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Trending — Cinegraphs. An Infinite Loop.

Rod Serling On Writing

Quote of the Day

"You guys can keep riding your optimism unicorns around marshmallow island using happy thoughts as currency, but here on Earth, where everyone’s a dick but me, I’m pretty sure we're all totally fucked."

_______________

__________ explains that while _________ bills itself as a production company, it's really a hybrid of an advertising agency, production house, and multimedia content factory that has dialed into the low cost of entry and pervasiveness of the Web. ____________'s mission is to place the Web at the center of all advertising, exploiting it to make marketing cheaper, faster, and more effective -- across all platforms. "We are the model for what the future of an agency is going to look like."

Final Shuttle Launch As Seen From Airplane

18-year-old Ryan Graff was lucky enough to be flying to Miami as the Shuttle launched, and captured these cool photographs of Atlantis’ smoke trail. via Laughing Squid.

Manual Photography Quick Reference Poster

This is a great little quick-guide to download to your phone or whatever. Click to embiggen. Poster available on Zazzle. (Although why the F anyone would want a poster of this is beyond me.)

 

Take Shelter

The Typography of the New Amazing Spider-Man Movie Logo

Frankly, I think the world needs another Spider-Man movie, like I need another credit card bill, but whatever. I always preface these crits with the disclamier that it comes from a dark place of anger and jealousy; as I'd kill to have the opportunity to design the new Spider-Man logo.

Regardless, this logo is pretty bad. Arbitrary logic is the enemy of successful design, and nothing could be more arbitrary that putting "the amazing" in lowercase. Why do that? Here's a little design tip: The type will usually tell you when you do something illogical and stupid. In this case, it's pretty obvious — the descender of the "g" is kissing the Spiderman letters. That just doesn't work. At all. Period.

Also, there are plenty of great extended gothic typefaces out there; so why horizontally scale (ie. stretch) the type?! This is like typography 101. Horizontal scaling deforms letterforms and messes with legibility ... and it just looks really bad.

Third. The kerning is weird. "The amazing" letters are miles apart, and "Spider-man" is jammed up like the L.A. freeway. This disparity is problematic from a readability standpoint, as the logo is supposed to read "The Amazing Spider-Man!", not "t" ... "h" ..."e"... you get my point. The horizontal space between the "t" and the "h" is larger than the vertical space between the stacked words. That's junior varsity typography. 

Finally, if you want something to look cohesive, it's a good idea to utilize similar font weights. Utilizing a lightweight lowercase font up top (?!) and a bold uppercase face on the bottom doesn'y make much sense. Add the aforementioned kerning disparities to the equation, and it makes me think someone is intentionally sabotaging this logo. Maybe the designer hates Spider-Man? Or is upset that Tobey Maguire was replaced as Peter Parker?

Oh, and one final observation. If you're going to go to the trouble of making the logo 3D, don't present it straight-on from the front. It's the one angle that kills any sense of form, space, perspective or drama. 

A Sad Screengrab Self Portrait, 450p x 450p

PROcess — Scrappy Characters, Brooklyn Industries Tee

Work in Progress. Clck the pic to embiggen. 100% Illustrator vectors. I worked on a wacom tablet, drawing on top of an initial blue line sketch. I created some custom brush settings to replicate the feel of "real" character inking. Final will have some nice half tone dot shadows on the characters (very 80's look). Should be pretty tight. Final print on black tees.