Chocolat is a text editor software/app for Mac and recently it offers, as many other softwares companies do, a free trial of the software before users buy its app. Cleverly and playing just a little bit on the Graphic Designer's vanity… Chocolat offer the app to be used after the trail is over, HOWEVER, it will display everything in Comic Sans, gutted! 

Comic sans was designed by Vincent Connare originally to imitate comic book writing and was released by Microsoft in 1994. All sounds good, but, comic sans is undoubtably one of the most hated fonts in the majority of graphic designers font folder (if it hasn't been purposely eradicated already) and there are many reasons for this. In my own opinion, Comic sans represents amateurish design where maybe someone has made a poster to sell their bike or to notify the public about a lost pet or in fact, anything where any 'non designer' has just chosen what they think is a simple and suitable font or favorite font for their purpose, but of course it usually is not the right font… but hey, who cares, i mean if everyone knew which font to chose and when to use it, Graphic designers would have very little purpose other than spending their time pointing out such insignificant concerns. The only time when one should be worried about the use of comic sans is when a professional Graphic designer has used it in a Corporate Identity for a professional business or something that requires even the slightest degree of seriousness as opposed to a t-shirt that Bobby the clown would wear while performing his hilarious act to a group of 3 year olds at a birthday party.

A guide to the use of comic sans. It is pretty funny but there are some nice examples of comic sans posters albeit they are examples where the font is actually being used as the subject at hand. Smashing magazine has already got a list of examples and you can see them here.

Cameron Chapman wrote an article about the history of comic sans here and also researched a little deeper into the subject so you can find out all you want about it there. I just think the image above is a lovely tongue in cheek hint at the vanity of some graphic designers. Have a look at the following video, the whole story there…it is worth the watching as there are some fanatics out there.

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The Original Post is Located Here: comic sans and graphic designers

Help Remedies packaging design It is made from 100% recyclable and biodegradable materials.

We all think we are very environmentally friendly and are always on the look out for new ways to improve our lives through the most up-to-date environmentally friendly innovations. We want to have a greener business and all know that ‘sustainable is good’, we also know that if our clients can see that our company is environmentally considerate they will buy our products. As they say, every little helps and by buying into your eco friendly business and products your customers are not only purchasing the products themselves but rather a piece of mind.  Being aware of your carbon footprint is important however it is not always the cheapest option, in fact… it is rarely the cheapest option, it can take more time, require more accurate research, cost more for production and in turn less profitable but then of course it can also work entirely in the other direction. With more and more people showing interest in their carbon footprint and sustainability there is more and more desire for a cleaner product a product that was created with the welfare of our planet in mind.

So, as a graphic designer that until recently was just offering a service, the most I can do to be eco friendly in my day to day business apart from watching my own carbon footprint, is to encourage my clients to use the more environmentally friendly materials for their printed matter, less plastics in their packaging, less energy in their production overall design sustainability etc etc. My office runs on natural energy, I have recently taken a step back towards the handmade, through sketching with pen and paper rather than the mouse, using recycled paper in my printers, using tree free 100% cotton paper for my letterpress print jobs (where possible) buying second hand inks for the letterpress rather than new inks (soya inks are supposed to be the more eco friendly alternative but I have read a few negative reports about howthe way they are produced is far from eco. So I see it by using rubber based inks which I managed to find on ebay I am not creating any more waste and in turn being more sustainable) Although printing is one of the ways a graphic designer can make a difference, packaging is also a very big issue and one that design has a lot to do with. One of the most eco friendly packagings in our history is the egg carton introduced in the 1930's, Its design has not really changed that much. It is functional, inexpensive to produce and of course protective to a certain extent. Here is a note I found with regard to carton packaging…

Carton packaging is the most eco-friendly claims study 
Cartons are the most environmentally friendly form of packaging cutting carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuel consumption by up to 60 per cent compared with other forms of packaging, according to a study conducted by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

full report can be read  here

Eco-friendly solution was to use embossing and to the right the techno vacuum pack

A Green Pack is the way forward, packaging which reduces the environmental impact and ecological footprint and at the same time must meet the functional and economic needs of the present without compromising the future. With this in mind I have selected a number of  interesting packaging designs where great design meets ecologically friendly and sustainable functionality.

Everything is 100% natural…  sugarcane bagasse pulp paper, coated with sugarcane lignin and printed with vegetable-based inks

once again packaging using sugarcane pulp paper and vegetable-based inks

Previous use and a second life for this coconut shell. Fuegos Luxury Cigars

extra virgin olive oil packaging

Pasta Garofalo, new eco-friendly and biodegradable packaging by Angelini Design

Chris Chapman’s Roll-Out Vegetable Patch. A cardboard step-by-step gardening system for growing your own vegetables.

