Filed under: Art, typography | Tags: delaware, design studio, fonts, House Industries, show and tell, type foundry, typography
House Industries is a type foundry and design studio based in Delaware that produces consistently tremendous quality work. Everything from their fonts to their book layouts, to their pieces of merchandise is just visually stunning. I highly, highly reccomend adding House Industries Show and Tell to your blogroll. They literally never dissapoint.
Filed under: branding
“The foundation of brand is TRUST. Customers trust your brand when their experiences consistently meet or beat their expectations.”
~Marty Neumeier The Brand Gap
Over the course of the last couple months I’ve been working on creating a brand for a small catering and baking business. Thus far I’ve designed a logo and a business card with a menu in the works and a website further down the pipeline. The client is one of my colleague’s mothers. My colleague, a salesman in our company, has been really making the push for her to gear up her marketing efforts and branding, with the goal being taking her business to “the next level” from word of mouth recognition and success to further professionalism and bigger gigs.
A lot of my freelance work has been small (one-person owned and operated), predominantly women-owned businesses. This work is gratifying insomuch as I feel I am really able to help individuals ultimately pursue their dreams. (Making the jump from part-time to full-time in some cases or just broadening their clientele in this case.)
It’s also extremely gratifying to be able to work with a client who understands branding and marketing. I have been dealing about 60% with my colleague and 40% with his mother as we work towards a recognizable brand. With a background in sales, my colleague “gets’ what branding is all about and is helping move his mother’s business forward.
At any rate, yesterday, he and I were discussing moving forward with the menu. We’re at the stage where the design has been accepted and I need to make a few minor tweaks to the content and hash out the printing. As I discussed with him the changes I was going to be making he replied with, “That’s great. Go ahead, I trust you.” Trust from your customers is probably the strongest weapon in any company’s arsenal, and especially so when we, as designers, are called to visually represent someone else’s dream. It was great for me to hear and makes me want to execute that much better as we move forward with establishing the brand.
It’s also worth noting, that he trusts me, because my work has consistently beat his expectations. Both my colleague and his mother have been 110% satisfied with the work I’ve done thus far, and thus trust me to continue exceeding their expectations. While that may put a little more pressure on each piece I do for them, I think it’s the best kind of pressure you can ask for.
Filed under: Logo Design | Tags: arrangement, basketball, concept, event branding, logo, march madness, ncaa, organization, style, tournament, women
After yesterday’s post on the Men’s side of the NCAA tournament logos I thought today I’d feature the womens’. All i can say is wow, the disparity between the two groups is ridiculous. I’m not entirely sure how the NCAA is structured, but the women’s side has significantly better logos across the board.
I’m especially fond of the Tampa Bay logo and the clever incorporation of the basketball – subtle, yet noticeable and very well executed. Additionally, the St. Louis logo really forces the perspective on the arch and acheives something new and dynamic with a recognizable and well-known icon of that city.
The best comparison groups highlighting the disparity between the men’s and women’s logos are the Indianapolis and New Orleans logos. The men’s Indy logo was trite and one might say shabby, but the women’s puts together a lovely package of venue and skyline and stylized basketball. The women’s New Orleans logo works on the same concepts as the men’s but it’s infinitely better organized and simply works much better.
Filed under: Logo Design | Tags: basketball, event branding, logo, march madness, ncaa, symbol, typogrpahy
Imagine this creative brief: We need an event logo. The only stipulation is that you incorporate the year of the event, the name of the city where the event is held, some kind of symbol reflecting that city (or not if you’re somewhere like Indianapolis), the NCAA logo, the words FInal Four (ideally in a relatively even-weighted san-serif, or not) and ideally a basketball.
I really love the March Madness tournament and with this year’s tourney rapidly approaching I was interested to see this year’s logo. Upon checking it out I went through some of the year’s past to have some sort of history to the yearly event branding.
The 2009 logo is disappointing. After seeing it on NCAA.com I looked around with a “is this it” feeling trying to find something more. But this is it.
At this point in history with the auto industry collapsing, how appropriate is it really to use a symbolic tire as the background and as representational of Detroit? Regardless of social standards/faux paus, the suggested tire isn’t really that great, and it only gets worse when you add the flames. They just seem ill-advised, or at least ill-placed. They’re not working with the other logo elements. The “2009″ falls way too close to the word “final” and generally I think the typography choice for “2009″ and “Detroit” is a miss.
