The Brilliant creative team blog

So you have been given a print job to work on. You have your layout setup and looking great, you have flowed in all the copy and created all the styles and masters you will ever need, at this point you couldn’t be more efficient... now all that is to be done is source some awesome looking photography.

Images of great photography start to flash through your mind, you know what you want and now you’re on a mission. A quick check from client notes "a young, attractive woman at a party having fun", easy!

You enter your search and wait in anticipation like a kid opening a birthday present who is 99% sure what it’s going to be, only to be greeted with page after page of the most bizarre and useless photography ever taken. What results next is hours of searching and next page clicking as your excitement dwindles into despair and you actually wish you could punch the models in their stupid faces.

Wow... what happened there, everything went dark?

Anyway, there is a fantastic website called www.awkwardstockphotos.com dedicated to the best of the worst in stock photography, seriously this is simply amazing and should be a real eye opener to those that don’t have to deal with sourcing stock photography!

Buzzfeed have also put together their top 60.

Every one knows who Annie Leibovitz is, celebrity photographer, chief photographer of Rolling Stone for over a decade, tour photographer for the Rolling Stones and erm... in debt for 24 million!

For decades she has photographed the big celebrity names and no more so than in her latest ’Dream Portraits’ series for Disney Parks marketing including; Penelope Cruz, Jeff Bridges, Queen Latifah, Johnny Depp, Gisele Bundchen, Jennifer Lopez, Scarlett Johansson and David Beckham amongst many more.

Although the Disney stuff is great I much prefer her adaption of the Wizard of Oz for Vogue featuring Keira Knightley.

Annie doesn’t have a website or portfolio online that I could find so Google Image Annie and enjoy.

Stop the Violence is a series conceived by photographer Francois Robert who has collaborated with Rick Valicenti from 3st. Francois came up with a alphabet made solely out of bones for the photography exhibition "Stop the violence" and Rick stepped in to design the book and also producing a 60 sec promo video.

There are a couple more shots of the collaboration here at 3st.

Here at Brilliant we are lucky enough to be involved with projects that require nicely designed and highly detailed illustration on a daily basis. This is mostly a good thing but it can also mess with your deadlines and cause mini panic attacks if you get carried away or even worse, a change in style or subject is required.

We love to produce artwork that is something a little different from the last but delving into the new and unexplored; whilst exciting can be deadly with a time constraint so its a good thing that everyone at Brilliant are designers at heart and not just at work!

Personally I spend as much of my free time as I can practicing my design and illustration techniques, which can be anything from an hour a night to the whole evening and few early morning hours. The practice allows me in theory more time to complete the work and produce something awesome as well as being able to offer a variety of styles, techniques and concepts.

Having an arsenal of finishing abilities behind you allows you to put more time into the purpose and messaging of a design.


(Image is a mixture of 3d, vector, photography, hand drawn elements and Photoshop techniques)

I have used a few tablets in my time and to be honest felt quite put off by them, to me they always felt unnatural, especially being so used to gaining the effects I needed with a mouse. There are many styles and techniques that just cannot be achieved with just the use of a mouse and so went out and bought myself the Wacom Intuos 4 A5 tablet.

Within moments of playing with it I felt a great sense of relief that I had not wasted my money on a cool looking but ultimately useless piece of kit. I have always been told that anyone who works with image editing, painting, or illustration software needs a Wacom tablet. Graphic designers, illustrators, visual effects artists; if you ever brush on a paint stroke, it’s seems ridiculous to use a mouse.

The pen/tablet interface makes painting and drawing much easier and faster. It’s more comfortable on your hand and, thanks to pressure sensitivity, more expressive especially within the fine details of a piece. Because the tablet can send pressure, tilt, and bearing information to the computer, you can create calligraphic brush strokes, and other effects that work just like real tools. All this without clenching your hand into the tight little claw a mouse requires.

The Intuos 4 has a scroll wheel with a big button in the middle that’s called the TouchRing. Anyone who has ever picked up an iPod will identify with this feature straight away, it can control zoom, brush size, tilt and cycle through the layers palette, in the long run it will save you so much more time.

I am really impressed with how far drawing tablets have come since I first used one and although it will never eliminate the need for a mouse, its great to be able to pick it up and just draw!

I love the fact that I can be inspired to either start a new piece, try a different approach or a new technique just by taking the time to appreciate others work. I get excited when I see a colorful illustration or a nice piece of typography but until recently, photography has never really given me the same ’buzz’.

I stumbled across the photography of Dave Hill and at first glance his work gave me that ’How in the world did he achieve that?’ Each piece has been thoroughly thought out, incredibly well composed and the details are amazing.

His website has a massive behind the scenes section which is a must if you’re like me and need to see how things are done.