Table of contents for March 2020 in Computer Arts

As you peruse our typography in branding feature over on page 46, you’ll see five very brilliant, very different examples of how typography can galvanise and even define a brand. Whether you’re keen on kerning or disinterested in descenders, all designers should get a kick (of varying magnitude) out of the Tt insanely creative world of typography. It’s creativity under a microscope! Perhaps it’s because of the astonishing number of moving parts involved in a successful typeface that most initial reactions to them seem intuitive. But, as Simon Dixon explains in the feature, there’s a lot of work that goes on behind that gut reaction. “It’s the specifics that make the experience more relatable,” he says. “The tracking and kerning. The legibility and different sizes. The satisfying feel of a…

dutch.scot When briefed to modernise the branding for London-based French restaurant Orrery, originally designed by Terence Conran, DutchScot looked to the stars. The studio drew influence from the orrery mechanical model of the Solar System that shows the relative motions of planets and moons. “The space is filled with light,” says Ross Goulden, DutchScot’s creative partner, adding that its elegance wasn’t conveyed in the “heavy” previous branding. The new logo uses geometric slab serif font Beton and sees the letters “orbit” around the initial “O”. Stills were then taken during different stages of this orbit and printed on to menus and business cards. The designs were also inspired by the restaurant’s circular look and colours of its dishes, and the studio worked with Jemma Lewis to create marbled patterns printed…

vanderbrand.com Vanderbrand recently created the new brand strategy and visual identity for organic, sustainably sourced sparkling water brand Sapsucker. The Toronto-based agency’s branding looked to stand out on-shelf from competitors by focusing on its Canadian roots and aligning it with wellness products to create a holistic brand with consistency across packaging, “witty” copywriting, social media and more. “We explored many iterations of how we could incorporate the tree or woodpecker in the graphic language, but it didn’t represent how the product had evolved,” says senior art director Melanie Hong. “Our approach needed to take a step back from literal interpretations of tree water.” The wordmark is inspired by “Canadian nostalgia” such as sports apparel and packaging, and pairs historical-leaning typeface Central Avenue by Colophon Foundry with the modern low-contrast grotesque…

Christopher Scott Professor of graphic design, Universidad UTE christopherscottdesigner.com “In 2012, nine months after finishing my masters at the University of Ulster, I was invited to give a workshop at the Metropolitan University in Ecuador. As soon as I walked in, I met the director. He told me: “Christopher, I have an opportunity for you.” It was to become a professor of graphic design in Ecuador. Saying yes was a huge risk. It involved plunging myself into a new language, new culture, new food… new everything. To say that it was tough would be an understatement, especially in the first year, when just buying some bread in a shop was very stressful. But seven years on, I’m still here teaching at the University UTE, which continues to be an amazing…

From a distinctive approach to using type, right through to a fully bespoke typeface, brands are exploiting the wide-ranging potential of typography to express themselves. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but every brand should be aware of typography’s power as a differentiator, and have a strategy for using it in the most appropriate way. “No matter the medium or the audience, type is everywhere that a written message needs to be conveyed,” says Lukas Paltram, creative director at leading type design studio Dalton Maag. “Creating a unique expression at that essential level of communication is extremely powerful. It can be a big asset for brands to stand out, and it enables them to use a unique voice in their visual communication.” Creating bespoke typefaces is expensive and time-consuming, and may not…

HIDE REPLIES ON TWITTER Twitter is famed for its troll problem, and that may put you off sharing work on the platform, particularly client work. But a new feature means that if you receive offensive responses to your tweets, you can hide them from public view. While these tweets aren’t deleted from Twitter, they are placed behind an extra click that will take most of the sting out of the tail. Just click on the downward arrow on the top right of the tweet and choose Hide Reply from the drop-down menu. RESTRICT ON INSTAGRAM Taking a similar approach to Twitter, Instagram is road-testing a feature called Restrict, which enables you to shadow-ban users who comment on your images in offensive or abusive ways. This mode can be activated via…

BUY ADS ON INSTAGRAM Illustrator Subi Bosa (@subi_bosa) has found advertising on Instagram has paid off thanks to its targeted use of data. “Over a few ad runs, I’ve learned that my prime client is an African-American woman, who is a mother, lives on the East Coast and posts online content about motherhood,” he explains. “As a result, I’ve been able to help these women produce their self-published picture books.” BOLSTER IRL RELATIONSHIPS Bringing together virtual and physical networking can be a killer combination. “I’ve found Twitter useful in cultivating contacts initially made in ‘real life’, at events and so on,” says illustrator and designer Andy Carolan (@AndyCarolan). “For example, recently I was awarded a brand identity contract from someone put in touch with me by a client that I…

REFUEL YOUR ENERGY We’ve found you sometimes have an excess of creative energy that doesn’t find a home in your commercial projects. This in itself can be a source of frustration. Being able to use these ideas in playtime can prove to be inspirational and energising. TRUST YOUR GUT Nobody can predict the next big thing in design. At its best the industry is driven by passionate creatives who strive to deliver their best work and have a jolly good time doing it. As a designer you should aspire to do just that. We feel the best design sparks from a sincere intent of its creator. TEST YOUR MIGHT When you’re not constrained by a specific assignment, you have the freedom to experiment. Playtime is an excellent opportunity to flex…

