect, all key features – the bite, the floating leaf and so on – had to be combined accurately (click the top-right arrows icon to enlarge this image) Nearly one in three people gave the Apple logo a stalk (it doesn’t have one), and 22 per cent put the bite on the wrong side; while one in 10 people drew the adidas trefoil logo – which was introduced in 1971 and still in use – instead of the three stripes version, which was launched in 1997. And nearly half the people tested thought the Starbucks mermaid doesn’t wear a crown (she does). Starbucks has used three logos since its formation in 1971 So what can we learn from this exercise? Primarily that brand colours are easier to remember than shape – more people correctly identified the colour palette than any other element. And that the most successful logos use colour (and colour theory) to differentiate from their competitors. Importance of brand colour Karen Haller, a leading authority in the field of applied colour psychology, highlights the challenge facing logo designers in our article The designer’s guide to using colour in branding: “People have an emotional connection with colour first. Then we take in the shapes, the logo, and we read the words,” says Haller. “If we sense a mismatch, it’s the colour we don’t believe, despite the beautifully crafted words.” So could you do any better? You can see some of the drawings below for each logo. And if you fancy having a go yourself, head over to Signs.com to take the quiz yourself (you’ll find it at the bottom of the page). Via LogoDesignLove. Related articles: How to pick the perfect colour palette every time 21 outstanding uses of colour in branding 11 places to find logo design inspiration View the full article

Colour is such a pervasive part of everything we visually encounter in the world, that for many designers it becomes an intuitive choice. If you think back to school though, you'll recall being told at a young age that there are three 'primary' colours – Red, Yellow, and Blue. We were all taught that any colour can be created by mixing these three colours in varying quantities. It turns out that this isn't quite right (although it's still workable enough in practice to be taught the world over to five-year-olds). Get Creative CloudHow colour is formed Colour theory stretches back to at least the 15th centuryUnderstanding how colour is formed and, more importantly, the relationships between different colours, can help you to use colour more effectively in your designs. The Bauhaus school understood this in the 1920s and 1930s, with staff and students going on to develop colour theories for evoking particular moods and emotions through choice of palette in design and architecture. The theory of colour is a discipline that stretches back much further than that - at least to the 15th century - and encompasses physics, chemistry and mathematics to fully define and explain the concepts. However, much of this is unnecessary to being able to use colour effectively. This quick primer will give you a handy overview of all the important aspects to help you start making informed decisions. Colour systems There are two primary colour systems – methods by which colour is reproduced: additive and subtractive (also known as reflective). We use both on a daily basis – the screen you're reading this article on uses additive colour to generate all the colours you see, while the book you're reading uses subtractive colour for its front cover. In simple terms – anything that emits light (such as the sun, a screen, a projector, etc) uses additive, while everything else (which instead reflects light) uses subtractive colour. 01. Additive Additive colour is based on red, green, and blue - RGB for shortAdditive colour works with anything that emits or radiates light. The mixture of different wavelengths of light creates different colours, and the more light you add, the brighter and lighter the colour becomes. When using additive colour, we tend to consider the building block (primary) colours to be Red, Green, and Blue (RGB), and this is the basis for all colour you use on screen. In additive colour, white is the combination of colour, while black is the absence of colour. 02. Subtractive Subtractive colour is based on cyan, magenta, and yellowSubtractive colour works on the basis of reflected light. Rather than pushing more light out, the way a particular pigment reflects different wavelengths of light determines its apparent colour to the human eye. Subtractive colour, like additive, has three primary colours - Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (CMY). In subtractive colour white is the absence of colour, while black is the combination of colour, but it’s an imperfect system. The pigments we have available to use don't fully absorb light (preventing reflected colour wavelengths), so we have to add a fourth compensating pigment to account for this limitation. We call this "Key", hence CMYK, but essentially it's black. Without this additional pigment, the closest to black we'd be able to render in print would be a muddy brown. The colour wheel The modern colour wheel has been in use since the 18th centuryIn order to make it easier to see the relationship between different colours, the concept of the modern colour wheel was developed around the 18th century. These early wheels plotted the different primary colours around a circle, mixing different primary colours together in strict ratios to achieve secondary and tertiary colours. The colour wheel allows us to see at a glance which colours are complementary (opposite each other on the wheel), analogous (adjacent to each other on the wheel), triadic (three colours positioned at 120 degrees on the wheel from each other) and so on. Each of these relationships can produce pleasing colour combinations. There are many more pleasing relationships between colours based on their position on the wheel. There are free apps for picking a colour scheme, or you could use your designer's eye to pick your own. Click through to the next page for a little help on this. Next page: the three components of colour, colour gamut, and more... The three components of a colour