picture.words

I'm a self-taught illustrator who lives for ideas and creating little works of art! Currently working on several self-initiated picture books for children, which I plan to have finished by December 2014. My blog is a tool to help keep me inspired and motivated as I journey the tough creative road ahead.

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There is no “correct” solution to a designproblem, only an array of possible solutions.

Itsoncraft

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EXPERT ADVICE 6 TIPS TO BOOST YOUR CAREER Jessica Walsh Stay persistent. Coming up with a good idea is only a small part of the process – you need the passion and persistence to sell the idea and see it through. Adhemas Batista Humble up to learn. You don’t know much, and you will never know enough. Open your mind to constant learning and success will follow. Jon Burgerman Don’t copy what seems to be popular now, because everything moves on and then you’ll just be behind the times. Also, your peers will bitch about you behind your back! Learn from what’s around you, but put your own spin on it. Jeremyville It’s a long journey, but do it for the reason that you want to be great, not to be famous or for quick money. That will lead you to make bad career choices. Kjell Ekhorn, Non-Format Trust your instincts and pursue your interests. It’s your individuality and talent that will make you stand out in the long run, so you might as well embrace your individuality and hone your talents right from the word go. Jon Forss, Non-Format Never ask a client what it is they want – ask them what it is they are trying to achieve. Your reputation needs to be that you’re a designer with imagination and originality, not that you do as you’re told or that you might be, as one ex-client once revealed, “a little cheaper than Kall Kwik”.

