Stop & Post March 2012

[MEB]

Welcome to Stop & Post March 2012.

Logos, stereograms, page layouts, illustrations, cartoons, typography experiments, glass work... February was a month full of variety again. And we saw some posts from new members as well Welcome aboard! Thank you all for sharing your work!
If you haven´t posted yet, well... March seems as good as any other month right? You already know the drill... Go ahead and post whatever you have been doing. It doesn´t matter if it´s already finished or not, as long as it has been done with Xara software.

Happy posting!

[Fred C]

Just playing with lines and moulds.

[xtom]

Just finishing up on this website revamp. Hopefully done design wise, just back and forth with content.



and trying a bit of a logo re-do for another site revamp, top is original that I did ages ago pre-xara I think, and bottom one is the new final result (I think!), probably not a whole lot better but it should hopefully be a bit fresher looking on a new site design.

[gwpriester]

Fred - Where was that design when I was doing drugs?

That's really very elegant.

[gwpriester]

I've been working on a new series of stereograms using layers of transparency. I'm in en experimental mode.

[gracehjs]

Those I really like.

[Penny O'Rorke]

Gary, those are all great, especially the third one.

Penny

[ZEBtoonz]

Unbelievably great, Gary! You always amaze me with your stereograms. Just terrific!

[Fred C]

Fred - Where was that design when I was doing drugs?

That's really very elegant.

Thanks for compliments, Gary! Drugs, huh? (recently or back then..60's--??) ...Oh, the secrets of a great sustained art career

Just a very few of your stereograms give me a 'drugged' feeling when I can't quite get them to pop into view. This last group re: transparencies work well.

Regards,

[BONES]

I've been working on this for a while. It is a "skin" for the music software I use. The image shows just a small selection of the work, there are more than twice that number of instruments and many more effects, as well as a mixer, all of which had to be done. Its a massive amount of work and if it wasn't fro Xara, I don't think I could get through it. The knobs are multi-frame animations done is a specialist application, KnobMan, but the rest is Xara. Because I used to get complaints about blurry images, I export everything at 300 dpi and then down-res it in Photoshop to 96 dpi. That seems to keep the bevels and text nice and crisp. For this skin, I also used Photoshop's Lighting Effects (in the Render group) on each background image. It is faded back - 24% transparency using Hard Light blending mode - so it is quite subtle but it makes a big difference to the overall look.

It started out looking nice and clean, like the second image, then I downloaded a few "old metal" textures and applied them liberally to age everything, using different transparency modes to achieve the desired effect. The clean version is called XTRO and I've called the grungy version XTROapocalypse. I've made half-a-dozen or more skins for this application, Synapse Audio's Orion, but this is easily the most complete and best designed of the lot. Previously I have concentrated more on usability than style but this one combines both to really good effect, I hope.