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The ZehnKatzen Times
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The blog of a graphic designer in Portland Oregon, trying to find his main chance. Filled with observations of the obvious and the not-so-much, an obsession on graphic design, a love of writing and Photoshop, Illustration, and the desire to become ma
Recent Posts Tagged With 'design'
[design] Another Thing Crowdsourcing Design Work Kills ...
2282. … actual creativity, as in at least trying to come up with something original.As detailed by SpecWatch here, an icon from a site called Vecteezy was used in not only a "contest" on Crowdspring, but also on 99designs. The icon, a round design...
[logo] 10 Best and 10 Worst Identity Redesigns of 2009
2280.From Brand New, the 10 Best (and 10 Worst) ID Redesigns of 2009. They take in a wide swath. This'll have spoilers, but you'll definitely want to surf to the article to read the comments, especially considering the Best of the Best of.The worst h...
[type] Consider H&J\'s
2276."H&J's" are layout-speak for "hyphenation and justification", and they are the bedrock to successful text-flow in your layout application, be they QuarkXPress, InDesign, Scribus, or whatever.Modern type and more advanced layout programs seem...
[design] The Cherriots Transit Map
2273.The graphic look for Salem-Keizer's public transportation system - the Cherriots – have changed, and they're looking more slick and together.The website itself, http://www.cherriots.org, has gotten a major makeover. The old site didn't have ma...
[ad_design] What Might Have Happened If The D&D Club Started Drinking Canadian Club
2256.Last year some ad agency came up with an ad campaign for Canadian Club whisky based on a certain retro perception of The Sixties Dude – a campaign that was a little bit rude, rather un-PC, and played on that proletarian worldliness that could ...
[liff] Unpaid Layout Work is STILL Layout Work …
2253.… ands I lurves me some layout work. And I work best under a deadline. I hate them and I love them. And my hands are very full. Working in InDesign CS3 to lay out the OryCon 31 Programs and the Sierra Club Columbia Groups Columbia Overlook. In...
[art] Drawing Comics With Doug TenNapel
2250.Doug TenNapel gave you Earthworm Jim and GEAR, and now he gives you about ten minutes or so of his time to show you how he does what he does and talk about storytelling: What is interesting about TenNapel is, with just about everybody (up t...
[type] letterPLAYGROUND: Type Play For The Peoples
2247.What is letterPLAYGROUND?It's just what it says it is. No fancy web-based application, just a site where you and I and everyone we know can riff on letterforms, make them art, upload them, share them, and have fun.It's type, it's art, it's playt...
[type] Laika – A Font That Dynamically Responds To You
2244.I've always felt that type is not as static as people think it is. Even printed, unchanging type has the power to move, influence and change moods (imagine a Last Will and Testament in Times Roman. Now, Imagine the same document in Comic Sans. H...
[blog] My PDX Street Typography Photo Featured At Portland Building Ads And Other Vintage PDX Signs
2243.If you're interested in Portland streetscapes, funky found typography, and Portland visual history as I am, then you already have Portland Building Ads blog (http://pdxbuildingads.blogspot.com) in your blogrollio somewhere. So, when the propriet...
[design] How To Layout A Comic Book Cover
2241.Ever wondered what it takes to create a decent-looking comic book cover? Well, it takes Adobe InDesign CS3/CS4, Illustrator CS3/CS4, Photoshop CS3/CS4, and this tutorial from the most inspired design blog. It merges photographs and computer grap...
[logo] What If Logos Used Comic Sans?
2231.Here, we keep beating up on Comic Sans (which, as history will show, Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft BOB), which is a little unfair, because Comic Sans didn't really spread itself everywhere, but someone asked themselves the eventually un...
[design] What Is Graphic Design?
2227.This nifty little short will tell you what graphic design is the best way anything can – you'll react to it. … if you got a message communicated, that was graphic design. It's art and typography and color and hierarchy and awareness an...
[packaging] I Can Haz Canned Cheezburger Naow
2218.We are not entirely unfamiliar with the efficacy of canning food to make it travelable and extend shelf life, and although the idea of finding imported Heinz Treacle at the Hawthorne Fred Meyer (that has to be boilt in the can before being eaten...
[logo] Another Reason Why Helvetica Is Cool
2214.It resolved a logo design impasse – and the sum was immediately, obviously, greater than the parts:I was working for Quiksilver as a tee shirt designer.” Said Dean Bradley. “In the building late one night I began to hand-write the company ...
