Art4screen.com

What is a logo to a team? It’s their identity and their masthead, and a place to focus when the going gets tough. A great logo can inspire and motivate, while a dull logo can make a team feel cheap and amateurish. With all this pressure on producing a design that gets people excited the stress can start to affect an artist. Logos are one of the most challenging tasks a designer will tackle in screen-printing because of the expectations. No one (no matter how small the budget) hires a designer for a mediocre logo. Everyone wants the best, something that will make the crowds say, “That’s a killer logo!”
The way to consistent, high-quality logos is to develop a method of design that works with your particular skills. Not every artist is great at drawing, and some that are good with the pen have trouble with typography. To find your niche keep a mental log of successful logos that are well received and try to glean what it was that people really liked about them. You may be surprised by what customers consider your design strengths to be.
After doing hundreds of logos for clubs, teams, and local businesses I developed a strong method for quickly whipping up logos that satisfied the customers. The steps I devised were fairly simple to follow and worked well with my style of design. I will use my steps as a reference for you to compare to, but the best results for you will be achieved by using your inner eye and skills in a way that feels right. The heart of creating team logos still rides on achieving the proper visual feel.
Before I start roughing out the design, I like to remind myself of some basic logo “rules” that I use to keep me focusing on the customer. As with all artistic rules, they are made to be broken and exist only as a guideline for injecting function at the outset of creation. Read the rest of this entry »

My article made the cover of Screen Printing this month! I have a lot of new content to add over the next few weeks. The tutorials are coming soon! CorelDraw X4 and Photoshop tricks for separations will be in the near future. I am developing tutorial DVD’s as products that should be out in a month. Let me know if there is something that you want to see and I will do my best to include it in a future post.

As a gift to those that decided to drop by you can download the graphic that I created to print a reference of the PMS color table using a DTG machine. It is quite useful. All you have to do is create a printed version on a t-shirt and then use it as a reference to pick out colors that you want and use those values in your source image. Kind of a reverse engineering approach but it works great. Additionally, you can see how close your RGB conversions of pantones simulate the hues in the book. If you have a CMYK machine you can use it to test the conversion of the RGB to CMYK to find the truest method. This file is nice because it has a boatload of colors from all of the swatches. If I would have been a true masochist then I would have put in all of the numbers… sheesh - but you can find a number by going down from the beginning of the swatch table and finding it on the shirt - they are in descending order.

A second file that is included for download is my CMYK Photoshop painting reference which I use for both color matching and creating CMYK painted files that can import and print out quickly from CorelDraw. This file also works great for profiling common colors on a CMYK DTG machine.

Happy printing -

P.S.: The PMS file looks cool on a black shirt to wear around too…

Fast isn’t always good. Unless you’ve already agreed on a price, then fast or faster is not only good, it’s the way to go. If you think about an artist that works fast what is the vision that comes to mind? Most people are programmed to think that artists need to slowly craft their work like we are carving sculptures or molding clay. Not so with graphic software! The faster you work in software, the more things you can try which equals the more options you can test which results in the best version for the client. So how can you be as fast as possible in the art/designer game without it cheapening the quality?

Well… short of outsourcing your artwork to Pakistan or India, (this is a joke on Tim Ferriss, the genius of fourhourworkweek) there are ways of significantly increasing your art speed in a very short time without sacrificing quality:

1. Master the quick keys - those are those pesky little symbolic keystroke combinations that are listed next to primary commands in most graphic software. Learn the main ones for navigation, zooming, layout ordering (what is below what) first and move onward from there. This can double or triple your speed by itself. Next - look into the next stage of keys which is shortcutting the dialog menus and navagation menus like windows explorer (you can shortcut most of this as well using keystrokes to zoom alphabetically and reorder the layouts as well).

2. Practice with the pen tool - using the pen tool for navigation and common graphical tasks can also increase speed by up to 40% over the mouse. I tested this with a side by side comparison of moving and clicking the mouse and using a tablet for all navigation. Moving the mouse takes 25-40% longer and is less precise. It’s just comfortable, right? The price of comfort is easily broken if you add up small amounts of time over a whole week. You may earn an extra hour or even two whole hours in a week in just navigation time! Thats enough time to catch Borne Ultimatum again… (I will post the time differences in a later spreadsheet for those interested)

3. Organize your work space and file system - the hardest things to do are often the best ones to start with. Organization pays off in the obvious ways (easier to find stuff) but don’t underestimate the freeing of mental clutter that physical or computer file clutter causes on our easily distracted brains. Easier to focus equals easier to concentrate and more work in less time.

4. Reboot at lunch and defrag once a week - I have taken the practice of rebooting the computer at lunch and it really helps with the slow drag (this is the phenomenon where the computer runs out of memory after running large graphic files and things just get slower and slower) - practice backing up all working files before of course. Read the rest of this entry »