Tag: Graphic Design

Of cherry blossoms and insecurities

I’ve just finished the Easter theme for the VGVA site. It’s been a fun and challenging experience, improving my skills and deepening my understanding of many Illustrator features. Pushing the envelope, that’s what it’s all about.

I’ve just finished the Easter theme for the VGVA site. It’s been a fun and challenging experience, improving my skills and deepening my understanding of many Illustrator features. Pushing the envelope, that’s what it’s all about.

Plus, the kudos. Those are always good.

The header graphic was the most complex I’d done so far; in fact, the real challenge (in addition to figuring out the tools at my disposal) was having a clear idea of how the finished product should look. I had to make several changes to the colour scheme along the way and my first draft, was very rough: some rough Paintbrush daubs in place of cherry blossoms, and a few lines sketching out a tree. So the next step, naturally, was to add more details, make everything more realistic.

Or… was it? The problem was that (a) it’d be a lot of work, and (b) even if I pulled it off, it might not necessarily look that good anyways. Maybe realism was overrated; maybe an overabundance of little details would just overwhelm the viewer, and all I had to do was show the essence of cherry trees and Easter eggs and all that springtime goodness. (Granted, the eggs were the easy part.)

For the next few days I kept going back and forth between the two extremes. The fact is, I wasn’t that secure with my visual imagination (something I already blogged about) and so falling back on what my camera saw instead of creating my own interpretation seemed a safe solution.

Well, I think the final product works. I’m still not totally happy with it, but I’ve alway been my own worst critic, so take that with a grain of salt. At the moment I’m heroically resisting the urge to go back and tinker. I can’t find the reference right now, but some years ago I read a quote by Aldous Huxley about regret. He wrote that it was a mistake to continually go back and fiddle with your finished works. No matter how much you polished them they would always have flaws; at some point you just had to let go, learn from your mistakes, and go on to make whole new works. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: identify what needs work, and then fix it in a later version. I probably can’t do much better right now. A year from now, though? Oh yeah.

The Physics of Thumbnails

The square-cube ratio: when an object doubles in size, its surface area quadruples but its mass is multiplied by eight (oh, I was tempted to write “its mass octuples,” but that’d be a little much. Also, Firefox’s built-in dictionary doesn’t recognise “octuples”).

The square-cube ratio: when an object doubles in size, its surface area quadruples but its mass is multiplied by eight (oh, I was tempted to write “its mass octuples,” but that’d be a little much. Also, Firefox’s built-in dictionary doesn’t recognise “octuples”). And since a creature’s strength is proportional to the cross-section of its limbs, this explains why an ant can carry hundreds of times its own weight on its spindly little legs, a human can just about manage another human, and an elephant with its thick frame and stumpy legs can carry 25% its own weight. An elephant-sized human wouldn’t even be able to move.

So what’s the point? The rules don’t change when you get smaller or bigger, but how they manifest themselves does. This was brought home recently as I tweaked the thumbnails for VGVA.com‘s style switcher. The problem was to present the graphics, colour scheme, and overall look of each theme in a 20 x 20 space. Just shrinking the main graphics wasn’t enough. Details disappear, colours show up differently, even proportions can seem a little out of whack.

Consider the (newly finished) Christmas theme. That one was easy: I just took one of the snowflakes, shrunk it a bit, thickened the lines (otherwise they’d disappear), and then cropped it. Result: a pretty little thumbnail that does a good job of suggesting the whole while looking nice on its own. The tree wouldn’t have worked in a square space, and trying to show a whole snowflake would have meant (a) losing a lot of detail and (b) wasted space because those snowflakes are taller than they’re wide.

Second hardest: Red Fire. Deciding to go with just one shade of orange in the center part was easy, but then I fiddled a lot with the angle and granularity.

Biggest headache: Sunburst. Shrinking the sun graphic was no good: at that size it was just a shapeless smudge. Even worse: against the darker backgrounds I lost most of the contrast between the yellow and light blue. What to do? My first step was to thicken and darken the orange outline. That helped, a little, but the shape was still wrong. It was only a couple of days ago that I had my Eureka moment: stretch it out. The essence of the full-size graphic was in the shooting rays, so the thumbnail had to emphasize them. Also I lightened the yellow just a bit, to increase the contrast with the blue background. It felt a bit like cheating because I wanted to keep the colours the same, but the large sunburst had a white centre, so that was all right.

So, yeah. That is an interesting experience. I don’t know how many people this will interest, but I wanted to record this latest step in my quest to be a better Web designer.