[type] Georgia And Arial Are Finally Getting That Print Polish
2210.Verdana and Georgia are two fonts everyone has seen. They're all over the web, literally; MSFT dubbed them part of the set of core fonts for the web, and every computer with a commercially-produced OS likely haz them. They tend to occasionally ...
[type] Max And Les Kerning Are At It Again …
2209.Suitcase Fusion, Extensis's signature software product, have been pleasing Mac typophiles and designers for years now. Well, they're now available for Windows. (via Manage This at blog.extensis.com) Click to the above link if the video is ...
[design] Paul Rand: "Don't Try To Be Original, Just Try To Be Good"
2207.Words of inestimable wisdom from the late Paul Rand, via Logo Design Love, in a nifty 3-and-a-half minute animated video: Here's a link to the YouTube page because there's just a white rectangle when I try to load the blog, and I never know ...
[design] PortlandOnline Design Contest Throws Light On The Poison Of "Spec Work"
2206.The recent retracking of the PortlandOnline.com "Refresh" web design contest into a banner-design only contest (thanks to local creative professionals standing up along with AIGA to remind the city that good design work comes from committed prof...
[design] Fantasy and Science Fiction Themes in TV Since Star Trek – Amazing Graphic Treat
2205.io9.com's Stephanie Fox is someone I am now a fan of. Her genius here is the chart, and her production goes to show how an aptly-designed chart can give you a distilled view of trends that you can get your brain around.Starting the year after St...
[design] Paste Into – The "Other" Paste Command In Photoshop
2200.The joy of Photoshop is that it has more features than you can shake a stick at. That's also the heartbreak, because there are so many it's easy to forget ones you would find mad useful. And one of those is Paste Into.It's an advanced version of...
[design] Personas: Data Mining As Graphic Design
2199.Something that should be meaty food for thought for everyone who communicates online is available for a time. It's called Personas (http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html). It's a crit of "data mining", which is not only the way places l...
[pdx] Life's A Sign That Gets Stolen From A Nonprofit
2197.I think that there should be a space reserved amongst perdition's flames for people who would steal from feminist non-profits:Bitch magazine (http://bitchmagazine.org) is a non-profit, feminist media and advocacy. Go to thier site and read up on...
[web_design] Getting a Letterpress Effect With CSS
2196.Here's a nifty trick I stumbled onto yesterday. Letterpress is very chic these days. The look and feel of letterpress is unmistakable and immediate: it imparts a level of craft and artisanship that make each letterpress piece a personal statemen...
[design] 10 Gems Of Logo Design Truth
2195.Logo design talk frequently becomes the stuff of "whalesong and joss-stick', as the pugnacious IT site The Register likes to wag. To a degree it's true; the talk of color, influence, graphic elements and design frequently sounds like one needs a...
[design] Separated At Birth: The 2001: A Space Odyssey EVA Pod and The New MAX Green Line?
2194.The design sense and style are certainly the same. See how the design zeitgeist works?I'm tellin' ya, man, that's kinda eerie. It'll all be fun and games until Frank Poole gets stranded at Clackamas Town Center.Technorati Tags: MAX Green Line, M...
[design] I'm On The Bēhance Network
2189.A very happy thing happened today. I just received an invitation to participate in the Bēhance network, http://www.behance.net.The Bēhance online network is part of a company whose stated mission is to organize the creative world to make ideas...
[design] One-Hour Photo – The Early Days Of Adobe Photoshop
2178.In the beginning (the 1980s), there was Display, which was a neat program developed by Thomas Knoll to display (well, yeah) grayscale images on his Mac SE. His brother, John, who just so happened to be working at ILM at the time, encouraged him...
[branding] If You Have The Real Thing, You Don't Have To Keep Changing It
2174.You know how they say a classic is timeless? Check out this history of the Cola Wars:Copyright Duncan Riley, originally postedon (and hotlinked from) The Inquistr hereThe original article (see the link in the caption) has little to say about the...
[satire] The Onion's Short National Nightmare Is Over
2170.The Onion is now back to normal, displaying the banner of a "former subsidiary of Yu Wan Mei". Good to know.The material published during the paper's Great Leap Forward can still be viewed however:http://www.theonion.com/content/chinaThis was on...
