Museum of Art: Fort Lauderdale

I get a daily inspiration email from Communication Arts.  I love getting these emails. Every one has a "Webpick of the Day" in it. Sometimes I like them, sometimes the site isn't as impressive as I hope it will be.  This time, I found a great, happy, colorful, energetic site for the Museum of Art: Fort Lauderdale.

I'm really intrigued by the diagonal line in the header that creates a semi-transparent area revealing the images below through several color overlay type vertical bands. It is a very small area, but it provides an incredible effect when the slideshow plays and the various images produce exciting effects when viewed through this "filter" effect. I love it!!  Super creative! The diagonal line trends to the center gray bar as well and there are other angled shapes in the design.  Navigation is clean and simple residing in the center gray bar with secondary navigation at the top along with social icons. The site is built in HTML5 and I like how it works when I re-size the browser window.

Size reduced for close to tablet size, the site looks even cleaner.  It becomes more obvious that the main navigation resides at the bottom. Clicking any of the links takes you to the "inside" layout below.

Basically everything remains the same, but the main slideshow area is reduced, bringing the lower part of the home-screen into view plus a blue identification bar at the very bottom letting you know "where you are". I clicked "ACADEMY" and the blue bar verifies this. To see the information provided about the Academy program, you scroll down. Same goes for all links. It is a very unified and nicely organized navigation design.

Adobe Rocks!

Again from the new September / October issue of Communication Arts magazine is this packaging design theme and campaign that the Adobe Creative Team came up with for this year's release of the newest Adobe Creative Suite 6.  I've been watching Adobe for over a year in anxious anticipation of this release and it doesn't disappoint. I had been using CS3 for years. I've always enjoyed staring into Adobe packaging graphics.

To me this new era says "NEW" all over again.  It says modern, cutting edge, futuristic, even space age.

The way they manage to bring "sexy" to a sliced, diced, blurred, and color altered woman is amazing. Lines are sharp, simple, and sleek in some, yet others tend to have an even further digitized blur, combined with texture and more I'm sure I can't decipher at my skill level. But somehow, there remains a unity among them.

Is that unity the feminine form then?

They even slice and disfigure the "CS6" as kind of a tribute to David Carson I would guess. The packaging and brochures are beautifully done, and they speak volumes about the technology poured into the new CS6.

Joanna Kustra: Fashion Photographer

Our next project is to design and build a website for a photographer.  I like how this site uses the entire screen as a home-screen slideshow and the over-sized navigation text rests on the left. With each hover over a link, the image changes and there is a very subtle scale change upon the new image loading. It almost produces a Ken Burns effect.  When you click on a link taking you to the category, then I get a bit disappointed because the home-screen images were so large and impressive. A slider with four or five images is placed in the center. Navigation can be done by sliding the bar at the bottom, or with arrow keys. The site is built in Flash and is nicely done overall.

I receive daily inspiration emails from Webneel . This is where I learned of Joanna Kustra's site. 

Mohawk Branding

I just recently received my copy of the new September / October issue of Communication Arts. It's the 53rd  Design Annual and is filled with tons of great design. Everything from packaging and brochures, to book covers and branding is represented. All of the entries are impressive. Similar in concept to the Kerr Vernon post that I made on Aug. 28, this design is bright and I'm drawn to it.

I love the way the colors overlap and create different shades and shapes within the composition.

I did the best that my scanner could do to bring this to a decent representation of the printed magazine.

The design works very well for everything from business cards and letterheads, to package wrap. The recognizable logo shape works even without the color. Repeating it on the package wrap creates an intriguing pattern too. Michael Bierut is the art director with Katie Barcelona, Michael Bierut, and Joe Mariancek designing with the Pentagram design firm, New York, NY.

Helms Workshop

Communication Arts May / June 2012 Illustration Annual.  Another design house highlight section. I had seen Helms Workshop in another issue of Communication Arts where the group had been recognized for their concert poster style of screen printing for various advertising campaigns. This time around many of this types of work are displayed.  The pizza box for Pinthouse Pizza is incredible. It looks like a compass with all the various points in a multi-point star type arrangement of triangles and diamond shapes. What grabbed my attention though as I was looking through the Illustration Annual with the term "illustration" on my mind, was the image below.  It is an illustration done for the same Pinthouse Pizza.  I was taken by the subtle use of color on the background with simple black and white used to advertise for the pizza business.  I'm not sure what a "Whale" has in common with pizza, but I guess they're having a Whale of a Good Time.

Austin Beerworks

So, while looking through the May / June 2012 Communication Arts magazine, I was curious to see if Helms Workshop did any web and interactive design as well.  As it turns out, they do that too. In fact, their letterpress / screen-print type designs work very well in their website designs. Check out their site to see more of what they have done. The background image doesn't scale as we have been working on. Instead, it kind of slides left a bit when you re-size the browser. So, in terms of fully cross device usage, it isn't meeting that. But I don't think it would be difficult for them to update it and make it more mobile friendly.

Juniper Park

The May / June 2012 issue of Communication Arts magazine is an Illustration Annual.  Among the many impressive designs to look at in the magazine is a section highlighting the work of a design firm called Juniper Park. Numerous campaigns of theirs were displayed, but the one that caught my eye for its creativity and absolutely insane approach is the Kettle Cooked billboard.  They actually hand carved the billboard out of wood, rather than just printed material.  This would be an incredibly creative concept if you were to try to make a print appear to be hand carved wood. But they went the extra mile and actually did it with wood.  I think this is way outside the box thinking and I love it.

Side Note...

I knew I had seen something recently that claimed it could produce HTML and CSS from the layers in your Photoshop file.  I haven't tried this yet, but it looks intriguing. I can't wait to see how well it works. Best of all, it is cloud based and FREE.  Click the image to view the actual site. The article that led me to it was on YouTube.  I subscribed to these guys channel because they come out with a lot of great things to share with you. It's called The Treehouse Show.

Elegant Branding

This was found in the same location of HOW Magazine - November 2011 as the last post.  I really enjoy the look and feel of elegance with this design though, so I am adding it too. Aesthetic Movement designed this for their own identity and use.  The choice of stationary is designed to be more traditional feeling. To me, it says that I should get out my calligraphic pen and write a long letter to Grandma.  The clean and simple sans-serif font takes that classic feel to a different level, making it much more professional looking.  The simple A M initials couldn't be simplified any more. The logo is on one side of the business card while the other has the contact info.