Tag Archives: graphic design

Infinity Ad: A Bit Off-Colour

Yeah, so this one is based on a very, very juvenile joke. I’d apologize but I wouldn’t mean it!

It’s also smaller than some of my other recent graphics, designed to print at roughly business card size (2.25″ x 3.25″) to go over the backing cards used in the Infinity blister packs, which I’ve been reusing as billboard surfaces.

Enjoy!

Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They'll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!
Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They’ll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!

Infinity Ad: Making Better Worlds

Everyone’s favourite terraforming/engineering/evilevilevil megacorp needs a giant billboard ad too! Third and (for now) last of my big 3″ wide by 5″ tall 300dpi ads. This one is also released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License.

WY Recruit
Weyland-Yutani looking for recruits to some place called LV-426. What can go wrong? Click on image to grab the full-sized image from Imgur!

Mars image via Wikipedia, released under a CC-BY License. Weyland-Yutani image redrawn in Inkscape from various images found online.

Infinity Ad: Blue Sun

Borrowing from another popular science fiction universe to provide some graphical fodder for Infinity terrain, here’s another big (5″ high by 3″ wide, as designed) advertisement. This one is being released under the CC-BY-SA License for reuse as you please.

Blue Sun ad
Blue Sun Corporation ad, designed to be printed at 300dpi, 3″ wide and 5″ tall. Click through to get the full-sized, much more detailed image from my Imgur account.

Background graphic from monaeberhardt on Flickr, CC-BY-SA. Blue Sun graphic redrawn in Inkscape by me from smaller images found on the web; original is copyright Josh Wheadon or whichever studio produced Firefly.

Another Infinity Ad: Travel to Varuna

I’m home with a stubborn cold that won’t go away, so decided to kick GIMP and Inkscape to life and create another couple of billboard-sized ads for my Infinity terrain. Here’s one advertising the PanO ocean world of Varuna as a travel destination. It’s available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License for (limited) reuse.

Travel to Varuna
Travel To Varuna – click through to my Imgur account to see the full-size PNG file. Designed to print at 3″ wide by 5″ tall at 300 DPI, hence the size.

Sources: Tropic water background via Flickr user tahitipix, CC-BY-NC-ND Licensed. Turtle Clipart via the OpenClipArt Project, Public Domain Licensed. PanO logo by Vyo from his awesome Infinity Logos in Vector Format project.

Billboard Ads for Infinity

While building another piece of scenery for our Infinity tables I built a roof that didn’t turn out; it just wasn’t working out physically the way I’d pictured it in my head. Turning the partially completed piece on one edge, though, I realized that what I’d created would work quite well as a display board for two big billboards – presumably video or holographic displays, this being a bright hexagonal future!

Here’s the basic structure, front and back views.

bb front
Front of the billboard. The whole thing is 6″ tall and 4″ wide.
bb back
Rear of the billboard. There’s enough space to balance a figure on the very top, if you’re so inclined…

To get something colourful on the two displays, I fired up GIMP and then went looking through Flickr and Google Image Search for source materials. It’s easy to just rip things off when you see them around the web, and far too many people do that. Both Flickr and GIS allow you to search for images that people have specifically licensed to allow free reuse of, though, and generally you have to pass on your graphics made using their images as sources – what is known as a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

Haqqislam billboard - Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity...
Haqqislam billboard – Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity…
Tyrell Corp - one of everyone's favourite (evil) megacorps!
Tyrell Corp – one of everyone’s favourite evil megacorps!

For the full size, high quality, and uncompressed images, please use these two links:
Arabic billboard – 2.7Mb
Tyrell Corp billboard – 2.7Mb

Creative Commons License
These works by Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Basically, this means that you can use these images as you see fit on the web or printed for use, including commercial use, but if you modify them further you have to share your version too.

Creative Commons sources:
Neon on Ferrari
Chevy grille
star twist origami
Blade Runner screenshot
Tyrell Corp logo

I didn’t wind up using either of these two (yet!) but they’re too cool not to share: 2nd Life cyber-art, and another by the same artist.

