Typography

Alphabets and Fonts Posters

Appreciation for letter forms and composition, with hand-drawn precision.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time

DL Flyers

Created in Adobe Illustrator.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Make the Intangible, Tangible!

In the interim, I’ve been scouring my favourite blogs, discussing trends with friends of design and marvelling at the new young blood emerging in graphic design, both locally and internationally. If you haven’t caught wind of it yet, paper is resurging among young artists and designers worldwide as an experimental material for design.

Bright, punchy and pop-culture-relevant works from artists such as Jeremais Boettcher, Julien Vallée, Asif Mian, and more, are fuelling this insatiable design trend. And it’s paper design like you have never seen before. For more info, get copies of “The Typographer’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Oded Ezer, “Tangible: High Tough Visuals”, edited by R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, M. Huebner and “Hand Job: A Catalog of Type” by Michael Perry, all available from Amazon.com but check out your local book shops, too, for stocks.

These books showcase one of the most prominent developments in contemporary design today – the manifestation of creative visions into material objects and spaces. It documents how designers are using the stylistic means of graphic design to implement their ideas spatially to create stunning three-dimensional designs, objects and orchestrated spaces.

The examples prove that spatial innovation in graphic design is not limited to experimental work, but is being sought out more and more by commercial clients, for example, in store design. The examples in this book reveal how the intangible is made visual through handmade craftsmanship, physical experiences, visual environments and staged spatial installations such as art installations, interiors and architecture as well as urban interventions.

The awesome creations of Canadian-born graphic designer Julien Vallée incorporate such splendid handcraft and digital technology. In his cover art for the book Tangible: High Tough Visuals, Vallée uses his multidisciplinary approach to create a stunning, almost palpable cover by staging his design spatially via crafted three-dimensional objects and lettering. Not limiting himself to print, he uses the stylistic means of graphic design to create art installations, motion graphics, animations and video designs. His playful graphics have gained him commissions from clients such as MTV, Swatch and New York Times Magazine, to Kanye West.

In a short, online interview for Gestalten TV, Vallée talks about “giving material another function and really creating something different”. Bored of the pre-formatted computer technique, he discovered that paper is a fantastic way to escape from the tediousness of digital and give the materials exciting new dimensions. Add stop motion techniques, Flash and some visual effects to the mix and you have a winner! On that note, check out BluBlu who uses three-D space in yet another unusual manner – animated graffiti wall paintings.

Now, that’s inspirational.

Subscribe to our newsletter and get these tasty design bits monthly.

Type design and Serifs are Back!

Well, this month it is all about being in style, regardless of the medium you are designing for, you need to be on top of your text styling techniques.

The impact and effectiveness of a layout, whether intended for print or web use, hinges, most often than not in my opinion, on its creative text treatment. Every designer knows that importance of solid and appropriate use of fonts to complement and enhance a layout. We have all experienced that inevitable disappointment when faced with an otherwise beautiful image or illustration, and amateurish typography.

Are you struggling with Typography? Don’t know your serifs from your sans-serifs? At a loss when faced with hundreds of fonts in your font list? Can’t style your web text as easily as in print? Try these tips and resources to improve your typography skills in general:

An old favourite book of mine is still “The Non Designers Type Book” by Robin Williams. Although some years old already, I still find it a valuable resource for bare essentials typography and it’s easy to read for beginners. Check it out at Amazon.

Have you come across a font that appeals to you and you don’t know its name? Try sites like Identifont or What the Font, two great sites to answer those annoying font queries.

Good typography isn’t only selecting a font, but also requires a technical knowledge on optimising spacing, avoiding hyphenation and justification problems and applying punctuation correctly. Often these topics make for very dry reading in a text book or online, so why not enrol in our InDesign Essentials Skills course to get the basics of typography? These topics are covered in a fun classroom environment, with loads of practical exercises, not to mention learning all the fantastic layout tools that Adobe InDesign® offers designers for both print, interactive and web use.

And now something for the experienced typophile, you may be pleased to know that Serifs are Back. Oh yes, and how! Check out Sushi and Robots, Design Taxi and Carsonified for only 3 great examples of beautiful use of serif fonts online right now.

Online typography design is even more of a mystery to designers. The text often doesn’t look they way you want it to, no matter what. Right? If that’s your situation, its time you checked out our featured HTML & CSS Essential Skills evening course coming up in November. This course not only demystifies XHTML as a means of structuring online info, but provides absolutely necessary page and text styling tools through the use of industry standard CSS to turn your web sites into works of art.

Subscribe to our newsletter and get these tasty design bits monthly.

Open Days

Visit our premises, see the student work and meet informally with our lecturers.

Scheduled Open days for 2010:

• Every Friday from 20 Aug until 19 Nov (1pm – 4pm)

Email us for details or phone on 021 402 0303.

Poster Design

Movie Posters 2009

Created by students using basic camera techniques, props and lighting. Edited and completed in Adobe Photoshop®.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills

Movie Posters 2008

Students are required to prepare a set for shooting their own movie poster, including art directing a photographer, providing props and models and makeup. Then touching up and adding special effects and typography in Adobe Photoshop®.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Alter Ego Posters 2009

Created by student after Adobe Illustrator basics training, exploring the huge variety of special effects tools, filters and advanced pen tool techniques. Completed in Adobe Illustrator®.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | 1 year Web Design & Interactive Media | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Alter Ego Posters 2008

Created by student after Adobe Illustrator basics training, exploring the huge variety of special effects tools, filters and advanced pen tool techniques. Completed in Adobe Illustrator®.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | 1 year Web Design & Interactive Media | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Label Design

Wine Labels for an existing, local wine estate

Label designs created from scamps, digitised and produced, by current FOD students, in Adobe Illustrator®, Adobe Photoshop®, as part of a campaign project including brichure design and wine box packaging.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | 1 year Web Design & Interactive Media | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Cross Media

Sustainability in design 08

Print campaigns involving combinations of drawing & scamping, storyboarding of a TV Ad, layout techniques, photo manipulation and special effects and presentation. Students are required to incorporate design and printing techniques that are sustainable for the environment.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Mixed campaigns 08

Print campaigns involving combinations of drawing & scamping, storyboarding of a TV Ad, a print advertising campaign that culminates in a DPS (double page spread), POS item (point of sale) and an online web site concept too.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Hand Rendered

Exploring letter forms as imagery

A sample of tactile projects created by full time students, allowing the exploration of letter forms, line work and basic drawing.

Related courses: 2 Year Digital Design Full time | 1 year Web Design & Interactive Media | Adobe Photoshop Essential Skills | Adobe Illustrator Essential Skills | Adobe InDesign Essential Skills

Final Movie Julia Serpil Ronja

---

Photoshop Tutorial (Curves)