Graphic Design Archives - Page 18 of 32

Aug 09

Newport High School grad wins state graphic design contest

NEWPORT, Ky. (WXIX) – A Newport High School student recently returned from a national competition for students preparing for careers in trade, technical and skilled service jobs.

After winning at the state level, Brandon Harris traveled to Atlanta in June to compete with students in each state.

Even though he did not win at the national level, his skills will continue to improve beyond the competition.

“I made this t-shirt design and I was like in my head, ‘this is actually really nice,’” Harris remembers, “And I didn’t think really what my other competition would be like. As I got there I saw the other shirts and was like, ‘Wow! I guess there’s some pretty good comp!’”

A 2022 Newport High School graduate, Harris, recently won a state competition.

He’s been taking a graphic design class at the high school since he was a freshman and he says that class and his teacher have allowed him to possibly pursue a career in graphic design.

Skills USA hosts a state and national competition each year for students in high school and beyond. Categories include things like carpentry and baking to graphic design and welding.

This year, Harris entered the t-shirt design competition.

Students were asked to represent their state in a unique design that had a deeper meaning to them.

Harris describes his design:

“An outline of Muhammad Ali with his quote, ‘Don’t count the days, make the days count’ on the inside jumbled up everywhere.”

Ali was born in Louisville and his quote is important to Harris.

“It means to keep going you know.” explains Harris, “And to just have that drive to keep going every day and just keep getting better and have patience as well.”

Harris won the competition in Louisville and that got him a spot in the national competition in Atlanta that happened in June. Even though he didn’t win in Atlanta, he knows that experience will help him down the road.

“I don’t just waste my days and waste my time. I try to make my days worth something and get something out of it to make myself better by the end of the day.”

Harris says through working in graphic design, he’s learned that the best designs can often take time and patience. He has some advice for

“Keep trying. If you don’t think something works out just think of new things,” says Harris, “Don’t always get rid of your original ideas because sometimes the worst are the best.”

Harris is going to take a year off from school and decide if he wants to pursue a career in graphic design or study pre-law.

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Aug 08

Tap Lines: The Portland graphic designer who puts the art in craft beer

The mural on the wall of Batson River’s Portland location. Images courtesy of Hugh McCormick Design Co.

“Marketing’s job is to get people to do something,” says Portland-based graphic designer Hugh McCormick. “Branding’s job is to get people to feel something.”

In a crowded marketplace packed with great beer, an affective attachment to a brewery can be the difference between what comes home and what stays on the shelf.

Hugh McCormick Design Co. (HMDC, for short) has designed logos and branding for Maine breweries Austin Street Brewery, Bissell Brothers Three Rivers, Batson River Brewing & Distilling, and Kit Brewing – winning 21 national design awards in the process. Those awards have included “crushies” from the Craft Beer Marketing Awards competition, including a recent award for work done for Battery Steele Brewing, as well as Austin Street Brewery’s rebranding and the mural of Batson River Brewing & Distilling in Bayside in 2021. HDMC also won a number of awards from Graphic Design USA in 2021 and 2022 for specific beers like Kit Brewing’s On Your Mark and a number from Austin Street, including Anton Vienna Lager, Austin Street Lager, the Narrative Pilot Series, Marquee Moon Pale Ale, Bombtrack IPA and Bennu Black IPA.

According to McCormick, a beer label should not only draw attention to itself, but also “tell the story of the beer.” This isn’t about being loud, but being “present,” McCormick says. “You want to create something interesting that grabs people’s attention, but can also look handsome in a fridge, instill confidence while in someone’s hand, and answer the question, ‘Why did the brewery make this beer?’”

To be too literal is to “take an easy way out,” he explained. “For example, let’s imagine a brewery creates a Blood Orange IPA. Now, if the label is covered in oranges… and that’s the label, it would be like painting music notes on a guitar. The story ends fairly abruptly and that’s pretty disappointing.”

