New Zealand Heavy Metal Forum & Discussion

[Rob]

New name change we put it as "THE BLACKLIGHT CONFIGURATION"

ve just spend 2 days, taking a few photoshop lessons couldnt be arsed waiting for ppl to make a logo. did my own idea and design all while rippin on public domain and photoshop brush's and techniques. yay for me. my first real photoshop artwork. im happy with it.

let me know what u guys think, before you scream out. OH I CANT READ IT. well just think of all those tech/elite metal bands who have a logo that u cant read its an ambigram. it is cleverly drawn and if u flip it around etc. it still reads either way.
check it! scaled down for forum its about 2200x1660 or something.



UPSIDE DOWN

[Trendkill]

i had to reverse it horizontally and vertically if that matters
i like the reverse version better actually

[Rob]

i think its just totally awesome that no matter if your holding the cd or i am we can both read the logo either way.
its exceeded all my expectations of my photoshop skills. you can see why when i get on a buss i just spend 2 days no sleep working on this. burning it into my retina.


yeah man. if its any consolation. this isnt a TRUE ambigram. its really a partial ambigram. it only reads forwards and upside down. true anagrams read all ways i think. dont quote me on that.

[Trendkill]

oh its just upside down, duhhh
yeah thats mean as,
i like the upside down one more, its more evil

[Rob]

btw sorry i was calling it an anagram its an ambigram. lol

here is the ultimate ambigram. it reads forwards backwards. upsidedown reverse every way i think

[Dead Kid]

Great logo! Maybe you could hide some symbols in it. You'll have no problems if someone puts your gig posters upside down.

An ambigram is just anything that can be read from a second viewpoint or perspective. It doesn't necessarily need to be rotated or flipped. This one's easy to see if you back away from your monitor:



That earth/air/fire/water one only seems to read 2 ways anyhow...

[Rob]

nah i can read it 4 ways.
earth on every outside edge. ???
or just looks like it but aint right?

yeah that one is nice. light is a wave. good old wikimedia
for a second i tried to upside down then just seen it lol

yeah i like stuff like that. and optical illusions
were lookin for some we can hide in the album art. perhaps stuff that shows up well under blacklights.

thanks for your comment

[deathbynewt]

I like the art you made, I reckon its good, Better than I do on photoshop! lol And I agree with everyone else, look better upside down lol

[Rob]

Better than I do on photoshop!

really. all i started out with was an idea. what i wanted. i gravitated towards that. and took some online tutorials that showed me the techniques i needed to use, so then i pretty much already knew how to do it. just needed to know the protocol and tools to do it, if that helps. anyone can do it.

so, the logo upside down or the picture with the city/destruction upsidedown aswell?
if the whole picture then u can just do that with the cd when its printed

got our first t-shirt done yesterday.
i talked to the asian guy for ages while he converted it into his "format" on his pc @ the shop
i stressed. "THE OUTLINE" not solid fill ok. you see. the background is transparent. so its a LINE fade. not SOLID FILL OK!.

get the shirt and whatdya know. its solid fill. complete moron. just ignored all i said. thats why i was trying to tell him cause i knew he would just do that.. moron, Oh well. "therapist" just lost 45$ to a moron/inferior product. but he's happy so. meh. i want to re do the prototype before making a run.

atm the only changes im considering are "decreasing the saturation" on the blue.
but im open to input.

[Rob]

a quick thankyou to "Death" for finalizing and touching up the image. desaturation and vectoring the graphics.

pro mate. thanks for your work.

[Burning Beard]

nice, text looks much smoother!

[Trendkill]

looks pretty evil now \m/

[Death]

dont think i desaturated too much, mostly adjusted levels, fixed the glows, touched up some of the lightning and bought the skytower to the foreground and illuminated it a bit.

[Burning Beard]

One thing - sky-tower/city and lightning looks stretched?

[Death]

I didnt do any size modification, but pictures were quite low resolution from what i can tell?

[Rob]

yep i worked with 1280 x 1024. and then blew it up as large as i could. i guess i should have vectored it first?

[Burning Beard]

yep i worked with 1280 x 1024. and then blew it up as large as i could. i guess i should have vectored it first?

...allow me to give you an insight into my workflow...

You don't need to vector everything - you only want your line-art and text as vectors. The difference between vectors and bitmaps is vectors are based on points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons - based on mathematical equations - so you can resize them infinitely in either direction without making the file bigger or losing any quality. Bitmaps (jpeg, tiff, bmp etc) are pixel based and lose quality very quickly with every resize in any direction.

Every time you begin something; be it a t-shirt, CD sleeve or a poster, always begin with the highest possible quality source file for your elements. I save "versions" as I develop a piece of work so I don't end up losing the original artwork or previous versions. So if there's a major change along the way and it turns out it's shit (and that happens to me a lot) you can revert back.

If you're thinking about printing stuff for a CD cover you really ought to look at starting at 300 dpi (or higher) and start thinking about millimeters instead of pixels. All the Tainted audio artwork I've done (two albums, one single) has been supplied at 600 dpi.

Stretching stuff disproportionately is really noticeable so always constrain the proportions when making things fit. Unfortunately there's no perfect way to enlarge bitmaps. There's fancy plugins out there that offer an improvement to what Photoshop can do with regards to inflating smaller images but nothing beats beginning with a high-res source file.

[Rob]

from an audio/video perspective i understand that, ive never really played with cross platforms and variants of wysisyg in imaging, ive had print shop experience with print files and loading for print press at shops etc.
working with 300 dpi. but ive never known the limitations of it as in like LOOKS right on the monitor. print it out. its totally different. i started to notice a bit with like certain resolutions and dpi's made this weird moire or patterns in the image that weren't there before. etc

it used to humor me watching movies where they show u some silly security camera footage and somehow enhance it a million times until they can read the name of the killer reflected across 100m street in a shop window. its like. wow so u can get information from no where. lol

[Crud-bucket]

Background looks cool but the writing,logo is a bit umm crappy-like.Can i say that?

[Rob]

yeah sure.

its arranged that way so the font works upside down also. if you mean difficult to read.

[DYING OF THE LIGHT]

What the fuck?

[Therapist]

What the fuck?

This picture will not have anything to do with Blacklight's image or sound when we get the ball rolling early 2011.
Just a photoshoped back ground to showcase the new logo.

So don't pull your tampon string out just yet!

[Rob]

haha. well said. im still wondering wtf hes "what the fucking" about..

[DYING OF THE LIGHT]

Do you want me to be honest?

[Therapist]

Look, be honest/give us criticism when we've released our stuff officially - Artwork and all.

I don't give a flying fuck what you have to say a.t.m.

If your having a whinge about us using the Auckland skyline in a logo mock-up that will have nothing to do with the finished product?

Then don't, because that idea has been done to death already and we want to be more original than that.
Also check out Auckland band Set on end's album "Means to an end"