Rui Vieira Photography & Design

I call his name: "Rui" ~ Rui Vieira is a Digital Photographer and design freelancer from Portugal who enjoys his time by exploring fantastic scenes of urban art photography.



Dynamic flow in Simplicity is what his design is. You'll see many of his poster designs are actually amazing composition between highly photography effect and modern typography layering. Nevertheless, he always passionate to snap urban spots and even the multicultural urbanity in it.



A conceptual photograph of his, titled "Communication" is one of my favorite. Smartly taken as a simple daily portrait of how the urbanists are moving time and moving life with a communication tool.

Communication by ~RuiVieira on deviantART


Sometimes, his inspiration comes from cityscape corner or high rise architecture building. The "Linha Tejo" poster design series are displaying architectural element that collaborates carefully-picked typography.


Another instance of archi-typo poster designs of Rui Vieira could be "Headline" and "Zero2"


Headline by ~RuiVieira on deviantART



He has decided to move from Blogger to Wordpress blog platform to get more enhanced features on posting his poster design and photography. Be sure to visit Rui Vieira Graphic Design website if you're interested to see his design portfolio. You can also visit Rui's DeviantART profile with great deviation ;)

This article post is a contribution to "Design you love: a group writing project". (Thank you to Mirko of Designer Daily who made this event possible). A late submission I know :D (due to my heavy scheduled tasks) but the main thing is that: I hope you all will enjoy this short design review. I've missed the blogging days moment and I miss replying wonderful comments posted by the wonderful you! Have a great weekend everyone :)

June Graphic Flux entry - Xerces CD Cover Design

Wow ;) Finally, I finished the design submission for Graphic Flux June Graphic Design Challenge. Still 5 days to go for the entry deadline date, so please join now if you still haven’t submitted your own design.

You can take a look to some of the recent design entries on Psiplex.com. The design challenge is to create a CD artwork cover for a band, and here are the details:

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The group's name is Xerces. They are your countrymen and need to make a global impact with this release. Groundbreaking artwork for their CD will be used to carry over to their other media to create a strong connection to the group. Xerces' main focus is music for rain forests. They are all about letting the world know about this incredible but shrinking resource. They would like the CD artwork to reflect their passion for rain forests. Xerces wants to keep the artwork 4-color and their only other requirement is to use the font face 'Petie Boy' available for a free download from Bittbox.

Click the image to enlarge

To set 4-color schemes only into this CD cover design is absolutely challenging, so I went to see natural background that has mono color hue and this dark wooden board background became my choice. Xerces’s is a unique band and focusing on music for rain forests, therefore emphasizing it to fit the natural context is important. I want it to be simple but mystify at once :p, so I was adding up a floral abstract leaf which has rich detailed texture.

To be honest, I prefer to have destroyed BB Petie Boy fonts on the design. But, then again, it is rather difficult for me to make it readable when only 4-color schemes allowed to use in this design challenge. In the end, I decide to put the red “S” destroyed font letter to spice up. The other font’s characters are white and to make it stand apart from the background, I thought I need to add red stroke to each of it.

I want to hear your comment regarding to this design challenge and my design submission! :D so please drop comments and I really appreciate it if you would join this Graphic Flux June Graphic Design Challenge also!


Related Post:

• Graphic Flux – Design entry by Moonshadow
• Graphic Flux – Design entry by Doug Cloud
• GraphicFluxEntries

June's Graphic Flux Challenge

The June's Graphic Flux has started, as Psiplex.com announced the theme of the challenge for this graphic design project.

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To join this collective graphic design project, you must create one CD artwork cover design for a fictional indie band. Some rules of design are set to get start. Be ready to drive your maximum creativity and start to design after you visit the detailed design submission rules at: The Graphic Flux June Graphic Design Challenge

Please comment, if you have any question regarding to this blogging activity. This graphic design challenge is open for everyone :D

You can grab the banner above if you like to spread this challenge to the internet readers across the globe!

