No matter what era we grew up in, midcentury design elements feel familiar to each and every one of us. There is a certain comfort found in design elements from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and that’s the rare and unique specialization of RetroSupply Co.
Dustin Lee, founder of RetroSupply Co., first discovered his own love for midcentury design in the treasures that he found in his grandmother’s house and garage. Her home became what he lovingly refers to as his “retro lab,” a place where he could explore midcentury hardware boxes, pulp comic books, product packages, and anything else she had laying around. During an extended stay at her house, he had ample opportunity to explore those wares, among many other random things he found in local antique stores, with the singular goal of finding ways to extract the “vintage” from those objects and recreating those effects in a digital format that could be applied to graphic design projects.
That work took time and dedication, but the time that Dustin spends working on Retro Supply Co.’s products enable graphic designers to shave minutes, if not entire hours, off of their own workflows. It is his method that enables him to achieve such beautiful and authentic results in his work. He uses real objects to make many of his digital design assets, including wood, ink, and paper, 60-year old wax oil crayons, foil, garage grime, and even coffee and oil spills.
RetroSupply Co. has certainly become one of the very best online resources for midcentury graphic design assets, offering fonts, brushes, layer styles, print effects, and textures. If you love working with midcentury design elements, Retro Supply Co. should be at the very top of your list of resources.
One of Dustin’s more recent releases is Cross Country Cross Hatchers for Adobe Illustrator. Crosshatching is the technique of adding shading and texture to illustrations through the use of closely spaced lines. You can find crosshatching in lots of midcentury cartoon illustrations and even in comics today, although the technique was actually invented by an artist in France hundreds of years ago.
Cross Country Cross Hatchers, designed to work with Adobe Illustrator CS4 and above, has everything you need to create a natural crosshatching appearance in seconds. This collection offers 216 hatching brushes: 108 centered brushes and 108 edge brushes that enable you to work on either large areas or precise edges. There are also 48 crosshatching swatches that are perfect for use with the Blob Brush tool, and in case you feel at all lost, Cross Country Cross Hatchers includes brush reference sheets and an easy-to-follow installation guide.
The brushes in this massive crosshatching collection are easy to use and you can create crosshatching effects to your heart’s content. By overlapping different line angles, you can add depth and texture to even the most basic illustration. The possibilities are limitless!
The crosshatching brushes in Cross Country Cross Hatchers were gathered from real illustrations in travel postcards so their effects are as realistic and authentically-drawn as they can be.
RetroSupply Co. currently offers 110 products through YouWorkForThem, including illustration goodies, textures, brushes, graphic styles, halftones, and more. Visit their portfolio to check out the rest of their work and if you love midcentury design, bookmark it so you’ll always have their products right at your fingertips for your next project!