Green packaging for Nooka Glue-less. Simple dye cuts making a feature of an otherwise plain carton.

The Original Post is Located Here: design sustainability and eco packaging design

Just a short note to let you know what is happening here in Cologne at the moment. The Art Cologne Fair is currently underway and will run for 5 days (last day 22nd April) it was established in 1967 as Kölner Kunstmarkt (Cologne Art Market/Fair) and it is regarded the world's oldest art fair of its kind. This year the ART COLOGNE FAIR will be a cooperation of two independent Fairs, namely the Art Cologne Fair and the NADA Cologne Fair. 

Approximately 200 International galleries will showcase Classic Modern, Post War and Contemporary Art in Hall 11 of the Cologne exhibition Centre. The NEW CONTEMPORARIES section will spotlight cutting edge works. 

If you fancy going to the Fair then tickets are still available here.

Some Featured Galleries – These are the galleries and artists featured but the Images shown may not be on display at the event.

Stephan Balkenhol from Galerie Forsblom

Vlado Martek from AANANT & ZOO

Alex Olson / Alan Reid  at Lisa Cooley

The Original Post is Located Here: Art Cologne – International Art Fair

The following pictures of beautiful packaging examples may not be the most recent package designs, but they are however, some of the best packaging designs for food and drinks or at least in my opinion. As usual a simple approach, clear colours and message are what makes these stand out from the rest. Surprisingly, the majority of this lot of designs don't even have photographs of the product as we so commonly see in food packaging design. Not a bad thing though, as we all know the images of the beautiful pre-packed meals which are displayed on the box are usually far from an accurate representation of the contents.

Food & Drinks Packaging
My favourite and often award-winning food and drink packaging designs were and still are from the supermarket chain Waitrose in the UK. They allways pushed the boat out for their packaging and it was always grabbing your attention and yet at the same time, simple and pleasing to the eye. Design companies that worked in the past on the Waitrose packaging included Lewis Moberly, Turner Duckworth, Bhavesh Chauhan, Swissmiss, Studio 176 to name but a few.

In 2005 Lewis Moberly created this new packaging for Waitrose for a re-launch of its rage of specialist pre-packed cheese and the resluts are simple, sophisticated and appetizing. The packaging is of course still modern today. Lewis Moberly are also responsible for the following Waitrose herbs packaging and a few others featured here.

The Waitrose Fresh Herbs Packaging Design won the Bronze Award in the EDAwards 2009 Packaging Design

I love the tongue in cheek go at starbucks

Jamie Oliver's food packaging is also a big hit  with simple and yet striking hand made effect labels etc. The Packaging Design of champagne glasses and salt & pepper pots etc. here are by Pearlfisher

The Original Post is Located Here: Beautiful Packaging

Creative Guerilla Marketing Examples are everywhere and this post they are in the form of Media Billboards. Billboards have become much more exciting in the last 10 years and there are certainly some brilliant campaigns out there which are catching our attention and causing us to have a chuckle, stare in momentary disbelief and of course just to appreciate the ideas. My favourite ads are those that hardly need the logo to be included such as the Guinness billbord on the bottom, I was actually surprised the logo was included on the banner, as the normal marketing/branding rules do not apply when using gorilla marketing.

problems downloading? cpould just as easily worked for the following campaign

problems downloading? this one is not for toilet paper but rather a laxative

really clever one for miele's vacuum cleaner

same idea for 2 different energy companys and executed differently: They both work but i prefer the Eslom electricity example.

gruesome fun with a handful of sliced pigeons lying on the ground below the 'giant razor blade'

more examples of guerilla marketing from earlier posts here

The Original Post is Located Here: Top Guerilla Marketing Examples & Media billboards

Just a short last minute post for anyone stuck for an idea over the easter weekend, how about this origami easter bunny. I stumbled upon some great easter bunnies out there on the net but the instructions are not always accompanying the images so it would be almost impossible to work out some of the more complex folds and so I will supply a link to some folding diagrams below. One other cool idea would be to fold the bunny out of a bank note as a gift for the kids. have fun!

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great idea for all those square cakes you will be baking .

more folding instructions for origami easter bunnies.  