The Deadline for the design submission would be in: June 30th 2008

Related Post:

• The Graphic Flux June Graphic Design Challenge
• Graphic Flux – Collective Graphic Design Blogging Project
• Graphic Identity Blog Updates

Graphic Flux – Collective Graphic Design Blogging Project

It was started from a small discussion with graphic designer friends who are also bloggers, I have an idea to set a collective graphic design blogging activity. An event that I hope will be continuously persist in every month and growing.

The main objective is to showcase everyone skills and talent in graphic design. The submission entries don’t have to appear like somewhat of professional graphic designer can do. They can be a process of a newbie experiment to learn advance technique...anything that will express your sense of art in graphic design or simple stuff that has developed from creativity.

Graphic Flux is the title of this Collective Graphic Design Project and it was first brought by Psiplex.com. We hope that this collective blogging project will dynamically visualized your graphic design as we are calling out more and more graphic designers or everyone who has big passion to graphic design to get involved into this project.



What to Do?

• In every month round, we will set a new graphic design task for the participants. We think that different theme challenge in monthly time line set would encourage you to stay creative with more challenging task.
• We will choose the blog host every month to showcase all the entries. If you are a Blog Catalog user, and has been actively involved in our group called Blog Catalog Graphic Design Group, then your chance to be chosen as the host blog for this project should be more.
• As we announce the new monthly round task, give yourself time to design as what will be described in Graphic Identity blog or the host Blog! We think that monthly round timeline should give all the participants to design and relax into pure creative time.
• Create your graphic design based on the theme’s format and rules.
• When you are finished with your design, just post it in your blog and don’t forget to link back to the chosen host blog and to the Graphic Flux announcement post on the host blog itself. If you are not a blogger, you can always write a guest post about your submission design on my blog or your friend’s blog.
  
• Describe your design process tricks and tips or just share the story of why you come up with your design.
• We will notice that you are in the game, by contacting to the Graphic Flux blog host of the month via email or post a comment to the Graphic Flux announcement post (depends on the announcement rules set by the host blog) and include:
  1. Your name
  2. Your blog name and URL
  3. Your design post permalink
• The deadline for each entry submission would be in the date of 30th every month. Once the submissions are in, the host blog will pick some of the best designs and showcase them on a round up post in the following month.
• You are allowed to contribute only one design per project/site.

What You Will Get from This Blogging Project

• We like the idea of staying connected to each other’s blog. Which are you probably have done it by commenting on a someone’s blog post, subscribing to a blog, or many things that you can do to get involved in everyone’s blog. Well this collective blogging activity would somehow connect you in more unique way :D
• You can learn new tips and techniques from other blogger mates who have joined this blogging project.
• Showcase your design work in a growing community and having a chance to let people find out more about you.
• You will get more related back links and of course: Link Love. By the end of the month, Graphic Identity blog will give the link love to all the participants of this graphic design project in a monthly round up post. Graphic Identity Blog now has received PR 5, so please use this benefit and submit your entry when we launch this project next week!

The Blog Host for this collective project is already chosen, and that would be Psiplex.com. While we gather more participants within a week, kindly subscribe to Graphic Identity blog Feed to hear the next update about the project task for the June’s round.

Redditers – What They Tend to Do?

Reddit’s environment is not so much different with another social media website which gives you way to click for a vote. This kind of environment is absolutely perfect for a blog article which has interesting headline. Another thing is Redditers can actually spice up the article’s headline submitted to draw more attention. Regardless to all the pros and cons, Reddit encourage the Redditers simply to vote the article submitted and hardly can find a way to visit or even to revisit if you get lucky enough for a precious visit.

Analyzing your stat would probably help you to figure how each of your referral websites performed to your blog. A popular article submission in Reddit, can stay on the front page for approximately the maximum time frame of 24 hours or less, after which it’ll move in the second page for a while, before slowly falling down the ranks. A short blast within hours or a day, and no guarantee of follow up actions in return. This is what so called: “A perfect example of high bounce rate in Google Analytics”.

Huge traffic is what all bloggers eager for. The kind of traffics that you need would be so much depending to the blog that you maintain. If you blog about money or primarily run some advertisement programs, to get high exposures to your blog is the reason why you should bother with Reddit.

