There are a lot of designers out there I’m a big fan of. But, when I think about my career and where it’s taken me, a lot of it can be traced to the things I learned from the three designers who influenced me most early on.

Mig Reyes
Interactive Designer | Threadless
migreyes.com

What I learned from Mig:
Passion projects are underestimated. Client work pays the bills, but don’t neglect to start projects you’re passionate about on your own. If you share what you’re passionate about as a designer it can and does lead to some awesome opportunities.

Von Glitschka
Illustrative Designer | Glitschka Studios
drawsigner.com

What I learned from Von:
Von got me back in touch with my illustration roots and made me realize that I didn’t have to make a career distinction between designer and illustrator. They can work together to broaden the possibilities of approaches I could take in my design work.

Jacob Cass
Graphic Design | Just Creative Design
justcreativedesign.com

What I learned from Jacob:
Jacob has been a huge source of motivation for me. He’s won several awards, traveled and worked around the world, spoken at conferences like TED, and put out some killer work. He’s also only 23. Being a relatively young designer myself, seeing Cass’ career has beaten the lazy out of me on several occasions and given me a lot of personal goals that I once thought not to be realistic for a designer under 40.

Since I’m more of a visual person (obviously) I thought it would be interesting to see what those three years of work looked like all together — so I made a little collage of just the covers I did for all the books I designed in that three years.

MoCo is a full-service agency with offices in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. The office has a really nice atmosphere, and I’ll be working along side two extremely talented designers that I haven’t seen since I stepped onto a podium and received my diploma.

All in all, a great start to a new year.

This tutorial is designed to show how difficult recoloring jobs can be made much easier by the proper use of the Gradient Map adjustment layer in Photoshop. For this example, I’m going to show how to turn a black metallic object into gold. Let’s first take a look at the image.

We have an AK47 shot on white seamless. But, we need to bling it out and make it gold. What makes this a difficult effect to achieve is that gold is lighter than black gun metal. Any time you lighten an object, you risk losing the details in the darker tones of the image. And that’s where the Gradient Map comes in handy. You can take all the colors and values of the image and assign new ones. Let’s take a look at how the Gradient Map works. First I’ll open up my image and create a gradient map adjustment layer by clicking Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map. Here’s what I get.

This is how the Gradient Map works. Your image is made up a tons of pixels, each one of them has a value. Each one is either black, white, or one of the numerous shades of gray in-between. Even if your image has bright and vibrant colors, the Gradient Map thinks of your image as black and white. You’ll notice above that Photoshop has taken the darkest pixels in my image and replaced them with the color at the farthest left of my gradient. It has also taken the lightest pixels in the image and replaced it with the yellow in the far right of my gradient. Whenever you apply a gradient map, the left part of the gradient represents your darks, the right side is your lights, and the half way point is your middle gray. Let’s try a more extreme example.

You can see that the shadows in the image are replaced with red. The highlights remained white because that’s the color I chose for the right end of the gradient map. All the midtones from dark grey through light grey are replaced with their corresponding color in the middle area of the gradient.

So, now knowing this, we can move on to the cool part. First thing we need to do is find something gold to sample color from. I happened to find this from Stock.xchng.com.

Once you find your image, use the color sampling tool to grab some shadows, midtones, and highlights. You can see in the image above which areas I sampled from. This is what I got:

Using these colors, I’ll go back and edit my gradient map.

This is what it looks like with all the colors in the gradient equal distance from each other on the slider. It’s getting closer, but the colors need to be repositioned. Repositioning takes practice. It’s not an exact science because it each image you work with is going to have different combinations of light and dark tones. Experiment with positioning to get the effect you’re looking for. Through some experimentation, I came up with these color positions.

This is looking much closer to what I’m going for. The only thing left to do is mask out some key areas to bring the black back into the wood. Since my gradient map is on a layer adjustment, I can use a hard round brush to easily mask out what I need.

The other nice part about using an adjustment layer is that you can play with the blending modes to get some interesting effects. For example, if I change the Blend Mode of the Gradient Map layer to “Luminosity”, I get a nice silver effect. Try out some more blend modes and see what you get.

Adobe Illustrator first came on the scene in 1986. Since then, its evolved through about 17 versions into it’s current form, Adobe Illustrator CS5. After that many versions however, there are a few fundamental things Illustrator lacks. Things that, in my opinion, should have been included years ago. As a side note, I’m currently working with CS4, so it may very well be that Adobe has addressed one or more of the following I plan to gripe about. However, I’ve been to a few conventions where Adobe has had a booth, and I’ve never seen any demos that would lead me to believe they have included these functionalities in CS5.

Multi-directional Gradient

This functionality is long overdue. Especially when you consider that Photoshop has more gradient options than Illustrator. Right now, you have two options as gradients go: directional and radial. But what if you had a line like the one above? You want to use a gradient, but you also want that gradient to bend and curve with the line.