The three component parts that help us define a colour are hue, saturation and brightnessYellow is yellow is yellow, right? Well, actually, no; there are many different colours we could refer to as yellow. Different shades or tints, saturations and hues are all possible while still being within the yellow part of the colour wheel. As a result, there are three primary component parts that help us define a colour: 01. Hue This is the position on the colour wheel, and represents the base colour itself. This is typically referred to in degrees (around the colour wheel), so a yellow colour will appear between 50 and 60 degrees, with the perfect yellow appearing at 56 degrees. Green, meanwhile, appears at 120 degrees on the wheel at so on. 02. Saturation This is a representation of how saturated (or rich) a colour is. Low saturation results in less overall colour, eventually becoming a shade of grey when fully desaturated. Saturation is normally referred to as a percentage between 0 and 100%. 03. Brightness This is how bright a colour is, typically expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100%. A yellow at 0% brightness will be black, while the same yellow hue and saturation at 100% brightness will be the full yellow colour. Colour gamut Colour gamut describes the range of potential colours a system can reproduceColour gamut is a way of describing the full range of potential colours a system can reproduce. It may surprise you to learn that the range of colours achievable in CMYK is different to that you can achieve with RGB. This is partially because of the nature of the two different systems, but also (in the real world at least) as a consequence of limitations in our technology - screens aren’t always capable of producing the same range of colours as each other, and pigments reflect light at a non-uniform rate as you reduce their saturation. Colour perception Finally, it’s worth looking at how different colours can affect the way we perceive other colours. A typical illustration of this features a mid-grey tone placed over a light grey background, and the same mid-grey tone shown over a dark grey background. The apparent brightness of the mid-grey is altered according to the context in which you see it - a trick of the eye, working to make sense of its surroundings. Hues works in the same way as tones when placed adjacent to other colours, allowing you to create different effects using the same palette of colours. Further reading There's more to explore in the world of colour, which is why we've got a tag for all of our articles on the subject of colour. Visit creativebloq.com/tag/colour to explore our latest colour articles, or read some of these highlights below. 01. The designer’s guide to using colour in branding Colour sells. Whether you’re working with a product, service or space, the ‘right’ combinations of colours can influence how someone feels, thinks and behaves – with powerful results. What are the ‘right’ combinations, and how can designers sidestep subjective debates to harness the power of colour more effectively in branding projects? Computer Arts magazine takes a look in this guide, speaking to experts in colour branding and looking at tools to help you make the right choices. 02. How to pick the perfect colour palette every time In the 1980s, colour psychologist Angela Wright identified links between patterns of colour and patterns of human behaviour. She went on to develop the Colour Affects System, which identifies links between four colour groups and four basic personality types, based on original research involving Aristotle, Newton and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. If harnessed correctly, designers can use the Colour Affects System to control the message of their colour palettes and, crucially, kill subjective debate around colour in client meetings with evidence to back up their decisions. This guide from Computer Arts magazine's colour issue explains how it works… 03. How to manage colours in Photoshop This article provides a great overview for users who are new to colour management, with practical advice for managing colours in Photoshop. It explores how to convert your images from RGB to CMYK mode, and the effect this will have on the colours within your image; how to customise your colour settings to suit your particular needs; and how to sync your colour profile across all of your Adobe CC apps, add a particular colour profile provided by your printer, and preview a CMYK version of your design without losing any RGB information. Get Adobe Creative Cloud04. 10 colour management terms designers need to know Getting your colours right means getting your head around some tricky terms. There are a number of jargon terms that might baffle you - so we've put together this handy guide. Have a read, and you'll soon be able to sort your spectrophotometer from your tristimulus colorimeter... 05. 4 ways to master colour in logo design Colour is a universal language in design. It can help convey a brand’s personality, create market standout, and evoke an emotional response. This article reveals four ways to work with colour more effectively in your logo design work… 06. Outstanding uses of colour in branding Successfully 'owning' a colour is a big deal. With this in mind, we've explored how different brands around the world have staked their respective claims to 10 colours – in some cases with considerable success. 07. The best colour tools for web designers For web designers, one of the most important choices to make is over colour selections. Choose the wrong ones, and you might just lose out on an opportunity. But how do you know which colours work well together? To help with the important task of colour selection, this article points you in the direction of some of the best free colour tools on the web (plus one special bonus at the end for Mac users). View the full article

