Out of all the stuff we bought today Milkman dried milk was by far the best packaging. Ok so the design is a bit ropey and the girls hair is cut out really bad and all pixelated, but I love the illustration, so much better than a photo. Haven’t tried the milk yet though.

Here’s a load of hilarious Star Wars merchandise concepts that never made it to the shops - Gallery 1, Gallery 2. Shame, I totally would of bought a Death Star BBQ!

Via Yewknee. Originally from.

Kids have it so good these days, these Moov - Technic Lego like ridable kids toys are awesome! I’d be trying to get my Mum & Dad to buy me about 10 kits to make some sort of massive monster truck. Reckon this is going to create a load of future transportation designers.

Watch a video of them here.

Via NOTCOT.

I‘m hopeless at anagrams and even though there’s graphical clues in this motion graphic piece, I can’t decipher these book titles. If you’re able to without looking at the clues, I take my hat off to you.

But the wooden penguin-esque 3D book covers are simply amazing. While you’re there, check out Low Fidelity Car Dream, awesome.

As I posted about before, Andy Whitlock from Now in Colour is running Early Designs and wants us all to show some examples of our early work and talk about how it compares to the work we’re producing now. It slightly pains me to unearth all this ancient work, but I agree with the principle that it’s quite an interesting thing to see, so here’s some examples of my Early Designs:

Illustration:

I’d say my illustration style has changed a lot over the years. But actually after going through a load of old sketches and stuff, I’d say my hand hand drawn illustration hasn’t changed much at all.

Some stuff like life drawing, I was much better at then than I am now!

I think it’s the tools I use that have changed, this has had the biggest effect on my illustration. The early illustration examples above are hand drawn, pencil and ink. Spirit marker & pencil crayon. I started during 2000 (because of flash) producing vector illustrations, but these were still scanned in ink drawings, then ran through streamline. God do you remember streamline :P

Nowadays in 2008 I use Illustrator as my primary drawing tool. Which generally gives my work a more stylised & simplified look. I think my hand drawn sketches are quite similar to those of the past though.

Design:

I didn’t think I’d have much direct comparison work to show because I didn’t do web or multimedia design at Uni, I was a industrial designer back in the day. So my work (few examples above) is of products not websites. Even though it’s quite different, I can see my sense of fun in the handheld Sgt. Smiles teeth cleaning game for kids. Also my love of all things ancient and industrial, in the timer dials of the flip-top microwave.

Above is more recent web design work, not really a direct comparison, but I think has a similar mood? But wait, while looking through all the old stuff I unearthed a CD containing the first ever website I built! I kind of forgotten that I’d build websites back as early as 2000 - so bear in mind that this was the first thing done by someone self taught… Now re-uploaded and not seen on the web since 2000, here’s one of my final year projects at University called Jibber-Jabber. Makes me cringe a bit, but I am impressed by the amount of man hours that went into that thing…Blighmy when did I ever find time to do any drinking!

Some things haven’t changed much though. I’ve always liked making charts, diagrams and interesting ways of keeping scores. Above is a birthday scorecard type thing I made for a mates 20th birthday. You can see how the more recent King & Queen of Sports scorecard below, is kind of like an evolution along the same lines.

That’s pretty much me done. Hope you enjoyed looking at my old work alongside more recent stuff to see how it compares. Now it’s your turn! Unearth those old college sketch books and post your own Early Designs.

Loads of interesting stuff to buy at ReForm school. I especially like all the re-purposed stuff like the Recycled Street Sign Platter, Billbird House, Electrolux hoover racecar (not cheap!) and the Skateboard Clutch Purses pictured.

Illustartor & Designer Helen Dardik writes a lovely little blog - Orange you Lucky! Lots of good stuff on there, generally of a cutesy, retro type nature. What I really like are the patterns she designs on a regular basis. Oh just found the link to her portfolio site, check out One lucky Helen, full of good stuff.

Asite I designed and illustrated a while ago has just launched today, it’s the Are you British in Bed Quiz or K-Y Jelly ;)

They’ve got a new product out in the UK called Touch Massage, or how we had to refer to it endlessly in the site - K-Y® brand TOUCH MASSAGE® 2-in-1 Tingling or Warming… that rolls off the tongue nicely doesn’t it! Anyhow it’s a combination of pussy rub and massage oil, to get you all sexed up in the bedroom.

