A graphic design company based in Auckland, New Zealand.
Design and production for print, web design, identity, branding, editorial, apparel, illustration, e-marketing, e-commerce and more.

Today in 1976

Nov25th
So since the company name is 1976, I decided why not let you know a few important events that happened on the year of my conception.

Today in 1976 a Viking 1 lander radio signal sent from Mars helped prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Gravitational time dilation is a phenomenon predicted by the theory of General Relativity whereby time passes differently in regions of different gravitational potential. Scientists used the lander to test this hypothesis, by sending radio signals to the lander on Mars, and instructing the lander to send back signals. Scientists then found that the observed signals matched the predictions of the theory of General Relativity.

Excellent work NASA! (and cheers Wikipedia)

Fantastic live act in 76

Experiments with the Nikon D7000

TandJ

MacBook Pro 17″ Web Design Solution

I bought a Macbook Pro 17″ (March 2009 unibody version) and loved the amount of screen real estate. There’s been a lot spoken about the size of fonts and in general everything being rather tiny on this otherwise great laptop. The high resolution screen with native dimensions of 1920 x 1200 means things are beautifully crisp but smaller than what the majority of us are used to seeing. Personally, as my eyesight is good, I don’t have much of a problem and I can always hit command + in Safari if I really need to enlarge text quickly.

There is an added disadvantage as a web designer though.

In print we are used to zooming in and out to look at fine detail, align objects and text etc and we are very aware that the only true proof of our design is printing to a decent laser printer. In web design however I am used to viewing at 100% most of the time and setting up my document in Photoshop to 72dpi.

There’s a good article here about the myth of dpi here but regardless of this I prefer the main content in my designs to be fixed to a width of 960 pixels.

I started noticing that my decisions were being influenced by how tiny everything appears on the 17″ screen. Once I was happy with a design I’d view it on a larger, lower-res screen and find that most of the elements were oversized and in effect ugly.

So what’s the answer? How do we preview with a normal screen resolution?

There are a number of options but none of these are very useful.

  1. Use an external monitor (great but costs more money and you need an adapter for the mini-dvi port plus I want this thing to be portable!)
  2. Change the resolution of the display to 1680 x 1050 or smaller (this is not native and will appear fuzzy)
  3. Use this command in the terminal to change the scale of applications: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.3 (fuzzy render again)

I’ve found a work around for now which is simple and I think will work pretty well.

As the dpi of the 17″ MBP is 133, simply set up your Photoshop document to that as well. So a 960px wide document becomes 1774px at 133dpi with Resample Image checked.

This will then give you a fairly accurate idea of what your design will look like on a 72dpi screen of perhaps 1280×1024. If you zoom out once in Photoshop so you are at 66.7% you get a very good approximation of a 1680×1050 view. This is all crisp and smooth of course as you are still using the native resolution of the MacBook Pro.

The only caveat with this approach is remembering to output any proofs or graphics at the correct dimensions. You can do this easily by changing the Percent to 54.14% when you Save for Web or if you are supplying the psd to a developer, resize the document back to 72dpi (with resampled checked of course). Obviously any images you use will need to be twice as large as they otherwise would but that’s a small payoff for being able to escape screen shock later on when you see the site on a different screen.

MBP

Get crafty

katie-flag

Made this flag recently for a friend’s civil union. She’s a dancer so Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to Your Beauty’ seemed to fit. Each guest has been asked to bring a flag which will be hung up next to all the others at the reception. Note the dodgy hand-stichting and hand-drawn lettering and image.

Gone but not forgotten

Major announcement for those who haven’t heard. Greg has left these shores (just last Sunday) for a warmer climate. Seduced by Sydney, he’s decided to hand the other half of the reins over to me (Gareth) and go for a complete lifestyle change. We will still be collaborating from time to time and the 1976 you know and love will still be operating just the same.

You’ll be missed mate, best of luck over the ditch.

goodbye

Wedding season

Seems like wedding season will soon be upon us again. For those less conventional couples the old traditional invite just doesn’t say enough. The invites I’ve done this year and last have been commissioned by creative brides and grooms who want to make you smile even before you get to the open bar.

invites

Goodbye High St, Hello Quay St

1976 has moved our office! After watching Season 2 of The Wire, we decided we needed to be closer to the ports to keep an eye on things. Sharing the office with the good folks at Milk means access to running water and a new level of office banter.

We are now found at Level 3, Altrans House, 104 Quay Street.

office

Vintage Video Effect Without Photoshop

IMG_0006

To achieve this stunning look:

  1. Buy a cheap Canon point and shoot with duty free vouchers.
  2. Use the camera trouble free for 4 years.
  3. Make sure you subject it to the odd bit of rough and tumble to season it. A couple of drops onto concrete or red wine spill should do it.
  4. Set kids up with 90’s dance cd’s and a bag of Rashuns. Turn the lights out and the flash on.

Phoenix Foundation Design contest

Pretty happy to get an email From Samuel Flynn Scott of The Phoenix Foundation to say they had chosen my design to be used on their t-shirts and tea towels for their upcoming NZ and European tours. The brief was the word ‘ buffalo’ and essentially the scope was as wide as one could ask for. I immediately just had this vision of a buffalo type dude in a sharp suit riding a little grannie bike down to the corner store. Got the pencils out and came up with this guy.
What I have heard of the new album sounds awesome, warm pyschedelic fuzz of the finest calibre.

PF_Yellow