If ever you needed proof that 4K has moved from an experimental technology to the mainstream, it arrived this September in the form of two announcements from Apple. Firstly, Apple began rolling out 4K HDR content on iTunes mid-month, in the United States and other countries. Then a week later, it announced a major update to Apple TV, introducing 4K and high dynamic range (HDR) support for the first time. Along with 4K-capable apps from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, consumers now have a number of affordable options for streaming 4K content to their smart TVs. But 4K isn’t just about films and broadcast shows. With the latest laptops, tablets and even smartphones now featuring 4K screens and higher, consumers will increasingly be expecting all their multimedia content to be available at super-high resolution. In this post, we look at what this means for designers and creative agencies going into 2018 and beyond... 01. 4K will become the norm for video Even though GLOW is a retro show, its credits needed to be in 4KEven though it seems we’ve only just got used to HD, 4K is going to become the norm for video in 2018, whether we’re talking about movies, TV shows, commercials or social media campaigns. With the younger generation increasingly able to film their own 4K footage on the latest smartphones and sports cameras, they’re certainly not going to accept anything less from the professionals. And there are no exceptions, it seems. For example, when Shynola was asked to produce a credit sequence for Netflix’s Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) – a drama inspired by a 1980s TV show – it was asked to make a title sequence “that looks like it’s in 4K but other than that could have come straight from the original show”, it told Creative Review. When even something that sets out to look purposely old-fashioned has to be in 4K, it’s a clear sign that it’s become the industry standard. 02. Larger screens will provide more opportunities for innovation There was once a time when, if you showed video on a very large screen, it looked blurry and unprofessional. But the rise of 4K means it’s possible to show pin-sharp images on larger and larger screens, and the industry is quickly taking advantage. One example is Samsung’s gallery at the recent IFA Berlin trade show, featuring some of the world’s best works of art displayed on 4K HDR screens. Another is how McCann and Framestore took a group of school children on a ‘field trip to Mars’ by essentially turning an entire bus into a VR headset. As you can see in the video above, they did this by creating scenes from the Red Planet in Unreal Engine 4, across a ‘driveable area’ of 250 square miles. They then rendered that in real-time on the bus using a combination of a GPS, accelerometer, magnetometer and laser surface velocimeter. Finally, they used specially 84-inch, 4K resolution screens backed by a layer of switchable film, allowing them to broadcast VR footage on to the glass. 03. Billboards will become more like Blade Runner A mockup of how the new-look Piccadilly Lights will look when upgraded to 4KIf you think 84-inch screens sound big, wait until the forthcoming revamp of Piccadilly Lights – the iconic advertising space in central London – is revealed this autumn. The new 790sq m screen will be the largest in Europe, and will be linked to a high-speed fibre Wi-Fi network, giving brands an easy way to display 4K content, including live video streaming and real time social media feeds. We’ll have to wait and see what that looks like, but it all sounds very Blade Runner. And it’s not just Londoners who will benefit from 4K big-screen advertising. Outdoor advertising company JCDecaux, for example, has announced it is updating its digital billboards across the UK to 4K. 04. Social media will push 4K forward Facebook is making a big push for video, and 4K will be an important part of the mixThe last couple of years have seen Twitter and Facebook make a big play for the future of video viewing. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has tried to reinvent the social network as a video platform, including high-profile deals to stream Thursday night NFL games. Meanwhile, Facebook has doubled down on its Facebook Live strategy, funding its own shows and exclusives from media partners. 4K is becoming an increasingly important weapon in this battle, most notably shown in Facebook’s announcement in July that you can now live-stream 360-degree video on Facebook in up to 4K resolution. That's along with The Live 360 Ready Program, a list of third-party 360-degree cameras and software solutions verified by Facebook. With these two companies continuing to wrest market dominance from the likes of Amazon and Netflix, expect much more technical and creative innovation to come in 2018. 05. Websites will need to be 4K ready too Using vector graphics rather than raster images where possible will help your websites look pixel-perfect on 4K screensAs more and more people start viewing websites on 4K screens, from smartphones to laptops to smart TVs, web designers will need to make sure their designs will responsively adapt to such devices. That’s partly about adherence to general responsible web design principles, such as using vector images wherever possible, but there are also other concerns relating to things like larger screen widths. Learn more by following our 4 tips for designing a 4K-ready website. 06. 4K will take over gaming Killer Instinct is the first 4K console fighting game for the XBox One X4K gaming has been a reality on the PC for some time now, albeit for those with a 4K monitor and a powerful enough desktop computer, equipped with the latest Nvidia GeForce GTX 10-series and AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. But in 2018, 4K will extend its takeover of the gaming world by colonising the console. Sony has been in the forefront of this revolution with the PS4 Pro, launched last November. This, although not offering ‘native 4K’, uses a clever form of upscaling to create 4K images. But all that will soon be eclipsed by the release of the Xbox One X, unveiled this July and slated for a November release, which will enable games to be rendered at true 4K resolution. 