A screenshot of Chris Spooner's portfolio website.

April’s artist of the month is Chris Spooner, a UK-based graphic and web designer.

Chris runs a rather prolific blog, Blog.SpoonGraphics, which celebrates it’s 5th birthday this year. This blog is a huge source of inspiration as Chris is often shares thoughts, techniques and other interesting things about the graphic and web industry. His tutorials are very concise and provide some good tips for using Photoshop and Illustrator within the graphic design context.

What I like the most about Chris’s work is the clean look of his designs. The edges are very sharp and the details are very crisp and clear. He makes an interesting use of pattern, texture and colour with a splash of retro throughout his work.

If you want to check out more of Chris’s work, check out his website: http://www.spoongraphics.co.uk/

I also highly recommend subscribing to his blogs: http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/ and http://line25.com/.

screenshot of the Evernote website

As a creative person, I’m particularly fond of writing notes and making sketches of things that inspire me. Until last weekend, I used to use my iPhone camera, the Notes app, the Reminder app, a small notebook and a pen to record any random moments of inspiration. A lot of information in lots of different places can be difficult to keep track of and to amalgamate.

Whilst visiting the beautiful city of Edinburgh with my good friend Icy Sedgwick last weekend, I was introduced to a wonderful app called Evernote. Icy had been using it to record thoughts and inspiration for her stories, and suggested that I try it for my own note-taking.

So, what is Evernote? Basically, it’s a note-taking app that allows you to attach photos, websites and any other relevant information to a single note. You can also organise your notes into notebooks and assign tags to make to easier to locate specific notes.

The biggest selling point of this app is it’s capability to sync with an online account and allow you to access your notes on any computer as well as your phone. This was a big plus for me as one of the biggest problems I’d been having with my old method of note-taking was compiling everything together. With Evernote, everything I write or attach is in one place, saving me precious time that I can then dedicate to doing creative or fun stuff.

Why do I think creatives should use it? For the same reasons that I use it: to make notes on the move, be able to keep everything in one place (pictures, web links, notes etc.) and to be able to access the notes whereever or whenever you need too. It’s great for writing minutes for meetings and collaborative projects as a single account could be used by several people to share notes.

If you want to know more about Evernote, check out the website. The app is available for a wide range variety of platforms.

• Reflect on your own work and improve it.
• Seek feedback and guidance from other artists or interested individuals.
• Gain attention from prospective clients.
• Demonstrate a passion for your creative platform.
• Provide an insight into your creative thinking and sources of inspiration.

The prospect of writing a blog can be quite daunting, especially for people who struggle to put their thoughts into words. The aim this post is to give you some advice on how to start a creative blog, write interesting and relative content and get it noticed.

Stay on topic

When starting a new blog, choose a topic and stick to it. If your blog is focused on graphic design, then your entries could be about artists who inspire you or the briefs you’re currently working on. Don’t write about how drunk you got on Saturday night or who is annoying you in your personal life. It’s unprofessional.

Stuck for ideas? Look at other blogs for inspiration.

If you’re suffering from writer’s block, you could create a list of your favourite album covers, or write a short tutorial to demonstrate how to use brushes in Photoshop. Remember, blog entries can be presented in a variety of formats. These can be lists, tutorials, book reviews, event or conference summaries, etc. Use your blog as a digital sketch book as well as a platform to talk about your work.

Plan your content

Once you’ve decided what you’re going to write about, you need to think about the content you wish to include. Try writing a list of key points you want to discuss in your post. You can then turn these key points into short paragraphs.

Draft your post before publishing

Write your post in a word processing program such Word or Pages first. This will make it easier to proofread and you can use the spell checker. Avoid publishing your blog post and then proofreading it. People who subscribe to your blog will likely receive notification of the new post immediately, and seeing a poorly written entry with multiple spelling and grammar mistakes will not encourage them to return.

Think about your language and pitch

If you are writing a post about your design work, narrate it as if you were telling a story. Talk the viewer through your sources of inspiration, development and final product, using descriptive language and appropriate terminology. Never use bad language and avoid slang.

Seek permission and reference correctly

If you want to include images that don’t belong to you, it is polite to seek permission of the owner first. Many artists have no problem with their work being posted on other people’s blogs as long as they have been cited correctly. If you receive a request from an artist to remove their work from your blog, please do so. Remember to cite quotations too, using the Harvard Referencing System.