Cube Bunny Diagram

more diagrams for easter bunnies (larger selection)

The Original Post is Located Here: Last Minute Easter ideas – Origami Easter Bunny

There is a cool event happening here in Köln (Cologne) this weekend and it is the largest Illustrators festival in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) which takes place of Friday, 20th of April until Sunday, 22nd of April in the DQE Cologne honor field. 43 professional Illustrators coming from many diverse fields such as Advertising, Freelance, Editorial, Product, Comic and Children’s books will be there showing off their skills. This is the first time they are presenting as a group and to such a wide audience here in Köln (Cologne) the large variety of the commercial and freelance illustration coming from in and around Köln (Cologne). Visitors will be admitted FREE and will be able to participate, especially the kids. There will be displays, presentations, a conversation round, live drawing, times workshops for children. I will certainly be taking my 8 year old budding comic artist J who was only last week showing some comic illustrators here in Köln Südstadt (Cologne South) his own graphical works. Here are a few of the exhiubitors works. If you are in Köln (Cologne) then it would definitely be worth a visit. Here is the web address.

You can see some featured illustrations by friend and illustrator Marine Hardouin an earlier blog here.

The Original Post is Located Here: Illustrators / illustration Festival/Event in Köln (Cologne, Germany)

We just had our good friend and graphic designer Mette Malling over from Denmark, (Copenhagen to be precise) for the weekend. Pleasantly enough, the weather here in Cologne was fair, but that didnt really matter as we were stuck inside the studio producing a short run of simple letterpress business cards for Mette on the Adana 8×5. Before Mette arrived I asked her to produce a design for the cards so I could prepare the artwork onto a transparent film and so when we began we only had to expose the graphic onto the polymer plate and then fire away with the design…or so we thought. Friday was not the the 13th but it may have well been if luck was anything to go by. Nothing worked out for us, Mette had used a small serif font for her card and although the Polymer was up for the challenge we were a bit rough handed during the wash out (actually Mette was) and we managed to lose a dot from the ‘i’ in ‘info@’ on the email address. Of course we had already inked up the letterpress and arranged the polymer on the base too and luckily we noticed the fault before actually doing a complete run. So, we exposed another piece of polymer and off we went. Now, unfortunately we were using the wrong polmer for the Base and so the inking was not working as well as planned but in the end and after much make ready we were able to get the simple cards done. 

I wish I had taken Mette’s advice and simply made the layout using our lead type, we even had a very similar font there but I thought it would have taken too much time to asssemble the letters into the desired layout. Well, not to worry, the cards turned out well in the end and I have been given a nudge to get my Golding Official printing press working properly so I can start doing larger runs of cards like 10 at a time rather than 1 or 2 which was sadly the case with the smaller Adana table press. Unfortunately, I fortgot to take some pictures of Mettes card so I will try and get her to do one and send it to me to upload. While I was on the subject of business cards I had a look around the web to see if I could find some cool letterpress business cards and so here they are. You can also watch a video here about business cards on one of my earlier posts, it is hilarious. And here is another post on how letterpress actually works. Enjoy!

nice simple design on this one too… simple one colour print

I like this but the main logo is not embossed but rather debossed. looks well smart though.

the paper is really nice and the imprint not too deep. looks smart.

lovely, you must be careful with letterpress not to overdo the pressure. Without ink you do need to give it a bit more depth. just the ticket here though.

Justine Ungaro cards, nice, wish i could see a picture of the other side too

looks like it is coming through to the other side on this one, but a nice design and idea all the same.

edge painting is a letterpress printing trade secret, or at least so it seems. Nobody wants to tell how they do it and there are lots of different suggestions out there so this will be the trial and error I am afraid but I will start with a nice tight clamp of the card and use a brush followed by a sponge or cloth to absorb the extra colour. I assume that this could work but I have read of cases of the cards sticking together. Airbrushing could also work as it is sort of instantly dry in the right conditions but then the ink is different and so it needs to be matched to the ink used for printing the cards. I will post a little update when I get a chance to do the edges, it would be great to do our own kikisoso creative business cards so watch this space.

another lovely example of the edge painting on Andy McMillan's cards. Mr. Manager no less!

like these little card sleeves and have tried looking for a nice 100% cotton paper sleeve myself for a client project but they are not easy to find. if anyone knows of a supplier then please let me know.

The Original Post is Located Here: Simple letterpress business cards

I have already shown the finished product on my blog and will provide a link to it at the end of this post but I have not really answered the question how to letterpress. This is just an example of how letterpress works using a small table top press, in this case an adana 8×5 or as it is also often written, adana eight five. Although there are many other printing methods this is my favourite hands-on method and although I also like to do lino-cuts and wood cuts etc. i find that with letterpress I  can get top quality results. This small press can be fantastic for achieving professional results but take s a bit of tinkering to reach them. Business card size is idea as you can really get a nice even impression and also as deep an impression as anyone would need. These particular letterpress cards were for a luxury clothing brand based in luxembourg and the nature of the business it was very important to have a luxury label to suit the product itself. We used a 100% cotton paper for the labels which was designed to maximize letterpress imprinting but they also have a really smooth feel to them. The Client had suggested a further element to the cards and so when the letterpress printing was completed the cards were then given a red wax stamp which really completed them. Here are some pictures of the press and the process of printing the cards using a photopolymer plate for my type in this case.