07. Marketing 4K will require creative solutions 4K video may now be the norm, but how do you market it to a public who have only just got used to 1080p? While the jump from VHS to DVD, for example, was pretty revolutionary, the move from HD to 4K is a little more evolutionary, so to visually sell the benefits of expensive 4K tech demands a huge amount of creativity and imagination. One interesting approach can be seen in the explosive ad for the Xbox One X, which had gamers drooling at E3 this year. Created by Ayzenberg Group, it begins by focusing on the actual tech inside the console, then we see these components morph into luminous pixel threads that gradually combine to immerse the player in a virtual world. Pretty stirring stuff, in short, whatever type of screen it’s viewed on. 08. We’ll need to start thinking about 8K Sony’s just unveiled its 8K camera, the UHC-8300While 4K has now entered the mainstream, things won’t stop there. The next stage of the resolution revolution lies in 8K, the current highest definition standard. 8K UHD has two times the horizontal and vertical resolution of the 4K UHD, with four times as many pixels overall, or 16 times as many pixels as Full HD. Right now, 8K resolution is mainly used as a way of creating 4K footage through cropping techniques and/or downsampling techniques. And while 8K cameras have been pretty rare until now, they’re likely to become increasingly available, with Sony unveiling its first 8K camera, the UHC-8300, at IBC 2017. Watch this space... View the full article

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Getting a tattoo is a big deal. Whether it’s a classic or unique design you simply love or a picture or symbol that marks a meaningful event in your life, bagging the best tattoo design is a long and sometimes difficult process. Here, we’ve pulled together some inspiration that’ll help you choose the tattoo design that’s right for you. To make things simple, we've split the article into themes: flower tattoos (this page), tribal tattoos, mandala tattoos, dragon tattoos, cross tattoos, skull tattoos, geometric tattoos, anchor tattoos, animal tattoos, and couples' tattoos. (If you're interested in watercolour-style tattoos, check out these 13 incredible examples). Each of the categories contains more traditional tattoo designs, as well as quirky original ideas. You can navigate to the section you want using the drop-down menu above. Click on the images to see more of each tattoo artists' work. Doodle art: 52 great examples01. Rainbow roses tattoo Morag at Purple Rose Tattoo This rose tattoo steers away from the standard red colouring, marking it as a classic design but with a modern twist. The intricate shading and delicate leaves add to its realistic execution. 02. Monochrome tattoo Hannah Louise Kyle This black and white rose tattoo again steers away from the classic red, offering up an elegant black-and-white design. The heavy line work keeps it to a traditional tattoo style. 03. Pink rose tattoo Esme Loasby The bright colours is what makes this flower tattoo design stand out, especially when you look closely at the clever colour gradient. Adding more than one flower always makes for a special piece. 04. Wildflowers tattoo Esme Loasby Speaking of choosing more than one type for your flower tattoo, this beautiful botanical creation proves that you can put a lot of elements into one piece and it’ll still work, provided you use a tattoo artist who knows what they're doing. 05. Rose and dagger tattoo Tom Butts If you’re looking for a more traditional design, this rose tattoo could be just the inspiration you’re looking for. The inclusion of the dagger adds an edge and makes it a bold, stand-out piece. 06. Red rose tattoo Sascha Roth A bolder choice is this rose tattoo design, with clever colour work placed just away from the careful lining. Including so much black might not work for some tattoo designs, or tattooees, but it works here. 07. Geometric peonies tattoo Mark Jelliman The linework on this trio of peonies is crafted with such elegance, it makes a real statement. It just goes to show that keeping things simple can often be the best approach when it comes to tattoo design. Next page: Tribal tattoo designs These great tattoo designs are all inspired by tribal artworks from around the world. Some of these stick to common themes from native American tribal art, for example, while others give them a contemporary twist. As before, click on the image to go to the tattoo artist's website or Instagram page. 08. Tribal mask-inspired tattoo Manu Dermagrafics This stunning leg piece was crafted freehand, and with its bold shapes, colour-blocking and seamless line work, it’s a tribal tattoo worth showing off. The shape itself compliments the shape of the leg, too. 09. Subtle shading tribal tattoo Paxii What makes this tribal tattoo design stand out is that through the thick line work and colour-filled shapes, there’s a subtle shading that brings it to life, adding new dimensions. 10.Thick framed tribal tattoo Mike Schwalger This custom Polynesian tribal tattoo sleeve is able to include a variety of different shapes and lines without making it look too busy. The thick line framing adds a more artistic flair. 11. Pared-back tribal tattoo Leo Braz Sometimes tribal tattoos can be simple. This piece signifies the serpent in the Marajoara tribe, with the back placement proving to be the perfect place to show it off. 12. Repeat pattern tattoo Sunset Tattoo Keeping with the simple theme, this half-sleeve tribal tattoo offers an intricate yet uncomplicated design. And with such a clean design, the pattern is as mesmerising as it is timeless. 13. Tribal collar tattoo Margaret River Tribal tattoo designs often demand a bold placement and this visayan tribal collar is a breathtaking example of how simple line work and intricate patterns can make a statement. 14. Modern twist Daniel Matsumoto This work, by Daniel Matsumoto, manages to put a modern twist on the classic tribal tattoo design. Mixing thin lines with block colour is a simple but unique way to make it pop. Next page: Mandala Tattoos Mandalas are peaceful, spiritual symbols in both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. With their intricate, nature-inspired patterns, it's no wonder they're a popular choice for tattoos. As before, click on the image to go to the tattoo artist's website or Instagram page. 15. Pointillist mandala tattoo Ricky Williams With its circular shape, placing a Mandala tattoo around the ear is a great way to make the most impact. The pointillism aspect in this design is stunning. 