These days the educated craft beer drinker knows that craft beer from a can can be as good as beer from a bottle. And one of the companies that is helping to reinforce this notion is 21st Amendment Brewing from San Francisco California.

A name like 21st Amendment brings to mind images of post prohibition America, of a time when beer popularity was exploding, and when almost all beer came in cans. 21st Amendment has taken these images and wrapped them up with beautiful graphic design and marketing.

Each of their distinct brews come in cans, and mostly in 6 packs from what I’ve seen. Each brew has gorgeous art on the boxes as well as a smaller version of that same art on each can. They are all images of Americana with a vintage flavor and a modern playful twist. Take the Statue of Liberty taking a break on the job, Paul Revere ridding into town on a hog, Mt. Rushmore kicking ass, or Teddy Roosevelt sitting down by the fireplace enjoying a winter ale. The art style is complemented beautifully by great typography that tells you everything you need to know about the can of beer that you hold in your hand. The text is logically divided by the direction it reads in, which works wondrously on a medium like a can which you can easily turn in your hand and read the text clearly.

If you can find 21st Amendement in your area bring a 6 pack home and appreciate the art on the cans. They are also conveniently really great beers, so feel free to pour one can while you appreciate another. But I would guess that if there was 21st Amendment in your area, you would’ve already seen it, because the packaging really does a good job of standing out and saying “Hey this can really does hold something special”.

- ECF

Mouse over the images on the left to see more

December 5th, 1933
The 21st Amendment to the US Constitution is ratified when Utah becomes the 36th state to approve it. Prohibition officially ends.

It’s pretty incredible how long it took me to appreciate graphic novels. For many years I simply had disregarded them, to be honest, i don’t even know why. I had assumed they all came as small comics so I will chuck it up to laziness and youthful lack of means. The first graphic novel I sorta read was 100 Bullets Issue #1, around 6 years ago, maybe more. The issue was released online as a promotion for the rest of the series. I thought it was pretty damn good! and then quickly got distracted by other interests…

Over time comics were always there, friends would say “oh have you read this comic” and many people I knew/know would say they were into comics, whatever that means. And of course when the watchmen movie came out it escalated to a frenzy and it was impossible to walk to the grocery store without seeing that yellow smiley face.

Finally this past year I decided to give in. I read watchmen. I felt I had to pay my dues. For the record I enjoyed tremendously. The story is fantastic, and it is in fact much better than the movie. The art I wasn’t particularly impressed by. It has that classic “drawn” look. Like the art lacks polish or the story was put before the art and printing. Which is fine, I would still recommend it to anyone. After the obligatory watchmen I did an inordinate amount of research and compiled a list of novels that I think I would like, but one stuck out on that list. The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman.

Hickman wrote, lettered, drew, colored, and inked this short run comic. It originally ran 6 issues and is now available as a trade paperback.

You can immediately tell that this comic was the project Hickman wanted to work on all his life.

The story is passable, in my opinion Hickman isn’t the best writer, but lets move on because if you wanted good story you would read a book. (jk)

This graphic novel is visually stunning. Each page looks like a poster, and in fact could actually be a poster. The whole book is printed on glossy paper and the coloring is sharp.

A lot of disciplines of graphic design carry over exactly into graphic novels. For example, focusing the readers vision. Hickman completely ditches the panel approach for the most part. You would imagine that it would be hard to keep the readers eyes following the page in order, but it’s handled expertly, and the reader is never lost trying to read the page.

The book is also riddled with simple vector style graphics and patterns. This is so reminiscent of web design that sometimes I would look at the pages and think, “hmm that pattern would make a good background.” There is also good use of layering and elements are reused in different opacities it gives the book an overall grunge feel, all while straddling the line of being too visually busy. To top it all off, Hickman actually has pages that are infographics.

Another aspect I was greatly impressed by is Hickman’s attention to detail. It is often the very little things that take a design from good to great. There are tasteful little things all over the book: Page numbers randomly positioned on the page, sarcastic disclaimers that begin each chapter, or little notes directed at the reader.

Go get it, it’s a visually stunning read. I dare any design professional to read this comic and not be impressed.

