#graphic-design — Public Fediverse posts

Fifteen years, forty-six tins, and one illustration duo. Leckerlee Lebkuchen and Strohl, Inc. just proved that packaging design doesn't need a yearly reinvention to stay exciting; it just needs a consistent story worth continuing. Their new 15th Anniversary tin brings the brand's own storefront to life on the shelf. https://weandthecolor.com/leckerlee-lebkuchens-tin-packaging-design-just-turned-15-heres-what-46-tins-taught-me-about-brand-continuity/211680

#graphicdesign #branding #packagingdesign

In 2014, I modeled a range of Minions pencil tip toys for a supermarket campaign. It was a fun job, but very hectic, with tight deadlines. 😅

#toys #minions #animation #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #sculpture #3DArt #3DModeling #illustration #illustrator #cartoon #digital #art #artist #arts #arte #designer #GraphicDesign #NoAI #3D #3DRendering #CGI #Blender3D #B3D #blender #DigitalArt #OriginalArt #ArtLovers #MastoArt #FediArt #MastodonArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

Almost nobody using "Garamond" knows the twist: for most of the 20th century, the world's most famous "Garamond" typefaces weren't Garamond's work at all. https://weandthecolor.com/the-garamond-typeface-why-theres-no-such-thing-as-one-garamond-font/211656

#font #typeface #type #garamond #typography #graphicdesign

Some tributes to Mega Man I made through the years…

I've never played the games, but I love the character and the graphics. 💚

#MegaMan #PixelArt #gaming #games #game #gamer #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #RetroGames #RetroTech #VintageComputing #retro #history #nintendo #NES #SNES #1980s #1990s #tech #technology #vintage #nostalgia #digital #DigitalArt #graphics #CGI #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #art #artist #arte #arts #GraphicDesign #MastoArt #FediArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

I ran the same client brief through Adobe Stock, Envato Elements, and Creative Fabrica for six weeks. Here's which one actually earned its subscription fee and why the answer depends more on who you are than which platform is "best." https://weandthecolor.com/adobe-stock-still-beats-envato-elements-and-creative-fabrica-just-not-for-everyone/211641

#adobestock #envatoelements #creativefabrica #design #graphicdesign #ai

London TFL Dot Matrix is a set of dot matrix fonts in the style of London Underground arrivals board. https://github.com/petykowski/London-Underground-Dot-Matrix-Typeface

#graphicdesign #opensource #fonts #webdesign #typography #uk #london

Updated: Use Free Asset Resources To Transform Graphic Designs

- Add 7 Museums/Libraries
- Add Biodiversity Heritage
- Add CIRA Stock Images
- Add Europeana
- Add Flickr Commons
- Add Gradient Swatches
- Add Old Book Illustrations
- Add rawpixel

Explore the possibilities of using free graphic design assets to transform a project with this human curated resource list organized by category.

https://www.adamsdesk.com/posts/free-design-asset-resource/

#blog #GraphicDesign #inkscape #GIMP #photoshop #illustrator #free

Kawaii version of my 1990s Moon Child game character. 😊

Modeled using the Chisel SDF 3D modeling add-on for Blender (see previous posts for some work-in-progress impressions).
Rendered using Cycles.

#MoonChild #kawaii #cute #TeamHoi #GameDev #gaming #games #game #gamer #RetroGaming #RetroComputing #RetroGames #retro #commodore #amiga #windows #DigitalArt #graphics #CGI #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #art #artist #arte #arts #GraphicDesign #MastoArt #FediArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

Vintage Graphic Design Book Review: Heller & Fili’s Love Letter to the Ornaments Type Forgot

A review of Vintage Graphic Design, Steven Heller and Louise Fili’s sourcebook of type, monograms, and ornaments from the golden age of printing.

I bought Vintage Graphic Design during the pandemic, back when my mail carrier and I were on a first-name basis. Four packages a week, most of them books. This one arrived in a padded mailer that smelled faintly of a print shop, and six years later it’s still the book I reach for first. Steven Heller and Louise Fili built it as a sampler of type ornaments, monograms, and specimen pages pulled from foundries most designers have never heard of. It is not a history lesson. It’s a candy dish for people who like letters.

Here’s why that matters right now. Half the mood boards landing in my inbox these days have some AI-generated “vintage poster” pasted into them. The ligatures are wrong. The kerning drifts. The ornaments repeat in patterns no human engraver would ever allow. This book works as a correction for exactly that problem. It shows you what the real thing looked like before anyone tried to fake it. That makes it more useful in 2026 than it was on release day.

I still remember the first project where I actually used it, not just admired it. A bakery client wanted “old world” branding without looking like a costume. I pulled three monogram references straight from these pages, redrew them by hand, and sent the client a logo mark that felt earned instead of generated. That’s the real test of a reference book. Does it survive contact with an actual deadline? This one does, repeatedly.

