Thus ‘dpe’ was born. ‘dpe’ means ‘Design | Participate | Excel.’ I made plans for a teaser kind of series ads to generate interest among the students.

Following are the three posters that were circulated as e-mails, one poster a day.

Notice the transition of background color and the change in the point of view of the box. ‘Provocative’ wordings like ‘We are second to none’ and ‘You are not a designer till you take part in this competition’ are coined and used. The box is open in the third poster only. The box and the alphabets are 3D modelled in SolidWorks software. We received quite a good number of responses for the first contest.

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: 10-Nov-2009

I said to myself: “Here are some people who are genuinely interested about ads.” Then I started posting some articles in this forum. This blog post is entirely dedicated to nine posts authored by me in DesiCreative.com Forum in the year 2009. These nine posts discuss art, advertisements, animation film…
Enjoy!

1. Photoshop is helping “you!”

2. ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’

3. Color! Or is it ColoUr?

4. Inspiring — I hope one day I too will be doing this!

5. Darth Vader in our life

6. Devil, will you return (again)?

7. Careful when you park your car!

8. “Tell me, what was your first design?”

9. HP: Student work in response to D&AD Student Awards brief

This was one of the requirements I received from my friend describing the image to be put on a poster announcing the registration for a Soccer League.

As always, I designed three posters.

Corner Flag

This poster conveys the idea of soccer in a subtle manner. Apart from the logo, no football is featured in the visual. Fortunately, my friend too liked this poster very much. So it got printed in more numbers. I received some positive comments from my friends. This success shows that deviating from the requirements and creating something fresh (and green!) will always be liked by others.

‘Boy band’

Three silhouetted players are walking towards the camera dribbling the ball – just like a slow motion visual from a music video of a boy band. Vibrant colours and a subtle motion blur to the ‘Are you ready?’ caption… also went into this poster.

“Goal!”

A conventional, but a brilliant ‘save’ scene. Again vibrant colors… In this poster too, I added a motion blur to the ‘Are you ready?’ caption.

Acknowledgements
The following images are used to realize these posters:

• ‘Soccer’ by Admane Samir, Algiers, Algeria.
• ‘Football field’ and ‘Goalkeeper’ by Rawku5, Germany.
• ‘Training’ by Gabriella Fabbri, Italy.

Software: Photoshop
Design Date: 17-Sep-2009

‘Voices’ is a student magazine in my college with the slogan ‘Raise your voice, let yourself be heard!’ I got a chance to design posters that ask students to be a part of the magazine.

One of my earlier attempts of poster design for this same magazine can be found here.

‘Up’

Image Courtesy: Richard Sweet, London, UK

‘Mute’

Image Courtesy: Dimitris Kritsotakis, Athens, Greece

‘Voice’

Image Courtesy: Ingrid Müller, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Software: Adobe Photoshop CS3
Design date: 18-Aug-2009

This sticker urges people to minimize the use of cars and adopt walking or public transport system. This reduces fuel consumption and ultimately saves trees.

Click on the image for a bigger picture.

Image Credits:
‘Trees:’ Sophie, Canada
‘Rear-view mirror:’ Marcio, Brazil
‘Wooden background:’ Salva Barbera, Spain

Software: Photoshop
Design Date: 06-July-2009

The Premise
In 2007, the technology company, where I worked, was thinking about conducting a walk-in interview to attract new talent to fill in some positions. Handouts were to be printed and a newspaper advertisement must be given. I was approached to do the design. A couple of samples were given to me. I started my work.

One is not enough
I always follow the practice of giving more than one option for the clients. This means more hard work, but in the end, I have more chances of winning an account. The safest bet is to do a conventional one, a rebellious one and a creative one.

Conventional ‘Dream’ Ad
If you open any newspapers and look at the recruitment ads, most of them fall under the ‘text only’ ads category. A couple of them may feature typical happy faced employees in formal attire, looking at you. Or you can see a vast office space, cubicles with all the latest technology devices or a team meeting proceeding at the board room.

The words that came to my mind were ‘dreaming,’ and ‘high flying.’ Then I remembered: I had a vast collection of photographs that I took during my second visit to the wonderful country of South Korea. After digging up my hard disk, I found a couple of photos. All of them are taken on 29-Apr-2007 at Joyeong-dong, near to Yeungnam University, South Korea.

Now, the story takes a new path…
Click on the photos for a larger view.
These are mounts that served as tombs of old ruling classes in Korea. After the excavations in 1987, this place is kept as a recreational area and many people visit there in the evenings.

I spotted three friends relaxing on top of a mount.

