We build logos from scratch here. I m very proud of that fact. I could tell you all about our formal process with lots of big design buzz words, but I think it would be better to take you through a journey we took on a recent recent project.
We meet with Loewinsohn Flegle Deary for over two hours for our branding kickoff meeting. The discussion involved favorite cars, architecture, interior design, music, etc. About an hour into our meeting, the magic began.
Each partner began to open up about why they feel they practice law better than other guys. They talked about passion, the good feeling of a job well done, killer instincts, and the drive to do everything they could with their God-given talent. By the end of that meeting, we knew LFD.
And that s the first step in creating a real logo.
Our designers worked for days sketching the names of the partners in hundreds of fonts. We worked on layout, possible symbols, typefaces, and possible opportunities for ligatures.
(the artful way letters can flow into one another) At the end of the process, we had a large stack of paper, filled with little scribbles. At this point, we could have found a font that looked similar to our sketches and created clean logos comps for our meeting. Instead, we prefer to include our clients in as much of the process as possible.
In our round 1 presentation, we showed the lawyers and their marketing folks about 150 sketches. We pointed out strengths and weaknesses of them all and listen closely as they helped us design their identity. This is crucial.
A mistake designers often make is ignoring how creative their clients can be. We don t tell our clients who they are, we help them express what they already know.
The partners picked their favorite ideas and now it was up to our team to turn those ideas into a polished reality.
We searched through thousands of fonts to find many of the characteristics our sketches had produced. This is a tedious process since we don t look at fonts during the sketching phase. We trust the instinct of our drawing ability and don t want that to be colored by predetermined type shapes.
Once we ve found a few type faces the serve our purpose, we begin to modify them to suit our concepts. Hours are spent polishing in the computer to create a custom font that appears effortless and perfect. When we presented these polished logos to the client, the decision was quick and decisive.
Their help in the design process ensured that they liked the results.
With the logo agreed upon, there is one major portion of the process remaining. We have to build the logo finals so that it can be used by any vendor the firm uses in the future.
In the case of the LFD logo, this includes a small, medium and large version ready to be used in everything from an outdoor metal sign to a PowerPoint template. The LFD brand also includes a monogram style icon that is used when a medium cannot accurately reproduce the detail in the full logo.
came to use a while ago wanting a big, fun corporate blog.
We proved that the idea of fun and corporate could co-exist when we worked with last year. I can say however, it takes a lot of creative energy from both us and the client to keep the spirit light and the executives happy. Luckily, proved to be another great company to bring into the blogosphere ( ).
We are always working to be a creative shop that insists on a good concept before design begins. In this case the challenge lies in finding a visual look for a blog that could potentially talk about 100,000 different products. The concept that emerged was a 25 color palette and a huge mosaic representing every product Shopping.
com offers. Obviously, this is a pretty big chore but to the team s credit, it looks great. Special thanks to Jeff for drawing hundreds of products by hand.
Once the concept is in place and the client is happy (Shopping.com was happy after round 1, thanks guys!), we start designing the function of the blog.
Its amazing how simple it is to make good design decisions when the concept is solid. In this case our major goals were a tag cloud that actually looked well designed, and a special Q A blog post. This is where our integration with the front-end architects is crucial.
We are always willing to ask and they are always happy to work with us to find a solution that is up to standards and well designed.
In the end, the blog went live with a few days to spare and looked just like the comp the client loved. Well done to everyone involved.
We are getting this blog thing down to an art. Next big chore: re-doing . I just read an article about Jerry Kuyper on .
He has been a great teacher and designer for the last part of the 20th century. However, his major claim to fame is that he just happened to work with some of the best schools, best studios and best designers of our time; all while they were reaching the peak of their design fame. The article jokingly calls him the Forrest Gump of design.
I don t want to bore you with every detail, but I thought I d add one of my favorite passages:
The design team was exploring new designs for the United Airlines airplanes, with the goal of improving fuel efficiency by using less paint on the planes. We were looking at wavy and jagged lines, trying to avoid straight lines that everyone else used. Saul (Bass) pointed out that straight lines on a plane-a cliché-communicated a smooth, stable flight to customers, which is exactly what they wanted.
