Personal projects are the best way for a designer to learn because it's much easier to try different things. It's just about making decisions and building them. With Abduzeedo we try to keep it as personal as possible, at least when it comes to changes. We redesign it at least once a year, not only the overall site design but the brand identity.
We've featured quite a few posts and images with the effect most call double exposure. This technique consists of 2 images superimposed. There are some really nice examples with very intricate overlaying, usually with faces of people mixed with photos of nature. I've been thinking about giving it a whirl in Photoshop for a long time and I've finally gotten around to it.
Daft Punk is releasing their new album next month, titled Random Access Memories. While biking around in San Francisco I started seeing some posters and billboards on walls advertising the new album and was inspired by the amazing artwork. Of course, I've always wanted to do something for Daft Punk so this post's timing seems just about right.
One of the most important things when learning design, or pretty much anything, is to pay attention to how other designers tackle problems. That was my personal inspiration that led me to start sharing tutorials and case studies. They are not designed to help come up with ideas, but to help with the execution, one of the biggest problems most people have.
After over 4 years I decided to start working on a new personal site. The last time I made updates was back in 2009 and since then I haven't been paying too much attention to it, however I feel it's time for me to try some different things with it in terms of web design, responsive, mobile first and other such trends. The first thing I needed of course was a logo.
Last week I saw the new Iron Man trailer and as usual, it was nothing less than amazing. The effects are top notch and I'm really anticipating seeing it in May. There's still a couple of months until we can set our eyes on the real deal so I decided to create the Iron Man mask from scratch using Illustrator and Photoshop just to warm up and to try to improve my illustrating skills.
For this week's tutorial, I will share something new that I am still trying to learn how to do it. It's the retro/futuristic/geometric illustration style I've been seeing more and more often. This illustration is inspired by the work of Justin Mezzell, Matthew Lyons and Dan Matutina. I also see that James White has been experimenting with this style as well.
Following our series of tutorials inspired by movie posters, today we bring to you a simple image inspired by the new Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell's movie, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. The poster and the TV spot show a really nice old signage effect, that's the title of the movie.
Light effects are my favorite type of effect, I don't know why but I always liked to play around in Photoshop trying to recreate them. Then once I discovered the power of the Blend Modes, especially the Color Dodge, creating this effects became much easier.
Creating a visual identity is always challenging, there are values and messages to pass through the logo, colors and all the branding assets. We try to share all sorts of case studies for different branding projects in order to illustrate the subtleties of each project and how designers approach these constraints.
Following our movie poster inspired tutorials, today we bring to you an image inspired by Oblivion, the new Tom Cruise film we can't wait to check out. The poster has a post-apocalyptical composition of a waterfall with some ruins of old buildings including the iconic Chrysler building in NYC. Of course we loved the poster and we decided to create something similar in Photoshop.