16. Hidden mandala tattoo Ricky Williams Mandala tattoos come in all sizes and this delicate design could be just the kind of thing you’re after. Sleek, delicate work that gradually moves into darker colour is a special touch. 17. Bold mandala tattoo Jayne Rogers The thick lines on this half-Mandala tattoo design make it the perfect way to go if you want to make a statement. Choosing to do a half design is also an option if placed around the ear. 18. Layered mandala tattoo Niky Brown Opting for a layering effect on this Mandala tattoo design enables it to take on a more 3D-design effect. Adding it some point work really makes this one inspiring. 19. Colourful mandala tattoo Mors Tattoo Taking on a more classic style, the colour work enables the Mandala tattoo to make more of a statement. Adding colour to the leaf exterior makes for a seamless execution. 20. Shaded mandala tattoo Renette Hammer Mandala tattoos circular shape enable them to be placed almost anywhere but the chest provides a nice canvas to really show them off. Pointillism is also a great way to add depth and subtlety. 21. Stained glass mandala tattoo Skylar Rose Wasserman If you’re after a Mandala tattoo design with a more colourful, unexpected twist, you could go for something like this. The stained glass window colour effect allows shades to blend into each other. Next page: Dragon tattoos Dragon tattoos might show the world how brave and fiery you are, they might celebrate your cultural heritage, or they might just exist because you think dragons are really cool (you're not wrong). Whatever your reason for wanting a dragon tattoo, check out these designs for inspiration and click on the image to go to the artist's website or Instagram page. 22. Whimsical dragon tattoo Alice Badger Sometimes, it’s best to look to the world of TV and movies for your tattoo design inspiration. This one featuring Haku from anime classic Spirited Away is a great place to start. 23. Fierce dragon tattoo Lydia Bruno Dragons are also the perfect way to start off a sleeve, thanks to the variety in which they can be presented. This colourful example leaves room all around for more designs. 24. Oriental dragon tattoo HH Orlando Tattoo Speaking of sleeves, this Japanese style dragon tattoo offers colourful inspiration. The detail on the scales is a particularly nice touch, as is the juxtaposing, delicate flowers underneath. 25. Symmetrical dragon tattoo Joe Fletcher If you love the idea of a dragon tattoo but you’re wary of getting the whole form tattooed onto, opting for the head could be a great way to show your beast appreciation. 26. Linework dragon tattoo Heritage Tattoos A dragon's serpentine body can make it a great option for a head tattoo. This simple, black-and-white linework tattoo design offers elegant inspiration if you’re willing to take the leap. 27. Abstract dragon tattoo Dámaris Argüelles Pérez A more experimental tattoo design could be just the dragon you’re looking for. This puzzle-like piece keeps it modern while also harking back to more traditional tattoo styles. 28. Etchwork dragon tattoo Byron Barker This etchwork dragon tattoo design harks back to a neo-traditional style of tattooing and works best when placed on the side of the body, allowing lots of detail. Next page: Cross tattoo designs Meaningful and beautiful, cross tattoos also come in a variety of styles. Choose a style that's right for you with these great designs. As before, click on an image you like to go to the artist's website or InDesign page. 29. Botanical cross tattoo Reny Tattoos Cross tattoo designs don’t always need to be in a standard, straight line. This example shows that cross tattoos can be moulded with another style to create something really beautiful. 30. Pretty cross tattoo Bruno Diego Another way to amp up a cross tattoo design is with layering. This delicate design incorporates illustrations of love hearts in an elegant and original way, making for a special piece. 31. Symbolic cross tattoo Hegotme This clever cross tattoo design references the crucifixion in a minimal but impactful manner. Adding the nails into the design is a great way to do this. 32. Curvy cross tattoo Kelly Kossuth Maybe you’re looking for a bolder cross tattoo design and this one from Kelly Kossuth shows how you can be both bold and minimal, thanks to thick line work. 33. Minimal cross tattoo Tattooist Uzi If minimal is more your style, this delicate cross tattoo design could be just the inspiration you need. Delicate line work and zero colour can still make an impact. 34. Shaded cross tattoo Slicecrust This classic cross tattoo design works well thanks to neat shading work and clean, thick lines. It’s a perfect design if you want one placed on your arm. 35. Artistic cross tattoo Steven Gilliard If you want to combine your love of being a designer or artist with your cross tattoo, then this clever piece could be right up your street. The dot work makes it pop. Next page: Skull tattoo designs If dragons weren't tough enough for you, how about a skull tattoo? Some of these skull designs are pretty scary, but others are actually really beautiful, and even cute. We're sure they'll all serve to inspire your scull tattoo design. 36. Skull and rose tattoo Phatt German Sometimes you want to add a bit more depth to a skull tattoo design. This skull, which has a rose design incorporated into its cap, does this very effectively. 37. Multi-layered skull tattoo Charlotte's Web Tattoos Another way to incorporate depth into a skull tattoo is this half-dead design, which sees a skull merged with a crying face. The addition of a clock makes it extra creepy. 38. Mexican skull tattoo Barbie Lowenberg If you’re wanting something a little less creepy, this cute skull tattoo – complete with floral decoration, in the style of Mexican Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) skull masks and decorations – is the perfect way to show off your love of the dead. 39. Delicate skull tattoo Uvethekid Sticking with the floral theme, this skull design offers a more freehand approach, with wavy lines. The difference in line thickness and the dotted shading is what makes it great. 