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When Jess Bachman, Creative Director of Visual.ly contacted me to say how impressed he is by my work, I of course felt very honoured. Visual.ly offers infographic services to some of the world’s biggest brands on an extraordinarily high quality level. So the question of working together with him and Visual.ly, I could only answer with "Yes!". I’m looking forward to many great infographic projects. Speaking of infographics, I want to give you some interesting tips: - A study proved that data shown in round shapes is remembered most. - Bar charts are probably the oldest data visualisation method ever. However, you should use bar charts only when you have to. An infoGRAPHIC should look like a graphic and not like a boring chart, no? - According to a study, data in an infographic having more than six colours is much easier to remember. However, this raises a bit of concern as regards the design and overall look as a higgledy-piggledy infographic can easily look unprofessional and cheap. - Speaking of colours, you should always thoroughly think about how to use colours in an infographic. The colour is the very first thing somebody sees of an infographic. So implement some sort of colour system. It can also make sense to create the infographic in black and white in the beginning and implement the colour scheme in the end. - Lately, I have stumbled upon a few infographics using photographs. Placing an illustration into a photo can be a nice thing when executed smartly. But placing a photo into an infographic? Sorry, that is just scary. The human eye always looks out for things we know that come closest to reality so you automatically focus on the photo. The infographic around the photo becomes less important. Mixing infographics with photos is very delicate! Do you want a great and unique infographic for your business? Simply send me an email ! #infographic

Every graphic designer or every person working in the creative industry knows them: creative blocks. You try to get your head around the job as much as possible but it just leads nowhere. I have such moments too and they are very frustrating of course. But there are a few things that help me break creative blockades in order to get back into a creative workflow. TIP # 1 - BRIEFING MEMORY I write important points of the briefing on little cards and mix them. Then I lay out the cards on a big table – like a memory game. Translating the briefing gets some oomph through this and I sometimes get new ideas. TIP # 2 - TAKE A SHOWER It might sound funny, but my best ideas are thought up under the shower. Maybe the soulapping of the water makes my creativity flow, I don’t know. But I can be quite sure that when I take a shower, I step out with a fresh body and fresh ideas in my head. Important: Write ideas down as soon as you’ve finished the shower! TIP # 3 - EXERCISE Sports always helps to get a tired creative mind going again – jogging outside is especially good. Fresh air combined with a good workout is the best method to „reboot“ your mind. TIP # 4 - COOKING I love cooking. When I have a creative blockade, chopping fresh vegetables and trying out new exotic spices helps me a lot to get a free head for a good, intense work session. TIP # 5 - ELIMINATE MESS It depends on the person, but usually if everything is in order then distractions are at a minimum. "A tidy desk is a tidy mind" - this is not just for your physical desk, but your digital desk too. I once spent a few hours organising 2500 images that were just numbered (which did not help anyone). So now if I need a certain image, I can view my options easily without losing precious time and creative power. TIP # 6 - IDEAS AT NIGHT It is proved that the human brain is extremely active at night. And indeed, many of my creative ideas I dream at night. The good thing is that I mostly wake up when I have an idea. I immediately write it down then so no idea gets lost. TIP # 7 - RE-ORGANISE THE DESK/OFFICE Re-organising my desk or office furniture helps me get a new perspective on things and projects for clients which can boost creativity. (Upon successful completion of the job, the desk or furniture is put back of course.) TIP # 8 -HOLIDAY When time and budget allow, travelling abroad is always a benefit for my senses. I love travelling to countries where everything is completely different than in Austria – another culture, another language, other smells, other food etc. This is how I broaden my horizon, which tremendously helps me in my creative job. TIP # 9 - LOUNGE, JAZZ OR CLASSICAL MUSIC Studies proved that listening to classical music makes you work more effectively. And I can only confirm that. Some of my best works I created while listening to classical, jazz or lounge music ( http://deluxemusic.tv/ is fantastic for the latter). TIP # 10 - A RELAXING EVENING Here and there, it is important to completely switch off your mind and relax. If it is a foam bath at home, an evening in the sauna or a day at a thermal bath: Taking a break from everyday life fills up my creative tanks with fresh energy. Important: Don’t forget to switch off your phone! These are my 10 best tips for breaking creative blockades. All tested and approved! I hope I can help some creatives out there to prevent themselves from future creative blocks. #inspiration #creativeblock

