Tag: Design

A basketball net, viewed from above, secretly forms a 24-sided shape: an icositetragon. And somehow the bottom of the net also looks like three overlapping squares from a forgotten 1993 sports logo manual.

I made a Josef Albers painting by accident while fixing someone's logo colors.

Do you have a friend or loved one who adores libraries? For their upcoming birthday, consider creating a unique and thoughtful gift by wrapping their present in custom-made wrapping paper featuring a design inspired by the date stamps found in…

Did you know that Photoshop can draw instant trees?

Will you welcome Comic Sans into your heart, mind, and ethics?

Back in the 90s and 00s, the Wingdings font was the precursor to emojis, and it's so adorable.

Every day I check the Eiffel Tower webcam. Many days the colors are pretty nice. I’d like to grab a quick color palette to tweet with my @EiffelLive Twitter account. Today’s Eiffel Tower view is peaceful. Gray and white tones.…

Winslow Homer’s paintings are full of dichotomies. Earlier this week, I uncovered eight paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection with wonderful dual meanings. Themes like life and death captured in one painting. To really punch these double interpretations,…

The new General Motors logo is very curious. It employs design trends from each of the past five decades. Perhaps General Motors wanted a logo that was timeless? If you use trends branching across a wide spread of time, that…

Are you ever looking for a font that is super-duper condensed? A font so tall, that you can barely read it? A skyscraper of a font—even more than a skyscraper—I want a font that is a 1,450-foot tall stick. Is…

Want a free graphic design magazine mailed to you six times a year? Here is a funny story about how my free subscription was accidentally mailed to someone else for five years. Graphic Design USA has been the trends magazine…

I just love getting promo emails from Quark trying to convince me to move back to Quark’s design program. I used Quark XPress in the late 90s in college, and at my first two jobs, but Adobe InDesign came and…

The Museum of Science and Industry is renaming the museum to be the “Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry” Sounds pretty silly right? Look at how long that name is. Plus, Chicagoans notoriously hate renaming buildings. The Chicago…

The screenshot tool is so incredibly handy tool. (also known as screen capture on Windows). With the Mac, if you hit command-shift-4, you get a crosshairs to click and drag the area you want to capture. Today I accidentally dragged…

Google Fonts is amazing collection of free fonts. 916 font families just waiting for you. You can download them all in one zip file totalling 407 MB. I haven’t updated my Google Fonts collection since 2015. Today I added the…

For a design comp, I quickly selected a Google font, Encode Sans. Because it comes in lots of weights thin, extra light, light, regular, medium, semi-bold, bold, extra-bold, and black. WONDERFUL! Such glorious options. And then quadruple over these options…

Some key commands are easy to remember. Command-c for copy. But what about obscure ones like Indesign’s command-option-j for underlining text? (In Indesign that’s called a paragraph rule). What does the letter j have to do with underlining text? Maybe…

How to fit 100 columnists, 15 comic strips, and 50 employees into one holiday invite. This year I was asked to design the invite to our company holiday party this year. Normally, this would be finding some nice holiday stock…

I have a penchant for creating really complicated Christmas cards. This year I decided to print fifty photos onto strips of paper. Then slide those strips into a clear plastic ornament. Kinda crazy. But also kinda fun. Here’s a preview…

When your company syndicates Dick Tracy, you often get to have some fun at work. Four months ago we moved out of the Tribune Tower, and into our new office space in One Prudential Plaza. In the recreational part of…

Rotis Semi Serif not a serif. It’s not a sans serif. It’s an in-betweener with hinted serifs. Your body text does not want hinted serifs. Your body text wants either full serifs or none. But good news! Rotis does come…

Back in the 1930s, the Tribune Tower’s observation deck boasted one of the best views in Chicago. The ticket to the observation deck looks a bit like the 1984 State of the Union ticket. Ah, vintage design.

The design of the State of the Union ticket has gone through several evolutions through the years. Most recently a typo appeared on the 2018 State of the Union ticket. Oops! Ok, the typo is pretty bad, but many other…

  [button link=”http://spudart.deviantart.com/art/Science-fiction-is-totally-cool-589672191?purchase=print” size=”large” color=”orange”]» Art prints and canvas available[/button] Giant alien robots invade Chicago! Death rays shoot out of their eyes. The campy setup makes for a great B-movie sci-fi thriller poster. What could be more fun? Swap out…

  [button link=”http://spudart.deviantart.com/art/Science-fiction-is-Knowledge-invention-589673191?purchase=print” size=”large” color=”orange”]» Art prints and canvas available[/button] A worm dressed in an astronaut uniform watches a rocket blast off into outer space. Totally crazy. This is the final poster in this series of three illustrating the etymology of…

  [button link=”http://spudart.deviantart.com/art/Science-fiction-is-Knowledge-fiction-589672726?purchase=print” size=”large” color=”orange”]» Art prints and canvas available[/button] Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy is always one of the top results when googling for vintage sci-fi posters. The design of this poster fit exactly what I needed for my…

Since 2010, the Super Bowl didn’t use any color in their logo. For 2017, the Super Bowl 51 logo will use red. Why red? A few thoughts why red is being used in the Super Bowl 51 logo: The colors of…

40 years ago today on January 2, 1976, NASA released a 60-page Graphics Standards Guide. It’s awesome to see the design of the worm logo standing the test of time (despite the fact that NASA retired the worm logo in…

When you Google a color’s hexvalue, the entire browser should turn that color. A couple other thoughts related to hexvalues: What are the most popular hexvalues used on websites? Certainly search engines that crawl billions of websites would have stats…

What is the perfect snack to enjoy while watching the moon turns red and slowly disappears? I found myself pondering this question while sitting on my back porch watching this rare celestial event. Digging through the pantry, M&M’s became the…

What if you found a masterpiece painting laying on a busy sidewalk? Certainly you would look at it. Maybe you might even pick it up, or photograph it. During autumn we have millions of such masterpieces laying on our sidewalks.…