Enrich your design: leaflet printing from Solopress

29 August 2012

Kumi Yamashita's Shadow Art


Remember a short while ago we were talking about the silhouette idea with the football goal sized translucent screen of tracing paper? Well today we were introduced to a new type of shadow art using much smaller objects and different angled light sources to create something extraordinary.

Kumi Yamashita is a Glasgow school of art student who has taken the simple natural resource of light and manipulated the shadows cast using obscure and sometimes relevant objects to the subject matter. Take her piece above named Untitled (Child) as an example. Numbers are a learning process for any child, the phyiscal forms of which have perfectly combined to create the shadow of a child's face.

Other forms of her amazing work include Origami and City View both of which are displayed below. It is evident that she is a true shadow master whose simplistic object choice can create something so much more using nothing more than our natural elements.

Origami

City View

To see more of Kumi Yamashita's work visit her website kumiyamashita.com.

This article was originally found in and inspired by Esquire UK's article.

28 August 2012

Movie Day - Burn After Reading

I'm no film critic but Burn After Reading was a star-studded delight of a spy comedy. It had me bursting with laughter at every riddiculous scenario it could think of. The Cohen Brothers really managed to put something together that stretched each of the cast member's talents to its truly surreal realm. Brad Pitt of course had his signature 'I must eat in this film' move though.

The way this movie was first publicised to me left little to the imagination. Instead it left me admiring the wonderfully creative font and simplistic design of its film poster. The red background has the effect of a roller painted wall as it has squares of slightly different shades, similar to the kind you'd get when painting the outside of a plastered wall unevenly. The contrast of the clean text makes the message stand out better, ideal for a film poster.


The only spy related imagery of the poster is from the silhouette of the handgun on the left and the binocular holding person on the right. Unless you'd seen the film you wouldn't make these connections, which on review tie in with the message: "intelligence is relative". Personally, after seeing this poster I thought it was reflective of the plot for American Beauty.

I'm a big fan of simple movie posters that captivate their target audience, however, I prefer to have a little more suggestive imagery of the plot or at least the genre of the film, as binoculars and guns could be tied in with other genres e.g. action.

Overall, its font makes it an inspiring design as I'm a firm believer in keeping design simple. Where it falls down is in delivering its message clearly enough. There are lessons in typography that can be learned as the title of the movie is coloured differently from the cast, yet perfectly slotted in place with the rest of the text. Someone create an event poster may pull some inspiration from it as there are some many different messages that need to be conveyed in text with limited space at times.

I'd recommend watching this film too. Just take a look at the trailer for it below:

22 August 2012

5 Of Our Favourite Free Fonts

Fonts are one of the most attractive features of marketing that captivate the attention of consumers all over the world. Of course it is perceptual as to what attracts who, however, most of us can gauge what looks good within our community, and on a bigger scale our nationality, to gain as much positive attention as possible.

Many designers attempt to create their own fonts to maintain originality within their work, however, for those who focus more on the other design aspects and less on the font, there are a multitude of free font sites available across the web which will allow the use of them for modificiation, commercial gain, etc. This noted, we've found a few fonts across the web that we quite look the like of.

So without further ado, here's our 5 favourite free fonts!

1. Scribble Box


2.  Nova Solid

 3. A Ripping Yarn

4. Masterplan



5. Media Blackout


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