Have you ever noticed how sick running club gear can be? Neither have I until this weekend. This week's Creative Juice features a new collection from Ikea, something to consider adding to your portfolio website, branding, mobile app beauty, and more. Let's start juicing!
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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TL:DR
SOMETHING GORGEOUS: Color Block Everything In Your Room
PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK: A Design Portfolio Website With A Showreel
CREATIVE FIND 01: It's All About The Lighting
CREATIVE FIND 02: Making Learning More Abstract and Creative
CREATIVE FIND 03: Just Take A Deep Breath
ONE GRAM: Showing Off Scrapped Design Work
ONE LESSON: The World of Running and Design
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Something Gorgeous
Color Block Everything In Your Room
TESAMMANS Ikea Collection
I want that storage unit sooooooo bad!
Design duo Raw Color collaborate with Ikea to create the TESAMMANS collection of colorful furniture, textiles, tableware, and decorations. This set reminds me of the Josef Albers color exercises I did in university. Imagine walking into your design studio with that wonderful little storage unit. How excited your eyes would be to pull out a pen or notebook. If they have any leftovers by the time I make it back to the states. I will definitely be making a purchase.
Portfolio of the Week
A Design Portfolio Website With A Showreel
Good News
Good News is a design studio with offices between Amsterdam and New York. While their portfolio website may not contain in-depth case studies of their projects. I appreciate that they took the time to create a showreel walking through some of their highlighted projects.
There are a few things I think are important to take away from their portfolio website. First, knowing that this is a design studio that most likely comprises of decades of experience. It is important to recognize that at this level in a creative career. A portfolio website is like a formal requirement. It is something you need to do business. When it comes to the career of a younger creative, you absolutely need a portfolio website that has more substance than this. Not to say that this is bad. But Good News as a design studio can get away with showing images of their projects rather than having project pages devoted to individual projects. Which brings me to my second point.
Because Good News is a design studio. So much more effort goes into finding client work outside of showing off high quality projects. It takes networking, relationship building, marketing, outreach, etc to keep a studio like this operating. And at the end of the day, a portfolio website is a little slice of that pie.
And to bring it back to why I liked this portfolio website in the first place. The showreel. Gone are the days where showreels were only for video editors or animators. With tools like Adobe Express, Screen Studio, Figma, and Loom. Anyone can make a simple showreel to showcase their work. Something that I have definitely thought about for some time now as a perfect way to deliver a lot of information to a visitor in a short amount of time.
Have you considered adding a showreel to your portfolio website? Let me know with a reply and maybe I can help you out.
Score: 6.7/10
Built with: Readymag
Creative Finds
It's All About The Lighting
Gantri Design System by Landscape
Design studio Landscape creates a bold yet relatable lifestyle brand for lighting platform, Gantri. For art direction and photography really shines in this sytem. Also love how Landscape provides statistics in their overview about how their work effected Gantri's sales.
Making Learning More Abstract and Creative
Projector Illustrations by Marta Gozha
Marta has created beautiful series of illustrations to pair with creative course material to keep students engaged. I haven't taken many online courses but I definitely appreciate attention to details like this.
Just Take A Deep Breath
Lungy iOS by Pi-A
Lungy is a mobile breathing app that delivers daily breathing exercises. The visuals paired with the breathing exercises are beautiful and were enough to get me to download and try it out. Happy to say that I will be keeping this one my phone for a while.
One Gram
Showing Off Scrapped Design Work
@carla.palette
What should you do with work that a client doesn't approve? Well here is a great example. Show it off! Just because the client didn't select it to move on. Doesn't mean it has to never see the light of day again. Of course, don't forget to ask the client for approval. But Carla does a great job on her account presenting scrapped work as if it was actually approved by the client.
One Lesson
The World of Running and Design
Imagine waking up at 6:00AM for a 6:30AM race. You signed up "just for fun". And oh, the last time you ran distance longer than one mile must've been 5-6 years ago.
Last week I signed up for a 6K race as a training exercise. I am prepping for a fitness competition in June. I had no expectations. It was just to see where I was at physically with running. I can tell you now as I am writing this edition. My legs feel like complete rocks.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised from a design perspective. I don't know if you ever noticed this. But running crew gear is sick. Over the years I have seen a variety of apparel and merchandise come out from different niche groups. But I was never close enough to really take notice of how interesting and visually expressive the work can be. While I was mostly out of breath after the race and trying to recover. I felt very visually inspired scanning the various hats, tanks, shirts, socks, and shades of other runners. I also enjoyed reading the copy and language used to describe the ethos of the brands they were sporting.
While I might've limped away from the race physically in pain. My brain was firing on all cylinders as it flipped through all of the cool logos, fonts, and color palettes that I saw cross the finish line.
Get out their and explore something new. You never know what inspiration you'll take away.
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