Rather, he said, the design should emerge not from what’s specifically in the can, but why the brewery chose to make that beer at that time. Were they inspired by an experience? Are they trying to reinvent a mundane style? Answers to such questions should fuel the label’s visual representation of the beer.

These considerations apply to the brewery as a whole as well. From beer to logo to tasting room to merchandise, a coherent branding strategy should evoke the brewery’s culture. If it doesn’t, “then it is time for a rebrand,” said McCormick. And as a brewery matures, it might want to reassess the association between culture and visual presentation. In McCormick’s mind, a brand is “a living, breathing organism that can always be refined.”

Austin Street Brewery’s original logo on the left and rebranded look on the right.

HMDC’s work with Austin Street illustrates this point. McCormick adapted the brewery’s old and familiar mash paddle logo so that it worked more as a “symbol than an image.” From there, he developed a typography system and

Aug 07

ICD Brookfield Place announces Tasmeem’s debut contest winners

Artwork on view at ICD Brookfield Place Dubai.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features of Writer

ICD Brookfield Place, Dubai, has announced the winners of the first edition of Tasmeem, an annual graphic design and poster exhibition and competition. The works of the selected 12 regional designers were unveiled on July 25 and will be on show until August 26.

The winners of Anti-Type, the theme of the inaugural edition, were selected following an open call for original works of graphic art and typography by a committee of experts including Graphic Designer and Type Designer Wael Morcos; Type Designer and Multidisciplinary Artist Ali Almasri; and Curator & Public Programs Designer, Daniel H. Rey.

Curated by Graphic Designer and Art Director, Jenan Saleh, the exhibition takes the notion of ‘anti-type design’ as a starting point. The poster designs on display use letterforms as a tool to tell stories in fresh ways, exploring new horizons in type design.

The 12 winning designers, each a recipient of a Dhs1,000 cash prize, are Ana Escobar Saavedra, Erin Collins, Ibraheem Zaki Khamayseh, Kinda Ghannoum, Maryam Belhoul, Mohammed Khalil, Nouran Abed, Rana Wassef, Reina Hasbini, Saba Sayfaiee, Sarah Shebl and Zeid Jaouni.

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Commenting on the exhibition, Rob Devereux, CEO of ICD Brookfield Place said: “We are excited for Tasmeem to continue to support young regional talent in its annual showcase.” Selection Committee member Rey said that “this year’s selected designers are presenting their ideas in a multidisciplinary way, intersecting their non-conformist design practices with the fields of biology, data science, urban planning, civil engineering, and social sciences.”

Anti-Type aims to foster a deeper understanding of how letters are designed and facilitates a discourse related to the history, present, and future of type design. Throughout the long history of type design (the art and process of designing typefaces), people have used many tools at their disposal to make type legible and beautiful — from brushes to woodblocks to metal plates to digital software.

wael morcos 1 Wael Morcos is a graphic and type designer.

The exhibition sheds light on how the field of type design is ever-evolving, especially in the digital age, where access to a variety of typefaces encourages experimentation.

Almasri is a type designer and multidisciplinary artist based in Amman, Jordan. In 2014, he launched his own type foundry under the name Abjad. Rey advocates for #YouthCuratingYouth and cross-pollination in the Global South. His work in exhibitions and public programs balances institutional and grassroots presence across the Americas, the Arab Gulf, and Scandinavia.

He recently launched Almacen/Armazem, a multimedia research project archiving and exhibiting creative practices related to Latin America and the Arab world. Morcos is a graphic designer and type designer from Beirut, Lebanon, and a partner at the Brooklyn-based design studio, Morcos Key. He has spent time developing identities and Arabic-Latin bilingual typefaces, in addition to working in

Aug 06

OpenAI’s DALL E 2 Has Potential to Disrupt Graphic Design Industry

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the graphic design industry, with OpenAI’s DALL E 2 image generation model potentially displacing human graphic designers.

DALL E, the AI system that creates realistic images and art from a description in natural language, is now available in beta. Last week, the company began the process of inviting 1 million people from its waitlist over the coming weeks.

