NH Design's Blog

Graphic Designer

[wildragon]

Bogsneaks are great!

(He’s name is Jumanji.)

[nh-designs]

Inspire To Make

😱

Ch Ch Ch CHECK IT!

[nh-designs]

Thought of the day

The only thing you can always change is your attitude. Bad things happen sometimes, if you have a good attitude in the way you react things can be solved and people people around you are happy too. 

When I catch myself in a bad mood I’m quick to think to myself ‘why am I angry?’. Was it really that bad or that big of a thing that has set me off? Most of the time it is actually such a minor thing. If you can realise you’re in a bad mood you can change it. Think about how easy you have it and how privileged you are. There’s always someone out there who’s worse off then you are and that’s something I remember when I think i’m having a bad day. 

Having a bad day and staying in a bad mood can make more bad things happen and compound. If you dust yourself off and get back to doing what you do with a bright attitude everything is minimised. 

[nh-designs]

[nh-designs]

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's visit to bottles of Australia. #boa #primeministerofaustralia #bottlesofaustralia

[nh-designs]

NH first ideas, playing with text.

[nh-designs]

Clipping Paths - Adobe Illustrator

Clipping paths can be a very powerful tool in creating artwork and clipping artwork without actually damaging the original artwork. I personally prefer to use clipping paths over erasers if it is at all possible. It’s important to be able to come back and release the clipping path at a later date. It has saved me many times in the past. Mind you making a few errors early on has taught me this. 

When you are working with someone else's artwork it is imperative that you take care and don’t manipulate it. Using clipping paths correctly can save you a lot of time in the future. If the client wanted to see the logo in a different way but you had already deleted part of it this could cause time wasting and hassle. Either save yourself a copy of the original artwork or use clipping paths correctly to protect the integrity of the art. 

One thing that is frustrating is customers who rely on the clipping path to actually draw their artwork and gradients. Using clipping paths for your outlines/vectors is not a smart way of doing your art especially when your artwork needs to be separated into colours for a screen printing process. 

[fuckyeahoverwatch]

Junkrat ~ Steven K.N.

[nh-designs]

mega cool artwork!

[nh-designs]

Progress starts again for my tiger wall artwork. It’s been a long time since I had any time to work on this. I guess it’s because I am now finally starting to become more comfortable in my role as a graphic designer. I was put in the deep end in my job but that is the reason I have learnt so much in this year. In pressure situations doing what I love I have learnt the most. I am better with my time management and am finally getting old projects finished that I have put on the back burner for far too long. Please keep watching my tumblr for more updates on this piece. 

Thanks

[nh-designs]

There is a big difference between printing a colour as opposed to seeing it on screen. In the image above you can see the light orange on the right hand side and the orange 021 on the left. They are in fact both Orange 021 as selected in illustrator and the swatch booklet.  For me it’s as simple as looking inside a swatch booklet as I always have one nearby. the swatch booklet has direct matches for global PMS Colours and it is one of the items I will pick up most everyday. Not everyone has a swatch booklet so for the customer/client they may need recommendations from us to what gives the best result. it can be hard to get their head around the fact that what they see on screen might not necessarily be the exact same match as on printed materials. It is imperative that we let the customer know exactly what to expect and what they are going to receive/achieve by printing certain PMS colours. 

[nh-designs]

Rick Grimes walking dead

[nh-designs]

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: You haven't.

Thomas Edison

[nh-designs]

He who does not hope to win has already lost.

José Joaquin de Olmedo

[nh-designs]

Screen Printing

Once the artwork has been received we need to assess whether it can be done. We aren’t digital printers so there are some limitations in our printing ability. We have a few little rules that we try to stick to. At the end of the day if a client insists on something against our rules we have to do as they say. All we can do as designers is point them in the right direction and show them previous examples of work similar to what they are telling us to do. That way they can see the results before making the same mistakes. 

Screen printing Rule #1 - We will tell the client not to ever print a gradient of colour in typography. The reason is as soon as we start to use gradients the colour is not a 100% colour. It will be made of dots to achieve the percentage specified. in some artwork a gradient is a great tool to show a transition in colours. Using gradients on text will not have the same effect. It will result in blurry/undefined edges. the text definition would be lost and become fuzzy and harder to read. One way to get around this is the give the text a nice solid keyline and that would allow us to keep the integrity of the shape of the lettering intact. 

Screen Printing Rule #2 - Always try to use a white underlay when printing directly down on a coloured substrate (the item being printed on). If there is white in a design it generally makes it a simpler job for us as designers. If we can manipulate the artwork in order to print the white down underneath all of the artwork we can guarantee the exact PMS colour match. Problems arise when clients don’t have white in their designs and want to print bright colours on dark substrates. This can cause problems, an example would be printing a vibrant yellow directly onto a black bottle. Doing this without a white underlay causes the yellow to change pigment and dull in colour. The result will make your yellow end up looking like a mustard colour. This is obviously an issue for us and we will tell clients as soon as we have seen the artwork if this could be a potential problem. Other coloured surfaces can have different outcomes. It is our job to try and foresee what might happen if the job progresses.

Screen Printing Rule #3 - Always allow for movement in the screens. Colours should underlay each other in case a screen moves. Our production team will do their best to be pinpoint accurate. Sometimes the screens can move in millimetres as the screen is pressed down and stretched across the surface. We have to allow extra colour underneath the edge of the colours on top. Think of it like building up a hamburger to create the artwork. every colour will be printed on a separate layer. If a colour moves when being printed we want to have the colour printed underneath to show through so there is no gaps/holes in the artwork. having an underlying keyline (which we call trapping) will prevent this from happening if a colour moves in the printing process. Printing the lightest colours down is generally a good rule of thumb. Also good to note that White and Black will cover any colour and will not show much variation with another PMS colour underneath. We always try to print down black last if it is in a design that will give the final result a nice solid outline. As always this is determined by what we are trying to achieve for the client. 

[freshcravings]

Smooth it over with a fresh smoothie. Food art by Daria K

[nh-designs]

this looks delish

[nh-designs]

50 posts!

[nh-designs]

Drawing Vectors - my growth

Drawing vectors was not always one of my strong suits whilst I was at university. I was more comfortable using the Indesign program for the majority of my assignments. Any chance I got I would use Adobe Photoshop because I really enjoyed experimenting with the different effects/filters. I didn’t shy away from Illustrator, I was just not really adept in using it. I learnt a lot about it but I most of our assignments only needed me to use Indesign. 

Indesign is my preferred program however using one program is not a smart way to move forward as a designer. You need to fully understand the Adobe Suite and master the all the programs for their strengths. Knowing which program to use and when is important for building intricate projects. 

I was never taught the fundamentals of how to use the tools in illustrator at university, everything was self taught. I think because of this I missed certain steps in drawing vectors. I was always uncomfortable using the anchor points because I didn’t know how to use them correctly. Only now in my first graphic design position have I needed to re-train myself to use them correctly. In my current job it’s very important to have an eye for detail and to limit mistakes. We only use vector because we use a screen printing process. There is a lot of artwork that isn’t supplied to me in vector/outlines and I am required to redraw it, allowing us to break the artwork apart and prepare it for print production. Every colour in the design will be separated by us as designers and re-formatted to print in a specific order to give the best outcome. It is imperative that we have vector graphics otherwise we can not specify which parts of which designs are particular PMS colours. It’s rare but sometimes we print flattened artwork, and this can only be done as a CMYK print which would count as four colours (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). We charge per colour and print up to a maxiumum of 8 colours. I will cover more on this in other posts.

Thanks for reading!