Anticipate nothing more but merely high exposure in one or two days. However, there is an interesting case study which is done by Maki of doshdosh.com.
Maki has been projecting formulas to bring long term perspective or growth plan based on his research upon a Redditer fellow’s submission materials.

Reddit was my first experiment of using social media website to promote my early articles. My blog visitors ranged only 20 to 50 for the whole day that time. As a newbie, I was so careless of not spare some times to read useful tips from more experienced Bloggers. Although I got boost of traffics from Reddit, the experiment was turning into something bad! I thought it was okay to submit my own article to Reddit, well this was a huge mistake because most of the Redditers hate it. Unlike Digg, Blog Engange, or Design Float which have more flexible submissions guideline’s rules, the Redditers can easily blacklist your domain or website when you do repeated self-submissions/promotions.

As a social media website, Reddit is a giant community ever. If you only care about numbers of traffics and nothing but traffics, then you are a typical Redditers.
When you determine that a well targeted traffics and readers as your main concern, I think you may start to think another way besides just using Reddit. Everyone who thinks of long term growth progress should always agree if this community is not even worth to be sticked on.

That is why (in my personal opinion) I’ve seen lots of high profiled Bloggers only focusing to Digg, Stumble Upon or Del.icio.us for promoting their blog. See how Bittbox attracts the readers to do the socio bookmark favor by using three kind of socio bookmark buttons (Digg, Stumble Upon and Del.icio.us) and so does I Love Typography which uses 4 buttons only (Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook and Stumble Upon) to avoid the clutters.

A Digg user clicks the digg button as a way to vote your article, but believe it or not, Digg’s environment will bring you more valuable traffics than Reddit. Jacob Cass described this in his article: What is the best social media website? Digg, SU, Delicious, Reddit … or?

Are You a Typical Redditer?

This article is a submission for Vivien’s Social Media Group Writing Project, something that may be useful for you to learn more about Social Media Websites.

UPDATES

• InspirationBit featured the articles submission on Digg&Reddit topic as everyone involved to this group writing project have shared the Love And Hate Relationship With Digg & Reddit


• Total rounds up articles from 9 host bloggers of Across The Universe With Social Media result over 60 submissions

Related Post:

• Design Forums and Design Niche Social Media Sites you always wanted
• Finally, a Social Networking Moment with Graphic Identity
• NEW BLOG COMMUNITIES to Promote Your Design Blog Topic

Things to Consider Before You Join a Flickr Pool

Photographers and Designers need a social media website that would help their artwork visually targeted. Flickr has the powerful tool to bring a visual masterpiece uncovered to the millions of viewers. If you’re a photographer or a designer who blog, why not starting out a Flickr pool? It would be wonderful to include a bit of interactivity with your readers. Besides promoting goal, A Flickr pool is an excellent media, where you can discuss and learn from others.

I’ve already joined some of Flickr Pools which is Bittbox User Showcase and another design contest event called “What is Graphic Design?” held by Veerle’s Blog. After I’ve submitted some of my graphic designs into the group pools, I begin to have more amazing Flickr contacts, receiving comments and some Flickr members adding my designs to their favorite list. To me, Flickr is like a huge design reference collections where I can find inspirational works of visual art and meet the man behind those masterpieces.

Before we jump to the main topic, I also would like to let you know that I’ve started Graphic Identity Design Showcase pool. This is a group where you can showcase your graphic design after you adapting some of my Free Design Box items as part of your artwork. In the mean time, I’ve manually submitted some of graphics which are designed using one of my Photoshop Brushes series. They are actually a group of great deviants and I would love to see more in the future. You are always welcome to join this group and feel free to add your profile or blog URLs in the comment box!

Here are things to consider before you join a Flickr Pool:

1. Create a nice screen name url because you can direct people to your Flickr pages with it! Some of you probably don’t know that you can change your default Flickr profile, which is usually consist of ugly code and numbers by login to your Flickr account
The unique URL address you can use to show people your photos (and your Flickr profile) should be look like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourscreenname/
A nice screen name URL should be potentially easy to remember and to identify. Otherwise, you’ll be a forgotten by the group members.