What Is Vintage Graphic Design, Exactly, and Why Do Used Copies Still Sell for $80?

Strip away the marketing copy and here’s the plain answer. Vintage Graphic Design is a curated scrapbook of type specimens, monograms, cartouches, filigree borders, and stock pictorial cuts, all pulled from print material made between roughly 1880 and 1930. Heller and Fili didn’t write this as a narrative history. They built it as a reference shelf item, the kind you grab when a client wants “old” without wanting “dated.”

Context helps here, so let’s set the stage briefly. The late 1800s through the early 1900s marked a real boom in printing and type technology. Foundries competed hard, churning out new display faces and ornament sets almost every season, and American Type Founders formed in 1892 by consolidating dozens of smaller shops into one giant operation. That competitive pressure produced an explosion of bold, weird, wonderful typefaces, exactly the kind of material Heller and Fili spent decades hunting down. Calling this a “golden age” isn’t just marketing language. Output and craftsmanship both genuinely peaked during this stretch, before offset printing and mass standardization flattened a lot of that variety.

The material in this particular volume came from decades of digging. Flea markets in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Florence, and Barcelona. Antiquarian book stalls across Eastern Europe. Online auction catalogs, too, once the internet made that easier. This book pairs naturally with the authors’ earlier 2011 title, Vintage Type & Graphics, and it also serves as a companion to their book Design Connoisseur. If you already own one Heller and Fili book, this one slots right in beside it.

Who Are Steven Heller and Louise Fili, and Why Their Names on the Cover Matter

Steven Heller spent years as art director of the New York Times Book Review. He still writes the Daily Heller column for PRINT magazine and contributes to Design Observer, Eye, Wired, and the Atlantic. Steven Heller co-chairs the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts. He has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 180 books on design, illustration, and political art, fifteen of them with Fili. And he holds two honorary doctorates, the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and the Smithsonian’s National Design Award. That’s not a resume you argue with.

Louise Fili spent eleven years as art director at Pantheon Books, where she designed close to two thousand book jackets. Since then, she has run her own studio, Louise Fili Ltd., focused on food packaging and restaurant branding in New York. She’s designed typefaces, including Mardell, Montecatini, and Marseille. She holds the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the Type Directors Club Medal of Excellence, and she sits in the Art Directors Hall of Fame. When someone with that eye tells you a border ornament is worth your attention, you listen.

Inside the Book: What You Actually Get on Each Spread

Every spread in Vintage Graphic Design earns its page. Nothing here reads like filler.

Type Specimens and Display Faces

Most pages show full specimen sheets from foundries you’ve likely never encountered. Bold display faces sit next to condensed variants and shaded versions of the same letterform. You get to see how a single foundry expanded one idea into a full family, decades before “variable fonts” was a phrase anyone used.

Monograms and Cartouches

The monogram sections are where this book earns its reputation. Interlocking initials, wreathed letterforms, and ornamental frames built for wedding invitations and cigar labels. Cartouches show up constantly too, those decorative shield-like frames used to hold a name, a date, or a product line. If you design logotypes or crests, this section alone justifies the purchase price.

Filigree Borders and Stock Pictorial Cuts

Filigree borders fill the margins throughout, ranging from restrained hairline scrollwork to genuinely over-the-top Victorian excess. Stock pictorial cuts round things out. These are the small commercial illustrations printers kept on hand, everything from steamships to bicycles to hands pointing at things. Packaging designers will recognize the DNA of half their reference folder in these pages.

How to Actually Use This Book in a Working Studio

Owning a beautiful reference book means nothing if it just sits closed on a shelf. Here’s how I actually work with mine.

Scanning and Tracing Ornaments

I scan individual specimens at high resolution, then trace clean vector versions in Illustrator rather than lifting the raster image directly. That respects the fact that Heller and Fili’s curation and reproduction carry their own copyright, even though the underlying historical designs are old. Tracing also forces you to actually understand the letterform construction instead of copying it blindly.

Building a Personal Swipe File

I keep a running folder organized by ornament type: monograms, cartouches, borders, and pictorial cuts. Every time I redraw something from this book, it goes into that folder tagged by project. Six years in, that folder has become more useful to me than most paid stock libraries.

Referencing Historical Accuracy for Clients

When a client questions whether a design choice is period accurate, I pull up the relevant spread and show them the source. That single move has saved more pitch meetings than any amount of persuasive talking ever has. Clients trust a 1905 specimen sheet more than they trust my opinion, and honestly, that’s fair.

The Archive Yield Index: My Framework for Grading Vintage Design Sourcebooks

Design critics don’t have a standard rubric for this category of book, so I built one after finishing my third pass through Vintage Graphic Design. I call it the Archive Yield Index. It scores a vintage design sourcebook on three factors, each rated from one to ten, then averaged into a single composite number out of ten.