I can’t say it often enough how important a good and thorough briefing is. According to Wikipedia, a briefing is a short and concise summary of a situation. However, the briefing for a design project should not be concise, but thorough and long enough so the designer receives many details about the company, the product, the target group, the advertisements planned and the competitors etc. Furthermore, the designer has to be informed about the amount of design pieces to be produced, in the short AND long run. Knowing all of this enables the designer to plan and calculate accordingly. Let me give you an example: The client orders a poster layout from the designer because he/she wants to promote their new product. Two months later, they order a website design. A few weeks later, they want a logo to be drafted. Another month later, they need a brochure. All these projects were given to different designers separately and exactly in that order. In the end, nothing fits into a scheme, third parties (also the client’s target group!) maybe do not even recognise it is about one and the same company and everything looks simply wrong and unprofessional. Nevertheless, the client spent a lot of money altogether; a lot of money for a bad visual appearance. It may sound unlogical, but there are companies ordering designs exactly like the above example. Mostly, this occurs because of a lacking understanding for design. The boss of a company doesn’t necessarily have to have this understanding for design processes, this is the designers job to make his client aware of the importance of a briefing and to challenge the client in the course of the briefing. The designer must definitely know what it’s all about, this is crucial. In the example, an experienced designer would have developed a corporate design concept in the beginning, and then they would have applied this concept towards further projects (website, brochure, poster etc.). The result: A continuous design concept that goes through everything like a common thread, the image is correctly transported to the target group and the client has a professional visual appearance in the public, which costs them less than all the „unprofessional“ designs together. And afterwards, the company can realistically think about maximizing profit. (More info about how a good corporate design can maximize your success and profit can be seen here !) But sometimes, companies also think „Does the designer really have to know this and that?“. As it’s about translating a vision into a design: Yes! Simply drawing a nice picture in the CEO’s favourite colours of the season, is not the general idea. The more the designer knows, the better they can work. A further problem that can arise; the client does not know what they want. And it gets worse; the client does not know, who they are and how their business model looks like. If the client keeps saying „I don’t know“ in the briefing, every experienced designer should be warned. These clients very often tend to lay things open (that are crucial for the corporate design), in the middle of the design process or even after the corporate design has been finalised and approved. This can lead to a re-development of the complete corporate design and causes high additional costs and longer waiting times for the company. The lesson is clear: Only after a company knows where to go in the future, a designer can create a design that correctly translates this journey into a visual identity. #briefing

Twitter has changed the design for user profiles. That means that also the last big social media platform, that used to allow at least a bit of individual design possibilities for profiles, has adjusted towards the "normal", standardised social media designs. In the past, you had the chance to adapt your background to your corporate design for example. This possibility was killed by the design relaunch. Similar to Facebook & Co, also Twitter uses a big banner picture for the top of each profile. This banner measures 1500 pixels x 500 pixels. Here you can see my new Twitter design as an example: There is also a novelty with regards to tweets: The shorter the text in the tweet, the bigger the font. That means the shorter the tweet, the more it stands out. This looks like a bug and despite thinking about it, I still have not come across a reason why Twitter is doing that now. Very strange. Here you see two examples: What does Twitter want to achieve with that? Is a short tweet automatically more important than a long tweet? Twitter seems to think so, but I don’t. As Twitter normally does great things, I cannot imagine this to be a bug, but it does look like one. Another novelty is pinning tweets: Like on Facebook, you can now pin tweets so they appear on top of your Twitter feed. This is very good, especially for corporate Twitter accounts. Also the way that photos/videos are displayed, is new on Twitter. When clicking on photos/videos in a profile, you see a structure similar to memory cards, that shows all photos and videos of a Twitter user. This is something that Twitter copied from Google+ after they had copied it from Pinterest. Is the Twitter design relaunch linked to its stock market launch and to its "profit pressure"? I don’t know. What we can all see though, is that the big social media platforms are becoming more and more similar (design-wise). If you like it or not. When thinking of other social networks, design relaunches often had to face negative criticism (at least in the beginning while users were still getting used to the new design). However, the new Twitter design has received quite positive feedback so far. And I also have to say that I really like the new Twitter design (apart from the font size "bug") – even though a lot has been copied from Facebook and Google+. So Twitter was everything but revolutionary, but they really worked hard on improving the user experience and this is what counts when it comes to social networks. #twitter #socialmedia

Yes, that’s right. Google+ seems to have a design bug that is quite awkward. I want to show you this problem with an example. Original picture: This is how the picture looks like when posted on Google+: Google+ turns white backgrounds in photos grey. Maybe this has to do with the fact that Google+ (like Facebook by the way!) places the picture description on top of the picture in white font, like you can see here: It is very strange, if you ask me. You post a picture with a white background on Google+ and all of a sudden it has become grey. Horrible! You can only solve this problem when you know how to use Adobe Photoshop (or another similar program). This is how I solved this problem: Take a screenshot of the original photo with white background Open it in Photoshop Cut the picture accordingly Save the picture as a png file Job done! #google #socialmedia