40. Gruesome skull tattoo Kelly Violet If you’re looking for something truly bold, a half-sleeve skull tattoo design is one of the options you could go for. This one, illustrated with medieval weaponry, is jaw-dropping. 41. Baroque skull tattoo Siren1 Sometimes two skulls is better than one and this detail tattoo design effortlessly places them together without making it look crowded. Perfect for placing it on the arm. 42. 3D-effect skull tattoo Bali Namaste Tattoo Studio This small skull tattoo takes a different approach when blending two skulls together, giving off a 3D effect with a minimal and cute design – perfect for small spaces. Next page: Geometric tattoo designs For something a bit different, why not get an interesting tattoo featuring geometric shapes and patterns? They can be as colourful or as big as you like, as these great designs show. 43. Artistic geometric tattoo Expanded Eye Expanded Eye is a duo known for its incredible geometric tattoo designs. With splashes of colour, clever shading and breathtaking structure, this is the perfect geometric tattoo design inspiration. 44. Prisms tattoo Malvina Maria Wisniewska The great thing about geometric tattoos is they can be formed of simple structures but with a detailed execution. The interweaving line thickness on this design is a great example of that. 45. Honeycomb tattoo Miriam Frank Mixing shapes and colours into your geometric tattoo design can make for a pretty amazing final piece. By adding just the red to this piece, it ensures the design doesn’t go overboard. 46. Golden Ratio tattoo Michele Volpi The Golden Ratio describes the perfectly symmetrical relationship between two proportions and this geometric tattoo design is a gorgeous and clever way to pay tribute to its perfections. 47. Pared-back geometric tattoo Sarah Lu The simplicity of geometric tattoos also means that the hand poking technique can work really well. This simple but effective design puts a different spin on the arrow. 48. Kaleidoscopic tattoo Diego Favaretto If you’re wanting a larger geometric piece, this tattoo is a great example of one that works well when placed on the back. The never-ending detail on this one is particularly impressive. 49. Colourful geometric tattoo Sasha Unisex Of course we couldn’t feature geometric tattoo designs without mentioning Sasha Unisex – the tattoo artist who has become renowned across the world for her stunning, colourful geometric work. Next page: Anchor tattoo designs About as traditional as tattoo designs get, anchor tattoos are enjoying a retro resurgence. But, as these designs prove, a traditional theme doesn't have to result in a stale old-fashioned design. Click on any image to discover the tattoo artist behind the innovative design. 50. Anchor and heart tattoo Patryk Hilton If you’re after a classic tattoo staple, an anchor design is one of the best options. This traditional style piece is a great way to make a statement. 51. Exotic anchor tattoo Sam Ricketts Anchors can also act as a frame for a tattoo design, with this example proving particularly impressive. By using a simple anchor as your base, you can embellish it to your heart’s content. 52. Anchor and bird tattoo Sami Tutch You can always embellish your anchor tattoo design but in a more subtle, sweet way. This little anchor features cartoonish characters that make it perfect for a cute arm piece. 53. Watercolour anchor tattoo Tracy Burton If you want a splash of colour on your anchor tattoo design, adding in wave-like watercolour is a great way to include your love of anchors in the sea. 54. Sketchy anchor tattoo Elena Aiello Continuing the watery theme is this cute anchor tattoo design, that adds splashes of colour in a simple, hand-drawn style. The loveheart is also perfectly incorporated in the design. 55. Monochrome anchor tattoo Ecke Wunderland The detail on this tiny anchor tattoo design is so perfectly executed, it almost deserves more space. The inclusion of the paper boat is a delightful touch, finishing off the piece beautifully. 56. Geometric anchor tattoo Aracely Ramírez Ponce If you want the colour to be the main focus of your anchor tattoo design, this watercolour, geometric anchor is a great way to show it off. Next page: Animal tattoo designs Another popular choice, animal tattoos might honour a beloved pet, serve as a reminder of a great experience, or show part of your personality through your choice of a favourite animal. These animal tattoos again vary wildly in style, so if you find an art style that you like, click on the image to go through to the artist's website or Instagram page to see more. 57. Fox tattoo Lotte Vanns This simple, hand-poked design is the perfect way to pay tribute to your favourite animal. Thanks to this fox's long body, placing it around the knee is a great way to show it off. 58. Greyhounds tattoo Daemon Rowanchilde These racing greyhounds are stunning in their own right – thanks mostly to their meticulously drawn anatomy – but by placing them within another design, it makes the whole piece pretty breathtaking. 59. Dinosaur tattoo Kimsany The cartoonish colour-blocking on this brachiosaurus makes it truly unique. Complete with intricate line work and the perfect long arm placement, this is one way to get noticed. 60. Elephant tattoo Adrián Desgracia This sketchy design is great if you want to go for a sleeve design with a difference. The surrealist aspect of the elephant is also reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s work. 61. Whale tattoo Raphael Not sure what style to go for in your animal tattoo design? This is one solution: this unique killer whale design combines two different styles in one, with the animal's middle section drawn as shaded scales. 62. Bird tattoo Jason Corbett Pointillism is a beautiful option when it comes to bird tattoo designs. This one, perched just on the shoulder, keeps it simple with minimal detail and colour. 