I took on a project recently to create a fake brand of a fast-food restaurant with a traditional Polish drinking angle with vodka shots as main courses and small appetizers to take the edge off.
You can see all the posters at our behance:
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Polevvka-restaurant-branding-and-posters/7733451
Who said they need to be clean and simple? Well I did. But sometimes going a little bit overboard can yield interesting results and catch attention, which sort of is the sole purpose of a business card.
Pure black is only pure when you close your eyes. In the dark
We have covered minimal design before, and every time we did the idea was to have black text on white background. Well, that minimalist approach was of course oversimplified, but a couple readers asked me about that, so here we go:
I stumbled upon a couple of blog posts recently about the issue and that made me think about it as well. The fact is that pure (#000000) black doesn’t exist anywhere in nature. Even if a surface is black, light hitting it makes it dark-grayish with a warm or cool tone. So it’s never really black, but we call it that.
Same with text. Black text on a white background creates A LOT of contrast (as high as it gets really) and that’s not very good on the eyes. The idea is to modify the extremes a little bit (both black and white) into some nice looking dark/light greys. If the general website palette is warm, we should have our “blacks” warm with a bit more red, than blue in them. If it’s rather cool, we’d add more blue to our black and have a black and blue design. Yay.
Pure black is also not good with other colours because it immediately catches the eye and distracts us from the rest of the content. I personally prefer even brighter blacks, than most designers, ranging from #2x2x2x up to #4x4x4x, with my “white” backgrounds being somewhere around #fdfdfd with a slight addition of either blue or red.
All in all toned down text is both readable and beautiful and it’s the first step to better typography. Let’s leave pure blacks to print, because after it’s printed it’s not pure black anymore (light is hitting the black making it grey too)
When people use the term “business card” we usually associate it with the boring rectangle in 2 or 3 standard sizes and forget about it. Well ok, sometimes someone uses a crazy color. But that’s not enough nowadays to catch the eye now is it? Here are 20 business card ideas that I’ve found that experiment. And surely having one of these given to you, you’d remember the company. Some are even edible!
See them after the break:
There are many ways for achieving “BIG formats” in graphics. One is using very high resolution images. Another one is using vector graphics which is scaleable without artifacts and is great for logos and simple elements. But what if we have a pretty small photo and we’d like it to be big anyway? For a while there weren’t many options but a couple of years ago I found something that I want to share with you.
Rasterbator is a tool that you can use to make large prints from small graphic files such as posters, photos etc. How large can it be? Well let’s quote their website:
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.
20 meters is quite large, isn’t it? And it’s all done by creating lots of little (and bigger) circles of many colors that when viewed from a distance create the image we want. It’s actually quite simple, a technique that was known before and used in print (old newspapers) in a slightly different way. Here it’s an algorithm that enables you to convert your photos from simple pixel x pixel ratio to something much, much bigger using dots. And many of them. What’s great about it is that it’s free to use for commercial purposes as well, so another good thing coming from the so called “community” for the fun and usage by the masses. And it’s pretty easy too.
It even can divide the image into smaller portions (let’s say A4 page format) and export a PDF with a4 pages that you can print on your home printer and then hang in the proper order to have the whole big image. Now that’s creative!
You can check out rasterbator at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator. Don’t forget to see the amazing photo gallery!