Specimen Density Score

This measures how many distinct type or ornament examples appear per page, on average, without white space padding the count. A high score means you’re getting genuine variety, not the same three ornaments recolored.

Reproduction Fidelity Score

This measures print and scan quality. Can you actually trace or digitize a specimen from the page, or does ink bleed and low contrast make that impossible? A sourcebook with poor fidelity is basically a coffee table decoration.

Studio Applicability Score

This measures how ready the material is for real studio use. Are pieces isolated enough to reference directly, or are they buried inside busy composite layouts that need serious extraction work first?

How Vintage Graphic Design Scores on the Archive Yield Index

Specimen Density lands at 8.6 out of 10. Almost every page carries multiple distinct examples, and repetition is rare across the 208 pages. Reproduction Fidelity scores even higher, at 9.1. The full-color printing holds up under a loupe, and I’ve scanned pages directly for texture reference without complaints from the file. Studio Applicability comes in lower, at 7.3, mainly because many ornaments sit inside dense composite spreads rather than isolated on white. You’ll spend real time in Photoshop extracting a single cartouche cleanly.

That works out to a composite Archive Yield Index of 8.3 out of 10. For context, that’s a genuinely strong score in this category. Most ornament anthologies I’ve tested land somewhere between 6 and 7.5, usually dragged down by weak reproduction quality or padding.

Vintage Graphic Design vs. Other Type and Ornament Sourcebooks

What I’d Change About Vintage Graphic Design

No book is flawless, so let’s be honest here. There’s no index that lets you search by foundry name or country of origin, which is annoying when you’re chasing a specific specimen from memory. Captions stay minimal throughout, so you often don’t know exactly where or when a piece was printed. And because this book runs semi-limited in print cycles, used copies occasionally spike well above cover price. None of that kills the value. It just means you should treat this as a browsing book, not a lookup table.

One more small gripe. There’s no bundled digital file set, so every extraction is manual work on your end. A companion download pack with a handful of cleared vector traces would turn a very good sourcebook into an essential one. Maybe that’s the next edition. A designer can hope.

Who Should Buy the Book?

Type designers building revival faces will get direct reference value here. Packaging and branding designers chasing an heirloom aesthetic will find the monogram section especially useful. Letterers and hand-lettering students benefit from studying real historical construction instead of AI-smoothed approximations. Design students in general should own something like this early, because it trains your eye on primary sources rather than someone else’s Pinterest board of primary sources.

Where Vintage Type Revival Is Headed After 2026

A few predictions, based on where the market’s already moving. Expect demand for authentic vintage-type reference material to keep climbing as AI-generated “vintage-style” content floods stock libraries and mood boards. Designers will increasingly treat books like this one as proof of authenticity, something to point to when a client questions whether a look is genuinely period accurate. I also expect more foundries to license direct digitizations of specimens similar to what’s shown here, turning inspiration into usable font files faster than in past decades. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see Heller and Fili, or Allworth Press, revisit this format again, since the well of undigitized ephemera from this era is nowhere close to running dry.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Is the book Vintage Graphic Design good for beginners?

Yes. You don’t need a design history background to enjoy or use it. The visual material speaks for itself, and beginners often find the monogram and border sections the easiest entry point.

How many pages does Vintage Graphic Design have?

It runs 208 pages, printed in full color by Allworth Press, released January 7, 2020.

What’s the difference between Vintage Graphic Design and Vintage Type & Graphics?

Vintage Type & Graphics came first, in 2011, from the same two authors. Vintage Graphic Design followed in 2020 as a companion volume with a similar mission but a fresh set of ephemera. Owning both gives you a wider reference pool with minimal overlap.

Is this a history book?

No, and the authors say so directly. It’s built as a visual sampler, not a chronological history of type foundries or printing technology.

Is the book Vintage Graphic Design useful for AI prompt reference or mood boards?

Very much so. Because the specimens come from real printed sources, they make a stronger reference anchor than AI-generated “vintage” imagery, which tends to invent ornament patterns that never existed historically.

Where can I buy Vintage Graphic Design?

Check Allworth Press directly or major book retailers carrying ISBN 978-1621537083. Used copies circulate through secondhand booksellers as well, though pricing varies with availability.

Can I legally use ornaments from this book in client work?

The underlying historical designs are largely old enough to sit in the public domain in most cases. But the specific scans, curation, and layout in this book carry their own copyright. The safest approach is to redraw or trace elements by hand rather than lifting page images directly, which is exactly what I do.

How does this compare to just searching Pinterest for vintage-type inspiration?

Pinterest pulls from mixed sources of wildly uneven quality, and plenty of “vintage” pins are actually modern reproductions or AI-generated fakes mislabeled as historical. This book gives you a vetted, high-resolution, properly sourced alternative, curated by two people who’ve spent their careers doing exactly this kind of research.

