Monthly Archives:
February 2016

The Black Eyed Peas once asked where is the love? I want to ask where is the romance?

According to the dictionary,

Love (noun) is a strong feeling of affection.

While,

Romance (noun) is a  quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.

We make mistakes all the time, at work, at home, or even on the road getting there. That’s part of being human. At work, you learn from your mistakes. At home, unconditional love helps you overcome them. In between both worlds, we come across different behaviors that might push us to write a book on how to lose friends and alienate people.

People’s relationships revolve around meeting the other in the middle. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to maintain a relationship, but It takes one clear moment to realize that we don’t have to! Maybe, just maybe, we don’t need a social experience that drives us to keep bits and pieces of ourselves in the hiding, put our comfort and pleasure behind, and engage in conversations we don’t want to have, especially when socializing has become focused on gossip, feeding desires and putting one’s interest first.

People may wrong us all the time. It’s normal. The better we know and love someone, the more we’re likely to spare them the agony. Maybe this is why we search for love. We look for a sanctuary, a keeper or a shield.

Time may change who you care about and how you care about them, but I hate to believe that such civil behaviors only exist in romance. I hate to believe that if we are not in love, we are becoming avatars in our own skin.

Civilizations have been adding new words to the encyclopedia over the years. Bromance is one of them. Instead of expanding, today, our dictionaries are shrinking, losing words that do not fit their definitions anymore: the true meaning of friendship, love, caring, and sharing a genuine moment.

Long live bromance!

What is my definition of bromance you ask?

1. Treating others the way you like to be treated
2. Respect them and their boundaries
3. Always have good intentions and assume the best
4. Help or jump at the opportunity whenever you can (aka genuinely CARE)
5. Which leads me to my final point: BE PROACTIVE.

A daily dose of the above prescription is advised for a better work experience and a smoother stay at home. Trust me on this one!

Rebecca Mourani
Associate Creative Director

As a designer and a print fanatic, I am always wondering which movement do we belong to nowadays.

Where does all these technological advancements and infinite choices available for modern day designers, leave us?

If we make a concise trip inside the history of graphic design, we cannot but notice the sense of order artistic movements have provided designers back then. We also cannot deny how much the socio-political context influenced certain movements, but there was always a universal feel to the artworks of the same era. While today, rapid developments are shaping our interactions, tools and audiences on a daily basis.

If we take a look at the historical timeline, we can easily categorize the movements in respective phases. When one movement ended, another one began (of course disregarding the fusion in the couple of years during the transition period).

Back then, each movement had its timeframe, tools and context. Even war and war propaganda influenced graphic design universally, and were considered as a movement, first during WWI, and then another time in WWII.

Every phase represented a piece of the puzzle. A puzzle that could not be completed without the results of the industrial revolution, the first photographic implementations, building up to the New Wave movement, also called the electronic Art Nouveau.

Ah! The computers.

They revolutionized everything. For the last 30 years, they kept offering us new tools and platforms to express ourselves. But did it erase all the rules?

Imagine a designer born just after WWI. In his career journey, he would have gone through several movements and his skills would have evolved from decade to decade.

His tools: lithography

His platform: posters

His audience: whoever saw that poster

Now, fast-forward to the year 2015, where this same designer is exposed daily to numerous printing techniques, offset, digital, silk-screen, and most recently 3D printing. Add to that the electronic choice of not printing at all.

His platforms: Posters have turn into posts and google ads, press ads and billboards, e-shots, newsletters, led screens and projection mapping among many others

His audience: the whole world

Without forgetting the context where all these choices are happening: wars, social and environmental issues, globalization, fast-paced competition and daily technological advancements that push us towards a greater communication between different social groups and over boarders into different cultures with unlimited personal interactions.

While plenty might disagree and recognize all the above mayhem as an achievement, a break-through, I miss the days where posters were our public speakers, shouting visual slogans and beautiful illustrations. I miss the impact of the Bauhaus movement on serifs and non-geometrical typography and I especially miss the days where the first avant-garde futurists welcomed advertising as a manifestation of modern life.

It was that simple!

Rebecca Mourani
Associate Creative Director

Designers use many types of software on a daily basis, in order to communicate their ideas. For better or worse, they are our daily bread.

In fact, we spend most of our days learning new features, to speed up our work and get more out for less effort; and the rest of the time, crying our eyes off in front of that “Force Quit” alert window!

But, fellow designers, there is still hope! Because once we’ve overcome the beginners’ learning curve, there are some real gems hidden inside each program that can help us cut down the frustration?

Here are some of the tricks that we learned while working in our studio:

1. Ever witnessed a sudden pause in Photoshop while saving? Cry no more, here’s how you can fix it and continue working peacefully.

How to resume a paused application:

• Go to utilities- open terminal.
• Open active monitor and copy the (PID) number of the paused application.
• Go to “terminal” application and write ” kill-CONT (PID number) “

The PID is a number associated to every single process running on a Mac.

2. If you are like me, you probably prefer illustrator to everybody’s beloved Photoshop. However, I always envied how we can easily make a compound path of text over in an image in the latter. Well recently, our superstar Senior Art Director Zeina found a way to do it using Illustrator:

– First, Select the word or sentence. Create outline. Go to Object, Compound Path, Make.

– Then, all that is left is to Select the photo you want to clip, Arrange it to Back.

– And finally, Select all, and Make Clipping Mask (or Command 7).

3. We are all familiar and in love with the new mock-ups (especially the free ones). Well now, we can create our own mock-ups in Photoshop, and thus speed up that endless process while preparing a presentation:

– Design any shape you want to use as a mock-up on a new layer.

– Convert the layer to Smart Object.

– Click on it.

– Replace Artwork. Save and Close.

4. Ever wanted to Copy and Paste in Place an object from one file to another in Photoshop? It’s very easy:

– Select the layer of the object.

– Right Click on it, and Choose Duplicate Layer.

– When the Duplicate Layer opens, before you click Ok, Go down to the Document menu, and choose the other file’s name.

– Click Ok.

– Now when you go to the other file, you will find the object pasted in the same position!

And before we wrap things up over here, here’s a bonus shortcut, by our Senior Designer Larissa; whenever she wants to quickly shift from vector fill to stroke, she uses “Shift x”. It works in both applications: Illustrator and Photoshop.

Stay tuned for more!

Rebecca Mourani
Associate Creative Director