2. If you think that your photos or graphics are sorts of valued assets, manage the usage rights under a “Creative Commons” license. Hence, everyone will need to pay attention to usage rights if they want to use your photo in a publication.

3. Batch system on Flickr allows us to set different content type of uploaded files (photos or graphics). Flickr has a sort of organizing options where you can set the content type of your graphics to "other - art, illustration, CGI, etc." and NOT as a photo as wanted by the Flickr guidelines. If you already uploaded it you can change it under the organize menu and go to the poster (choose recent uploads), double click the thumb of the image and in the popup window choose filter and select "other - art, illustration, CGI, etc." I believe this system correlates a lot to Flickr photostream search

4. Watermark your photos with your blog URL or anything that would relate to your profile. I’m doing this from the start, and actually a spruce idea to send more direct visits to your blog.

5. Tags your uploaded photos because tags make it easy for you to find your photos later on when you have tons and tons of photos. When you upload photos, there is a little box where you can enter Tags. There is also a space to enter tags on the right on each photo page and you can add tags when using Flickr Organizr.
Just type some words relevant to the picture, with spaces in between, like "sky park dog blue grass green".

6. Read Flickr Community Guidelines for further readings ;)


This article is a submission for Brian Auer at Epic Edits as a part of a larger group writing project being termed “The Social Media Mega Project”


Related Links:

• Top 10 Flickr Hacks
  
• Flickr Etiquette
  
• What is Graphic Design Poster Competition on Veerle's Blog

Graphic Design Group Writing Project Articles

“Graphic Design” is not that hard to imagine. When you start typing words using your keyboards, graphic design could give you tremendous outlines to your imagination and actually you are unconsciously experiencing it in every single day of your life. You see it, you touch it, you need it, and you feel it!

The first Group Writing Project that I have entered came up with wonderful selected articles. Jacob Cass was organizing this cool group writing contest nicely.If you’re one of the Graphic Design lovers, I send a bit of warm invitation for you to read the articles, socio bookmark, to link up and subscribe!

I tried to categorize these articles so it would help you to grasp the headlines a little. Please correct me if somehow I made some mistake in sorting them. Enjoy!


Designer Bits

• Creative Design by committee is OK, but who wants OK? - Submitted by Jason
• 3 Devastating Mistakes that every designer makes and how to avoid them - Submitted by Lauren
• The Lucky 7 Graphic Design Stretches - Submitted by Yonatan

Web Design

• Maybe Some Clients Are Just Not Ready for a Sophisticated Website - Submitted by Anthony
• 4 Must Have Firefox Extensions for Website Designers - Submitted by Firewalker
• Design Process of making a Wordpress Theme - Submitted by Andrew
• Behind The Scenes of Exquisite Web Typography - Submitted by Vivien

HTML and CSS

• The Basics of (X)HTML Tags (Video Tutorial) - Submitted by Learning Nerd
• Using CSS Themes without Coding Knowledgee - Submitted by Erica

Logo Design

• All About Paul Rand - Submitted by David Airey (Logo Design Love Blog)

Social Network

• Design Forums and Social Design Niche Social Media sites you have always wanted - Submitted by Audee
• 5 Great Social Networks for you - Submitted by Mirko

Content and Review

• How Far Will Your Blog Graphic Design Bring You? - Submitted by Dexter.
• Are You Neglecting Good Looks in Favor of Great Content? - Submitted by James
• Real Life Examples of Why Content Reigns and Design Boosts - Submitted by Meryl
• 8 Things That Intimidate Me About Graphic Design - Submitted by Ronald on Viviens Blog.

Color

• Color Branding: Geographic and Niche Targeting - Submitted by Ann Smarty
• The Ultimate Guide To Designing In Black - Submitted by Chris

Tutorial

• How To Use Photoshop to make notepad sketches (tutorial) - Submitted by Verne Ho
• How to Create Vector Wings (Tutorial) - Submitted by John Breo

Design Optimizing

• Vector vs Bitmap Graphics - Submitted by Cecile
• 9 Best Practices for Email Design - Submitted by Verne Ho
• The Basic Elements of Graphic Design - Submitted by PJ

Freebies

• Free Scalabe RSS Icons for your blog - Submitted by Jillian

Which one of those articles is your favorite? Drop your comment and share this post if you like :D!