- ECF

When I tried to envision my new portfolio site, I pictured a very clean design. The visual focus of the site had to be on the portfolio work, this was my number one priority, and accordingly, the focus of the design as well. With that in mind I started working backwards – I did not want the page to
be cluttered up with video descriptions, or an overwhelming gallery of works.

I decided to split the site into 3 pages: One
for video, one for web designs and one for print
designs, each one sharing an almost identical
layout. This way, I always had the option of
sending an interested client a URL to just my
video work, or just my web work. I started
creating the video page as a basis for the other
pages.

I knew I would want to implement a
thumbnail display for my works, and have the
videos and images pop up in a light box. This
would help keep the page clean and free of
descriptions. Any information related to a portfolio
work would be dealt with in that work’s lightbox
display.

For the video section of the site, I wanted my
reel to be the most prominent element. While the
site will include most of my work, I understand
that most people don’t want to go through all of
my work, they just want to watch the compilation
reel. This is specially true if I plan on using the
site to try to garner employment. So the
design was always focused around making
the reel the most prominent element on the
page.

Initially I had the idea of a vertical navigation
menu, and you can see that in some of the
designs to the right. After some experimenting I
realized that the vertical navigation did not look
as good and most importantly created some very
weird spacing. The weird spacing issues eventually
lead to the idea of using side scrolling and in
the end I went back to designing on a very tight
grid with fixed top elements and side scrolling to
showcase my work.

elements

Background
Image I had on my computer, if it is yours let me know and I will credit you, I honestly don’t remember where I got it.

Color
This was a theme I remember seeing on Kuler for a   previous freelance project I had done, I tried searching for it again and couldn’t find it, so I recreated the colors from memory. I’m really in love with the colors. For anyone interested these are the color codes: #FEFEFE, #a1b70d, #e44025, #9e9e9e, #cecece, #000000

Font
Helvetica. I do think Helvetica is getting really over   used. I tried searching for another font, but I really like the  capital R’s in Helvetica and the font just fit really well. All the titles are actually stretched vertically, so we could say
it is a modified Helvetica.

I took my time with the design of this site, and when I thought I had a design I liked, I would let it sit for a couple days and then come back to it. This is a great practice that often times is made impossible by project deadlines, but I believe it really helps. When I come back to a design a week later and still think there is nothing I can do to improve it, that is a design I can really stand behind. I as I look at the portfolio site, I think that is still the case. Except for some minor tweaks I would like to do – sigh, a designer is never done after all…

- ECF

It’s a difficult thing to sell yourself as a designer. The first step is to envision yourself as a brand. Your job even before you start designing is to convince your employer or customer to choose this brand over everyone elses. The most effective ways to do this is to create an online presence. This creates brand recognition, proof of skill, and also a marketing platform. For myself, I have come up with a list of what my online presence will include:

A lot of creative individuals have a similar web presence and I think it’s a great way to brand and sell yourself as a designer. I’m starting this web presence completely from scratch. A building of an online empire from the ground up. The first step is establishing online real estate: websites.

a tale of two sites

My first site is my personal design portfolio. It was designed almost two years ago, it hasn’t been updated and I’ve outgrown the design. Not to mention the code is incredibly sloppy and it is not a representation of my best work in web design.

The second site is this blog. Design In Flux has worn many hats but for the past 8 months has been offline. I am going to transform it into a personal blog for my creative projects. The goal of this blog is to keep me motivated to always have an ongoing personal creative project. It also allows me to talk about any projects I might be working on, and hopefully eventually start a conversation with the design community.

It will also be benefitial to my growth as a web designer because an integral part of learning new things for me has always been writing or explaining them. Even if nobody cares to read what I’m writing.

“That is the plan, to build something I’m proud of.”

the design concept

I wanted both the blog and the portfolio site to be cohesive, and navigation between them seamless. Both sites sharing a very similar if not identical layout. Both sites will be also retaining their individual domain names. I want to keep the eferrer.info address as my portfolio and my previous blog at dinflux.com already had an established web address with plenty of history and SEO power. This should pose no problem and the site would essentially jump from one URL to the other without skipping a beat, the sites would also be hosted on the same server so the visitor would never run into one site being down while the other was up.

- ECF