For anyone who went to Art college you would have heard the term ‘Graphic device’ or ‘Graphic element’ basically it meant you didn’t know how to fill a space so decided to put a triangle or wavy line there to fill the void and cover up your bad design choices. For anyone who still likes to fill their work with unnecessary shite then can we please do away with the term ‘Graphic element’ as it would be good to be able to use this term without the bad rep that it comes with. Going forward just call them ‘Judders’ or ‘Shimmeys’. Thanks.

A great innovative project by Munich-based agency Serviceplan has won Best in Show at the One Show Design awards in New York. The annual report for solar energy supplier Austria Solar whose content is only revealed under sunlight took the top spot. Let’s just hope no one wants to read it in “dear old Blighty” as it may take a few days to get through during the cloud breaks.

Having passed this monstrosity on the way into work this morning I decided that it was worth a mention as it’s the perfect example of what not to do!! I have no idea who designed this? I’m guessing it was either the owners child or a dog who cleaned his sack while sitting on a keyboard. I have protected the owners identity as the style police are on the war path and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any arrests. But take a good look, do the opposite and you’ll be good!

Everyone in the office here at Shred likes a good old Porsche so we had to put up this when we stumbled across it online the other day. Lets hope this becomes one of the concept cars that does make it to market. More pics here.

• Get two photos of faces, ideally the same angle but not essential.
• Take one photo and using the circle marquee tool select the face of one of your images, just select the face and not the whole head, make sure you get in the eyebrows and bottom lip.
• Copy and paste the selection onto your second image, you may need to resize and rotate it until you are happy with it’s position.
• Using a feathered brush gently erase the edges of copied face so it is blended in. If you are using colour images you may need to play around with the contrast and levels etc or just use black and white images, they’re a lot easier to get right if your just starting out.
• Once you have mastered the technique you can have some real fun with the process. Put baby faces onto old mens heads, mens on womens. Go mad and be happy in the knowledge that you have just created a realistic image of someone who doesn’t actually exsist.

Recently at Shred we were tasked with creating a new T-shirt design that looked Vintage. This can be done quick and easy in photoshop but if you want to keep your design as a vector then this is how it’s done.

• First save your design and open it in photoshop.Try and keep the image at a good size A4, 300dpi should do.

• Create a background layer the same colour as your T-shirt.

• On a new layer above your design use some grunge brushes if you google grunge brushes there are loads of free ones online.

• Using the same colour as your T-shirt create the distressed effect. Doing it this way you can see exactly what the final outcome will look like.

• Once you are happy with the look delete the bottom two layers and keep only your distressed layer. From here you can save this out as paths and open in illustrator and simply overlay it on your design or you can use a programme like Vector Magic to vectorize the image (this will give it a slightly different effect).

Using this technique you can produce custom distressed vectors in minutes.
Here is the the one we used.

For all of you non patriotic citizens out there why not get yourself one of these bespoke sick bags to carry you through the up-coming Diamond jubilee celebrations. Each one is signed by the artist and can be yours for only £3 each.