63. Dog tattoo Ricardo Romero Rios Lots of people get their best pal tattooed on them. This one, depicting man’s best friend, is a cute way to illustrate your love for your furry friend – and there's a sweet Up reference to boot. Next page: Couples' tattoo designs Not just the preserve of drunken nights out, matching tattoos are a popular way to mark your commitment to your other half. While some of these designs go sickeningly all-out of the slush factor, others are more subtle, fun, and perhaps even be tasteful enough to avoid the laser, should you break up (not that you will, obviously). 64. Pizza tattoos justinsams There’s no better way of combining your love of your partner with your love of pizza. This cute design may be a little cheesy for some but perfect for others. 65. Sun and moon tattoos Jessica Leigh Ozimek If you’re getting married, you might want to make things even more permanent with ring finger tattoos. This sun and moon tattoo design is a sweet way to show off your love. 66. Chatty tattoos Dream Tattoo Your best pal is always there to listen when you need it most. When you’re far away from each other, this simple tattoo design will remind you that they’re always there. 67. King and queen tattoos B9 Tattoo Studio Be the king and queen of all couples with these minimalist playing-card inspired tattoo designs. It’s best to keep it simple, especially when placed on the hands or wrists. 68. Foxes tattoos Farbenfroh Tattoo Art These playful partner tattoos are great if you’re thinking of getting a couples' tattoo on your leg. The hand-drawn, sketchy style and clever shading make these particularly beautiful. 69. Colour mode tattoos NYC Adorned If you’re looking for something with a designer twist, you couldn’t opt for anything better than these cute colour mode pieces (you might recognise these as belonging to Jessica Hische and Russ Maschmeyer). If you're screen-based, go for RBG, while print designers are more likely to favour CMYK. 70. Heart tattoos First Class Tattoo Studio How about combining your couples tattoo design with your favourite show? This Game of Thrones-inspired piece is a great way to show off two of the things you love. Read more: 23 designers and their awesome tattoos What happens when tattoo design meets illustration 13 incredible examples of watercolour tattoo art View the full article

Is service design more than just expensive brainstorming techniques? After all, not everyone has a leadership role in their design or product teams, and service design might sound like something for the stakeholders to philosophise about. “Better to get on with useful code and design techniques ,” some might understandably suggest. However, brand and product experiences are influenced by outside factors, some of which are beyond the design team’s control. Therefore, to consider all potential customer touch points and avoid fragmenting into disjointed experiences, design teams can start thinking of themselves as holistic service delivery units with all members contributing valuable domain knowledge such as business, marketing, design, code, server technologies and data systems. Service design creates opportunities for team collaboration as well as increasing the potential to successfully meet audience metrics or conversion and retention goals. What does AI have to do with it? The current rise in artificial intelligence and robotics is leading to the rethinking of, and sometimes the entire overhaul of, established product roadmaps and ecosystems, as well as their related user experiences, business logic, server infrastructures and data sources. These new paradigms lead to consumer-focused cognitive realms. Using service design as a discipline to account for the intersections of people, infrastructure, communication and physical components in planning and organising your product, results in a map or sequence of events and functions that effectively represent your product’s or organisation’s digital and physical interactions with its audiences. when designing our services, we must consider what customers do or do not understandAt the same time, it also offers an opportunity to generate ideas for innovation. Apart from honing a user-friendly and relevant product, service design can uncover ways for a company to stay competitive by aligning its capabilities to the service sustainably. Already, machine learning is making different media, data and transactions accessible in visual and auditory formats, pushing the boundaries of familiar human-computer interactions. This is encouraging designers to reframe current user experiences beyond traditional inputs and outputs to service. Introduction to service design Service design methods go hand in hand with tried and tested product design methods, while adding new facets to the design process. The different schools of thought generally converge around these general methods: Definition of actors (users) and actions (steps taken by users and behind the scenes) involved in the services that are being designed. Scenarios, use cases and sequences of actions and actors’ roles usually captured in a service blueprint. Components of the service, including people’s contextual information, interactions, technical systems, business logic and data sources. The variation in the methods above helps define the requirements for the product or service and its underlying system that supports it. They all, however, make wide use of anthropology and ethnography disciplines, including video-ethnography and other contextual inquiry techniques to really gain a deep understanding of users’ behaviour. Other familiar user experience research methods are widely used including contextual interviews, personas, task analysis and journey mapping to capture vital information about users’ lives and what they go through on a day-to-day basis to make the product or service relevant. The end result is a blueprint of the service that details the components and interactions of the product by using well-known techniques from software development to capture functional requirements of an app. This includes service scenarios and use cases, but also goes beyond that by capturing key user behaviour and expectations. Jump-starting a service design culture Service