Saul believed that something becomes a cliché because it works and the challenge was not to avoid clichés but to use them in a fresh way.
If you re a designer, want to hire a designer, or just like design, I recommend .
Over the past 6 months, the .
Mark is a fantastic coder and information architect with a mountain biking and cyclocross alter ego. Almost immediately after he started work, Mark began making the 10-mile journey from his apartment in Far north Plano to the nearest station. I was intrigued and began spending my weekends getting my old bike in shape and taking it out for test rides.
After a little bike maintenance and training, I began making the 16-mile trek from My house in south Richardson to our . Two bikes parked in the office every day started to raise interest and last month, became the 3rd member of the 2-wheeled crew. He recently moved into a house just east of downtown with a 4-mile commute.
After a weekend trip to , he was armed with everything he needed to be a full-blown bike commuter. I m now pleased to report that is strongly considering a mix of Dart rail and bike locomotion to make his daily commute.
So as it stands, roughly a quarter of the The world lost a truly original talent yesterday.
I thought it would be nice to remember him at his very best in Young Frankenstien.
Major US newspapers have a circulation in the neighborhood of 280,000.
The population of Iceland is 280,000 (not counting Bjork, who lives on Mars).
In 2003, Hyundai sold 280,000 cars in Europe.
280,000.
Everyday, 280,000 people use MySpace for the first time.
Dubbed the ultimate online social-networking mash-up, this monster of the free-for-all web is looked down upon by most of the serious web community. It is admittedly poorly constructed, poorly maintained, and looks unbelievably bad most of the time. Somehow, it has charmed its way into the browsers of millions and millions of people.
Presently, MySpace has 80 million profiles (give or take). That s well over a quarter of the US population. Their page views have been in the top 5 for the US for the past year.
In their recent article on NewsCorp s acquisition of MySpace, Wired puts the lumbering giant in some context:
Back in 2003, half of the VCs in Silicon Valley were chasing the idea that the Web could connect people to one another, rather than to information. It took a couple of Los Angeles hipsters to give that abstraction a serious viral form.
Last year NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million.
That means founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe could easily celebrate by buying matching Ferrari 599 GTBs. Current asking price: $280,000. In design, one of the oldest crutches in the book is a vector line: a small straight divider to break up space or group two separate ideas.
They come up all the time in collateral, business cards, book publishing, and web design. The problem with using vector lines on the web is that you cannot physically get the line thinner than width of 1 pixel. One huge, fat, obtrusive pixel.
In print work, it s not uncommon to use 0.25 point lines.
Thinner lines are more elegant and help balance a piece by doing their job without drawing attention to themselves.
I ve done a little research and found that there is a predictable way to fake thinner lines in web work. Looking at screen shots of my own work, I ve found that when a monitor renders a vector line that is smaller than a pixel, it simply lightens a one pixel wide line. The ratio is roughly 0.
5PT:50%. This is an optical trick that fools you eye into seeing a very thin line that is the same dark color as the original. All the vector lines on this site were done using just this method.
They appear to be very thin lines that are the same color as the text you are reading. In fact, they are much lighter.
So, the best airline on earth and hometown hero Southwest Airlines asks you to design to be the face of their online community.
What rsquo;s going to be the theme? Big powerful 737 airplanes*? Corporate colors?
Pilots typing on laptops with a toothy grin?
Thankfully, no.
After reading everything I could about Southwest, looking over their and talking with their marketing department, I found a company with a history of Internet firsts and a history of simple, clever advertising.
In our meetings, we discovered that this blog would be the first direct online feedback Southwest customers have ever had with the airline.
With all that in mind, we came up with peanuts mdash; the little complimentary bag of peanuts offered on every Southwest flight torn open and spilling out all over the page. Southwest is famous for those little guys.
I felt they were really the unofficial mascot. So right alongside Southwest s employees talking to the world, it seems appropriate to have a bunch of peanuts.
A good deal of the design I see on the web seems to be an afterthought.
It is simply decoration for the content. At for such a great client. The Southwest team has been fantastic and very appreciative of our efforts to design with their message in mind.
As always, our development team rsquo;s work has also been exceptional.
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