The dark art of typography is perhaps the most mysterious and magical graphic design discipline. It can be bewildering to the uninitiated, yet is capable of drawing the most vitriolic reactions. So the challenge was making a cover that appealed to type-nerds (sorry) and the more casual designer. First thoughts were to use a bespoke typeface. But how to create a typeface that expresses typefaces? We also played around with some concrete-poetry inspired, negative-space defined TYPE formed by the editorial text around it (geddit?) but eventually, again, we drew a (literal) blank. A brief flirtation with Mark Bloom’s wonderful Coanda (mashcreative.co.uk) sent us somewhere that threatened to be a premature redesign, so we returned to our first tentative layout sketch (it’s always the way) where we used the cyan, magenta…

Often, the best design tools come about almost by accident, in response to a specific problem. And that’s exactly how Dekks, a new presentation app for creatives and creators, sprang to life at International Magic, an experience design studio based in UK and Germany. Why did it need to build its own app to create presentations; weren’t there enough solutions already? “None of them worked for our studio,” states partner and creative director Adam Rodgers. “So we decided to take matters into our own hands.” The main requirement was ease of use, to help the team create professional-looking presentations more quickly. “As International Magic had grown, and more people had became interested in our work, we’d found ourselves creating and sharing presentations more and more,” Adam recalls. “We were drowning…

Last year, Land Rover officially brought its iconic Defender back to life with a relaunch at the Frankfurt Motor Show. After originally retiring the stand-out Defender in 2016, a relaunch and reinvigoration three years later isn’t always the easiest to execute. Success requires precise planning to ensure an impactful return to market. The challenges that Land Rover faced are synonymous with all product relaunches and they must be overcome to ensure that once-idolised products and services don’t flop on their great comeback. We’ve experienced this with Precipice Design’s recent work on bringing back Braun’s iconic LE Speaker range, originally designed by Dieter Rams. A brand relaunch must be tailored to contemporary needs and align with the latest trends within the sector that the product once dominated, while maintaining the qualities…

Typography has defined The Public Theatre’s brand identity since 1994, when Pentagram’s Paula Scher crafted its logotype using original woodblock letters that had not yet been digitised. Fourteen years later, in 2008, Paula updated the logotype, setting it in six different weights of the Knockout typeface. “I selected the wood fonts, and later Knockout, because they were used in newspapers in the late 1800s, and then in boxing posters in the 30s, 40s and 50s,” she explains. “The type is populistic, so it was perfect for this not-for-profit, inclusive, and often groundbreaking theatre.” Each season, Paula collaborates with artistic director Oskar Eustis to agree a summer headline that captures the spirit of those productions – past examples have included Free Love and War and Love. Working primarily with different weights…

instagram twitter linkedin behance Is being on social media helping to advance your career? If the answer’s no, you’re not alone. For every designer or illustrator who gets their big break thanks to a post or tweet, there’s a dozen with nothing but sore thumbs and a tension headache. So what’s the secret to making social media work for you? To start with, in 2020 it’s impossible to make good use of all the different social media platforms. There just aren’t enough hours in the day, and it’s much better for your productivity (and sanity) to focus on just one or two. But which ones? Well, while everyone’s different, our research suggests there are four platforms that most Computer Arts readers will find useful at this present time. In this article we’ll…

Lately, Twitter has started to offer a new level of flexibility when it comes to images: so for example, you can now add multiple images to tweets (up to four) and add images to retweets, too. But in general, it’s clearly a less-visual medium than either Instagram or Behance, so you might think that creative professionals would find it less useful. In fact, though, many designers and illustrators today are harnessing the 280-character service to drive their careers forward. Artist Emmeline Pidgeon (@emmelinedraws) tends to post finished illustrations on Twitter, as well as sharing news of new books and projects. “At times, I’ve had about 70 per cent of my work come through the platform,” she says. “Many commissions come through getting to know people there, or them spotting my…

While Istagram may get your work in front of a lot of eyeballs, most of those eyeballs won’t be people working in the creative industries. In contrast, Behance is tailor-made for promoting yourself directly to agencies, clients and collaborators. “During the past eight years, I’ve lost count of the enquiries for freelance projects or interviews I’ve got through Behance,” says Davide Baratta, design director at Impero. “It’s enabled me to connect with the design community and collaborate with other designers all over the world.” At first, Davide just used it for inspiration, and was so intimidated by the quality of others’ work, he was “genuinely scared” to post. But once he took the plunge, he realised the power of the platform. “It gives you way more exposure than just having…

