A bit of VERY useful information shared by my coworker this morning it all came as a surprise to me since I had no idea of this kind of detail. So if you already know then good FOR YOU - but if you don't know the arbitrary lines on the side of the Solo cups aren't arbitrarily place after all. They are hidden detail that SOLO carefully designed in their cups as measurement lines. So now you know! CHEERS
Some of you may know us personally, others may vicariously live through the fun/boring things we do. Both Anh and I have design jobs by day and batman by night. Congrats to my partner and brother on working on the Nike Fuel Band at his awesome day job with ASTRO STUDIOS (www.astrostudios.com)- Such a successful awesome products this is only the beginning we've got a long design career ahead of us- the goal is pointed towards the clouds. We'll write a detailed posting about this later tonight.
Looks like this pick up will be a fun tool to have around the office. The Graphtec cutting plotter is our new used vinyl cutter.We're so excited for you guys because we're going to start sending out Creative Session vinyl for your: Laptops, Cellphones, Cars, House, Dogs, Cats, Girl Friends whatever you'd like to use it for. Stay tune for some designs for now we'll be going with our simple "CreSes Medallion" and the "CrewerC" stickers.
Here are a few photos of the plotting beauty queen. Feast your eyes.
So we've recently picked up a new DSLR for the office. We've been shooting all our stuff with the Nikon D7000 with great results. My only complaint is that the d7000 is a bit grainy in low light setting must be the lens? who knows. Anyway the 5d Mark II is an awesome camera.
I know, I know, the Mark III is out now but for what we' need it for dropping a little over 3 grand doesn't sound that appealing to me. This is my first full sensor camera and I'm still trying to get use to it but its been MAD fun learning on it. I'm not interested in doing a review for the camera (there are tons out there already) so moving on I'd like to share my excitement coming into the office today. I received a package from incase and this was whats in it!
This is the new "DSLR Sling Pack by Incase" Thanks for the hook up anonymous designer I know from Incase. Here are two quick images I snapped with my iPhone I'll take more detailed photos with the camera in the bag ect.
Freshest shade out! Ever since pop culture has been reviving the whole 80's movement we've been seeing alot of neon color ways hitting shelves. Some brands just are over the top with neon but our friend Nike up north is doing it quite right. This probably has something to do with the classic air max 90's.
Lunar Flows are the heart and sole of classic Nike running sneaks! Luckily i was able to get my hands on a couple pairs, these things went fast! You can't go wrong with the highly underrated woven finish!
No lie, I was literally drool'n over these when they hit blogs a couple months back. As an ID guy I'm big a big fan of crazy manufacturing methods and Nike definately delivered on these 97s! You're staring at the marriage of Hyperfuse tech and AirMax 97s for a stitch free shoe! BOSS!
A few weeks back my friend Amy reached out asking if I was interested in designing their 2012's softball shirts. Yes,I did design them and also wrote a blog posting about this; Titled "Free Work Free Exercise" -- scroll down a bit. The project was definitely fun to work on and a quick way of brushing up on my graphic design skills. Id like to remind everyone as we should take on non paid projects as often as we are able to. Being that they never have huge requirements and you have unlimited reign on the final results. Its an awesome way to build confidence and add to your portfolio at the same time.
Any whom a mysterious package showed up in the mail today. I was wondering who this Michael McFeron was.....
Opening up the box I realized a project I worked on a few weeks ago had came back as a pleasant surprise. Amy and Mike had sent me a team shirt with name on the back- Mucho Gracias guys.
Now here is another lesson to keep in mind- when specking out printing detail be sure to make it clear to the print shop of what you want in your artwork file because verbal conversations get lost in translation. My original intent was for a black shirt with gold and white accents. Illustrator has no gold color so I used yellow as a placeholder. The print shop took my document at face value. :) Oh well, it still looks good.
Remember these?
Well we've picked one up for the office. This thing is fast and zippy, I"m sure the updated board has better bushings and the barring are a lot smoother then what you bought back in the 70's but this board is small light and super fun to skate around town in.
They have so many color ways! http://www.pennyskateboards.com/home.html#!prettyPhoto
These came out last month but we've finally got our hands on them. Sorta slipped on reminding our selves to pre-order a pair of the Jordan 10's Chicago edition. But since we had an inside hook up. Went ahead and picked up a pair for our future baby.
The oldest living Industrial Designer- Eva Zeisel passed away the eve of 2012 but has left behind a legacy. She's inspiring the least to say.
So we've been sampling beanies from a few different resources. Working hard to really get what we like. I think we're getting close to something we are proud of and can sell to the general public! stay tune.
"Look up & there are those more fortunate, look down & there are those less fortunate. Stay true stay humble." --Creative Session
Recently my back has been hurting and I've been looking around at new office chair options. I was so fascinated by the concept of the Knoll Generation chair and wanted to save up some money to buy this chair. Turns out our favorite design site Core77 was holding a collaboration contest with Knoll inc. to give away free Generation chairs if entered a contest with your secret to success - Its very simple follow them on twitter and tweet with the hash marks #secret2success and you could win! The quote above is what i tweeted and to my surprise I won a chair! Can't wait to get a hold o fit.
