Going through various old project folders today, I found some things that I still like but that I felt might not fit in my current portfolio. So I’ve chosen to put them here so that they’re still represented.
The first piece is a logo for my cousins’ farm, The Kitchen Garden. They wanted something that showed off the bright color and variety of their produce (which is pretty awesome and delicious, by the way). Here’s the final logo:
In the process of getting there, I did some sketches that were way too detailed for a logo, but I still kind of like the drawings:
In 2008 while I was in the midst of doing the Manifest poster for Columbia, they also asked me to make some little characters for their newly launched social site, The Loop.
I visited Columbia recently and laughed when I saw a shirt with these characters on it inside of a claw game.
And I’ll end this post with the old BLERDS postcard design. I still enjoy this and the BLERDS logo.
I recently finished this baby announcement for some friends in Chicago. The announcement included lyrics from a David Bowie song (with a link to the song), the baby’s “stats,” a drawing of the happy family and a photo of the baby. All of the text is hand lettered. The announcement was distributed via email (as a PDF and as an HTML embedded email). Apparently it went over pretty well.
Erin and I are getting married in June. My one big task has been to design and create our wedding invitations. It took quite a while but I’m pretty happy with the results. I have put together the image below showing the highlights and I’ve also uploaded each of these images individually to a a Flickr set, which you can view here.
Here are some notes:
I designed everything and did all of the cutting and mounting
Erin wanted to send one to the Obamas, because apparently the president will send you a congratulatory card.
I addressed each envelope by hand using a calligraphy nib on a dip pen and brown ink.
The envelope and card stock that the invite is mounted on came from Paper Source.
Printing for the invites was simply done at Kinko’s
Printing for the direction card was done on my deskjet
We decided to do an RSVP postcard to cut down on paper and postage. The postcards were printed at Vista Prints.
The return address labels were obtained for free from Vista Prints.
I created and sent out 119 of these invitations
So as you can see we opted to try and make something nice while keeping it on the cheap and doing a lot of it by hand.
And I want to reiterate the point that if you did not receive one of these, it doesn’t mean we don’t like you.
A lot of people have been making a big to-do over Pepsi’s new logo since its debut. The debut, as you’re likely well aware, coincided with a certain historic election – an election that had a great graphic design campaign and a logo that seems strangely similar to Pepsi’s new look.
And the people are probably right. Say what you will about the new logo. I do happen to like it for its use of subtelty in corporate branding. To see what I mean, check out the logos below:
I bet you can tell just by looking which of these logos correspond to each of the ‘types’ of Pepsi – Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Max. I like how the mark is simple and identifiable but also has some versatility.
Another thing that I kind of like about the new logotype is that the “e” references the shape of the previous logo:
So yeah, maybe they did jump on the Obama bandwagon, but who hasn’t these days (in terms of products and marketing, at least)? That being said, I do enjoy, as I put it, the subtleties of this logo.
Their new website, on the other hand, is anything but subtle: Pepsi.com Ugh, I have had that open in another tab for about five minutes and I am going to have this song stuck in my head all day…
I visited Columbia recently and laughed when I saw a shirt with these characters on it inside of a claw game.
And I’ll end this post with the old BLERDS postcard design. I still enjoy this and the BLERDS logo.
