We Love Graphic Design - Opening Titles 2023

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We Love Graphic Design - Opening Titles

The project is a deep dive into the vast possibilities of the contemporary graphic designer: From old school Photoshop effects to beta-released Illustrator features, from AI images to computer generated patterns, from meticulously lit and textured Cinema 4D renders to simple browser-based 3D - and much more.

WLGD is a one-day graphic design conference, featuring 5 keynote speakers.
The day is kicked off with an opening titles film to inspire the crowd of graphic designers, while introducing the speaker names.

With the overwhelming amount of new trends and design tools out there, we wanted to capture a moment in time by exploring as many of these new styles, methods, and tools as our time frame would allow. Two thirds of the time invested in this project was spent on research, experimentation, and learning new software.

Credits
Visual Identity & Design: Hey Jack Studio
Direction, Animation & Design: Friction
3D Animation: Nothing Studio
Audio Services: Sanctus
Music & Sound Design: The Chicken Sound

Software in use
Adobe Illustrator, beta version
Adobe Photoshop, desktop
Adobe Photoshop, iPad
Adobe After Effects
Cinema 4D
FontLab
Cavalry
Cellular Automata by Ksawery Kirklewski
Pixelator by Ksawery Kirklewski
DALL-E
Midjourney
Procreate

Spline Tool

Below, you'll find an edit for each section of the opening titles along with some process imagery.

SPEAKER 1: VICTO NGAI
Theme: Happy accidents and geometric design

Below left: While the Expand as wireframes feature was still only available in the beta version, this was animated and exported frame by frame from Adobe Illustrator

Below right: Rotation and the moving texture animated and exported from Illustrator.

Above: Came across the Dancing Dissolve blending mode for an alternative “shiny floor reflection”.

SPEAKER 2: HENRIK KUBEL
Theme: Kinetic typography

The poster in this section is built in After Effects, creating a modular typeface based on Degular.
Each character is divided into 6 rectangles. For each you can individually set and animate glyph, weight, fill, stroke, and distortion.

Below: Modular typeface in use

SPEAKER 3: GIORGIA LUPI
Theme: Computer generated graphics

Above: Animated in Cavalry

Below: There’s a super interesting, rapidly growing scene of programmers using creative code to create beautiful graphic design.
One of them is Ksawery Kirklewski. We got permission to use a couple of his tools for this project, this one is called CELLULAR AUTOMATA.

SPEAKER 4: KATINKA BUKH

Theme: AI images

Below: DALL-E, promt: “jellyfish acid black background”

Below:

DALL-E, promt: “butterfly seen from above fluid marble pattern clean background”

A series of the best AI results were selected to form a sequence of butterflies.
The last of them was then cut out in Photoshop and mapped onto a butterfly model in Cinema 4D.

Below left: Early, unused concept. DALL-E, promt: “skeleton windsurfer big wave”

Below right: Early, unused concept. Midjourney, promt: “skeleton windsurfer big wave”

SPEAKER 5: CELESTE MOUNTJOY

Theme: 3D for all

Below: W inflated in Adobe Illustrator, exported as an .obj-file and imported into Spline Tool, a browser based 3D tool.

Above left: Created in Adobe Illustrator, frame by frame animation

Above right: Created by manually mapping several instances of an image onto the W in 3D space using Procreate.
The image was created in Midjourney using the promt "colourful messy techno".

INTRO