Below you’ll find this weeks design & photography inspiration. Every week I’ll post an article which covers the inspiration I’ve found on different websites. By doing this, I want to influence my creative side and develop it even further. Hopefully it will inspire you too!

1. Still life photography by Ruadh Delone

 This guys photo’s have something different than other still life photo’s. At least for me personally. It’s original, creative and just catches your eye! Very nicely done by Ruadh Delone (http://www.delonefotografie.nl/).

Every social media user will know what I mean – The vast amount of information you get from it! The more people you follow, the more information you’ll get. Especially Twitter serves as a good example, I only follow around 200 people and I can’t manage to read all of the tweets that enter my feed.

You’d have to be pretty diligent to read all tweets. The average person however, will comprehend around 450 words a minute I was told. That means around 3.2 tweets per minute. I usually receive 15 to 20 tweets per minute, just to give a comparison. That’s overwhelming isn’t it?

Scanning is the key to success!

Yes, scanning your timeline is the key to successfully using social media. A lot of people seem to get lost in the vast amount of information they receive every minute, hour or day. They’re making the mistake of reading to much!

It’s better to scan your timeline, just like a newspaper, and only read the interesting things you see. That way you’ll get the information you want, when you want it! This means (of course) that you’re still missing out on a lot of information, but that’s not likely to be overly interesting information because it would have caught your eye during the scanning process.

So, by scanning your timeline you’re able to find cool and interesting stuff! The parts you miss aren’t relevant enough and you don’t know you’re missing them anyway. I hope this will help you to get used to social media because it’s here to stay

Below you’ll find a few things I created lately for my work at Quipment. I’ve been busy with this the last few days and now I finally reached the end line of these projects.

A simple report card

The first project is a simple report card which covered the results from a customer survey we did last year. The goal was to get a similar look as the survey back than and also give it that report card feeling. Thanks to the printer this is accomplished. The response was great for this project and we scored very nicely, but it can be better! It always can!

The report card:

New website: ExpoBoxx.nl

Last week I also finished work on a new website, www.expoboxx.nl. ExpoBoxx is a company that leases exclusive exhibition stands to other company’s.

It’s a relatively simple website but has a clean and exclusive look. My work went into the design and coding of the website. My goal was to create a professional looking website, but keep it as minimal as possible. I also wanted the website to look good in all browsers. I managed that for Chrome, Opera, Safari, FireFox and even Internet Explorer! That’s probably due to the simple lay-out. The end result is viewable here.

Below you’ll find this weeks design & photography inspiration. Every week I’ll post an article which covers the inspiration I’ve found on different websites. By doing this, I want to influence my creative side and develop it even further. Hopefully it will inspire you too!

1. Logo design, Sans Serif in logo’s

A great round-up of logo’s that are using a sans serif font. There are some really original and creative ones in this set!

2. Top Designers advertisments, TBWA

“TBWA is an advertising agency with a big history behind it. It was founded in 1970 and since then has provided creative and interesting advertising ideas to the commercial industry. ” This set of ads will certainly make you smile.

3. Glamour Photography by Philippe Shangti

Philippe Shangti (http://www.shangti-studio.com/) really has a nice style of photographing. I really like this kind of photo’s, they pack a punch in my opinion.

4. Creative packaging design ideas

A products packaging, when done right, gives you that customer attention you want. This creative set of package designs will do the job for sure.

5. Beauty Photography by Jason Ierace

Jason Ierace (http://www.jasonierace.com/) did a terrific job in catching the beauty of these females. A great set of photo’s! Personally I like the pink lips a lot.

6. Artistic Colorful logo’s

Normally I only use a few colors when designing a logo, two at max. This roundup of logo’s however show us that it’s possible to use a huge amount of colors!

7. Beautifull Photo maipulations by Luis Beltran

When browsing to my weekly inspirational posts, you’ll see some amount of photo manipulations. These are different! Luis Beltran (http://www.luisbeltran.es/) is creating a very realistic result in his photo maniuplations. It’s only due the the fact I know they’re manipulated, otherwise I wouldn’t believe they were!

8. Appealing nature in rain photography

Normally rain doesn’t make someone happy, on the contrary! It makes people sad and emotional. These set of photo’s however show a different rain, beautiful examples how nature looks good from time to time.

From time to time I have to design a magazine or something closely related such as a newsletter for work. Most of the time it’s a lot of work to get the layout the way you want it. Arranging the different graphical elements really take some time, especially when you’re a perfectionist!

When designing something like this I always try to keep the time spent on arranging things as low as possible. This means I have to get it right the first time in most cases!

How do you accomplish that?

Good question! The answer isn’t that obvious though and probably differs per person. I’ll explain the way I’ve accomplished it and hopefully provide some tips & tricks for you to implement in your own designs.

Analysing the contents

I always start by analysing the content that needs to go into the Magazine. If there isn’t any available, which there almost never is, I analyze the topics that go into the magazine. When I’ve finished I sort them according to their importance. The important parts get more space than the less important ones. That’s kind of logical isn’t it?

Time to open up InDesign

After that it’s time to arrange text and graphical items (like photos). I always want to use as little text as possible. I’d rather design a good graphical representation of the subject by using high quality photos than huge pieces of text. Rule of thumb – use as little text as possible, but keep it readable and understandable.

Creating a dummy

After the content is designed and arranged it’s time to print a version and lay it out on a table. This way you can easily see what could be better. I always use post-its to add notes here and there.

When finished, I leave the design for a day. The next day I’ll review it again and add some other comments and notes if necessary. Then it’s time to get back to InDesign and modify the design according to my notes. When finished, I’ll print another dummy and voila, there’s the first “beta” version that I’ll show to my boss.

So what does this give me?

By using this work flow, I manage to get only a few modifications for each layout I design. You’ll never get to a point where no comments are made though. Keep that in mind, perfection doesn’t exists!