For many illustrators, the search for a personal style can be disheartening; the idea that a consistent and recognisable style is a prerequisite to becoming a successful illustrator is a stubborn one. But what if we didn’t have to look at style as that perfect uniform filter colouring our portfolio, but rather as a versatile tool to expand our creative possibilities? According to a recent survey by Ben the Illustrator, 74 per cent of the responding illustrators are dealing with mental struggles. Stressing over your style shouldn’t be adding to that. In this article I hope to share my insights on the matter and show examples of how that search for style can become a liberating process instead of a limiting one. IN PURSUIT OF MY STYLE When I was…

Reuse your assets A modular approach to creating slides will make it easy to re-use blocks of content and reduce the amount of duplication, while a state-of-the-art asset management system will make finding and using images, videos and text quick and easy. The key feature of the app will be enabling you to store ideas in the system, so they can be recycled and brought to life in a brand new format. Intuitive interface Dekks will work across browsers and devices via an intuitive interface, with features engineered to maximise individual and team productivity. The app’s core features are being created to remove the bugs and annoyances creatives often report when making presentations. Adaptable templates You don’t need to worry about your presentations looking like every other companies’. Dekks promises…

“Overall our formula is tried and tested with some key points of difference each year,” says festival co-founder Bren Byrne (right). “The surprises come in the discovery of work you weren’t aware of, and of shared process and problems with creatives working in different fields and different stages of their career,” Bren adds. While the 2020 main stage lineup is 95 per cent confirmed, Bren says that they try to leave a slot or two open for late additions to the festival, giving the flexibility to invite those who release a very exciting recent project, for instance. WHO’S ATTENDING? This year’s line-up is as varied as ever. Key speakers include the legendary April Greiman, German illustrator Olaf Hajek, Pentagram partner Sascha Lobe (right), creative studio Acrylicize founder James Burke, and…

Design work that features a strong graphical element is probably best suited to appearing on Instagram. The most visually focused of all the social platforms, it’s the go-to place to see work by artists, illustrators, animators and 3D artists. On the downside, you’ll have to work around the default square image format, and you won’t be able to add links to posts unless you sign up to the new Instagram Checkout service for selling goods. Illustrator Haley Tippman has been using Instagram to share her work since 2017, and around 95 per cent of her assignments originate from art directors finding it and contacting her – either through DMs (direct messages) or via the website she links to in her bio. Note, though, that this doesn’t always happen instantly. “Usually,…

Cluttered, text-heavy and, well, ugly, LinkedIn doesn’t look like it would be fertile ground for creative professionals. Yet in 2020, many designers and illustrators are making good use of it to develop client and business relationships. This is most marked at the agency level. For example, Simon Dixon, co-founder of DixonBaxi, uses LinkedIn to find not just new clients, but the right clients. “We view how we look for clients as a kind of curation; finding the right ambitious people driving significant brand change at interesting companies,” Simon explains. “LinkedIn is excellent for understanding this.” And you don’t have to be a studio head to take advantage of LinkedIn’s level of detail, he adds: “Anyone looking to develop broader prospective client and collaborator reach could benefit.” Freelance illustrator Tahgasa Bertram…

JOIN A COMMUNITY “Find a niche you’re obsessed with,” recommends motion and graphic designer Ben Darvill (@bendarvill), who posts side projects and experiments on Twitter. “Become embedded within the community and slowly create fans, then begin to rub shoulders with marketing professionals within the niche. It makes sense for them to hire people who are knowledgeable about their field.” BE AUTHENTIC Don’t try to paint a false image of yourself on social media because it won’t wash, says illustrator Antony Hare, who won two commissions last year, a film poster and an editing/animation project, via his Instagram @antonyharepi. Instead, he advises: “Be yourself. Imagine talking to a group of people when you type your tweet. Maybe the group is small, maybe it’s large, but tweets don’t exist in a vacuum.…

TOYKYO The Belgian city of Ghent is the home of this multidisciplinary design studio. Built on the shared philosophy that creativity, optimism and originality are key elements in life, the studio was founded in 2006 by Matheui van Damme and Joeri Steegen (aka street artist Pointdexter). As image-makers, TOYKYO enjoy navigating the blurred lines between graphic design, illustration, murals, animation and set design, thriving on versatility and creative challenges. Its partner agency Case Studyo collaborates with leading artists and illustrators on limited edition, functional art objects that are sold to art collectors and design fans worldwide. toykyo.be JOERI STEEGEN Joeri started creating his own universe using paper and pencil. The love for explosive visual culture was further cultivated when he discovered a new set of tools: spray cans. Continuing his…

ELENI DEBO Eleni illustrates books, editorials and advertising campaigns for a variety of international clients. When she’s not working, you can find her hiking in the Italian Alps. elenidebo.com GARRICK WEBSTER With over 25 years’ editorial experience, copywriter and journalist Garrick has recently helped develop retail, manufacturing and alcohol branding. imageandtext.co.uk RUTH HAMILTON Ruth is a design journalist based in Bath. She writes for a variety of design titles, and is currently the deputy editor of the popular website Creative Bloq. ruthemilyhamilton.wixsite.com/portfolio NICK CARSON Nick is an independent content strategist and copywriter. Recent clients include Virgin, Superunion, Jack Renwick Studio, and D&AD. nickcarson.agency…