26daysoffoodtype - the beginning

36daysoftype starts tomorrow!
Here's a sneak peak video of what you can expect from me (sorry if the image seems a bit wonky sometimes, I'm still figuring things out):

Flat lay photography - my new header

I don't know if you've noticed but I've been making some changes to the layout of the blog. One of the things that were bothering me the most was the header image. It's the first thing you see when you enter a blog, kind of the first impression the reader gets and mine wasn't making me happy at all!

With that in mind, I had this idea of making a new lettering piece (every excuse is a good one). The process of creating it is something I'll probably talk about in a different post as it's something I don't usually do as everything was made manually and I usually jump to the computer stage as soon as I can...

Nonetheless today I wanted to talk about the process of creating the image per se.

Idea

I knew I wanted to take a photo on my desk with a composition of elements that were simultaneously inspiring and useful. Well...not all elements are actually useful but they tell a bit more about me when you first enter the blog (that's why there's a children's book there which wouldn't usually be on my desk while I'm working on lettering but is such an important part of me that there was no way it wasn't going to be featured there. Choosing only one was obviously the problem...

Research

The objects that were going to appear in the image were decided but having google and pinterest as my best friends I decided it wouldn't hurt to see what others have been doing around the same subject. To my surprise, I discovered a world of articles about flat objects photography but they featured mainly beauty stuff

Composition

After laying the objects in an organized chaos, I started to take pictures. I suggest you take an experimental photo to get your composition right. Seeing your composition through the screen is completely different and helps you see if everything is well balanced.

An important tip is when you take some photos you think you're happy with, see them on the computer. 

For example, this is the first photo I took and I thought it was ok but when I saw on the computer I realized there was a stop of white space. With everything still in place, I was able to fix it. And I'm not even joking this was what editing looked like. Not comfortable but effective.

Light

I knew I was going to use natural light so I waited for the weekend to work on this as I come home after dark during week days.

My office is a great natural light during the afternoon but it starts to get direct sunlight around 4 pm and since I didn't want huge light contrasts I started photographing right after lunch.

Then It was just a matter of editing the image to soften the shadows and make the letting pop a bit more.

I quite like the final result and it is the first thing you see.

What do you think?

Monthly Calendar

Other of my New Year resolutions (besides restart blogging) was to create a monthly calendar that I could use in my phone.

For you to have an idea of how much of a procrastinator I am let me tell you that every year for a long time, I think "this year I'm going to create my own calendar" and this comes from the time I thought I was, or was going to be, a photographer, and wanted to do one with my photos. So this has been happening for at least four or five years. It's always a project in January that is forgotten by February and that I only remember by the end of december when it is to late.
This time it's going to be different, there's this blog to remind me of that.

So this year I decided to create a monthly calendar where I only have to create one month at a time, which helps take the pressure off.
It's not supposed to be the greatest calendar ever, my main goals are:

• commiting to it and not giving up; 
• experimenting things I don't normally do;
• trainning hand lettering.

So, without further ado, here's January:

computer | iphone5 | iphone4 | samsung galaxy s4

I started with a sketch on paper and then moved on to photoshop. Usually I prefer coloring in Illustrator as I work a lot faster with it.
The lettering is something I'm not happy with but will keep trying.

In the end, I was pretty happy with the result. So happy that I posted an image of it in instagram, maybe someone else would like it too as their wallpaper?  And to my surprise some people were actually interested so here it is. I tried to make it for the most common models but I believe they will fit other sizes if you resize it?

Also, out of curiosity, here's the sketch.