The Brilliant creative team blog

Graham Smith, the guy who brought you Unevolved Brands is a logo designer from Sussex who has come up with a new fun game called FontFuddle.

After attempting the first one I realised that my typography jargon was a little out of whack when faced with the need to know the technical term for the end of the stoke on a lower case ’e’.

A quick Google search later and I found this great resource which has won itself a place within the select ’elite’ of my bookmarks. Typography Deconstructed is a guide to the anatomy of type with simple graphical reference to each part of character, It’s also a nice looking site.

I would recommend everyone to take a look and give it a bookmark for later reference.

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.

I have really started to ’fall in like’ with Adobe After Effects, especially because I can easily animate my style effectively with info style illustration and typography. After completing A Brilliant Retrospective I started looking around to see what others are producing and found this gem of an animation... inspiration over load!

The animation focus is on a single woman living in rural Kenya. Now whether this woman exists or not is irrelevant to the story which highlights the struggles of making a living and how a half-acre tree farm can change a woman’s life. Not only informative but a little emotional too.

Enjoy.

I have just come across this site with a stack of very inspirational typography posters (above being my personal favorite), check them out here.

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)