Beyond the Obvious

Rubidium Beach is a new company here to help you with your small and medium scale graphic design needs. We listen, then we execute without stress or friction. We never forget that you know your own organization and its goals much better than we do.

We specialize in combining typography and real world imagery with abstract elements designed to achieve a desired emotional response. Looking beyond the obvious is what we do.

A Different Approach

Why choose us? We believe that there is much more to a partnership than great design

Business Philosophy

Rubidium Beach has an old school capitalist approach to business. We calculate price based on a reasonable hourly rate with overall business costs prorated in.

We see the “What the market will bear” version of capitalism as a fundamentally destructive force in society.

Zero Risk to the client

Small projects: You only pay if you are 100% satisfied with our work.

Larger projects: You approve initial concept work before any payment is due.

The risk is on us!

The Middle Ground

More about our thinking regarding pricing: We believe that there is a middle ground between the Canva/Fiverr low-budget DIY way of doing things and the million dollar logo design consultancy approach.

A business relationship should always be mutually beneficial and never zero sum.

about AI

Rubidium Beach is not anti-AI but we are against any use of AI that may do harm to our fellow creatives (or anyone else, for that matter). We will use it for tasks such as upscaling but will not use it to, say, replace a portion of an image with an AI-generated object.

AI is here to stay, though, and we have to make use of the tools that are available to us. With that in mind, we are building our own models that will be trained exclusively on our own work. Even so, AI will never be more than one tool among many in our arsenal and will never replace human beings.

This image is one of Steve’s that, ironically, was made using no AI whatsoever – only 100% traditional methods.

One of hundreds of free real and digital paintings

Free Assets

This and the previous image are just two of the few thousand that Steve has created and has put into the public domain over the years. These high-resolution images can be be downloaded and used for any purpose, no attribution, sign-up or email required.

Many make great backgrounds, wallpapers, and design elements. They are already used by literally millions of people.

Mainly 3D renders

Mainly Abstract Painting Backgrounds [Real paint and digital]

We Solve Problems

A quick illustration

The original 3D render

problem

The Client came across this 3D render created by Steve, on the free stock image website Unsplash, and thought that it would make a good banner for the AI conference that they were working on. The printer (correctly) informed them that the image would not scale up to the twenty-four feet width required and that a vector file would work. The client contacted us to see if we could help.

A screenshot of the final vector graphic ready for printing at 24ft x 4ft

solution

We deconstructed the original image and remade it as a vector file. There are automated tools for doing this type of conversion but the end result is never as good as a reconstruction.

The deliverable agreed upon was an svg vector file with no raster (non-scalable) elements in black and white. We also provided png and jpeg files in various sizes for screen use and a print-ready fully scalable psd file. The time of the client’s initial email request to delivery was under 48 hours.

What is rubidium beach?

Rubidium Beach is a new project set up by artist and graphic designer Steve Johnson to generate cool work with interesting people.

The name Rubidium Beach was the collective name of a series of novellas that Steve wrote a long time ago. The stories were pretty average but he always liked the name.

If you have a project that you think we can help with or just want to know more, hit the button below or give us a call!

Telephone: 219 213 9590