You have two work arounds. You can create a line, turn it into an object and create a gradient mesh. This is tedious, plus it relies on the user converting the line to an object, which leaves them out of luck if they wish to adjust the stroke or curve of the line. The other option is the Blend Tool. This means creating multiple objects of different colors and and blending them in the path you wish. This is also tedious and again does not allow the user to keep the editable line.

Place Points in Extreme

Anyone with some experience building vector art is familiar with the term “extrema”. If you aren’t familiar, here’s a brief rundown. Vector art is made up of anchor points. In the shape above, they are the tiny white dots. Extrema refers to the practice of placing those points in the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o’clock position when possible. Why extrema? It’s a cleaner way to build, results in smoother curves, and and makes art easier to fine tune. It’s an example of something very basic that should be right next to the “Clean Up Path” option in Illustrator’s menu. For that matter, the “Clean Up Path” could use some refining also—that’s a different story.

Font Generation

Little known fact—Adobe Illustrator started out as a commercialization of Adobe’s in-house font application. Why Illustrator has no font creation option is a mystery to me. Instead of including this very useful function, they’ve relegated their customers to seek out a secondary application like Fontographer.

Direct Path Manipulation

If the toolbars above looks foreign to you, that’s because they are. These are the tools of a plugin called XtreamPaths. They do a number of different things, but at the core, it is a very fluid segment edit system. For a more in depth look, check out the demo videos. The short and sweet of it is that it makes building art in Illustrator work the way it always should have worked. For me personally, it was well worth the extra money. Having used it for so long, I can’t imagine what I’d do without it. Having said that, I find it incredible that we’re already up to CS5 in the life of Adobe, and vector artists have to rely on a third party plugin for the type of intuitive workflow that always should have been there.

In Black Ops, you have the option of creating your own emblem out of various shapes, and after seeing repeat failed attempts by the team to create an exact Machinima logo in the emblem editor, I decided to see if it was possible to recreate their logo identically. The good news is you can, and the better news is you can do it with only four shapes and seven layers. So if anyone is so inclined to show their Respawn Army pride and don the logo as their emblem, follow these simple steps.

*note: there were a few different example logos online for reference, and this tut is based on the less squashed version.

Step One

These are the shapes you’ll need. Most of them are unlocked fairly early in the ranking stages.

Step Two

Here’s how it looks as a wire frame. Most of the shapes fall outside the bounding box of the emblem editor.

Step Three

The only colors you’ll need are red and white.

Layer 1 (Shield) = RED
Layer 2 (Oval Wide) = RED
Layer 3 (Oval Wide) = RED
Layer 4 (Spade) = WHITE
Layer 5 (Oval Wide) = WHITE
Layer 6 (Oval Wide) = WHITE
Layer 7 (Square) = RED

Step Four

Here’s the finished result. It takes some some patience, but it’s very doable. Go out and show your Machinima pride—or do the opposite.

This would have been an absurd question twenty, or even ten years ago. But, with computers and software getting more sophisticated, there’s a misconception that they can be a substitute for core skills.

My answer to this question has always been, “no, but you’ll be better off if you learn….” I think about it like this: You don’t have to know how to swim to work on a boat, but sooner or later you’ll wish you’d learned.

I had the opportunity to discuss this with two well-respected designers and get their take on this subject:

Von Glitschka

“I think a designer should draw. Because the better the drawing skills the better they’re able to execute those ideas that leverage an illustrative approach no matter what style, be it iconic and graphic or more rendered. The ability to take a raw thought and refine it through drawing until you have a solid well defined framework to build your design from will always be stronger than someone who noodles around with software. Too many know the tools, but lack the conceptual skills that separates a marginal designer from a great designer.”

David Airey

Defendant: Balls Without Borders
Charged with: logo slaughter in the first degree

Balls Without Borders does some amazing work and brings happiness to children in war torn countries all over the world. In that sense, they are a great success. Never-the-less, their logo design (which is actually a recent redesign) has failed. And having seen a lot of these kinds of logo disasters, I can wager a guess that it was the result of one of two things: design-by-committee, or crowd-sourcing.

Exhibit A: Too much going on.

Balls Without Borders operates globally, giving soccer balls to children. And that’s great. The problem is they’ve tried to cram all that information into one mark. It’s cluttered and visually unappealing.

A logo’s job is to be simple, unique, and memorable. A logo’s job is not to tell you everything an organization has done and ever will do. Nike’s logo is not a shoe, McDonalds’ logo is not a burger, and Pepsi’s logo is not a puddle of brown liquid.

Exhibit B: Stylistic clash.

Few logos appear in grayscale by default. That begs the question “why would you make a logo for a childrens’ charity black and grey?” The logo, combined with the starkness of the website, makes it look more like a POW organization rather than a childrens’ organization.

Exhibit C: Technical execution.

With cliché continent clipart, default hexagon shapes, and poorly executed silhouettes, this is clearly not professional work (I smell crowdsourcing).

Overall, I give this logo a D. And it’s really too bad because, as I mentioned above, this organization really does good work. They should have a logo that works FOR them, not AGAINST them.

If you have a Design Crime you would like to report, please email a link to designcrime@mattbruning.com