Tag: Design

The opportunity: The Art Institute of Chicago was asking for “surrealist objects” last week as a promotion for the current Magritte exhibit. The objects will be selected by the curator of the Magritte show and will be displayed in the…

Art museum bathrooms. Clean, sharply designed, austere. Much like the white walls of a museum, most bathrooms within art museums have a modern, contemporary yet neutral feel. Among the granite tiles and light gray walls of the bathroom in this…

Boredpanda.com reports: October Jones (real name Joe Butcher), the prolific writer and illustrator… is at it again with a fun series of sticky notes featuring a grimly determined cat named Peppy posing next to motivational messages. He draws them and…

Do you love amazing views? Do you love amazing architecture details? The next place you should visit is–surprise! Walgreens. Walgreens recently moved 40 steps from its cramped quarters above the Billy Goat into the first and second floor of the…

Without one color in the spectrum of light, everything looks much different. We need the range of all the colors in the spectrum to see the immense possibility of everything. Are you an expert in something? If you aren’t, do…

Think of a creative department. How many designers are normally on staff? A couple. Maybe up to six or eight. You’d normally have one manager for these two to eight designers. Just how many graphic designers are there in America…

A dog sits in a kitchen and smells unseen fresh bread. He patiently waits for this delicious treat. For the past couple of hours here at Panera, I’ve been looking up at the painting, appreciating how the yellow in the…

Watch a little boat fly up and down the Chicago River releasing green dye (youtube video). The pattern the boat follows looks like the one would use mowing the lawn. Next year I wanna see zig-zags! If the boat was…

Looking for some creative sources? Here are 60 (formerly 45) websites that bring interesting posts. You could subscribe to them using an RSS reader like feedly.com. 3quarksdaily: 2,000 readers A Creative Universe: 664 readers Art in America: 232 readers Art…

Giant yellow tennis ball is attacking Wrigley Field! What would that yellow sphere be? Ideas are explored on my baseball blog, Supernova at Wrigley Field captured in 1958 Topps baseball card. It’s a fun interdisciplinary blog post covering baseball, world…

If you are ever stuck on a color palette for a design, just pull out a bag of M&Ms. Grab a handful; and lay them out on the table. Viola! There is your color palette. That’s what happened to me…

This is a very interesting call for artists. As a public spaces artist who does not want concealed firearms to be legal in Chicago, I’m going to be giving this proposal some serious thought. If you are pro-gun, I’d like…

Pepsi originally thought they had Coke beat with this Halloween ad, but Coke’s unofficial response is actually much, MUCH better than Pepsi’s original concept. (source: thenextweb) First off, a red cape is not scary. What was Pepsi thinking that putting…

The sunlight hit just the red part of the tree blowing on the fire to give the blaze more life. The colors were saturated even more by the HDR photography of the ProHDR app on my iPhone. Originally I was…

Ahh these whipper snappers thinking they are old, talking about Photoshop CS3. Please. I’ve worked on Photoshop 3.0. That’s right. The ORIGINAL Photoshop. Before Adobe started naming them CS and CC. When Photoshop CC 3.0 comes out, designers in their…

There are at least 23 cities named Paris in America. I’d love to see the Eiffel Towers of each American Paris. If your town is named Paris, you HAVE to feature an Eiffel Tower. It’s a rule. All the Paris…

Yahoo trying to be like Google Google has an embossed logo. Yahoo now has a beveled logo. Google has a logo with super-thins. Yahoo now has a logo that is very thin. Google does many variations on their logo. Yahoo…

What do all these logos have in common? They are all designed by Ruth Kedar of Kedar Designs. Notice how all the logos are very pointy. The sharp pointy aspects of Google’s logo has always been awkward. The serif on…

If your company is desperate for new customers, you would probably respond to customer inquiries, right? Quark was the king of the design layout world in the 1990s. Every single professional designer used QuarkXPress for layouts. However, in 1999 Adobe…

The 15-year-old blogging platform Xanga is about to shut down. To revive the site, they are asking users for $48/year. However, Xanga demonstrated three things not to do when asking for money. 1) Don’t use two spaces after periods. My…

When i’m on the phone, instead of doodling, sometimes i like to type random repetitive letters. The f and j fit together rather nicely: Yes, these are all hand-typed. There are ten ff’s, 23 jj’s, and 389 fj’s. Photoshop says…

What do you think of the CTA ad for the Picasso show at the Art Institute? My brother, Erik, has some excellent points: Overall, I like it. It captures some of the cubist charm of Picasso’s work. Part of me…

If people dressed up as famous artists when visiting museums, who would you go as? I posted this question on the Spudart Facebook Page and got some fun replies. Dali, Warhol: “Someone distinctive looking like Dali or Warhol,” Tom Saaristo.…

Flickr determines the most interesting images by a combination of views, comments, and favs. Here are my ten most interesting photos from 2012. Along with each photo I give one photo technique that helps make the image interesting. Nostalgia with…

How do you pronounce the 2012 word of the year, GIF? I say it with a G. Not with a J. The creators of the word disagree, they say it’s to be pronounced JIF. But that’s stupid. GIF stands for…

Would you sit on the red carpet or the blue carpet? Richard Prouty wrote a blog post about an interesting performance artwork by Jonathan Horowitz. Here’s my thoughts: Cool performance piece. Yeah, we do end up staring at a television,…

Can Myspace get people to come back and rejoin their network? Check out their video: Josh Burns blogged, “The New Myspace“, and this is my comment I left on his post: I will personally always join any social media network…

Simplicity. Something covers of magazines today often lack. Multiple headlines cry for your attention alongside a primary photo. Editors hope one of the headlines will grab your attention while standing in line. You don’t have to pick up the magazine…

Oh the print publishing world, often they just don’t understand the digital world. Lovers of paper and ink. I come from that world. From 1997-2007 half my job was designing for print and working with printing companies. The other half…

Take a look at this contact form by chocolate maker Askinosie. It’s so cool. And when you submit your letter, it stamps “DELIVERED” on it.

Columnist Kristyn Schiavone has a fun article about grown-up school bags. You should give it a read. She touches on some good issues: — Admitting when you overstuff your bag with too many things — If you buy a backpack…