Inspiration: Beautiful Fashion Illustrations by Sophie Griotto

I stumbled upon this beautiful fashion illustrations by Sophie Griotto and wanted to share with you. Sophie's illustration's seems to have unique style, her focus is at the contemporary urban woman with accessories and attitude whom she portrays with beauty and personality. Her use of color is amazing making her illustrations attractive and appealing. Check her website to look at all her illustrations.

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Creative Process - Making an Ambigram in Illustrator

Ambigrams can be quite fascinating. I saw some brilliant ambigrams and was inspired enough to try and make one myself. For those who don't know what ambigram means, here is a definition from Wikipedia:

"An ambigram is a typographical design or artform that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction, or orientation. The words readable in the other viewpoint, direction or orientation may be the same or different from the original words."

To simply put, a ambigram is one where the word looks/reads same when upside down, or flips to create a whole new word.

There are many types of ambigrams, but the most basic is a rotational ambigram - visual representation of a word that when rotated 180 degrees (i.e. flipped both vertically and horizontally), spells the same word as before.

Rotational ambigram is the one that I tried to make. As it was my first try, for the words I decided to make an ambigram from my name, Sonali as I thought it is short 6 letters word and might be easy to make. Oh and if you still don't know, yes, my name is Sonali meaning golden or someone like gold. :)

Just like any designs, creating an ambigram doesn't have any set steps or rules, it depends on what you want to write. A good ambigram is one which is is legible and readable. I also think, making an ambigram is a good brain exercise as you have to think not only how you're going to write it but also how it would appear when inverted and you've to be quite creative.

I used Adobe Illustrator to make my ambigram, but you can use any app. that allows you to edit text. Also, you can sketch your ambigram with traditional methods, but I'm more of a digital person and I figured out using a font as a base would be the quickest method to make ambigram.

I don't know, how many of you would be interested, but I really wanted to share my process, so, below is a brief overview, a walk-through on how I made an ambigram of my name, Sonali.

Font:

After trying several fonts, I zeroed in on using a font named, Old English Text MT. Rather than Uppercase I decided to use lowercase alphabets. I Outlined the text and Ungroup it.

Planning:

The idea is to convert a font into an ambigram.

The word, Sonali has 6 alphabets and I figured out that "S" would have to look like "li" when rotated 180 degree. "O" should become "a" and "N" should be "N" when I rotate it to 180 degree. Here is a visual presentation of the idea.

For letters S and li:

The challenge was to convert S into li ans li into S. In the image shown below you will see the steps on how I created S and li. I used Illustrator's Selection Tool, Knife Tool for cutting the text and Transform Palette to flip the objects horizontally and vertically.

For letters o and a:

This one was easy as letters o and a are quite similar, in the image below you will see the steps.

For letter N:

This again was easy, the task was to make N look like N itself when you rotate it to 180 degree. I took only the left side of n, duplicated it and flipped it horizontally and vertically. After that I added the middle part and some frilly bits with Pen Tool.

Below you will see my final ambigram. You might have noticed above, that I have added some frilly bits to the text along the way to give it a finishing touch.

And here is the animated version so that you can see, it looks same when you rotate it.

That's about it and it's my first try with an ambigram and I think, it turned out good! I hope you enjoyed the above creative process.

So have you ever made an ambigram or are you planning t o make one? Either way it's fun to make an ambigram. Personally, I didn't follow any tutorials for this, just skimmed through some of the resources. Plus, like I have mentioned above, there are no standard steps to make an ambigram.  But you might like to check following articles and tutorials to get you started with an ambigram:

How to Make an Ambigram on Wikihow
Make an Ambigram
Advice On Learning to Create Ambigrams
How to draw ambigrams - Ambigram tutorial and walkthrough
Typographic Doppelgängers

I have also written a article on Ambigrams for Vectortuts - A Clever Collection of 40+ Inspiring Ambigrams which features some brilliant ambigrams, (logos and otherwise).

*Top image credit:ambigram.com

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Drawing Inspiration from Minimalism in Photography - Appealing and Engaging

If we see Wikipedia's definition, "Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features." What I like about minimalism is, it is art of less, it is about expressing what we want to with few essential elements. I also feel minimalism doesn't need to be plain or boring, with the use of few elements we can make it elegant and classy at the same time. Sometimes, it worries me to see especially when it comes to graphic and web design there is a tendency to clutter up the things, too many unnecessary bling-blings or too heavy graphic oriented designs which sometimes mars any beauty that a particular design might have. Anyways, with this post I am not featuring websites with minimal themes, we will keep it for some other time, besides it is the subject which has been talked about often on so many blogs on internet.

Instead, I chose to feature, some of the Photographs centered around minimalism. Like I have told earlier in my posts, I am extremely fond of Photography and when it comes to inspiration in designing and arts we can derive inspiration from some similar and unrelated fields, photographs being one of them. From this photographs one can get the inspiration for colors, contrast, perspective, shadows and highlights, and most importantly with minimalism in photographs we can see how much of the white space is important, it actually accentuates the subject and brings out it's beauty without taxing your attention span!

Though, I am aware that everybody can have a different definition about minimalism especially when it comes to Photography, but here I am trying to feature some of the images, (around 30 of them) which I feel have not only the minimal theme but are beautiful, appealing and engaging the eyes.

 

Simply, Quiet Life

Ikebana di Lucio Farinelli

I Want to Ride My Bicycle
 

Sensation

Tentacles

Red Converse at the wall of the red line

Chocolate & Cherries / Mon Cheri

  

Slavin@'s Photograph

2005-09-27

Me trying out urban minimalism

Three colors

Snow Tire

 

Simply..

Espresso cup

Micro Life in Green

Less is More

Little tree on red

High Wire

I catch the sun :)

(40)*

 

oO

Ploade

Connection

Disco

 

Marbles

Refreshing Minimalism of Flavours

Simplicity

Mentor

 

 Forty Shades of Green

Success

Hope you enjoyed the selection and found something that you liked. Next, I have plans for some more design related, articles, tutorial/tips, so stay tuned!

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