Finally, a Social Networking Moment with Graphic Identity

In the last week of February, I won’t publish any post about tutorial or creating another photoshop goodies to download. I think it is about time for Graphic Identity Blog to step outside, to see what’s going on in the internet world. Yes, nothing would be so much pleasurable, when you meet new people, sharing inspirational thoughts, and learning to reduce your own mistakes from other bloggers. For that reason, I took chances to spend a moment to build a strong social networking with great bloggers. Blog promotion comes as another benefit when you unite in a social networking event. It could be a moment to take this blog for re-evaluation and reviews to present better content for Graphic Identity Blog readers in advance.

The social networking events that I’ve been very excited to join with or soon will participate as well are:


Social Media Mega Project on InspirationBit.com



Vivien of InspirationBit.com has been setting a new deadline for the submissions to the Social Media Mega Project and giving everyone another full month of trying out different social networking sites and sharing your experience with the rest of us.

Take a look and see which social media site you’re interested in and would like to submit your entry to. Together the project covering 19 social networking sites, so you’re bound to find something that appeals to you.

• del.icio.us. Host: Aaron Stroud at On Financial Success


• Facebook. Host: Ina at Inspiring Wear


• Flickr & Zooomr (or anything photography related). Host: Brian Auer at Epic Edits


• Twitter, LinkedIn. Host: Isabella Mori at Change Therapy
  and Alphablogs


• StumbleUpon, YouTube, MySpace. Host: Karen Zara at a1-fan-fun


• Sphinn. Host Simonne at All Tips And Tricks


• Second Life. Host Dandellion at Living in the Metaverse


• Mixx, Propeller (formerly known as Netscape), Squidoo. Host: Pearl at Fresh Perspectives


• Sk*rt, Blogging Zoom, Bvibes. Host: JHS at Colloquium


• Technorati. Host: Monica at Me Like The Interweb


• Digg and Reddit. Host: Vivien at Inspiration Bit

Re-newed project timeline

• Start Date: Monday, January 21st


• End Date: Saturday, March 22nd


• Results Publication Date: Monday, March 24th


• Final Collaborative Results will be published on Inspiration Bit on Friday, March 28th


• End Date: Saturday, March 22nd

Bloghology on Search for Blogging.com

What Bloghology is all about? Bloghology is a collection of unique and remarkable bloggers and their profiles from all around the internet world compiled in PDF files to download. Mert Erkal http://www.searchforblogging.com/ invented the term of Bloghology and he is taking part to develop Peopleized.com.

Graphic Identity Blog apparently gets the opportunity to be featured in 2nd Edition of Bloghology.



If you want to be part of this Bloghology movement, sign up at www.bloghology.org to get your blogger profile featured. It will continue every quarter in 2008 and open to all bloggers. The number of downloads for Bloghology PDF files exceeded 4500 until February 19, 2008. The numbers keep growing on and on.

Bloghology is something insightful and powerful feature to promote your blog in a very exceptional way.

Graphic Design Group Writing Project on JustCreativeDesign.com



Jacob Cass includes me to be one of the sponsors for this project. The entries for this group writing project keeps flowing in and it will end in Tuesday 4th of March. This project is open for everyone, even though you’re not a graphic designer. There are lots of link love for the participants and great prizes to win!


Community Contest on FeedFlare.ca



It's been so wonderful when I meet Collin, who offers me to do the sponsorship for the FeedFlare’s upcoming contest. It would be held on March and I’m going to design a pack of new blog branding identity that will include a blog header, blog logo, favico, and 125x125px multi-purpose banner.


Thus for you who is interested to join it, just be connected to Graphic Identity blog for next updates about this contest!


Consider to experiment actively at those widespread blogging activities that I’ve mentioned above, be nice to give everyone favors and that what make all of your effort to build strong social network stand-out!