In today’s world of interactive web-based marketing, viral campaigns and high production television commercials, the print ad remains one very powerful and effective means for advertisers to reach their audience.
The printed format, whether it is for magazines, newspapers or billboards, sets specific challenges for ad designers. An idea or message must be communicated simply and swiftly, it must be eye-catching enough to grab the viewer’s attention and convey the important information in an instant. When a print designer employs humour to carry this information, the result can be become a visual ‘one-liner’, a joke that speaks the message the ad intends. This post brings together 30 hilarious print ads that combine great imagery with cracking comedy.
Concept Feedback is one very useful and simple tool for designers and developers to get feedback on their designs and concepts. Whether you’re working on a brand new web project or redesigning your own site, getting feedback before you launch can prove very, very useful.
We’ve partnered with Concept Feedback to give away premium concepts to 5 readers of SpyreStudios.
In 2007, Tim Ferriss’s The 4 Hour Workweek hit the shelves and marketers everywhere rushed to decrease their workload and boost their income. When you’re selling a product, it’s not particularly difficult to do so. After automating sales systems and creating low-maintenance businesses, they escaped office monotony and enjoyed their lifestyle, only to hear an army of designers asking how it was all possible.
For service businesses, minimizing work is significantly more difficult. The greatest asset that product-based marketers have is that their product isn’t human. A product can ship without direct attention, but a skill such as design or development can’t simply be outsourced until it no longer costs any time. However, there are ways for designers to minimize their time spent at a desk while still maintaining a per-hour or per-project income.
The following are a selection of strategies that can reduce the amount of noise in your design business. By systematically trimming away the non-design aspects of online design, it’s possible to significantly cut down the amount of time spent working while still maintaining the same end result. Try one or all, and create a design business that isn’t paralyzed by incoming projects and client maintenance, but liberated through simple systems and long-term strategy.
I don’t know about you, but in my part of the world (Canada), it’s really cold right now. As a result, we also have quite a bit of snow to inspire my creativity. So, in this tutorial, we will look at a super easy technique for creating a vector snowflake design in Illustrator.
More importantly, though, we will be looking at techniques for using Illustrator’s cropping and rotation tools in order to create, repeat and rotate an element in a very mathematical and intentional manner, all to create a cool looking vector snowflake. We will also create our own guides to help simplify the process.
When you browse through vector inspiration galleries or are experimenting with vectors yourself, it is very easy to get stuck in the chunky borders-retro-cute kawaii style of illustrations which are not only immensely popular but fun to do and everyone from MTV to Computer Arts Magazine are comissioning artists to make. Recently though, I have been coming across more and more “grown up” vectors that have a conscience, that tell a compelling story.
The artistic expression in these vectors is amazing, the detailing in some and the impact of the artist’s thought process is awe-inspiring. A lot of them touch base with what is wrong with the society, the medium today. Many of these vectors try to express inner conflicts and many of them hint at global issues more magnanimous than one can imagine. All expressed beautifully within a single illustration. I have rounded up a collection of 35 vector illustrations for you to mull over and feast your eyes on for inspiration that goes deeper than pure aesthetic design.
Elegant Themes is surely one of the best WordPress themes store out there. I’ve had the pleasure of customizing some of their themes for clients in the past and I’ve found they’re very easy to work with, well-coded and definitely great-looking.
So, to start the year on the right track we’ve partnered with Elegant Themes to give away 4 unlimited access memberships to their theme club! What this means is you’ll have access to all their themes for a full year!
