Macworld Cover Creation

Click here to watch the video

by peter belanger - http://www.peterbelanger.com/blog

After working on the latest cover for Macworld Magazine I wanted to show what is involved in making a cover. I focused on the three main areas: the photography, photoshop and design. I chose a time lapse format to convey lots of information in a small amount of time. The only drawback of time lapse is that since half a day goes by in 30 seconds, the whole process seam so easy! Lots of details were left out of the design process (like the cover meetings and rounds of layout options). I began to photograph the design process after the layouts had already been narrowed down to just three cover designs.

On the technical side, for the time lapse video, I used the Canon 5D Mark II with a 24mm-70mm zoom. I chose the 5D because of its great image quality with high ISO's. Canon's sRAW1 gave me the flexibility of a RAW file with the file size of a jpeg. The actual Macworld cover was taken with a Phase One P65+ digital back attached to a 4x5 Sinar X camera with a 65mm lens.

Many thanks to Rob Schultz for allowing me to invade his office and literally shoot over his shoulder.

The music was used with permission by The Brokenmusicbox.

Twitter Background Design How-To and Best Practices

With Twitter quickly becoming the hottest site to be seen on, everyone wants to stand out from the crowd. There has already been a range of quality designs showcased on various sites, which has shown an emergence of trends such as the ‘sidebar’. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices around Twitter background design and get to work creating our own. Read more...

Chris Spooner is a designer who has a love for creativity and enjoys experimenting with various techniques in both print and web.

Putting Some Spine Into Design

The spine of this comprehensive Italian dictionary from 1949 is striking and easy to read when the book is standing up, and stands out even on its side.

Adapted from dot-font: Talking About Design (Mark Batty Publisher)
By John D. Berry
Dateline: April 2, 2007

Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but in a bookstore we judge most of them first by their spines. For most new books—not the ones lying out on tables or prominently displayed with their covers out, but the ones lining the shelves—the spine is all we see. The beautiful, dramatic cover, upon which great effort and sometimes even expense may have been lavished, never gets seen if a browsing bookbuyer doesn’t reach out and pull the book oV the shelf to take a look.

You might expect, given this cruel dynamic of the marketplace, that book publishers, and the designers of dustjackets and paperback covers for those publishers, would devote a lot of attention to what the spine looks like. But it seems to be the rare designer who gives the question much thought at all. Read more...

Hiring a designer? Eight things to look for

Jul 06 | by John McWade
Read more...

1) Passion, vision and self-motivation. Without these, you’ll be dragging a rock. You need someone who shares your vision. Nothing’s worse than a “what-do-you-want-me-to-do-next?” kind of designer. Well, no, yes there is. One who’s touchy and confusing, too.

2) Vocabulary. A creative lead should be able to articulate what’s happening and why, in language that you and your staff can understand. If you start hearing vague terms like “pop” and “impact,” make him explain what he means. Listen for, “If we do A and B, we can expect C.” This is not trivial.

3) Inquisitive intelligence. Look for someone who’s curious about almost everything and approaches life with a sense of wonder. Similarly, I want someone who’s taken the time to learn about my company and whose questions are perceptive.

Upsampling Photographs and Line Art

"...When you ask Photoshop (or any other image manipulation software) to increase the size of the image once it has been scanned, and then increase the resolution as well, this is called upsampling. (An example of this is to take an Internet image saved at 72 dpi and then enlarge it and upsample it to 300 dpi). As Photoshop does this, it essentially makes up picture information that doesn’t exist. As the picture gets larger, Photoshop adds pixels (picture elements, essentially dots that are averages of the existing pixels) between those already there. Past a certain point of over-enlargement (beyond 105-110 percent of the original size), what you get is a blurred image and/or visible pixels...." Written by Steve Waxman. Steven Waxman is a printing consultant.

Read this article at Pacific City Graphics