Letterpress printing is not easy in the beginning and everyone needs to get to know their machine and papers and of course which ink suits them best. In this case the job was quite urgent I had to use oil based inks rather than my usual rubber based inks which take longer to dry. In the end the client and myself were very happy with the results  

the rollers are just laying a thin layer of ink onto the polymer plate as they roll down and then up again. to many passes can overink the polymer/type and this causes a mess and it is a pain to remove the ink from the plate or type as it is easy to knock your registration off while doing this. Lessons already learnt… the hard way

the polymer plate with a thin covering of ink ready to be pressed against the paper.

Here you can see the ink has made contact with the paper and I have achieved just the right/desired impression with my print. Deep enough to feel the indentation with a finger tip, but not so deep that the edges of the paper bulge around the type, although often used in letterpress today I find very deep impressions a little ugly. Unfortunately, there is always the desires of the client to take into account and so sometimes, we have to make more impression than we would like to get the right effect for the paying customer.

previous post featuring the finished cards can be viewed here and another post showing a great letterpress video A collection of inspiring Simple Letterpress Business cards can be found here, enjoy!
 

The Original Post is Located Here: How to letterpress – Adana 8×5

Not really the most interesting post today, but a question on my mind for the past two months. On December 8th last year I ordered the Apple LED Cinema Display 27 after a long time deciding whether it was worth the money or not, after deciding it was not but I was going to buy it anyway, i made my order of the apple cinema 27" in a local mac dealer here in Cologne. When I placed my order I was told there was a 3 week waiting time, which of course is a long time, and I thought well, I can't find it online anywhere else and I supposed there was a rush for people buying the Apple Monitor as a Christmas gift and therefore accepted that I had to wait.

Five weeks after the order of the Apple cinema 27 I decided to contact the dealer and was told that there was no sign of the monitor and they would contact me when they heard something from Apple. Now, this is Germany and I don't mean to be unfair but in my personal experience custom support is rarely pleasing and in this case it is as always relatively poor. This means I have been contacting the Apple ReSeller on a few more occasions about my Apple Cinema display since 12th december to find out when I can expect my order to be told they don't know. I would have thought that after almost three months they might have contacted ME to tell me the progress (if any) but, as usual it was up to me. I wondered why they had not just phoned up Apple and said "Hey apple, where is our customers cinema 27 monitor?"  and then maybe Apple could say something like " We are not continuing our Apple Cinema Display 27 because we made the new Apple Thunderbold Cinema Display 27" monitor and although it does not function with your 1 year old Macbook Pro you can just simply order another Macbook Pro which will work with it"  but apparently it is not so easy with Apple, That is the words of the dealer. of course.

SO, Today, 27th February 2012 (12 weeks tomorrow ) I am still waiting for my Apple Cinema Display 27 and have no idea whether Apple are continuing to make the LED display or whether I have to buy an alternative. I was hoping that there would have been a new connector or something which would allow the Thunderbold Cinema display to function with my 1 Year old Macbook Pro but after wasting endless hours searching online for an answer, it seems that there is no solution other than to pay another 2800€ for the latest 8gb Ram Macbook Pro. I would love to hear from anyone that knows whether this LED Cinema 27 is going to cease production or whether it will be available soon, otherwise I will buy one on ebay or the likes which is less than a year old and then purchase a Apple Care Plan to save me the headaches and give me a little assurance. I would ask apple but you know, "It's not that easy with apple"

Update 5th March 2012: Still nothing from the Apple dealer and I missed a gem on ebay just the other night as I tried to bid on an Apple LED Cinema Display 27 which was only 4 months old and had a full warranty until 2014 from Gravis. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of using my iPhone 3Gs to make a bid in the last 30 seconds, it failed miserably as since updating to the OS4 accidentally while charging my iPhone it runs slower than you can imagine. I mustn't complain though, it is over 2 years old and it seems that apple products are only supposed to last for one year anyway.

Update 12th March 2012: the screen arrived and it is fantastic. Glad I waited for this one and didnt go buy one of the second hand ones on ebay as this model also includes the three cable which powers up your laptop keeping your desk free from unwanted cable mess. I recommend this screen highly, the colour is fantastic and for someone who appreciates music the speakers are a treat compared to the laptop. Another great thing on the monitor is the isight camera, it is much sharper than that of my macbook pro and I am using it quite a lot all ready. 
 

The Original Post is Located Here: Apple LED Cinema Display 27, unavailable?