Design Nuggets August - ft. Ryan Carl

Welcome to August's round up of design nuggets! A talk by Ryan Carl at last year's Type Directors Club Salon in New York and I experimented with type and emulating a Risograph print effect for a digital poster.

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“Inserting Myself into the Conversation” with Ryan Carl at the Type Directors Club Salon (2019)

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Ryan Carl is a Designer who I've followed on Instagram for a while now (see profile). I'm always inspired by the simple but beautiful print work he shares there. His work always balances a thoughtful narrative with graphics that have a really textured and tactile feel to them.

So when I found a talk of his from the Type Directors Club Salon last year, I was excited to find out more about the designer behind the posts. He speaks about how he transitioned from taking briefs to doing more conceptual and self directed work, and building a unique style through his work. The talk is 1.5 hrs and has a Q&A section at the end.

Watch the full talk in TDC here

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RC's Instagram feed

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Emulating a Risograph print effect digitally

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We love physical print - as designers who work digitally it's not often that we get to actually touch and interact with our work in the real world. Lockdown had us missing our go-to print making studio, Peacock Visual Arts (a graphic designer's dream, it's full of amazing equipment, artists & an endless source of inspiration). To fill the print void, I decided to emulate a Risograph effect print on a digital poster.

Here's a quick summary of the steps:

Design - Created in Adobe Illustrator

Effect - Photoshop (1. photographed paper texture as a background; 2. imported the design as a smart object; 3. Generated noise to add texture to the design; 4. duplicate the design, and offset it with low opacity set to emulate inaccurate print registration; 5. (this part was a game changer) merge all layers and save as a greyscale image, then in a new PSD: Image > Mode > Bitmap and experiment with settings here to create halftone; 6. place the halftone version back into the original PSD and set the blend mode to soft light.)

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