Beta users will receive 50 free generations per month and will be able to purchase 115 additional generations for $15. Each generation will produce four images for approximately $0.03 per image. According to ARK Invest’s estimates, the compute cost to generate an image — the inference cost — is roughly $0.005 per image, suggesting a business model with 80%+ gross margins, in line with best-in-class SaaS companies, ARK wrote in a recent newsletter.

Notably, OpenAI is not restricting the commercial use of its generated images, ARK wrote. OpenAI announced last week that users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise.

According to ARK, tools like DALLE-2 should democratize access to creative content, enabling anyone to generate rich content — including still images, music, and video — instantly at a minimal cost.

Based on a recent ARK survey, to generate moderately complex images on par with those produced by DALL E 2, human labor would cost around $150, assuming 5.25 hours of human input at an average hourly wage of ~$29, ARK wrote.

“For perspective, with DALL E 2 OpenAI customers could produce 5,000 images for the price they would pay a graphic designer to produce a single image,” ARK wrote. “In our view, to achieve success in this new world, graphic designers will have to harness powerful, generative AI tools like DALL E 2 to compete and serve their customers well.”

Investors looking to gain exposure to the lucrative AI industry should consider the ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ). Companies within ARKQ are focused on and are expected to substantially benefit from the development of new products or services, technological improvements, and advancements in scientific research related to, among other things, energy, automation and manufacturing, materials, artificial intelligence, and transportation.

For more news, information, and strategy, visit the Disruptive Technology Channel.

Mebane graphic design company has team spirit | Business

At first, it seems an odd pairing, graphic design and football. But when you look at the sport, at nearly every level, there are logos, slogans, apparel, signs, and a seemingly endless opportunity for images that project power, strength, speed, commitment, and team spirit.

For years, Rob Avriett had quietly blended his graphic design interests and football coaching, occasionally creating logos and t-shirts for friends and former players who were aware of his creative talents. Avriett brought his collective capabilities off the sidelines in 2018, when the head coach at Grimsley High School in Greensboro, where he was on the coaching staff at the time, suggested giving something special to the players at the end-of-the-year banquet . The players loved the t-shirts, and Avriett immediately knew he was on to something.

“It’s grown organically,” Avriett said. “Someone will say, ‘Hey, we need a piece of apparel designed for this purpose, for this event,’ or ‘The team’s going here to play seven-on-seven, can you design us in shirts?’ Each time I did that, surely there would be a handful of requests that came back.”

Even families with kids in other sports were approaching him to ask if he could design apparel for travel teams, tournaments, and even for the parents to wear in support. Avriett was now coaching for Eastern Alamance High School, and requests for his design services were generally come through word-of-mouth.

In December 2019, he sent an email blast to his growing list of contacts that he and his wife, Kristy Cannell, would be stepping up their side business.

In January 2020, the couple officially launched Wild Rhino Creative, which catered more to the graphic design side of the business, and touted “a desire to match the intensity of athletic competition to creative demand.” In June, Avriett and Cannell, who teaches chemistry at Eastern Alamance, launched the apparel side of their business with the S’Go Eagles website. Avriett handles the graphic design and layout end, while Cannell balances the team by handling the marketing and production side. In the short time their company has been more widely-known, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“It’s grown tremendously,” Avriett said. “It’s grown from a point of doing it one or two nights a week, and honestly, only a couple hours at a time, to now where I’m looking at doing it full time. I’m volunteer coaching, but the rest of the time is committed to either doing a freelance design, or doing the apparel. And it’s awesome.

“Just about every customer wants to say something about their team, their business, themselves, or their cause, without actually saying anything. They ask ‘How can I be unique?’ A big part of this is translating that rapidly rich digital persona to make a statement about something,” Avriett added.

For many of their apparel projects, Avriett and Cannell use a white toner transfer, which is a hybrid process between the traditional cut vinyl and full, direct-to-garment method for jobs that show a lot of