Computer Arts, March 2016

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20 TIPS FOR NEW DESIGNERS AND ILLUSTRATORS 1 KNOW YOUR NICHE Mads Jakob Poulsen, creative director Think about what you can contribute to the world of design. What’s your niche? What’s your special secret weapon? Don’t be like everyone else – do what you think is fun. 2 HAVE A SINGULAR VISION Tony Brook, Spin If you make things the way you think they ought to be, they’re more likely to be what you’ll be asked to make going forward. It took me a long time to fully understand this. 3 STAY TRUE TO YOUR PASSION Rob Gonzalez, Sawdust Stay true to what you’re passionate about. It will give you longevity, which is what you need to gain people’s trust and respect. 4 BE VERSATILE Sebastian Padilla, Anagrama A designer needs to be versatile, like a Swiss Army knife. You need to be comfortable with working in broad fields such as typography, composition and copywriting. 5 REFINE YOUR SKILLS Matt Howarth, ilovedust Hone your skill set. Whether digitally or by hand, work hard on your craft every day and in time you will find a style that you are comfortable with and, most importantly, enjoy doing. 6 FOCUS ON IDEAS Jon Waring, 3Sixty Design Work on your craft, but also on your ideas. High-quality words and ideas for brands make you eminently more valuable. 7 FOLLOW YOUR HEART Dawn Hancock, Firebelly None of us really know what the hell we’re doing, but if you think with your heart and go with your gut, it will all work out in the end. 8 STAY INSPIRED Tommy Taylor, Alphabetical Look for inspiration everywhere you go and from everyone you meet. 9 LOSE THE ATTITUDE Steve Simmonds, weareseventeen My tip for a new, young designer starting their career is to lose any sense of entitlement you may have. Just because you’ve studied for three or five years doesn’t mean you can come into the industry and expect it to be easy. This sounds harsh, but I get young designers all the time telling me what they are and aren’t willing to do from day to day. You must remember that it’s not just graduates fighting for their place in this industry; seasoned pros and entire companies are fighting too and good attitudes make all the difference. Be keen and enthusiastic: it goes a long way. Bread and butter work is a staple in any studio, so expect to be heavily involved in a lot of this at first. Don’t expect to be working on all the bigger studio projects. This will happen in time; just approach the bread and butter stuff with bags of enthusiasm and make those projects shine unexpectedly. Do this and your rise through the ranks will be swift. 10 STAY THE COURSE Good Wives and Warriors Our general tip for people is to just try and stick with it! A creative career is going to be peppered with rejection and potentially confusing times. Without sounding too trite, it’s important to try and believe in the value of your work and keep pushing through the times when you feel like quitting! 11 BE PROACTIVE Gavin Lucas, Outline Artists Create work because you want to do it – not because you need it. Got a mate who runs a club night? Offer to make them a logo, create a flyer or make up some button badges. Show them you can design a website too, while you’re at it. Any designer who says they can’t do a website or can’t make button badges isn’t a designer. You can do anything. You can make anything. You can learn anything. If you really want to do this, prove it. The most successful people in the world didn’t wait for jobs to land in their laps; they created opportunities by working with people, collaborating, working for nothing (when appropriate) and creating work they could be proud of. Are you doing all of this? Congratulations, you might just make it as a designer or an illustrator. 12 WORK HARD Ollie Munden, ilovedust My biggest tip is to work harder than everyone else around you. 13 AVOID GOOGLE Kay Khoo, Kyoorius My one tip for new designers and illustrators? Stay away from Google. 14 IDEAS ARE VALUABLE Jamie Ellul, Supple Studio Your slick typesetting or mad skills in Photoshop won’t make you stand out to an employer or client. Only your thinking will. Have ideas and execute them brilliantly. And be nice – it’s a small world. 15 TAKE RISKS Ady Bibby, True North Stand for something. Take risks. Don’t be happy to merge into the mediocrity of creativity out there. 16 GET ON WITH IT Jim Bull, Moving Brands The act of doing is always better than thinking – get on with it and you’ll be successful. Start stuff! 17 BE CURIOUS Juan Molinet, illustrator Curiosity is your best friend. Embrace it – you never know where you’ll find inspiration. 18 CONSTANTLY COLLABORATE Sebastian Padilla, Anagrama Team up with different people and avoid becoming redundant. 19 DON’T FOLLOW TRENDS Pomme Chan, illustrator Stay true to who you are. Never change your design to follow a trend. 20 ONLY WORK WITH PEOPLE YOU LIKE Fred Deakin, designer and teacher Biggest lesson: only work with people you like on projects you care about. If you take your time to make great work then eventually the money will come. Secretive, technically brilliant, dazzlingly creative: Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn of Non-Format “picked up graphic design and shook it wildly until everyone’s head was spinning with excitement”, according to one panel member, Sawdust’s Rob Gonzalez (you can read his nomination on the left). It’s little surprise that the cross-Atlantic design duo have taken second place in our poll of the top 20 most influential designers of the last two decades. Forss and Ekhorn have built a reputation for uncompromising innovation. They’ve led the way in expressive typography and deconstructed graphic design since launching their partnership in 2000, and have been inspiring creatives and clients alike with their boundary-pushing branding, packaging, and editorial design. The pair, who recently merged with top Scandinavian studio ANTI, designed our stunning die-cut cover this issue (you can read more about the cover design on page 3) and the illustrated numbers you’ll see throughout this feature. They’re two of the world’s finest designers – and their peers think so too. What does teaming up with ANTI enable Non-Format to do that you couldn’t – or weren’t doing – otherwise? Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn: Non-Format remained a two-man team for a full 15 years, but it was starting to annoy us that we had to turn down some really interesting projects because we didn’t have a big enough team to back us up. Teaming up with ANTI gives us all of that and so much more. We can really concentrate on what we do best, and we now stand shoulder to shoulder with world-class talent in the fields of design, advertising, TV and branding. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on. Your work has inspired so many designers. Who’s had the most impact on you? JF and KE: M/M (Paris). For the past 20 years the two Ms have demonstrated time and time again that notions of beauty and legibility are subjective almost to the point of irrelevance. They seem to understand more than any of their contemporaries that there are few things as hollow as instant gratification, and that there is nothing more sterile, ineffectual or futile than trying to appeal to everybody. The words ‘demographic’ or ‘focus group’ have probably never once crossed their minds. Long may this continue. JF: I wouldn’t be surprised if I mention Brian Eno every single day. Apart from his obvious contributions to some of the best albums ever made, it was his 1996 diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, that really made an impact on me. That book is the only perfectly legal mind-altering drug that I know of. No one looks at the world quite like he does. Eno hasn’t just influenced my work: he’s changed the way I look at absolutely everything. KE: The late Japanese art director Nagi Noda’s work embodied a flamboyant, quirky and stylish visual universe, where everything was seemingly possible. She drew from an irresistible mix of fashion, art, pop and Japanese culture to create fantastical and otherworldly concepts for her commercial clients. It was as though she was looking at the world from a different angle and many a time, when Jon and I have struggled to find strong visual solutions for our projects, we’ve asked ourselves: ‘What would Nagi Noda have done?’ What can we expect from you this year, now you’ve teamed up with ANTI? JF and KE: We’ve certainly been busy over the last three and a half months since we hooked up with ANTI. Everything’s under wraps at the moment but we do have a typographic short film that will debut at Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in New York. It was a real jumping-in-the-deep-end experience for us, but we think it’s worth watching if only for the really great Skillbard soundtrack.

Computer Arts, March 2016

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CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT TIPS From everyday observation skills to expressing even the most ridiculous idea, here’s some practical character design advice Create a set of rules. Define the graphical elements present in each character and apply this to developing a character family. Play with size and proportion to create different characters within this family. Try to incorporate a little experimentation into every project. Make everything you create personal, and you will naturally invest more in developing your skills at every opportunity. Observation is key. Be aware of your surroundings and watch how people interact with each other and how this affects things like body language and expression. Try to capture these things on paper when developing characters – it can lead to unique and unusual results. Don’t wait for your dream project to land at your feet. Create self-initiated work that crosses over between the stuff you really want to be doing and developing in your personal work, with a client brief – even if it’s one you’ve written for yourself. Think in three dimensions. Draw a character and consider how it would look from the side, the back and the front – not just flat on the screen. Sketch different perspectives. Take a deep look in the mirror. Try to distill the essence of your appearance and soul. Take a pen, bring it to paper. This is fundamental to developing your style. A strong personality assures a character’s longevity. Everything, from the eyes and the proportions, to the way a character moves and gestures, needs careful consideration. Trust your intuition and let your style evolve naturally over time. Don’t be afraid of ridiculous ideas. There’s no such thing as a bad drawing. Try to have fun with your own work and give yourself the freedom to play. Make time for field trips. Inspiration can come from the most unexpected places.