When I went near to them, one of them looked at my OLYMPUS camera. English will not help you to communicate in South Korea as only a few people understand the language. I lifted my camera and the guy immediately understood my intention. His friends were lying down and this man sat there with a ‘natural pose’ gazing to a distance. I clicked his photo from a low angle and I vaguely remember seeing a jet trail on the top left of the view finder.

Later, I also clicked the jet trail in the blue sky. Yes, there is a television antenna too.

For my ‘dream’ ad, I combined these two photos and wrote the mast head “Dreaming a high-flying career in technology?’

This is the final product.

‘Bud’ – The Rebel
Can a technology company flaunt a playful look? Of course, yes. The best example is Apple Inc. ‘Budding talents’ was the keyword in my mind and I wanted to give a colorful look to the whole ad. This will help to grab attention of the reader when he browses the newspaper page full of ‘text only’ ads.

I took some photos of the Chinese toy — a solar powered ‘Flip-Flap’ bud. The shape of this toy was mapped in Photoshop and was used to create colored silhouettes that overlapped in the background. ‘Overlay’ and ‘Hard Light’ layer effects were used to create the interesting interference effects.

‘ID Card’ – You are the hero!
To cajole the reader, this advertisement tried to make him the central character. This ad asks for your photo to be put in the ID card of the company. It is very difficult to resist such an invitation.

What you see is the photograph of my yellow striped shirt, my Parker ball pen and my ID card. I took this photo by spreading the shirt on a table with all the accessories as shown.

Were they got published?
None of these works were published in the newspaper as the company headquarters supplied an ad specifically for the walk-in interview. There were talks on printing my work as handouts to be distributed at the venue of the interview. The ‘ID Card’ ad was later modified with this line ‘We have a space for your friend’s photo’ so that it could be used as an e-mailer inviting referrals from employees. If my memory serves me right, nothing happened to these ads.

But I am very proud of creating them. The experience was nice and I got a lot of feedback from my friends that helped me in my future assignments.

Sherlock Holmes – The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“Well,” said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return once more to London, “it has been a pretty business for me! I have lost my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I gained?”
“Experience,” said Holmes, laughing. “Indirectly it may be of value, you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.”

Software: Photoshop
Design Date: 17-July-2007

This is a Disclaimer

A commonly mouthed phrase in advertising field is that “Yes, we know the ad is just an average one. It is because the client does not share our vision and the budget was not enough. It is a pity. When are we going to have a perfect client?”

Go out and see (that means, do a ‘Google’) a self-promotional ad done by an agency. I am 90% sure that you will find it equally bad and non-creative. Tell me, what is the reason for this ‘no-show’?

Just now I designed and uploaded a website promoting myself. I am 100% sure that you will find it as boring, lacks content, lacks animated stuff and not a ‘new-age’ thing. And the website claims that I am the only designer in this whole universe who is capable of doing wonderful and creative designs. Blah!

The beginning

I start every design on a white paper. So, for the website, I fixed the background color as White (#FFFFFF). I decided that I will have a simple and clutter-free interface. All the text and graphics will be static (no roll-over images and no flash animations). The text and images will be laid out in tables of fixed row heights and column widths. There will be minimum text and most of the website content will be images. The colors used for text and background will be: Red, Black, Green, Yellow and White. No images will be used in the navigation bar and in the name/logo.

If you are still interested, read on…

Layout

The widescreen format fascinates me. Technically speaking, the aspect ratio is 16:9. That means, for a width of 16 units, the height of the screen will be 9 units. I wanted the website in such a way that it looks like a projected image on a widescreen. To represent the curvature of the screen as seen in cinema theatres, I decided to add upper and lower shadows leaving the right and left edges for the viewer’s imagination.

Many people are still using 800X600 pixels of screen resolution in their PCs. So I fixed the maximum width as 750 pixels. Applying the 16:9 rule, the height will be 400 pixels approximately. A three column X three row table with 750 X 400 pixels is used as the template. Other parameters are: CellPad = 0; CellSpace = 0 and Border = 0.

The first row is designated for the name/logo. The second row has a Green background color where images will appear and the third row is where the text content will appear. The three columns of the second row can feature three images.

Navigation Bar

Navigation bar is placed in the bottom of the widescreen table. No rollover images. So I added the following code to the pages.

A:link { color: #009900; text-decoration: none; }
A:active { color: #009900; text-decoration: none; }
A:visited { color: #0066FF; text-decoration: none; }
A:hover { color: #FF0000; text-decoration: underline; }

This piece of code simply tells the browser that all the links are in Green color. When the cursor hovers over it, the style should change to Red underlined text. A visited link should appear in a pale Blue color.

Internet Explorer obeys these commands faithfully, but it seems that Mozilla Firfox has its own way.