Nixon pioneers some of the most aesthetically interesting watches to us. They are a brand we've continued to follow and be inspired by. We're quite positive a percentage of you have friends whom own at least one or more purely because of how well designed these watches are. Here at the CS lab we are more than familiar with the Nixon brand, the recent Tone on Tone Ad by Nixon is something we reference and keep on being influenced by. With this said we're giving it a go, here is our own spin on a Nixon watch called "The Minamalist"
"simplicity is the new black."--creative session
"The Minimalist" is a design inspired to be pure simplicity. Our goal is to design a watch that equates to "Less but Better." The question we asked our selves was; How do we make something more meaningful by taking away? We understand as we continue to grow expectations began to pile up, with more expectation we require more time. "The Minimalist" is our attempt in removing the anxiety to our constant battle with time and disguising it subtly. Designing the watch we redirected the focus to the hour hand of the watch, by doing this - the initial read should give the watch bearer the approximate hour of the day and not be distracted by the minutes left within that hour. The minute hand is designed to be a secondary focus. With the "Less but Better" philosophy we also wanted to focus more on the materials and design but less on the overwhelming graphics most companies add to their watches.
CLICK TO ENLARGE
Lately I've been ultra busy with work, work. I mean Lab126 work.
Yes, CreativeSession is just a side hustle that Bro and I started back in 07' It's a way for us to collaborate with other artist, designers to do crafty, designer'esk type things. I'm very proud of C.S and how far this journey has taken us. What I appreciate most about my life as of yet is that I get to design 24/7. My 9 to 5 @ Lab126 is to design products for the Amazon brand. We just released 4 new kindles BTW. (be sure to pre-order yours.) After the 9 to 5 hustle, If the energy is there I'd unwind with dinner and a beer and have a bit of fun Creative"Sessioning" with little Bro.
This week we both have been burnt out from designing electronic products at work so decided we'd revisit our high school infatuation which is shoes. Both him and I actually went to school to become shoe designers. 4 years later the geeky, techie bug had us! We are both now product designers that still wished we kept our sneaker dreams.
Anh had re-worked an Audi inspired pair of skates this week if you havn't seen it LINK YO SELF HERE!
Here are images of what I did:
Quick sketches in order to lock down final shape & form.
Here is the final design : Nike ACG "Boat Dreams"
These are screen shots to show the details of the shoe! Done in Photoshop! SKILLING IT!
I'm Making this into a poster if anyone is interested. It'll be up on our fanpage soon. Be sure to like us. www.facebook.com/CREATIVEsession
Click image for higher resolution.
Finally sent out one color way to PS print in Emerville CA to have made! what do you think?
"Google magnify is our attempt at design an object removing it self of clutter. It performs one specific task & the task well." - - Anh Nguyen
Google Magnify is the latest concept to be created by Anh Nguyen. This concept began with a funny email that he had been going around the office at his work. He went up to their intern, who just happened to be from France, before realizing that he would have a tough time reading it. After a little bit of confusion, the intern just copy and pasted the entire email into Google Translate and was cracking up just like everyone else after reading it.
Then the idea started to percolate in his mind; what if there was a device which was basically a window to the world, where everything would be translated into the language of your choosing? A modern take on the magnifying glass, which hasn't been updated much in its 800 years of existence. With a flip out handle, triple cameras, and text recognition software running through the Google Translate engine, the device just needs to be held in front of any text to be translated on the spot.
Just think how helpful this would be for tourists, students abroad, even our parents; the world wouldn't seem like such a scary place with help from Google Magnify.
As we get closer and closer to October 15th (Karmaloop's KAZBAY Party in SF), we thought it'd be nice to update the readers with a detailed image of what the collaboration t-shirt we made looks like in its full glory, then speak a little about the process of creating and designing it.
Coming into this project, we knew that there were more than 13 brands who would be attending the party; these brands are all separate entities, but will be coming together with the same intentions: to promote brand awareness, to network, and to have a wonderful night.
It'll be a party you shouldn't sleep on.
Conception: When we first started the project, NASCAR and the massive amounts of ads that are applied to a each car came to mind, since we would be working with over 13 logos in the design; thinking of NASCAR made sense at the start.
The thought of the amounts of logos to put on a t-shirt design AND make it appealing was overwhelming. Maybe we'd have to change up our idea of how to go about this design.
We decided that NASCAR frame of mind for the design wasn't going to be attractive or appealing to pop culture, and definitely not something popular to used by the urban heads in the KAZBAH store. The question was now, "what could we use?" What popular product, vehicle, or character would suffice for this job? We dug back into our youth and the idea of Transformers came to mind - then Voltron. Voltron is a classic figure that most of these brands could gravitate towards.
Quickly after vectorization, we realized that trying to fit the Voltron figurine on a t-shirt and have enough room to fit 13 plus logos on it as well would be quite difficult, especially if we want each and every logo to be clear. That idea was tossed.
Then it came to me! Why not mix these logos into a nice sleeved tattoo design, but with a twist. We would use traditional japanese tattoo sleeve imagery, but mix in images that all these brands could relate to, such as things they sell; we wanted to include products like hats, shoes, ect.
The following are sketches, images and progress jpegs.