Use descriptive titles for your entries

Good titles will not only give your viewer an insight into what the post is about, but it will make your post more likely to show up in a search engine results list.

Add tags to your posts

Tags (or labels) make it easy for your viewers to find related posts within your blog archive. For example, this post is tagged with inspiration, tutorial and design, which will give a viewer the option to read more related posts by clicking on the appropriate tag. Remember to generalise tags when creating them so they can be applied to multiple posts, rather than a specific one.

Advertise your blog

The easiest way to get people to read your blog is to advertise it. Updating your status on Facebook and Twitter with a link to the new post will help direct traffic towards your blog. Contributing to other blogs or offering free-to-download content, such as desktop wallpapers, brushes and images, are other great ways to encourage people to visit your blog.

Update regularly

Ideally, you should aim to update your blog at least once a week. Followers will rapidly lose interest if your blog has not been updated in months. Also, avoid using your blog to add status updates. That’s what Twitter and Facebook are for.

Picking out the key features

Before you begin designing and building the poster, you need to pick out the key features that will be easily recognisable to anyone who glances at the poster. Below is one of the original movie posters that I’m using as inspiration. I’ve circled all of the features in the poster that are important to the superhero’s identity, such as the clenched fist and ring that powers, the mask and the insignia of the Green Lantern Corps.

Green Lantern movie poster with key features circled

Based on this exercise, you can determine which would be the best features you focus on when designing your poster. In the example, I’ll decided to use the image of a clenched fist with the Green Lantern ring as the main visual for the poster.

You should look at the colours used on the poster. Are there any colours that feature prominently and make the identity stand out? Remember, minimalist posters are meant to be very basic, so try to limit your colour palette to four or five colours.

Planning the layout

It’s a good idea to sketch out a few poster designs on paper before you start building your poster in Illustrator. This will give you the chance to play around with your layout and make a list of resources that you might need (textures, fonts, colours, etc.) Once you have the plan in place, you can gather any resources you need and start creating the poster in Illustrator.

Initial poster idea sketched on layout paper

If you want to recreate my example, the resources can be downloaded by clicking on the button below:

Building the poster

Open Illustrator and create a new A4 document. Go to File > Place and locate “fist.tif” on your computer and place it into the document. In the Layers palette, rename Layer 1 to “fist sketch” and lock the layer. This will stop you from accidentally moving the image when you’re tracing it.

Using the Pen tool, trace the fist sketch. Take your time and use the Direct Selection tool and the other Pen tool options to edit the paths if needed. You can see that I’ve worked across several layers and used different stroke colours. I find it helpful to work in this way as it makes it easier to locate, edit and delete paths if I need to.

Once you’ve finishing tracing, the next stage is to colour the image. I used the Eyedropper tool to take some samples of colour from a scan of a Green Lantern comic. The Eyedropper tool will recreate any colour you click on and store it in your Fill or Stroke colour boxes (whichever is active at the time) at the bottom of the toolbox. To save the colour to your Swatches palette for use later, click on the New Swatch button at the bottom of the Swatches palette. The colour will be stored as a swatch at the end of the swatch list (after all the default colours already stored there, if any).

Once you have your colours, change the Fill colour on each of the items. Remove the Stroke line from any shapes (such as the fist outline and insignia) by clicking the None button for the Stroke. Stroke lines add unnecessary detail to the image, so you only need them to define the fingers and thumb.

In the example, I also created a three-colour gradient for the background and added a couple of extra layers to make shadows for the fingers and thumb.

You’re now going to add a concrete texture to make the image appear more “grungy”. Create a new layer and place  the “grunge.jpg” into the document. Resize it to fill the whole page and cover the items you’ve drawn. With the texture selected, go to the Transparency palette and change the blending mode of the layer to Multiply and reduce the opacity to 30%. This will combine the texture with the coloured objects to make an old, rough effect.

Place “foldedpaper.png” in a new layer. Resize the texture and use the Transparency palette to change the blending mode to Overlay and reduce opacity to 65%.

That’s the main image of the poster finished. At this point you may wish to add a tag line in an appropriate font and adjust the layout to finish off the poster.

I scaled down the fist image, added the tag line in the space above it using the Futura font at 24pt and vertically aligned all the objects to the centre of the document using the Align palette.

Finished Green Lantern poster