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Read These
I got this book when I was in first year of college, practical and full of useful advice. Great for someone who wants to learn a little more about the reality of design rather than theory. – Youssef
While working at EdenSpiekermann in Amsterdam, I was lucky enough to work along side of Erik Spiekermann; so I bought his book to learn more about him. Simple, thought provoking book. – Youssef
Behind WhiteInk
This website has been set up by two graphic designers based in Dublin, Ireland. It serves as a joint output of their thoughts,
projects and feelings. They hope you find it useful and that by sharing their ideas and thoughts they can learn from one another and their readers.
Youssef Sarhan
Currently studying at The National College of Art & Design, Ireland. I enjoy what I do. Read some articles to get a feel for what
I’m about.
Tim Phelan
Graphic Designer and illustrator. Currently studying in the National College of Art & Design. I have a strong passion for illustration and photography.
In this tutorial I will focus on the hair. Before watching please note that there is a lot of information in this video to absorb, so watch and re-watch areas. I’d recommend pausing it at regular intervals before continuing so that you fully understand all the processes. Some of the areas covered in this video are:
– Colour Correction
– Removing Unwanted Straps and Hair
– Adjusting tonal values
– Grading the image
– Boosting image vividness
– Removing blemishes
– Working with blending modes
There are a lot of techniques and processes that go into each of the above, so if you’ve got a question leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.
An article on Design by Youssef Sarhan ON 12 March 2009
“If someone isn’t willing to wake up to hear me to speak, I don’t want to speak to them!” – Paul Rand
I just finished reading this short piece by John Maeda on his experiences with Paul Rand. John Maede invited Rand to speak to the students of MIT which resulted in a fantastic turnout and an inspiring talk. It’s a short read so I suggest you click on over and enjoy every word of it. It’s simply touching and endearing. Well worth the five minutes.
An article on Advertising, Design by Youssef Sarhan ON 11 March 2009
Visual rhetoric is a theoretical framework of how images communicate, as opposed to their aural or verbal messages; what the visuals implicate rather than what the content reads. There is a very tight relationship between graphic design and visual rhetoric, being aware of this is something I always try to keep in mind.
I’m currently living in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and as you’d expect the majority of everything is in dutch. As I don’t speak any dutch I depend heavily on visual rhetoric and visual associations to understand the message. For example, I was looking for some biscuits I came across a shelf full of different varieties, I found what I wanted purely based on the colours. For some reason dark chocolate is nearly always associated with the colour red and milk chocolate with blue. I’m not sure exactly why but perhaps it’s because red is usually associated with being a rich colour, a regal colour, which links back to the rich dark chocolate.
There are a lot more examples; dark blue and light blue milk cartons, full-fat milk and semi-skimmed milk respectively. Red/White combination is closely connected with ‘Sale’ or ‘Value’. These colour associations are basic, perhaps somewhat obvious but are an intrinsic part of visual rhetoric. Aside from colours, images too are reliant on their rhetorical value. This is a tricky area as different cultures and environments will have vastly different reactions to the same image. A solid understanding of the audience you are trying to communicate to is imperative to appropriate rhetoric.
An article on Design, Web Design by Youssef Sarhan ON 21 February 2009
In this feature I try to shed some light on the development process and/or elements of a selected design. By deconstructing the design into layout, typeface, colours & use of images we will hopefully develop a better understand of how the final result was achieved. I feel that this degree of awareness is crucial to a graphic designers development; being able to not only identify the design elements but the rationale behind them.
In this edition of Design Deconstructed (DD) I am going to be highlighting and discussing some of the design issues of WP Remix (http://www.wpremix.com/). Then Hopefully offer some adjustments I would make.
Rbhavesh of WP Remix contacted me a few days ago about deconstructing his design. So here it goes.
WP Remix is a theme for Wordpress which allows the client to use the wordpress dashboard as a website as well as a blog. You’ll see what I mean if you view the demo. The design looks functional and the coding seems robust. Ok onto the design of WPRemix.com.
When you load http://wpremix.com/ you see red, black and white. It’s a solid colour palette that works nicely. The main navigation is at the top and the the content is centered; there are plenty of images and works nicely on a range of resolutions. The first thing I noticed is that the red area is a bit large, it’s quite thick perhaps a rearrangement of images and text could adjust this.
In this feature I try to shed some light on the development process and/or elements of a selected design. By deconstructing the design into layout, typeface, colours & use of images we will hopefully develop a better understand of how the final result was achieved. I feel that this degree of awareness is crucial to a graphic designers development; being able to not only identify the design elements but the rationale behind them.
Ever since it’s early days Google has been aiming high, in 1998 they had circa 25,000,000 million pages that were searchable. That was pretty huge. The site read, ‘Index contains ~25 million pages (soon to be much bigger)‘, there weren’t wrong either; 10 years later they broke 1 trillion. This number is growing at an alarming rate so the information they need to display must be displayed clearly. The idea is that you can find exactly what you are looking for, and easily. I can imainge reading this at some point in the future and these figures being irrelevant.
Something interesting to note:
‘So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.’
Ok, onto the visuals of Google. There are many variations of google, depending on country etc. I am going to use www.google.com as the example.
In this feature I try to shed some light on the development process and/or elements of a selected design. By deconstructing the design into layout, typeface, colours & use of images we will hopefully develop a better understand of how the final result was achieved. I feel that this degree of awareness is crucial to a graphic designers development; being able to not only identify the design elements but the rationale behind them.
Within minutes of President Obama being sworn in the new site had gone live. I’d imagine it has received a huge spike in visitors but it seems to be coping perfectly. I’m trying to find out the designer/company who is behind it, so if anyone knows?
It looks fantastic. It’s clean, feels like a position of authority and most importantly approachable. It doesn’t look like a news site, like it used to. Here’s an image of the homepage.
