Roberto Blake | Typography | Graphics Design Is

Many designers, have and will continue to underestimate the amazing power and range of typography.
There are several reasons for this, but the reality is that typography is essential to a design skill set.
When stacked against photo-manipulation, digital painting, vexel artwork, and animation, the prospect of working with type, doesn’t sound all that exciting to most people.
Truthful, its because they don’t know any better.

All of the above mentioned techniques/skills can be incorporated into typography or used to balance it.
The range of design styles to which typography can be utilized is nearly unlimited, in fact there are very few designs that would not benefit from having typography introduced to them at some level.

So how can typography make me a better designer?
By getting used to the idea of conveying your message visually with type you can save yourself a lot of time creatively. The process for a design that uses a lot of photographic elements, or elements that are hand drawn, or digital illustrations is extensive. This does not even include the time it takes to develop inspiration or the process of experimentation. The work in editing and adjusting your images before you actually even start designing is very involved.

With type you can jump right into things without having to extract, adjust levels or curves, or work within alpha channels. The fact that if you’re working with Adobe Illustrator, all of your artwork is scalable and easy to reproduce, or move over to work with your other elements doesn’t hurt either.

Roberto Blake | Graphic Illustration | Paper Gangsta Girl

Paper Gangsta Girl
Like my other image Poker Face, Paper Gangsta Girl is an image inspired by a Lady Gaga song. For this image I wanted to combine certain effect in a subtle way.

I’ve seen this particular stock image used by digital artist in the past in a way that made me feel the effects took away from the image rather than complimenting what was already good about it. I tried to bring that feeling of movement and energy to the piece in a more minimalist way, while embracing a “hip hop” theme.

Roberto Blake | Graphic Illustration | Buttercup

Buttercup
While in Barnes & Noble I decided to pickup the book the Princess Bride on a whim last week only to find that it was going to be playing on telvision soon! This being one of my favorite movies growing up, and one of my favorite novels as a teenager, I decided to do a series of images as a tribute. “Buttercup” is the first image in the series. I found a stock photo that I felt favorite the lead heroine and decided to work some photoshop magic.

Roberto Blake Graphic Illustration Star Girl

Star Girl
Star Girl was interesting to work on, I used several effects here including one the required me to make a custom flare-brush set. This has since become one of my most popular images on both Photoshop Creative and Advanced Photoshop.

Roberto Blake | Graphic Illustration | Poker Face

Poker Face
More often than not I get the creative inspiration for my artwork from music, movies, or books. In this case I was inspired by watching the music video “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga. I found the colors, objects and symbols that repeated throughout the video (mostly associated with cards and gambling), to be a great source of design inspiration. Feeling the need to work more with closeups I decided that the stock image on the cover of  Issue 55 of Advanced Photoshop Magazine, would be perfect for this project.