Computer arts. June 2015

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Introduction to Character Design with Tom Bancroft Trailer from Taught By A Pro on Vimeo.

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Blue Deer/ Kék Őzek from barbarabakos on Vimeo.

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What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your design career so far? A tutor once gave me the advice: decide a time when you stop working in the day, rather than when to start. I don’t always manage to follow this, but as a general rule I think there’s a danger in allowing yourself all the time in the world to work on something. Partly because it means you have no life, and partly because if there is no stop time you work really slowly. I think it’s healthy to find a point where you tell yourself ‘this is good enough’. Tied into this is the advice to not be so precious about work once it’s finished.

Computer arts. April 2015

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I would have killed for something like Tumblr back in the day. You didn’t have that level of distribution for your own work; you were at the mercy of the newspapers and the magazines. That’s why today I tell everyone who writes me, “Get your work out there!” No one is stopping you but you. Put it out consistently. Grow as an artist. If it’s good, people will find you, and you will find opportunities. There is no gatekeeper now. Good work rises to the top

C.H. Greenblatt

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Develop your own unique voice and refine your portfolio before signing with an agency. When you’re ready, find one where you’ll fit in, augmenting their offering without competing with existing artists.

Computer Arts, March 2015.

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Thinking big!

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“I watched a lot of cartoons on our black-and-white TV. They left a deep impression on me, though at the time, I had no idea which ones were in color: My family didn’t buy a color set until 1976. In grade school, I became curious about the voices on the cartoon shows. I noticed names like Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Don Messick and Bill Scott in the credits. One day, my Aunt Kathy gave me a Stan Freberg comedy album. When I turned over the jacket and read the credits, I recognized several names from TV. That’s where I first saw photos of the people who did all the goofy voices. They were adults and looked surprisingly like everyday people. They became my role models—proof that comedy and odd voices could constitute viable employment.”

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/voice-acting/spongebob-voice-tom-kenny-talks-about-his-childhood-107656.html

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Five ways you can integrate the latest tech into your design practice 1. IGNORE THE TECHNOLOGY Thin about ‘why’ you are doing something, before you consider ‘what’ it is you’re doing. This is crucial if you aspire to use new technology to its maximum potential. Remembering this will ensure your campaign is effective, rather than gimmicky. 2. RECOGNISE LIMITATION Bold innovations are frequently pitched as the answer to our problems, but in reality they can quickly begin to cause many more. It is vital to understand the limits of the technology you’re working with. 3. BE POETIC Too many technologists obsess over practical problems. Side with the inspirational rather than the rational when thinking about your campaigns. If you can find an application that strikes the right balance between rational and creative minds, great things can happen. 4. CONSIDER YOUR ENVIRONMENT The benefit of technologies such as 4D projection mapping is that it can work directly with a specific environment. Picking the right canvas on which to project is a key consideration. 5. OFFER UNIQUE EXPERIENCES The more bespoke experiences can be, the more they resonate with people. Advertising by its nature should be memorable, sharable and meaningful. The more campaigns move away from a ‘one size fits all’ model and become sensitive to people’s likes, passions and life stories, the more importance the customer will attach to the brand.

Computer Arts. July 2014. P69

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Characters looking gd, mayb try n make sure arms r aligned from frame to frame and that ther isn't two arms showin at same time. Looks bit glitchy otherwise. Guessin it's a test so plenty time to perfect it. Character Shows gd potential for animation.

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wow that sounds like u hav given it some real thought and has potential i cant wait 2cu trying 2 put that together and bring it to life - thanx 4 the update i am glad 2 hear that the energy is there but remember build a portfolio of different ideas based on current trends and themes cos that is what will appeal - remember all the otha suggestions. Well done but remember to work to a deadline so u dont drift :-)

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I've loved all the recent illustrations you're doing. You have to keep going! I'm no crazy about the cheek treatment, but I'm not the artist. You're the artist! Are these for movement or for illustration? I still think you're often working from the outside in, rather than the inside out! In other words, planning the whole book out rough from beginning to end. Creating a blue print. THEN applying the finish! Get the WHOLE thing planned out first! It's like you don't want to do color and design on one character and put them onto pages with backgrounds, then realize that the character doesn't quite work. And you have TONS of characters! Is this about a family of many many many? But I'm very happy you're being creative and having fun! And learning software! Excellent! And then you have to explore the motivations of the characters. What made them the way they are!! Motivations are KEY. I know! You're doing great. You're going to animation already and you haven't done your blue print? Do the blu-print! Rough out the whole book from beginning to ending! You're wasting valuable precious time if you don't! You'll find out a lot of things when you rough it all out! Keep it super rough. Move things around. Look at layout and how it all flows. Get this out of the way before you start doing technical things!

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hello? how are you? are you using after effects or flash? i forgot?

I'm ok thanks I hope you are too? I'm using after effects but since this is just a test I only used jpg sequence to play it all back. It'll get more advanced later. What do you use?

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Zadey animation test