That said, I like most the logo constructed for the 2008 tournament in San Antonio. I could do without the blue gradient behind “final four” and “San Antonio” does not seem to be exactly on the same line as the belt, but the hat is really nicely rendered and the whole thing works pretty well together, given the amount of information contained within it.
However, looking back at some logos from year’s past make me REALLY appreciate the San Antonio logo. They all have so much going on in them they stray far away from anything “iconic.” In the case of the New Orleans logo, the clusterbomb mish-mash is maddening (pun intended). I also have a problem with the generic city identifier icons used. 2007 and 2002 were in Atlanta and no one could come up with anything better in 5 years than to stylize the peach? I mean, we all realize Georgia is the Peach State but there’s infinitely more that could be pulled out of Atlanta to represent the host city graphically. I’ll stop now (before I spend several hours discussing what I don’t like about 2006′s logo), and leave it at this: Considering the above creative brief for these logos, I think 2008 works predominantly for the same reasons the others all fall so short: it nicely packages a lot of necessary information into a cohesive and unified event logo.
Filed under: Ad Campaign | Tags: ads, brading, burger, burger king, cheeseburger, cute, dachshund, design, magazine, unbranded
My mom made a point of showing me the above ad on the back cover of Lifestyle magazine. First off, I have to admit to those of you who don’t know that I’m a huge dachshund lover (I’ve got a 7.5 lb miniature longhair named Izzy who’s the best pup ever!). I’m biased, but I still think this is a really great ad. BK’s new campaign for their mini burgers is based on the concept that these little burgers are “cute” and I don’t think they could have found a cuter dog image than this one. (Well, maybe there might be one here.) I think the ads work because they’re playful (look at that cute little burger) and unconventional (the dachshund is the focus and not the burger). Generally, I think Burger King does a lot of things right with their advertising/marketing/branding and this is another notch in the belt.
Also, I heard about this on the radio this morning. It’s reminiscent to me of the unbranded McDonald’s Quarter Pounder stores and I think it should prove highly interesting to see how they brand the new off-shoot.
Filed under: Logo Design | Tags: commercial, fictionaly, Logo Design, nbc, parody, saturday night live, skit, snl
Last night my roomate and I happened upon a Saturday Night Live “All Commercials” special. This led me to two items I wanted to write about here. Number 1: I have always thought as long as I’ve been a designer that working for a film or television studio creating logos, branding materials, etc for imaginary products would be totally awesome.
Number 2: In the same vein, the above commercial for “Annuale” features a really well-developed logo for the fictional product. Given the ridiculous nature of the product as described in the parody commercial, I think the logo design is absolutely appropriate. The twelve dot icon clearly speaks to the brand and the all lowercase san serif (looks like myriad) reads nicely as medical but comfortable and feminine. The color scheme really makes the “once a year” icon pop and I really like the way the icon was reinforced throughout the commercial abstractly (ie the woman with the all gray and one pink converse all stars).
The tagline I could probably take or leave as it leans more towards blunt than clever, but it’s funny that the voice over realizes it’s a pun as she’s saying it and ultimately works on the humor level that this is going for.
Filed under: typography | Tags: font, handwritten, lettering, quick brown fox, schweitz, style, typogrpahy
I decided this morning to test out YourFonts.com and create a handwritten font uing their template. The process is super easy and they provide you with a TrueType file to download. The whole process (minus writing out yoru font in the template) took less than ten minutes. In summary, I think yourfonts is an awesome resource for handwriting fonts and beyond – You can obviously fill out their template digitally and create any type you want.
Download SchweitzHand
(SchweitzHand.zip)
Filed under: Photography | Tags: classic, hotel, motel, neon, retor, roadsign, signage, vintage
This weekend the band did two shows, one in Frostburg, MD and the other in Martinsburg, WV. The route from Pittsburgh to Frostburg is truly rural and takes you through some towns that it seems time has forgotten. On the plus side, it provided an opportunity to view some great vintage signage (a lot of which was hanging outside of businesses which could just as easily have been open as having not been open in 20 years). This led me to search through Flickr to find some great collections of retro signage.
Check it:
Retro Restaurants
I Love Old Signs
Florida’s Old Signs
I Love Vintage Sign Abstracts
NYC Old-School Neon Signs
I Love Vintage Ohio Neon Signs
Hotel/Motel Signs
Vintage Motel Signs Only!
Motel and Hotel Signs
Neon Signs
