I'm brewing up something fresh and exciting with Creative Juice for you and cannot wait to share it. This week is full of color, motion, and thoughtful ideas about how being a designer or a creative isn't always about being the most technically talented. Enjoy!
Creative Juice is a weekly newsletter published every Monday morning so you can start your week feeling inspired creatively to make cool sh*t and get paid for it. Every Monday I share something gorgeous, a portfolio of the week, three creative finds, one amazing post from social media, and one lesson I learned recently.
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If you have an idea of how I can improve Creative Juice and make it better, feel free to submit your feedback here.
TL:DR
SOMETHING GORGEOUS: Rainbow Buildings Warm My Heart
PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK: How To Simply Make Your Design Projects Shine
CREATIVE FIND 01: It Looks Good to be Selective
CREATIVE FIND 02: In The Age of Ai, Good Taste is All We Have
CREATIVE FIND 03: Please Disturb, I'm Off My Phone
One Gram: Blue, Green, Pink, and Yellow Skateboarding Bears! Oh My!
ONE LESSON: Something New with Creative Juice
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Something Gorgeous
Rainbow Buildings Warm My Heart
Vertical Rainbow Office Building by SAKO Architects
Rainbows just hit differently when you're an adult. Whenever a rainbow shines after a big rain here in Bali, a tear may not appear from my eye but my heart definitely sings. SAKO Architects is the architecture firm of Keiichiro Sako located in Beijing, Tokyo. Keiichiro has transformed a once boring and pretty standard office building into a radiant display of color and light for the office of Musashi Paint Holdings Co.
Pretty fitting exterior for a paint company if you ask me.
Portfolio of the Week
How To Simply Make Your Design Projects Shine
Benjamin Parker
You're probably overthinking how to present your design projects and this design portfolio website I'm sharing today with you is a sign that you don't have to overthink it.
Benjamin Parker is a Los Angeles based art director and designer with a hefty amount experience on his CV. Coming from the advertising powerhouse TBWA, Ben now works on the iPhone Interactive Team at Apple. Pretty sick right?!
I wanted to share Ben's design portfolio website because I really appreciate how he has chosen to organize his design portfolio website homepage. It also doesn't hurt that the first few projects from Ben are from his time at Apple. So what can we gather from this?
Prioritization. Ben has strategically positioned his recent Apple projects at the top of his portfolio website homepage. This makes such a big impression on anyone visiting to see somehow who has worked with one of the largest companies in the world.
Big juicy thumbnails. For every project thumbnail on Ben's portfolio website he is using a 2x1.5 aspect ratio which is very large. From my previous experience in digital media, I've worked with the standard aspect ratios such as 16x9, 10x4, 10x3, 5x4, 4x3, etc. This aspect ratio gives Ben plenty of room to work with when he designing a secksi thumbnail that will showcase the project and entice visitors to click and learn more about it.
Layout and alignment. This is something a lot of designers and creatives struggle with on their portfolio websites. Ben has the title of his projects left-aligned to the project thumbnail as the primary point of information a visitor should see first. Below that is the second point, the call-to-action. To the right is the project heading, giving visitors more reason to view the project. Might sound silly to analyze this simple layout but believe me. This is something I see many struggle with.
Minimal text. Let me just make myself very clear. When I say minimal text, I do not mean include nothing. Ben has intentionally included 3 points of information. The title of the project, a call to action to view the project, and a catchy heading to describe the project. While I would say it that two of those should always be there. I really want to focus on the headline that he has included to describe his projects because this is probably one of the most important things you can learn as a designer. If you look under the first Apple project on Ben's homepage, you will see the heading "Designing the website for the biggest iPhone pairing yet". 8 words is all it takes for Ben to grab my attention about that project. In combination with the thumbnail he created, he has my attention.
Before wrapping up Ben's portfolio website, I just want to mention something that I think can be improved within his portfolio website. When you click into any of his projects you are met with lovely clear images, and an overview description of the project. When you get to the bottom of any of Ben's projects I'm left scratching my head a bit. At some point I would like to see links that would lead you to additional projects from Ben and even a footer that you can use to contact Ben.
What do you think of Ben's design portfolio website? Which parts do you think you'll want to incorporate into yours?
Score: 7.2/10
Built with:
Creative Finds
It Looks Good to be Selective
Selective Music Visual Identity by Bleed Studio
I tried to track down a full case study from Bleed Studio about their visual identity for Norwegian music management company, Selective Music. But could only find this post which still does a good illustrative the quality of work.
In The Age of Ai, Good Taste is All We Have
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the importance of taste – and how to acquire it
This has been on my mind for the last year or so now especially with Ai advancing so quickly. This piece from It's Nice That US editor-at-large, Elizabeth Godspeed, does a great job explaining why taste in design and creativity is important and how to develop and focus it.
Please Disturb, I'm Off My Phone
The Hinge Phonebook
The dating app Hinge released a phone-sized book to encourage you to connect with other in the real world. Unfortunately the book is sold out but you can still download the PDF at the bottom of the website.
One Gram
Blue, Green, Pink, and Yellow Skateboarding Bears! Oh My!
@anchorball
Ever wonder what neon colored bears would look like skateboarding and playing basketball in Venice Park? Welcome to Ken's magical world. Ken Kelleher is a sculpture artist who has had pieces installed in many different parts of the world over his career. While this post doesn't register to me as an actual installation, I imagine this is Ken messing around with Ai image generation to help get his creative juices flowing.
Have you thought about incorporating Ai into your process somewhere?
One Lesson
Something New with Creative Juice
Creative Juice is brewing up a new flavor of content for you coming very soon. Recently I had the idea to reach out to my amazing design friend, Justin Colt. Justin is one of the founders of the rad design studio The Collected Works and has been crushing it with the studio.
My goal with Creative Juice is to fill your inbox up every Monday with exciting and inspiring design work so you can go on to create amazing work yourself. I had the idea to ask Justin if he would like to share some of the recent projects and happenings from The Collected Works in a Creative Juice takeover. Justin graciously agreed and now we are just working on some of the final details of the content.
With that said, I would love to know if there are any design studios, graphic designers, or other creative powerhouses you would like to hear from and possibly share their work here in Creative Juice.
Just let me know with a reply here!
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