From paper to electronic paper. Designers have to make the idea that we're going to think for this new medium: a mix between the screen and the printed matter. Everybody knows Amazon's Kindle, but since the newspaper's collapse it seems that electronic paper would be the innovative solution.

Plastic Logic is presenting their reader and publishing application. This flexible electronic media would be available in 2010.

British Designers Create Italian Branding for Bahraini Restaurant

SHH has created a full branding package - including identity, environmental graphics, signage, menus, place settings and staff uniforms - for a new restaurant and takeaway concept called "Italiano", set to open this month. The first Italiano outlet, located in the food court of the Al A'ali Mall in Bahrain's capital city Manama, has been undertaken for client Al-Hilal Enterprises Group, for whom SHH recently designed and branded the highly successful Nu Asia new-build restaurant (about to roll out to a new second site in Bahrain). Continue reading...

Do you want your webjam to stand out from the crowd? Want to give it the edge over other’s websites? Well we cornered a top designer and asked them about setting up headers to give your site an extra bit of sparkle.

A standard header size on your webjam is 1000pixels (px) wide and 200px high. You can set the height in multiples of 25 between 100px and 300px. You don’t need many skills to turn the blank white background into a top class header. If you have photo editing software like Photoshop then that is a bonus. However, the template that we have set up can be run from paintbrush and that comes as standard on your computer.

Start by downloading your file from our site (see the bottom of this post) and opening it in your chosen platform. Save the document and go back to your internet browser. We’re going to use a designer’s best friend to make your site look the part.

Finding a Font

Visit www.dafont.com which is a font site with thousands of brilliant fonts for you to use. Have a look through these and find a couple that you like. Also take a look in the dingbat section where you will find some excellent resources to use as imagery on your header. In this example we are going to create an after school club site.

I’ve started by searching the ‘Kids’ section in the ‘Dingbats’ menu. I’ve chosen ‘Freaky’ and clicked download.

For my font I have found an ideal typeface in ‘Cartoon’ called ‘King Education Centre’ again, I select download.

Adding your fonts to your font library

1. Extract the zip files that you have just downloaded
2. Open you font library and drag and drop using windows or choose ‘install font’ on a mac

Creating the header

Now go back to your header. The first thing you want to do is choose a colour and use the fill tool to colour the header.

Now using the type tool put in the title of your webjam using the font that you have just downloaded.

Next to choose some pictures from your dingbats – they work in the same way as text, however a letter represents an image. Pick out a few and use them as you wish.

Save your file.

Now go back to your webjam and click ‘styles’ in the top bar and then ‘Customise style.’ Click on the ‘Change Image’ button and upload your header. Remember we set this up to work in 200px height so choose 200px in the height drop down.

That’s it, and your webjam is now unique and better still, it’s designed by you.

Take a look at the header I created here. And for those of you wondering I did create it using Paintbrush!

header 

Graphic designer Shigeo Fukuda, known for his distinct works based on optical illusions, died of subarachnoid bleeding Sunday, his family said Thursday. He was 76.

Fukuda, one of Japan's leading graphic designers after World War II, graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1956 and created the official poster for the World Exposition held in 1970 in Osaka.

In 1975, Fukuda won the grand prize at an international poster competition in Poland with a work named "Victory," in which he depicted a bullet flying into a cannon barrel.

We're going to miss him so much...

Dive into Fukuda's world.