Ben Burns is a brand strategist, an award-winning designer, and an expert in user experience. As the Digital Director of Blind, he oversees the intersection of design and technology in all client work.
Prior to joining the team at Blind, Ben founded Burnt Creative, a brand experience agency in Richmond, Virginia. He also served on the executive board of the Richmond AIGA chapter as Vice President.
In this book review, we are reviewing Lance Wyman: Process. A proposal for the 1976 USA Bicentennial identity by Unit Editions
This book is a near reproduction of the one-off, leather-bound ‘sketchbook’ that Lance Wyman made to document his design process for the creation of a logo and identity design for the 1976 American Bicentennial celebrations to mark the creation of the USA as an independent republic. It’s a record of the creative process that Wyman went through to arrive at a refined and workable solution.
The most successful creatives understand there are always new skills and techniques to learn.
You want to learn a new skill? Learn.
Why are some creatives great at what they do? Simply, they dedicate the time to learn their craft—especially the fundamentals.
A logo designer becomes great at designing logos because they studied the fundamentals that form a great logo. A copywriter can write a 1000 words in 10 minutes because they learned the fundamentals, then practiced and wrote daily.
Here’s the crux of this article nice and early for you…
Continue reading “Five Overlooked Ways for Continuous Creative Growth”
Before deciding on the final design of any project, you need to go through the tedious steps associated with the design creation process. This is a task that both experienced graphic artists or anyone just trying their hand at completing a print media design project should undergo if they want to end up with a competent project end design. Join us in this article as we discuss 10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Choose Your Final Design
Continue reading “10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Choose Your Final Design”
The design of the website of yours is vital, especially for conversion. Even though you can apply any tactic to boost your conversion it won’t be much of help if it doesn’t look good. We all know that humans are pretty much visual oriented. For example, the information is transported to the brain and 90% of that is visual. Visuals are way faster than the text (60,000x faster) in the brain. In fact, among the learners, 60% of them are visual learners. Read on to discover all about Design with visual ranking in mind.
Most of you are now wondering ‘what the hell are nudenotes?’ and ‘Why should I care?’. Two great questions, firstly, nudenotes is the name I give my style of sketchnotes. The goal of my notes are not to be a perfect piece of typography – they are a means of quickly jotting down information and insights in a way that can be referenced later or shared with others, quickly summarising large quantities of information with some simple doodles. They are unedited, analogue, warts-and-all, laid bare for all to see – nudenotes.
Why should you care about nudenotes? To answer that question, I will use one of the long-stand traditions of the sketchnoting: a numbered list. So in no particular order, here is a list of the benefits of nudenotes and the value they offer to creative people:
Continue reading “Sketchnotes – Why Nudenotes Are So Awesome”
Know Your Onions by Drew de Soto is a very enlightening book offering a different view of the things you encounter every day as a designer.
Drew De Soto who is a print-focused designer has been a graphic designer for over 25 years, this book is a guide for working in the Graphic Design industry and first published by BIS Publishers in 2012.
As he says in his Introduction: “After a 25-year career in graphic design, I’ve picked up a few things and turned them into ‘custom settings’. Read this book and save yourself 25 years.”
Drew was kind enough to send us a copy of the book to review and we were looking forward to tucking into this one, Again I would like to thank Drew for sending us the book and answering our questions as part of this review. Let dive in and take a look at Know Your Onions: Graphic Design By Drew de Soto.
Continue reading “Know Your Onions: Graphic Design By Drew de Soto”
In many ways, building a company is akin to raising a baby. They both start with conception, and then you nurture it/him for years while loving them more than anything else. So, it goes without saying that when you are designing a professional logo i.e. the face of the company, you want it to be the very best. You don’t want to compromise, and you shouldn’t, for the logo is more than just an attractive design that carries the name of your company, it’s the symbol for everything that the company stands for.
Continue reading “Top Tips for Designing a Professional Logo”
The word “Design” seems to permeate every facet of owning a business these days. We hear high-end brands like Apple espouse the benefits of employing design thinking at seemingly every keynote, but what is it and is it something you need to be employing for your business?
The answer is most likely yes. Read on to learn about The Power of Design Thinking
Aaron Draplin is a graphic designer, author, and founder of The Draplin Design Co. (DDC). He was Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, on October 15, 1973. and now based in Portland, Oregon. When Aaron left high school at 17 he started his associate degree at Northwestern Michigan College. This is where he learned the basics of visual art. When he turned 19 he moved to Bend, Oregon to pursue his career in graphic design.
