Design By Numbers Blog

Indie filmmakers Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata over at Tiny Inventions make short animated films from standard household items such as tin foil and toilet paper rolls.  After shooting the characters with a digital camera they animate and color correct all of their work in Adobe After Effects.  This innovative work flow has led the pair to move into more commercial work in addition to their short films.  If you’re an even nominal Adobe product user you must watch this.  Very cool stuff.

Something Left, Something Taken- Full Version from Tiny Inventions on Vimeo.

Here’s a behind the scenes piece produced by Red Giant TV, breaking down their work flow and blowing us away with their incredibly creative and simple techniques.

RGTV Episode 47: Tiny Inventions from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

While watching a music video by the Gorillaz I liked how they introduced the title for their song by stamping it to the grill of the car.  I love cool ways of introducing titles and text so drawing on it as inspiration I just had to replicate it in Photoshop.  I was on call at work this weekend so I had tons of downtime to play around with it.  First I downloaded an image from Flickr with a similar camera angle and a high enough resolution to do some close up work.  This particular muscle car was orange but it works for me.  Then I went looking for the matching font and in this case the Star Wars font came quite close.  I created a whole new grill to make it pop a bit.  Other than some grunge brushes and a set of bullet hole brushes I downloaded, I mainly stuck to the lasso tool to isolate parts of the car to discolor and dent with the liquify tool.  Photoshop has a clouds tool but I stuck with real cloud brushes because they were seemed to create a more billowing effect for the overheated radiator.  I then blew it out a little with some lens flare over the headlights.  The purpose of exercises like this is to synthesize some of the things I’ve learned into one piece without following a tutorial verbatim to essentially steal a design.

Here’s what I started with:

And here’s the result:

Welcome to my blog.  This is my first post on this particular site with many more to come (hopefully!).  This week in the world of design I learned that its not about adding miles of layers and elements to your design, but rather paying special attention to the few layers you already have.  While working on a photo collage for my son’s flag football team I searched high and low for a template or at least some body’s work to copy from in order to throw something together quickly.  I was planning on distributing the collage to the parents.  In the end I found a nice little tutorial on creating a football field.  This became my background then I arranged the photos on top.  I don’t like “perfect” looking graphics so I went pretty far to distress the background thanks to some nice grunge brushes.  In the end the parents were amazed that a simple design could look so cool!  They offered money which is always flattering but still more amazing is how many felt the background looked so much better than any they had ever seen because of the detail work that went into it.  I’d have to agree since the collage “templates” I saw out there were quite cheesy.  Its amazing with all the designers out there how little quality there is in photo collage templates.