Six years after I first opened this book, it still earns its spot on my shelf, and that’s not a claim I make about most design books from that era. If you work with type, packaging, or brand identity, and you’re tired of AI tools inventing “vintage” ornaments that never actually existed, buy this book. Then keep it within arm’s reach of your desk, because you’ll open it more often than you expect.

Check out WE AND THE COLOR’s Graphic Design and Books categories for more.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Ticket Design and Guilloche:)
- work in progress…

#ticket #guilloche #design #affinity #artwork #artist #art #noai #graphicdesign

Happy Birthday - Dog. Newly added to my collection. Available Here: https://1-lisas-baker.pixels.com/featured/happy-birthday-dog-lisa-s-baker.html

#HappyBirthday #birthday #celebration #dog #dogart #dogs #dogsOfFedi #dogsofmastodon #art #arte #artwork #digitalart #graphicdesign #birthdaygreeting #birthdaycards #greetingcards #cupcake

To Infinity and Beyond, a self-initiated poster series by Damon Xart. https://weandthecolor.com/to-infinity-and-beyond-posters-damon-xart/149067

#design #graphicdesign #poster #posters #posterdesign

I spent two weeks stress-testing GC Fentura across packaging, editorial layouts, and UI screens. Verdict: This "modern structure sans" actually earns its name—disciplined geometry, open counters at small sizes, and a weight range that doesn't drift. Not flashy, but built to last in a real design system. https://weandthecolor.com/gc-fentura-font-family-by-glyphonic/211620

#font #typeface #typography #design #graphicdesign

Are you also on @pixelfed, the Fediverse alternative to Instagram?

It's not as popular as Instagram (yet), but you're not plagued by ads, algorithms and other misery.

Here's my Pixelfed account, with lots of artworks and some photographs:

https://pixelfed.art/seven

You can also follow me from Mastodon: @Seven

#pixelfed #social #media #SocialMedia #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #3DArt #PixelArt #illustration #art #artist #arts #GraphicDesign #3D #DigitalArt #MastoArt #FediArt #CreativeToots

Graphic designer Nod Young was hired for the rebranding of It’s Time To. Just look at the stunning result. https://weandthecolor.com/its-time-to-branding-by-nod-young/112245

#design #graphicdesign #branding

Working on an older model for a print, here is a mini view. When in doubt.
#mbt3d #3D #b3d #modelling #blender3d #hardsurface #art #model #technology #industrial #graphics #design #artwork #DigitalArt #digital #GraphicDesign #MastoArt #FediArt #MastodonArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

Kawaii Moon Child progress. 🙂 It's evening over here in the Lowlands, so I'll continue modeling tomorrow.

#MoonChild #kawaii #cute #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #sculpture #3DArt #3DModeling #illustration #illustrator #fantasy #digital #style #art #artist #arts #arte #designer #GraphicDesign #NoAI #3D #3DRendering #CGI #Blender3D #B3D #blender #DigitalArt #OriginalArt #ArtLovers #MastoArt #FediArt #MastodonArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

Test Prototipo n° 003
Impossibile disegnare senza rimanere incollati al foglio. Torno dalla pausa con questa navicella: una varia combinazione di volumi, piani e superfici.
Solito processo: sketch digitale, lineart a inchiostro su carta, colorazione e grafiche nuovamente al pc.
#risma_2024 #drawing #shiptember #graphicdesign #scifi #boost #mastoart #mastodon

Following my kawaii whale (kawhaiile? 🤔), I'm now attempting to model a kawaii Moon Child in Blender. Here's a sneak preview of the work in progress. 🙂

#kawaii #cute #MoonChild #TeamHoi #CharacterDesign #design #artwork #sculpture #3DArt #3DModeling #illustration #illustrator #fantasy #digital #style #art #artist #arts #arte #designer #GraphicDesign #NoAI #3D #Blender3D #B3D #blender #DigitalArt #OriginalArt #ArtLovers #MastoArt #FediArt #MastodonArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

The 5 Best Adobe InDesign Templates We Actually Tested in the First Half of 2026. https://weandthecolor.com/the-5-best-adobe-indesign-templates-we-actually-tested-in-the-first-half-of-2026/211608

#design #graphicdesign #adobeindesign

A look at the Camp Crafts font duo by Komet & Flicker—serif vs. sans, connector glyphs, and where this rustic font shines. https://weandthecolor.com/camp-crafts-font-duo-by-komet-flicker/211603

#font #fonts #typeface #typefaces #typography #design #graphicdesign

A logo I designed for a client's application called Asteria, which features low-latency streaming for gaming.

They had a current placeholder but wanted something more professional. The design should be unique and identifiable as branding.

I'm available for new projects! Please visit my website at https://johnery.com or message me through email at [email protected]

#logo #graphicdesign #creativetoots