We basically built a sex quiz located in a passport control booth (I didn’t think of the idea!). It’s pretty well done if I don’t say so myself, Dezza & Russ did the flash development, Mattias did the HTML and FaceBook application. So on give it a go, it is actually pretty funny.

If you just want to get your hands on the lube, it’s available from Boots here »

Blighmy this guys good! Ross Macdonald has masses of class work to see on his site, illustrations, comics, movie props like the National Treasure: Book of Secrets above, childrens books and beautiful letterpress design work. Always lovely to a good breadth of work and even nicer that all of it is made with spot on retro/vintage styling.

Product design agency SeymourPowell have a new site. I don’t usually like flash sites, but this is quite sweet. Fast loading, not too flashy, well structured & easy to get around. Also the SeymourPowell in seven clicks stack of cards intro thing is a nice touch.

Cheers for the link Dom.

If you’re in Belgium next week, I’d highly recommend the opening night of Eugene & Louise Bakery. The marzipan characters they make are amazing:

And the packaging for their chocolate bars is spot on:

Cheers for the link Asi.

This is a nice idea, cellotape dispenser in the shape of a cassette tape. Made by j-me, who have a few other interesting products, such as the groinal keyholder.

Via Yacco’s blog.

I‘ve been asked a few times what filter I use to produce the washed out, printed look of some of my work recently. Well it’s not a filter, I just drop some textures into the alpha channel in photoshop, it’s pretty straight forward so I’ve made a couple of quick tutorials showing how to do it for a painted and printed effect.

First up - making your illustration or graphics look painted onto a textured surface. I’m going use this little sleeping weeble above as demonstration, you can download the files to work with here.

1. Create a layer mask. Open the image you want to look painted on. If you want you can download the image I’ve used here. Click the mask button on the bottom of the layer panel (1).

2. Stick something textured into the mask. I’ve used some wooden decking for this example, as it stands out quite well. If you’re using my photoshop file, select the wood pattern in the texture layer and copy it. Then re-select the image layer and click the channels tab (1). Select the bottom layer (alpha channel) and paste the texture (2).

3. Finished! You should end up with something like the image on the left. You have to go back to your layers and select the image layer again to get rid of the red (not sure why…) Should now look like the image on the right.

4. Fine tuning. At the moment the original image is quite transparent and a lot of the texture from the layer below is showing through. If you select the layer mask (1), then select from the menus - Image > Adjustments > Levels - you can move the white slider (2) over to the left and maybe the mid (grey) slider a little too. This’ll make the image less transparent (white = opaque in the world of masks)

The finished image:

I’ve made the wooden fence/decking into repeating tiles, you can Download them here (Select the tile - Edit > Define Pattern - then you can use paint bucket to fill your page with the pattern).

Well that was my first ever tutorial, I hope it made sense!

Here’s a quick tutorial showing how to make your illustration/graphics look like they’re printed. This is pretty much the same as the first tutorial, only we’ll be using different textures for the image than the background. For this example I’m re-creating my Cookie’s Plonk desktop wallpaper.

This is our starting point, check here to download the Photoshop file I’ve used.

1. Create a layer mask. Open the image you want to look printed. If you want you can download the image I’ve used here. Click the mask button on the bottom of the layer panel (1).

2. Add some paper texture. If you’re using my photoshop file, select the Textured Paper layer and copy it. Then re-select the image layer and click the channels tab (1). Select the bottom layer (alpha channel) and paste in the texture (2).

Return to the layers tab, and click the image layer. You can see above that the flat colour illustration now has the texture of the paper.

3. Add some wear & tear. To make it look a bit more realistic you might want to add some extra wear and tear. First you need to apply the first mask, select from the menu Layer > Layer Mask > Apply. Then repeat step 2 but use the dirty paper layer instead of textured paper this time.

The finished image:

Here’s the finished image! If you quickly scroll up and quickly compare it to the starting point - it’s good at taking the edge off crisp vector graphics, making them look warmer, friendlier & more real I think.

Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar have been scraping the internet again for stuff you’ve posted. This time round they’ve been mining online dating sites to analyse peoples search for love and self. Looks great from the screenshots, shame there’s not a web version, only a working installation in the Museum of Modern Art.