Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from eightyone design!
We would just like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all our readers and subscribers for taking the time to read the eightyone design graphic design blog and for all your comments and thoughts. We wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year!
Tags: Chritmas
Posted in Blogging, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Eightyone Design featured in Images Magazine
Images Magazine is a publication produced for textile screen printing, embroiders and garment decorators. It has a circulation of around 10,000 across the UK and Europe.
We were recently featured in Images Magazine showcasing the Summer 08 collection of World Beach Rugby Clothing. The magazine discovered our blog through Google and read our post about how we created the WBR Summer clothing range. Soon enough the magazine got in contact and asked to feature the article. We were more than happy to be included in the publication and thrilled they found us through Google.
We have just had the magazine delivered to our door and are really pleased with the article and the photography! Click here to download a pdf of the magazine and check out the article.
Have you been recently featured in a magazine / publication for a project you are particularly proud of? Are you finding a lot of people are finding through Google? Let us know your tales and stories!
Tags: blog, clothing design
Posted in Blogging, Freelancing, T-shirt / Clothing design | 3 Comments »
Design and Development of The VW Camper Van Blog Website and Logo Design
As you are probably well aware over here at eightyone design we have a huge passion for VW campervans. We have written a couple of articles on them (When should a graphic designer stop designing? and VW campervan logo designs) and love to tinker with our own VW T25 Camper Van. We had been thinking of creating a blog solely dedicated to our hobby enabling us to write endless articles about various events we attend, camping, plans for our van as well as featuring other peoples vehicles. We finally launched www.vwcampervanblog.com last month and we are really pleased with the overall look as well as how it has been received by the VW Community. In this article we outline the design process we went through to design the blog and where we drew inspiration from.
Overall Style
We decided upon a vintage / retro theme as the blog would feature all different vans from 1950’s and 1960’s splitties through 1970’s Bay Window Vans and also the more modern VW camper vans.
Logo Design
We started at the beginning - with the logo design. Knowing we were after a retro feel we hit the usual inspiration hot spots such as Flickr. We found some great examples of vintage and retro drinks signs aswell as petrol / oil signs which we really liiked and seemed to suit the subject matter really well.
There are some great Flickr Groups on this subject:
Vintage Soft Drink Signs
Vintage Texaco
Vintage Soda Labels
Taking inspiration from the above logos we developed several different logo design concepts in similar styles but decided on the logo below. Several different colours optons were played around with but we both felt it worked best with cream and blue as it felt retro yet clean and crisp.
Website Design
We found an excellent blog post over at Smashing Magazine featuring a range of retro websites. There was certainly plenty to get us inspired! Many of the interiors of campervans feature vintage fabric patterns and we knew we wanted to utilise this in the design.
We also were itching to encorporate textures in the website design to create a layered effect giving the design some depth. We love the canvas material we found and felt it added to the vintage upholstery feel we were trying to acheive.
For the other elements on the page we wanted a distressed look as though they were printed on the canvas. This was achieved using several different layers combined with blending modes.
We liked the idea of using Polaroid’s to display the first image of the post to further the personal feel of the site and make images look a little more retro.
Overall we are really pleased with the blog design and feel that it has a simple vintage style which is reminisent of the VW Camper Vans and the era from which they came. It was both fun and challenging to design for ourself without having any client input. It also allowed us to explore some techniques and styles which we have not yet been able to use on client projects.
So what do you think? Do you like the overall look of the blog? Do you like vintage / retro style design? Or do you prefer something a bit more clean and simple?
Tags: blog, branding, Logo Design, textures, vw, website design
Posted in Blogging, Design Inspiration, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Personal Projects, Web Design, branding | 2 Comments »
1 Outstanding Reason I love top 10 lists!
We often submit articles to the usual design blog submission sites such as Design Bump and Design Float and receive a lot of traffic from these (thank you to the good people from these sites!). However, I have been reading a lot of blog articles lately about how to boost traffic to your blog. Many of them mention that Top 10 lists (or any number for that matter - top 20 website designs or 17 great photoshop tricks etc - you get the idea) are a great way to bring a huge amount of traffic to your design blog though social networking sites such as Digg.
I have to say that I was skeptical so you may have noticed that we have been doing some experimenting here on the eightyone design blog with the sort of posts we have been publishing lately. For those of you that haven’t read our last few blog articles, here are the last 5 titles:
5 reasons you should detach yourself from your digital world
Why does everyone think they are a graphic designer?
20 Stunning Music CD Cover Designs
8 Items a Graphic Designer Would Take Back to School
10 Inspiring Website Footer Designs
As you can see, most of the blog titles are based around lists and use lots of images, and I have to say, it works! We have enjoyed a huge growth in traffic to the blog with the above posts and have also seen a good improvement in the amount of comments we are receiving (thanks to all those that have joined in on some of the discussions).
I’m not sure why these lists prove to be so popular? Is it due to the fact that the title is so precise and you know what you are about to see? Is it because they tend to be showing you something inspirational, which is always popular? Or is it just because we all like top 10 lists?!
So what do you think about top 10 lists? Do these types of posts increase your views? Are you someone who scours the web world in search of such lists, if so why?
Tags: Blogging, social networking
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »