Chameleon Home

Festival for the Community

Luke Harris — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:27:12 +0000

Our client stages a community festival once a year, and tries to appeal to everyone within the city boundaries. They wanted an open, friendly design with a sense of inclusiveness and place. We used the beautiful Mrs Shepperds (Alejandro Paul) for the flourishes of the title, and Archer (Hoefler, Frere-Jones) for the rest. Aerial images of the city helped give the design local context.

View Word Docs for free

Luke Harris — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:29:27 +0000

Want to view Word docs accurately without the expense of buying the program? Microsoft thoughtfully provides a free Word viewer download. Very handy for those who use open source or browser based word processors that don't always display Word documents exactly the way originally intended. Like the free Adobe Acrobat viewer, the viewer does not provide any editing functionality.

Word

Luke Harris — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:31:51 +0000

Our client wanted a high-impact type-based design. We used contrast, intense colour and a line of text from each of the stories featured in the anthology. The page curl gives a hint of depth and serves to direct attention from the title down to the subtitle. Typefaces used were Museo Sans and Museo Slab by Jos Buivenga.

Noun Project

Luke Harris — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:11:53 +0000

A simple idea, well executed: the Noun Project is a catalogue of symbols covering everything from the mundane to the sublime. They are available free of charge, and the web interface is as simple, clean and monochrome as the symbols themselves.

Lost Worlds of Graphic Design

Luke Harris — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:52:23 +0000

Personal computers and the Internet have opened up new worlds for millions of people, but they have also remade or destroyed dozens of professions and made hundreds of specialist skills obsolete. The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies chronicles the items used by professionals in the graphic design and advertising industries. They seem very distant and quaint, but once they were essential tools for serious professionals, and the making of them was an entire industry in itself.

Lions and Lillies

Luke Harris — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:34:02 +0000

A well-written and tightly plotted historical drama, Lions and Lillies: Book 1 covers affairs of state and love during the Hundred Year War between England and France. We were tasked to design a cover that created a sense of the intensity of the story, and combined military and personal aspects. In other words, the entry to "a world of passion and intrigue". The authors have created an informative website to accompany the publication of their book.

Is it a Bird?

Luke Harris — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:26:25 +0000

Science imitates nature and the result is art. German inventors have devised a rather beautiful mechanical bird that flaps, flies, soars and returns to land. It's interesting to contemplate humans one day flying in this way, but the lifting power required to get a human off the ground would probably be prohibitive. And the wingspan would be titanic. Armies around the world must be looking at this metal/composite bird as yet another potential surveillance robot.

Good Cover, Bad Cover

Luke Harris — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:33:27 +0000

Science Fiction covers often provoke amusement amongst those who don't read Sci Fi. For those of us who do, we treasure the remarkable variety of cover art — from melodramatic pulp novels to high concept fiction and everything in between. The covers could be formulaic, but were often wildly inventive and even avant garde. After all, if you are writing about the future, you're not automatically bound by the constraints of the past. This website explores the often hilariously literal and overblown art of the less refined end of the genre, while this one catalogues Penguin's consistently high quality and restrained covers (mirroring the often high polish of the contents).

Dingbats want to be Free

Luke Harris — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:00:48 +0000

More than just an old-fashioned insult, dingbats are pictorial typefaces packed with symbols useful in a wide variety of design contexts. FontFont have released a sampler typeface (not the full complement of symbols, but a wide variety nonetheless) for free downloading. Erler Dingbats were first released some forty years ago and have now been updated for the digital era with new symbols. Each symbol has been designed to integrate with its fellows. In the usual way of European type, the result is slightly bloodless but eminently useable.

Anatomy of a Typeface

Luke Harris — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:38:36 +0000

If you thought a stem belonged to a flower and a bowl was what you put the flower in, then visit Thinking with Type for a typographical education. The site is a well designed tour of type design, units of type measurement, classification and use, and hints on mixing typefaces, all written in plain English and elegantly illustrated. The site makes a good case for considering typography as the core of most graphic design, even on the web.