Robot Creative - Design and Marketing Weblog

Palette Generator - It's Magic!

by Alfredo San Martin

I just came across this great website ,from Big Huge Labs, while doing color palette research. This site allows you to "Automagically create a harmonious color palette from a photograph". It's great!

When designing web layouts, you sometimes want to create the design around particular styles of imagery. This is perfect for such a task. It removes the need for using the color dropper tool on multiple spots in the image.

It even allows you to download swatches in Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) format for Photoshop or compatible applications.

As a bonus for all you web designers/developers out there like me, it even creates a sample .css file to add to your stylesheets with all the hexadecimal color codes.

In just a few seconds you can have an entire color scheme ready to go for your layouts and websites. It's a great tool to add to your design arsenal.

Fontstruct is fun but limiting...

- by Lara August

Check out this cool online font generation tool.

Check it out >>

It allows users to create their own fonts using a variety of preset shapes. At first glance, I was skeptical. I remembered when CDs came out and real music connoisseurs griped that the digitalization of the music removed the graceful flow of the original tones. I was afraid that this program would create "digitized" and stiff looking fonts, and it does. I haven't gotten into it deep enough to know if it even starts to address kerning or not.

But I will give kudos to the contributing designers that are featured in the gallery. I was actually very impressed with how much they were able to push the package. The program still generates according to a stiff grid. This may be fun, and the fact that it's web-based is cool, but I'll be sticking with more traditional type design tools that provide free range of fluidity.

Amazing Left Brain/Right Brain Video

A brain scientist describes the experience of suffering a stroke one morning and how she went in and out of left and right brain functionalities.  I wonder if she was very "spiritual" before this happened. This presentation is about 15 min, but well worth it.

Watch the video and read an article about the presentation

"Gifts of Omegaman" - by Mateo Jaimes

"What I would really hope to convey in my paintings is that there is a gift out there for all of us, available each day of our lives: the fragrance of springtime, closing your eyes and feeling the sunshine on your face, accidentally bumping into a friend on the street. All of these moments, and many more are inside the many, many layers of my paintings." -An excerpt from the artist's statement

Showing May - June 2008:
Robot Art Gallery's May show will feature paintings by Austin artist Mateo Jaimes. Mateo uses layers of acrylics and oils on wood panel to capture the small, often unnoticed gifts of beauty that surround us everyday.   

Reception (Free and open to the public):
    •  First Friday, May 2nd from 7-9 p.m.

Regular Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.- 5 p.m. and by appointment.

For more information, visit the Robot Art Gallery website or call (210) 476-8801.

Marissa Starr Profiled in CityPages Magazine

Artist, Marissa Starr, whose exhibition is currently being shown in the Robot Art Gallery, was recently profiled in CityPages Magazine's April issue. Check out the entire article here.

You can see Marissa Starr's show "Up Close" in Robot Art Gallery through April 31st.

Robot Goes to the Creative Summit

On March 28th and 29th, Robot Creative's designers attended the 2008 Creative Summit at Texas State University in San Marcos.

The 23rd annual Creative Summit is a regional student competition and design conference that attracts students and professionals from throughout the US.

Those Robots who had attended the year before were very excited about the speaker lineup. What inspiration would it hold for us this year?

The crowd slowly began to enter the Alkek Library Theater. It was like I was back in a lecture hall in my old college days. After the introductions, first up to the plate was Heather Amuny-Dey from Nike. She walked us through many of the best products and packaging ever to come out of Nike's doors. It was nice to think of what you could do with an amazing new product and an almost unlimited budget. One can dream!

After hearing several speakers, I realized that the focus was not on cutting-edge designs from the biggest and best design firms, but rather on personal projects that these top designers pursued outside of the office. The purpose of these projects was to help keep them inspired and creative, and perhaps even change the world.

Brian Singer, of the 1000 Journals project, spoke about the origin of his idea. As money was an issue, he bought 1000 journals in 10 rounds of 100 and mailed them around the world for others to find, add their own stories and then pass them along in an ongoing artistic form. This project was perhaps the most inspiring and reminded our team of the power of our imaginations.

The conference was a nice mix of small and large design firm work, illustrators and photographers. All in all, I quite enjoyed it. Being a web designer, I would have loved to see more web representation. But there's always next year!