Inspiration of the Day

In today's inspiration of the day, I decided to feature Mauricio Mora's piece entitled "Natzuro". I used to have a passion for anything related to martial arts. I like the designer's cartoonish style, blur techniques, and choice of colors that creates an awareness for it's viewers. If you look on the guys face, you can just tell that he is focused on something hard because of the squinting mark under his eyelid. Mauricio did a great job with the shadow detail as well as the gradient which you primarily focus on when looking at his nose.The character outline is great too. Heavy outlines like the ones Mauricio made give cartoons and digital illustrations a unique feel and I like the fact that it made the character look as though he was popping out of the background. The background is pretty cool as well. It reminds me of something you would see from an old comic book. Even the motion blur on the yellow things( I'm not even going to lie, I don't know what they are because it wasn't mentioned. Just for the sake of this topic, let's just say they are chips) is pretty awesome. So basically here's what I think is going on in the picture. The guy is getting bombarded by chips and now he is trying to fight back to save his families honor! Haha now that is a crazy story. Oh and if you want to see more of Mauricio Mora's work check him out here.

Early Morning Design Catcher

So I woke up this morning, thanked God for another great day( oh it will be a great day today haha!), got on YouTube, watched a website review, and out the corner of my eye I saw a video title on the side of the page that said, "Live by your slogan or you don't have one." (Credits go to Jared Polin for posting the video of it on YouTube). I thought to myself, "whoa...now that's too real." To me, that title was so deep that I felt like I had to put my own self in check. Standing by what I offer people, clients, businesses and so on, can be a challenge sometimes depending on the situation, but regardless of that, I should still make every effort to do what I said I was going to do by giving them exactly what I had offered them in the first place. As a designer, my slogan, "Simple, clean, fresh." is part of the reason why people came to me and I will never forget that. Just to be real about it, I see a slogan as a promise that I am making to people and if I can't hold up to my promise, then I would be considered nothing more than a liar and a hypocrite.

So I got creative with the phrase and decided to just do a demonstration of how it would look on a few different items. It never hurts to go ahead and try something out as a designer. I tend to give some of my close clients, who are just starting in their business, visual help if they have a slogan and aren't sure if it works or not with what they are trying to promote. Most people charge consulting fees for things like that, but hey it's up to you what you want to do.

The reason why a slogan would fail for your design business is you

The number one person to blame when providing services or offering something to people and you don't follow through, is yourself. Keep priorities in check, plan ahead of time, be confident in your craft. Don't offer services that you have no experience in. Say for instance, if you do graphic design and tell people you do web design too, just because it sounds good, but you don't have a clue how to make one or even build one from something like WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, etc., or who to get the site hosted by, or get a domain name, let alone know what a domain name is. Like my coach used to tell us, "You better check yourself before you wreck yourself." Spend time researching the things you don't know in your spare time, not on a clients time.

Inspiration of the day

This piece is apart of Murat Suyur's collection called Food on Click ad. I love this image because it takes a short, unique phrase, "Ordered fish got shish," and literally gives you just that in the advertisement. You understand the problem immediately while trying to order on the phone because of the blockage aka the shish kabob. He did an excellent job with the brightness and contrast, shadows and highlights of the fish, lettuce, shish kabob, and the phone itself. Not only that but the subtle gradient is perfect for this because it brings a feeling of awareness to the ad without creating a distraction. This is the work of an advanced artist that knows how to work with and manipulate images to the point to where it makes you think that it could actually be possible to shove a fish through the phone. But yeah guys, don't shove fish or shish kabobs through your phones though haha.