Posts tagged ms paint
before photoshopping
Shopping list.
Modern life is full of so many chores: wash car, wash dog, record television broadcast, collect shopping from the supermarket. How did our ancient ancestors manage? Like the Pyramids, they must have had some help from aliens, perhaps their own little green men personal shoppers.
Fortunately, some of that otherworldly technology has been preserved and has been put to good use in the form of designing a useful shopping list. Here you can add new items and can tick off items as you collect them on your travels. Still need to work on the car & dog washing and recording of TV shows.
Halloween Season T-Shirt.
With the current global negative economic atmosphere retailers are ever so more desperate to sell items to their customers. Equally these same customers expect a lot more from the products they purchase. To this end, no longer do children ask casually for perhaps a small token of candy from strangers when they go Trick or Treating on Halloween, they demand some serious rewards.
Bearing that in mind we feel you should always be direct with your request and enforce it with a genuine realistic threat. Carrying a petrol jerry can wouldn’t harm proceedings and further enhance the demands.
Office Interior Design.
Following the article on an AutoCAD alternative for home design, we have had a lot of requests (ok only one, from Doris in Mayfair) for similar tutorials.
MS Paint can also be a useful tool to help plan the layout of your dream office. Here with careful measurements and taking in the scale of furniture we can see exactly how it all fits together. The customer found a mouse hole in his office, so we included a fat cat and a plotted route for the mice to the storage cabinet that holds the vintage cheese & biscuit selection.
Birthday invitation.
Sometimes you have to adapt work to your client’s outlook on the world. Here I was asked to change an existing card and create an ‘inclusive’ invitation to a kid’s birthday party, that catered for all ethnic backgrounds and for both boys and girls. One of the kids had a friend from Iceland, so I included a blue person. I think I got all the important information there and managed not to offend anyone.
Lost Pet Poster.
Years ago in my home town, if a pet went missing, you could assume it would end up on the menu of the local restaurant. I stopped going there when the meals contained more fur than meat.
If you also have lost a pet that is dear to you, you can use MS Paint to create an effective poster to distribute to the local area to get some response. It is good to try and get an accurate likeness of the pet and offer some description of the animal to encourage locals to look for him or her.
Website Design.
Everybody seems to be making websites these days, it’s almost as popular as Facebook.
I don’t have time to use sophisticated tools like Frontpage, as I want something that is quick and still does the same job. In fact with a bit of effort, MS Paint will give you results that can be more impressive than Frontpage websites.
This is the website for a shop that sells cupcakes. The specification was to make something happy and colourful with a menu that they could change in the future - I think I got the tone just right.
Business Card Design.
When a customer approaches you with an idea for a business card, you have to get the tone and message just right to communicate the purpose of the business. This real estate company wanted a modern design that showed they are serious players in the corporate property world, but yet still capable of working with the poorer levels of society.
With the help of MS Paint, I think I got the balance right between a professional card and yet still able not to alienate the poorer people, who we normally would ignore, or run away from for fear of catching some fearful plague.
Who Needs AutoCAD?
Home builders work from plans that are usually designed in CAD products like AutoCAD, but if you really want to build your own home you can create your own plans by using MS Paint.
I was asked to produce a plan of a house based upon a photo of it. I carefully drew the outlines in a green colour on a black background, so it looks like a plan. To make the customer visualise themselves actually living there, I sketched him in, in his favourite hat with his cat.
Note: He ended up not making use of the plans. I think it is because I made made his cat look a bit too overweight from all the cake it was munching.
Marketing products to all peoples.
Sometimes products can get in a bit of rut and end up only appealing to a certain demographic. A recent request involved a biscuit snack that was very popular with big builders, who enjoy it with a nice cup of hot tea.
Unfortunately, it was not so popular with other men, so the challenge was to appeal to men who are less likely to have manual jobs and yet still appeal to the blue collar guy in the street.
By sensitively choosing different imagery and subtle changes to colour schemes the product should now appeal to all men as they probably wrestle for the last pack it in their local supermarket.
Interior Design Challenge
A recent request came to me asking if it were possible to show a ‘virtual reality’ version of a room before and after it had been decorated. This is certainly possible with MS Paint. While the original bedroom is a very classy affair, we have managed to give it a personal touch that the owner would appreciate, knowing their intimate love for the family dog with a homely theme.
Some cruel people have suggested it looks like an acid party that went wrong and was home-invaded by graffiti artists with only pastel paints. But I can tell them that the customer really liked it and is considering using this technique to redecorate the whole house.