design methods allow us to develop and iterate a future for our customers with enough flexibility baked in to change direction and move forward in to comfortable team development cadences. With such a set-up, we can manage progress, research implementation of up-and-coming trends and technologies, and have the ability to deliver better and faster services with true business value such as lower operating costs and efficiencies. However, service design methods and strategy alone won’t get your organisation to the future your customers will exist in. A true service design culture must exist to get your digital teams working on what matters most while iterating on solutions and improving existing products. Service Design Tools is an online archive of methods in diagrams and deliverables formats that can be used for generating service blueprints, user journey maps and other service design artefactsAdditionally, considering artificial-intelligence opportunities in our products through service design methods puts us in tune with our customer expectations and gives us the ability to provide actionable users’ data to our stakeholders. As stated earlier, service design practices are generally related to the disciplines of product design, interaction design and systems design, and are represented in the following phases: 01. Discovery Here the aim is to first gain a full understanding of the problem(s) that need solving and the overall context. The discovery phase is very hi-octane in the sense that there is a lot of idea generation and sharing while uniting the teams, at the same time that expectations are constantly being reset, especially on the part of stakeholders. We understand their business dilemmas and work with them to remain flexible while maintaining integrity to the user experience and long-term vision for the product(s). Activities include: design workshops and customer journey mapping. 02. Design Findings from the previous phase are synthesised through arduous working sessions that sometimes turn into passionate arguments but eventually result in high-level concepts and other design artefacts. This is a good time for developers and system architects to weigh in with their valuable input as such decisions impact the technical architecture and business requirements, and result in support of an enhanced digital experience. The design team does well in establishing a systematic way to design aspects of the enhanced user interface that is immediately followed by A/B testing using remote services. The findings of such tests can be presented to the team along with the new designs. Such practice leads to addressing potential and sometimes blatant “design problems” that can easily cost more to fix once a product or app has been launched. If ever the team cannot come to a unanimous agreement on the design, prototyping and testing can resolve this. Activities include: user interface sketching, wireframes and prototyping. 03. Development At this stage, a unanimous agreement has been set by the team and developers sometimes pair with other disciplines to produce and deliver all components. After a solution is launched, teams observe the success against predefined goals and metrics, always keeping an eye out for future improvements. If there's one service design method that can lead to many gains, it's the ubiquitous customer journey mapWhere to begin If there is one service design method that can be easily exploited and leads to many gains, it is the ubiquitous customer journey map. I have personally been involved in journey map-design sessions where lead system architects and developers not only offered straight information about what can or can’t be achieved, but also were the most eager to share improvements and insights about the user’s journey with an unmatched empathy for the product user when describing this. Customer journey mapping A user journey map can define the ecosystem of users, processes, tools, systems and data that endorse the user experience. Consuming a service means consuming an experience, a process that extends over time. The customer journey truly illustrates how our audiences perceive and experience the product over time. It also considers people’s lives before and after they interact with the app, leading to valuable insights. A critical first step in creating a customer journey is to decide the starting and stopping points, as these serve as a safety net over which the service is explored, organised and visualised with the methods discussed in this article. When designing journey maps, identify and arrange the sequence of user manual and automated tasks to achieve a goal while engaging with a product. Journey maps promote a shared understanding of all the elements that make up user experiences including what a user is thinking, feeling and needing. However, instead of being a “catch all” or a design where every possible outcome is covered, journey maps are most useful when the end state of the journey achieves a desired goal, as this allows the design team to target specific user behaviours, attitudes and motivations – and what can turn them away. The effect of letting users drive their experiences Most of the time, users understand their needs better than anyone, although at times they might not be able to vocalise it like a designer would in creating a mental model. For example, when designing our services, we must consider what customers do or do not understand. This can lead to improvements in terms of support and organisational changes, even if we’re not the ones responsible for them. The thinking outlined in this article proposes some valuable techniques and insights that can lead to a service design transformation that feeds up the organisation. Start small by sharing with like-minded people, looking at issues that arise from another point of view and arguing using well organised information or proposing a user journey map. In time, others will get involved, moving the entire organisation closer to a holistic service delivery mindset. Related articles: 10 essential TED talks for UX designers 7 UX tools to try this year How to design a chatbot experience View the full article