I really like your work. I absolutely love this one!
Do you sell prints or digital files of these images? Why have you made them? Are they just for art’s sake or is there a more specific purpose?
Well, you could do some of what you’ve shown in Illustrator to a degree, I think using what you’ve shown more as a main illustration, but handling the long text articles in InDesign with having your “illustrations” be linked would probably work out. Based on your samples I don’t see the need for the level of fine tuned typographic control.
Just-B,
that’s my cat there looking. No, have not had clients for this type of work.
You may like this guy’s work – tons of amazing stuff Anthony Neil Dart.
CraigB,
let me ask you because I have not used InDesign in a century. Can InDesign let me control the transparency or the blending options of individual letters if all the letters are part of one paragraph (one text box/shape)? What I will do in Photoshop, if I want one of the letters in a word to be differently blended, I will put it on a separate layer, which obviously makes me work longer on making that, but if InDesign can let me blend individual letters with different blending option, then I might considering the switch.
And does InDesign blend layers with the same good effects that Photoshop gives me?
Another benefit to using Photoshop is that I constantly move shapes around… so if I am in InDesign, I will not be able to do that because the background will be one giant image mixed with tons of layers of different shapes and letters. The background will be one giant PDF, so if I want to rework the background I will have to go back to Photoshop to edit there. That leaves me working with 2 different programs as opposed to 1.
Seems I can’t rotate individual letters within a text box in InDesign. That’s a disappointment too.
Personally, I think InDesign would be a terribly frustrating tool for what you’re doing, and it would have no real benefits that couldn’t be better achieved using Illustrator.
InDesign is built around the premise of putting together multi-page documents that contain blocks of text, require consistency from one page to the next and is able to efficiency get it all done. It’s not really a free-form art tool.
The only problem I see with Photoshop is the whole resolution issue. You’re basically fixed at the size you make it, which might not be a problem. But if you (or a client) ever need to print these out at something approaching wall-size, they’ll be blurry. Large, blurry photos can work, typography, on the other hand, just looks bad when the appropriate resolution isn’t there to support it.
If it were me, I’d use Illustrator when possible and Photoshop where it isn’t.
With InDesign, you are also bound to the resolution of your background images!
Not really, depending on what you mean (I could be misunderstand what you wrote). Placed raster images obviously have a fixed resolution, but any vector elements added in InDesign or Illustrator remain independent of the resolution of those placed images.
This is really really good illustrative work!
This explains a lot!
But the part where you say this is a magazine…I may still be misunderstanding what you are trying to achieve.
I would still do the page layout in Indesign, placing this imagery into a layout and if you have article text to accompany this, I’d do that part in Indesign.
You don’t want to be designing magazine text in Photoshop if you want this to be a professionally produced piece. Not even if it is a web magazine.
Just-B, I meant magazine pictures; if they are 300 dpi, then that’s it. If the client wants to blow up the magazine layout to a trade show banner – then the image of the photo deteriorates. I understand that text, InDesign elements and Illustrator vectors are preserved… By the way, I always wished they made every pixel in Photoshop to be a vector too… but that’s beyond me – I guess the math or the computation doesn’t cut it yet… Maybe one day when we have quantum computers there will be lossless resolution.
PrintDriver, InDesign (maybe even Illustrator) will not let me edit individual letters within a text box that contains a paragraph of text. Let’s say I want an individual letter within the text paragraph to be MIRRORED – like this --> MIRЯORED, and its color blended with let’s say Overlay blending option so I can see the background – can’t do it with InDesign. So, because Photoshop can’t do it either within a single layer with text, at least in Photoshop I will be in the same program and will make two different layers:
- MIR ORED
- Я, and this one I will position at the right place where the gap is.
Sure I can do something similar in InDesign too – I can make the an individual text box with the Я, and put it on the top of the gap between the letters… but what if I need to move around the different shapes and elements – I can’t because I am InDesign and I have to think in terms of only moving text around not design elements from Photoshop.
You can do some of those things in Illustrator while the text is still live. There are limits, however, on how far you can go without, first, converting the type to outlines, at which time every glyph becomes an independent object that can be styled as you wish without the need to create hundreds of separate layers to keep the objects from merging.
That said, there are tons of pros and cons. Again, the main advantage I see with doing the hard-edged pieces — like typography — in Illustrator is keeping resolution-related problems at bay. I honestly think you have a commercial-quality, saleable style of work here. If you’re uninterested in pursuing that and you’re happy with Photoshop, there’s likely little reason to switch. If you are interested in pursuing a commercial direction with this kind of thing, you’d be running into problems with it not being scalable.
“commercial-quality, saleable style of work here?” 
Can’t tell you how many interview rejections I’ve had for this work in the last 15 years… ~100!? That’s why I don’t even bother anymore, and I will not design in any other way, I am too unyielding to my way of designing because I want to preserve originality. To find market for this type of work is possible only for those names that I mentioned earlier that have made a name for themselves already. Apparently their clients are open to something totally out of the box. I am trying one more time, except not trying for clients and ad agencies, but will try designing a magazine in this way… It’s been coming for long time already anyway because I want to cover social issues (like Adbusters and Colors magazines do), except their designs are a bit more toned-down and not so wild.
Will think about Illustrator and will play around with it.
Admittedly, your work would be confined to niche markets. But I can envision it in, say, Wired magazine or the basis of an Adidas promotion, for example.
Of course, you’d need to adapt your work to a commercial setting since the purpose of commercial artwork is obviously to sell, persuade and influence a target audience. If you’re unwilling to do that and work with art directors to create what they need using your style, yeah, it’s a dead end thing. I’m not saying your attitude about it is wrong or anything like that. I’m just saying that an uncompromising and unaccommodating philosophy doesn’t work in commercial illustration. Of course, if that’s not your goal or what you’re willing to do, that’s totally your call.
Another possibility is to sell them as fine art prints. Of course, that would take some marketing savvy to pull it off, but I think it’s doable. Geech, I’d probably buy one. It very easily could just be just my own tastes, but your sense of composition is brilliant, and I’m hardly one to liberally hand out praise.