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.

Parking outside Brilliant HQ can be risky business, especially with the large amount of morons who do not know how wide their own cars are!

After another encounter with a fellow ’Sawbonite’ recently and more damage to my pride and joy I decided enough was enough and in true English spirit, wrote him a very angry note along with a diagram and stuck it to his car, pointing out the evidence left on his car.

So be warned, cross me and I will write you a sarcastic note and draw you a pretty picture :D

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.

These have been floating around the internet’s design blogs for a while but still worth a share if you have not yet had the pleasure. The idea is simple, sarcastic and I love them.

They are letterpress cards on a wonderful stock which you can purchase here.

My favorite so far, written from the perspective of a Mentos sweet states that Diet Coke is overreacting.

There is also a website dedicated to the Dear Blank series here.

Currently working with Adobes Creative Suite 3 I had missed all the new features of CS4 and before I knew it, the software giants were starting to release CS5!

Adobe have just released the trials for CS5 and I managed to get my hands on a trail version of Photoshop, first impressions... awesome!

The workspace has been updated once again to allow a free flowing environment even allowing you to change layer opacity over multiple layers and an on-screen color picker. I have been desperate to try the new ’Content-Aware Fill’ which matches lighting, tone, and noise when content is removed from an image and fills the background as if the object never existed, although I was skeptical it didn’t disappoint and seemed to work flawlessly over the three images I tied out.

The new interface also has a ’Bridge light’ palette which makes finding images and graphics a breeze without having to have Adobes Bridge program open or manually navigating to images.

The most exciting development for me is one of the new transform option called ’Puppet Warp’ which allows you to select an object or part of and distort it to a curve without degrading the image, it may not seem like a big deal but performing this task manually with the original warp transform tool was a drawn out process of trial and error which usually ended in trying to find another way of getting the result along with a few strong curse words.

There is plenty more that CS5 has to offer and I personally cant wait to get it installed :)

This BBC News article about typefaces caught my eye, not only because I have a passion for typography, but also because it’s a subject which is rarely brought to the general public’s attention.

As a discipline, typography involves more than simply choosing a font for a particular purpose; amongst other things it also requires an appreciation for the subtleties of the art of typeface design, a knowledge of the history of alphabets and letterforms, and perhaps most importantly a functional understanding of legibility and readability.

But these things don’t consciously concern most people. Type is there to do a job, and when done well, it should be ’invisible’. Counter-intuitively, it’s for this very reason that typefaces really do matter.

It’s true that there are snobs who needlessly complain about the proliferation of fonts like ’Comic Sans’ and ’Papyrus’, blaming it on the wide availability of standard fonts within DTP software on affordable desktop PCs; but frivolous elitism should not be allowed to cloud the issue.

For example, using the wrong typeface for a corporate document is almost as disastrous as using the wrong company logo. Typefaces should be specified as part of any good brand identity guidelines because, as well as facilitating the readability of text, they contribute to the style, tone and personality of your communications.

Underestimate the power of typefaces at your peril!

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)

Upon my weekly browse of design blogs and illustration websites I found a website dedicated to the works of Roy Lichtenstein. His work has always inspired me to draw in a way I feel comfortable and not to follow the latest trends.

Within seconds of landing on the site Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein I was greeted with a showcase of over 60 examples of Lichtensteins work opposite the original works by artist’s such as Jack Kirby (DC Comics), Jerry Grandenetti and Russ Heath (Men at War).

I had always been aware that Lichtenstein had used reference for his artwork but with much of it looking very similar to the original, I couldn’t help but wonder how it had been allowed to happen...

I don’t enjoy jumping to conclusions, it happens, but there are plenty of points that this particular website fails to mention. I have always believed that Lichtensteins work was a concept; at the time no one was creating such new art, not to mention the massive difference in scale between the original and the artwork so although the reference was copied the context was unique.

Whether I truly believe this or not is another matter, I found a quote via Wikipedia which sums the argument up nicely; "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup."

In this article on the Guardian website, internet guru Clay Shirky shares his predictions about the future of online services.

He surmises that printed media such as newspapers will disappear in less than 50 years, and claims that "... no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds."

Whilst I too believe that the traditional channels for delivering certain content will eventually be replaced by cheaper, more convenient and environmentally friendly media; I do not think this portends the end of print in a wider sense.

Much like the survival and resurgence of vinyl due to demand from music enthusiasts, there will always be a market for high-quality printed material.

There’s nothing quite like opening a new magazine and being hit by the smell of freshly-printed ink on a special paper! And that’s the point: we mustn’t forget that with print, our senses are spontaneously engaged in a unique way. In any case, if print dies how else will we package all that lovely vinyl in the future ;-)?