The first row shows the navigation bar in Internet Explorer (Ver.6). ‘Newsletter’ is an unvisited link in Green, ‘Blog’ is a visited link in Pale Blue, ‘Contact’ is Red underlined text because the cursor is stationed over it.

The second row shows the navigation bar in Mozilla Fiefox (Ver. 2). All links are blue and are underlined in default. There is no distinction between an unvisited link and an active link. Cursor hovering effect is OK.

Links denoting a page are disabled in the corresponding pages only. The white text appears in a red background which visually conveys the idea to the viewer. When he is in a submenu page showing one example of work, links are retrained in a Yellow background. See the third row in the above image.

Vertical Scroll Bar

One page has some text in a table cell that is too long to contain in the designated height of 200 pixels. The following code ensures that a vertical scroll bar appears for the rescue.

<td width=”500″ td height=”200″ colspan=”2″ class=”style4″> <div style=”width: 500; height:200; overflow: auto”> <p>

/* The long text appears here*/

</p> </div> </td>

An attempt was also done to alter the look of the scroll bars by placing the following code.

SCROLLBAR-FACE-COLOR: #FFFFFF;
SCROLLBAR-HIGHLIGHT-COLOR: #D9D9D9;
SCROLLBAR-SHADOW-COLOR: #808080;
SCROLLBAR-3DLIGHT-COLOR: #D9D9D9;
SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR: #000000;
SCROLLBAR-TRACK-COLOR: #FFFFFF;
SCROLLBAR-DARKSHADOW-COLOR: #808080;
SCROLLBAR-BASE-COLOR: #FFFFFF;

Again Explorer and Firefox responded differently.

The scroll bar on the left appears in Internet Explorer and the other is in Mozilla Firefox.

It is voting time!

That’s all folks! Visit the website and I am ready for the brickbats. I am an average person in the art of dodging, though. Yes, you may find one or two Easter eggs…

Second thoughts

A flash based version of this website is under construction.

Useful links for the ‘really interested’ people

A Favicon is a small icon that appears in the address bar of your browser along with the website address. It is an icon with a dimension of 16 X 16 pixels and is also displayed in the saved website links in your ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favorites’. Steps on creating a favicon in Photoshop, the plugin needed to save the icon in *.ico format and the html coding needed to make the browser display the favicon are explained in detail at:

• ‘Mysteries Of The Favicon.ico — How To Create A Favicon In Photoshop.’

A feedback form is used widely in websites to establish an instant communication link between the website visitor and the website owner. To add this feature to your website, you need:-

1. An html page showing the feedback form
2. A feedback form script in PHP that collects, formats the data and e-mail to an ID specified by you
3. A web hosting service who allows to run the script in their server. This is usually a paid service.
4. An html ‘Thank you!’ page indicating a successful submission
5. An html ‘Error!’ page asking the visitor to re-enter the data

Since I am not at all good in explaining technical stuff to you, it is better to visit the pages:

• ‘Dreamweaver Tutorial: How to Add a Feedback Form to Your Website in Dreamweaver CS3 (Part 6)‘
• ‘Free Customized Feedback Form Wizard‘

Software: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, Adobe Photoshop CS2, GIMP 2.4.5
Design date: 29-June-2008

I was waiting in the hospital to see an ENT doctor for an hour. Absent minded, I picked up a three fold promotional leaflet of a Cell phone company. I started playing with it by folding and re-folding the ends. After some 30 minutes, I got a neat box in my hand. I tossed the paper box into my bag and soon I forgot about it.

After a few days, my brother informed me that the company where he works is conducting a jigsaw puzzle competition and they are in need of a teaser campaign to maximize employee participation. My brother is a software engineer and I have seen many of them in my life. I asked myself “What will make a software guy to come out and participate in a puzzle competition?”

The box. I mean, the Cube.

That is the answer.

On one fine morning, when you arrive at your workplace, you see a Rubik’s Cube sitting next to the mouse pad.

On taking it into your hand, you find that it is made up of folded paper and the base is open. This makes you to open and see what is inside. There is a text written in the middle: “Congrats! You cleared Level 1! Explore further…” Your curiosity is aroused and as you unfold the paper, you start seeing words and sentences announcing the coming of a Puzzle Competition.

This paper cube is made entirely by folding an A4 size sheet. No cutting, no glue, no stapler pins… One side of the paper has a pattern of Rubik’s Cube. The shaded portions inside the paper are not visible at first and that’s where we write the ‘Puzzle News.’

This is the folding detail of the A4 sheet to make a Cube of side 7cm approximately.

All Red lines are folds away from you. All Blue lines are folds towards you.

So, a visit to the doctor resulted in a good advertising campaign. Thank you.

Design date: 02-June-2008