Links of Interest, 25 March 2015

Yet another post of short links, news, random bits, and oddments that wouldn’t warrant a full post.

Laser-cut MDF for early motor vehicles? They look pretty good, actually, and they’re 1/3 the price of resin & pewter vehicles. I might have to make an order to Warbases sometime to expand my pulp/RCW/WW1 vehicle fleet some more!

Via the always-excellent Airminded (who describe it pithily as “the fine print”), this great Australian recruiting poster from the Imperial War Museums online archive.

All Eligible Men...
All Eligible Men…© IWM (Art.IWM PST 12220)

The Battle of Mons: The Official German Account
From the blurb: This book is a translation of the German official history of the Battle of Mons, which took place between the German and British armies in August 1914. It covers the lead up to the battle, details of the fighting that took place, and the immediate follow-up from a German perspective. Early WW1 isn’t my particular area of interest, but well translated sources from the German side of World War One are rare enough to make this especially interesting regardless!

To Delay Is Dangerous

Via the US Library of Congress, this fantastic simple British recruiting poster from 1915.

delay
…To Delay Is Dangerous…

Really fantastic handdrawn typography and an eye for proportions. A classic of the type.

The whole Library of Congress WW1 Poster Collection is fantastic and well worth a browse. WW1 and post-WW1 posters from all over the world, not just the English-speaking world. Even better, copyright has long expired on almost all of these items across most of the world, so you can re-use them for your own purposes if you like.

Draft Versions of New M&B Cards

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been rebuilding my Russian Civil War cards for Through the Mud & the Blood over the last few weeks. I’ve finally got the revised versions of my existing Red & White Russian card sets for RCW to a point where I’m happy with them, so for a change of pace this evening I set out to design some cards for some of the other forces we’ll have available.

rcw-card-draft-jan13
Quickly assembled screenshots of draft M&B cards, some revised, some new.

Above, a quick screenshot of the current state of my cards. The Red Russian card has slightly changed background art; all the Big Man cards have a significantly changed layout with more information, and I’ve got a basic background for both British and Warlord Chinese forces! I have a small force of British in tropical kit, and late in 2012 my brother picked up a starter force of Warlord Chinese from Copplestone, which he promises to paint up one day.

One thing I’m not sure of: flag or star insignia for the Warlord Chinese forces? The flag fits in better with my other force cards, but the star works a bit better with text on top of it, as that black stripe on the flag really gets in the way of legible text. Opinions in comments below, please!

The British are also, of course, likely to be useful for other M&B folks, so I’ll get that set done up next, probably in February after GottaCon 2013, where I’ll be running an M&B-powered RCW game!

WW1 Posters On BibliOdyssey

The often-fascinating website BibliOdyssey has just posted a glorious selection of World War One posters from the US, UK, France, Greece and elsewhere.

I’m hard-pressed to pick a favourite, but purely for graphical awesomeness and a slightly surreal message, it might be this American poster telling people to fund a hungry machine gun.

feed-me
Feed a machine-gun – the Great War equivalent of those “Feed a child” ads we see today, I guess?

BibliOdyssey is also over on Flickr, too.

Happy New Year, Have a Pulp Travel Sticker!

I haven’t posted any random pulp graphics for a while, so here’s a 1920s/30s style British India luggage sticker featuring the Taj Mahal.

taj-sticker
The British Raj in India, etc – an interwar-style graphic for your amusement.

I’ll probably throw together a “Warbard’s 2012 in Review” type post this coming week, but in the meantime, hope you had a safe and entertaining New Year’s Eve, a good 2012, and are looking forward to an even better 2013!

(Incidentally, the Taj Mahal graphic was originally from the awesome Open Clip Art Library site, home of all sorts of awesome Public Domain SVG & PNG images. I’ve mentioned OCAL here before, but it’s always worth reminding people of!)