Sometimes you just can’t get a whole object onto one photo. This can be quite frustrating. However, Photoshop can help! The photomerge function (File – Automate – Photomerge) merges several photos that belong together into one picture. Of course you need to have several single photos that you took in a row and will serve photomerge as puzzle pieces. Here you see some raw photos that photomerge has automatically merged for me. These photos really are totally un-edited! Some horizontal panoramas have a slight fish eye lens effect in the centre, which can make certain objects in the photo look blown up. Depending on the photo and what story you want to tell with it, this can be a nice visual effect. Especially since the GoPro cameras have become so successful, the fish eye lense experiences a revival – not only in videos. However, if you wish to get rid of that fish eye effect, you can edit the picture in Photoshop accordingly. Go to Edit – Transform – Image Warp. You need some patience and a good eye for that though. As you can see, photomerge is a great function that can be used with ease. Go outside, take photos of a beautiful landscape and try merging photos yourself! #photography #photomerge

Summer is coming up and the BBQ season is too. So it’s time to make our gardens and balconies more beautiful! A great thing I came across is this outdoor candle: The fantastic thing about it: These "wooden pots" are old pots from Indonesia used for ricing corn on the countryside. This outdoor candle brings a piece of exotic history into your garden. It burns for at least 50 hours and costs roughly 50 euros. You can order it online on depot-online.com by the way. #candle #outdoor

In this and my upcoming blog posts over the next weeks, I want to show you some web and poster designs of some great festivals. Let’s start with Mardi Gras (4 March 2014) that takes place in New Orleans (USA) every year. It’s indeed a very colourful and carnivalesque festival. You can’t deny the European origin from the Medieval Times. The purple colour gives a feel of magic and fantasy which is great. Also the combination with the green colour is okay. However, the green is too dark and when you scroll down to the bottom of the website, you see that the dark green looks very old-fashioned and not nice. Tradition and vintage yes, but old-fashioned? Please not! Instead of dark green, the designer should have chosen another colour or another shade of green. http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com In my next blog post I feature a festival in Belgium by the way ... #posterdesign #festival #mardigras

Off to the beautiful city of Antwerp (Belgium)! The Summer Festival (what a revolutionary name ...) took place there on 28 and 29 June this year. Here we see a mix of bright colours and rubber raft style coolness. They tried to include elements of flat design into the website which looks okay but you can tell they were desperate to follow the flat design trend. But all in all, the design is really nice. However, the inconsistent usage of typography is a negative point. Different fonts that don’t match as well as a full justification that creates ugly gaps between words reveal that people not familiar with design messed around with the website. Screenshots from the website www.summerfestival.be : In my next blog post I take a deeper look into the web design of the probably most famous festival in the world ... #posterdesign #festival #summerfestival

Summer time is travel time. So I went to South America to explore some of the greatest spots of Peru, Ecuador as well as the Galapagos Islands. As a designer I find it really important to get inspirations from different angles. Below you see a few photos that I took of beautiful things I found on my holiday: (Copyright photos: Helene Clara Gamper) #ecuador #per #galapagos #inspiration #holiday

Off to good old Bavaria! This year’s Oktoberfest takes place in Munich (Germany) from 20 September to 5 October. The website of the world’s biggest beer festival brings goose pimples to every designer. It more looks like a tourist booking website rather than a website for a great, international festival. They should definitely have a think about that. However, a nice design can be seen on this year’s official poster for 181st "Wiesn". The posters that won #2 and #3 in the contest are a bit disappointing from a designer’s perspective as they don’t really transport the spirit of the Oktoberfest. The winner poster does so though. http://www.oktoberfest.de The next blog post is the final part of my festival design series and it features the UK! #festival #posterdesign #oktoberfest

Today’s blog post is about the web design of the probably most famous festival in the world – Tomorrowland. Originating from Boom (Belgium), it now also takes place in Atlanta (USA) and Sao Paulo (Brazil). The festival’s concept was perfectly translated into the design concept of the website. Playful flowers, vintage style paper with burn marks and an interesting grid effect in the background definitely transport a feel of fantasy and dreamland. You see at first sight that design professionals worked on this website. The corporate design was perfectly executed here, very well done! http://www.tomorrowland.com My next blog post features a festival in England ... #posterdesign #tomorrowland