The Phase Collective

Featured: Marie Luise Emmermann

A couple of images from the Skizzomat Illustration Diary, a creative outlet for Marie Luise Emmerman out of Germany. This stuff is rad, but check the figurative collage work in there as well. Really nice, slightly bizarre, sensual and fleshy. Lots more to see at:

www.skizzomat.blogspot.com
+
www.skizzomat.de

Tags: collage, design, digital, figurative, mechanical

Featured: Matt Stevens

A side project of grand proportions: the Air Max1-a-day series by designer/art director Matt Stevens out of Charlotte, NC. The tribute portion is very cool as well. See if you can guess who’s who by style alone.

http://largetype.squarespace.com/

Young designers take note. This is a totally valid way to get some big-brand work into your portfolio. Think a step or two beyond just mock ads and make something interesting.

Tags: art direction, design, illustration, nike, style

Contemporary

So we can all look back on the trends of the 80s, 90s, maybe the 00s a bit, although that’s trickier. We can all see what design styles ruled the decade – what was contemporary. So then we should also be able to take a step back from the right-now, from what’s contemporary today, right? We can see what we (graphic designers, art directors, interactive creatives, animators etc.) are working on this week, or this month, and we *should* be able to recognize the aspects of our creative work that are lining up to fall into that category of ‘contemporary’. Do we want our stuff to look and feel like everything else that everybody else is working on this week, or this month, or this year?

The problem is that ‘contemporary’ and ‘trendy’ are constantly blurring together. They’re really one and the same. When our deadline is tight, or our clients are unimaginative, or we’re too buried in work to apply our own imaginative abilities… we fall back on what’s cool right now, and we contribute to the larger body of ‘contemporary’ work that we’ll all look back on in 5-10 years and be embarrassed to have been a part of.

Wouldn’t it be great to create, sell-through, and champion creative work that breaks the contemporary trends that surround us? What are the barriers, project to project (because they’re always different), that keep us from doing the unique and imaginative creative work that we know we’re capable of producing?

This weekend, I’ll be blasting out some design comps that will, I absolutely guarantee, be trendy and cool, but unimaginative. I will have to rush my work, and I will fall back on established and expected solutions. I’d like to apologize in advance for my contribution to the cheesy design trends of the early 2000-and-teens. I’ll blow it all out and work some fresh magic the next time, I promise.

Tags: creativity, design, trends, trendy

Featured: Able Parris

Able Parris is a collage artist and typographer doing some really cool crossover design/art work. Nice identity portfolio too. He’s all over the internet, but you can start at his Cargo site and take it from there:

work.ableparris.com

Tags: art, collage, design, typography

iPhone Wallpapers 01

Just posted a couple sets of iPhone wallpapers, including some stuff from the never-published Phase04 Habitat PDF mag. Also threw in some Midei City stuff, and some work from my in-progress side project called ‘Upload’. Head over to the link below for downloads, and enjoy:

www.gaberuane.com/wp.html

And shoot us an email if you have some freebies that you’d like to share.

Tags: design, iPhone, Midei City, mobile, typography, wallpapers

Featured: Zero per Zero

Zero per Zero is a design, infographics and illustration studio in Seoul, South Korea. We came across some beautiful transit system infographic work from these guys (Kim Ji-Hwan and Jin Sol ), and figured we’d pass it along. Check out more work, along with details and descriptions of the images below, at:

zeroperzero.com

Tags: design, illustration, infographics, Japan, maps, South Korea

Georgia 11pt

Another experiment from Gabe – zooming way in on the pixelated character set of Georgia at 11 points on screen. So the pixels were scaled up, then rebuilt as circles in a blue/black/gray palette to match the anti-aliasing you get in your browser. Small sizes read a lot like regular on-screen type, but you get some interesting abstractions when the characters are presented at larger sizes.

This is one of many side projects that has come together off of earlier projects and experiments. One element from wherever (in this case Phase 02 | Community), revisited and enhanced, then served back up in a place like the Phase blog for the hell of it. Maybe this comes out at some point on client work, but for now, its innocence is intact.

Tags: design, geometric, pixels, typeface, typography