After about a year and 1/2 of going it alone, I’m pleased to announce my return to full time employment. I’ve accepted a roll as the web designer/developer at Orange Door Direct which is part of the West Canadian group of companies.
Having a print shop on site is going to be a great learning experience and give me the opportunity to really explore the world of print more so than I have in the past. Now proofs come back in a matter of hours, not days. And on the plus side it gives the opportunity to more tightly integrate web campaigns with the print.
Why Return to work?
Despite the freedom that freelancing entails it was never my intention to be an entrepreneur and run my own business. Fulltime freelancing was nothing short of a necessity during the economic downturn where layoffs were in style and competition for new job postings was tight. So in that senerio it was sink or swim. Although I’m glad I was able to swim, it’s much easier to be in a boat.
Going it alone is also a lot of hard work, interrupting phone calls, invoicing, project planning/budgeting, and sales all take focus away from what I want to be doing, designing great websites. I wouldn’t say my work quality suffered as a result of all these other roles, but it definitely fell into a bit of a rut in that I wasn’t improving or being pushed to improve by others around me, such as other designers or art directors in the same room.
This past weekend saw the launch of one of the more interesting projects I’ve been involved with this year, Plague GPS is an iPhone based GPS game of Zombies vs Humans. And it’s just been added to the apple app store.
I was involved in the web/graphic design for plague, designing the two sided graphics for each element, the chaotic, blood splattered zombie world, and the clean, bright world of the survivors.
Being a huge fan of zombie films this was one of those “damn this is fun” projects for myself. Getting to step well outside the world of uber clean web 2.0 design and just having some fun mixing horror movie aesthetics with the shiny polished world of apple.
My wonderful fiance’ got me a Holga for my birthday last month and I just got back my first roll of film. After years of shooting digital and having limitless redos and adjustments between shots it’s quite liberating to just push down the shutter, hear a click and wind to the next shot. No real chance to second guess yourself until the film comes back.
Come across a great rarity today, a well designed, great looking, and functional font… for free.
Pablo Impallari is just giving away this beautiful piece of work. Alternate letters, ligatures, great retro look, this is the type of thing Veer would usually charge $100 for. But not Pablo, he’s happy just to see it being used, and that’s a very respect worthy move on his part. Clearly a product of passion, I just hope he doesn’t give all his work away for free.
Just launched the new site for The Highlands Consulting Group out of Sacramento, California.
This project represents a lot of “first” for myself, my first client from outside of Canada, my first time responding to an RFP, first site launch of 2010, first site to validate as HTML 4.01 Strict, also the largest site I’ve done on my own.
I’ve done sites of this size before, but always with the safety net of an agency surrounding and the buffer of an account manager to handle client communication.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the way the site turned out, and so is the client:
Next on the list is our new website! We are proud of the updated look-and-feel and would like to thank our web developer Jason Dorn for all of his great work
This also means I’ve got some room in my schedule for new work! Maybe it’s time to get a quote?
A great letter from Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar) thoughts on Adobe flash, and more specifically why it’s not on the iPhone/iPad. The biggest reason, keeping the web open source.
As closed off as the AppStore may be it’s a mute point when you consider the web, when Job’s speaks of the web being open he means any website should be viewable on any browser, on any device. Whether that device is an iPad or a PS3 running linux. Websites should be HTML based and not reliant on any middle man software to have them delivered to the web browser.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the Climbing Mojo logo/brand development for a while now, this was the first logo I’ve been contracted to do in quite a while and overall I am very happy with the final results.
Initial Phone call (AKA: The Brief)
During the initial phone call with the client we discussed what their expectations and goals were with the logo. Although they were creating a website aimed at climbers they didn’t want a bland logo that would be indistinguishable from their competitors. But at the same time they didn’t want to turn off their core audience of experienced climbers.
So essentially were were looking at finding the sweet spot between “standing out on the shelf” and “catering to the core audience”. One of the other major considerations was that this brand was first & foremost a website brand, so the logo would not only have to stand up in the climbing industry, but also in the web 2.0 world of youtube & digg.
The Initial Concepts
For the initial client pitch I prepared 3 separate concepts, one that was very on the nose and industry related, one brightly coloured “web 2.0″ option, and one off the wall option which looked nothing like their industry.
In addition to the actual logo concepts themselves I also included a number of mockups to show how the brand would translate across different media. This included photoshop mockups of Climbing Mojo apparel such as t-shirts and water bottles, and even a rough draft of what to expect on a website at smaller sizes.
This step, although time consuming tells a much better story of each concept then a simple logo isolated on a white background can do. Suddenly the client has an idea of how this mark is going to look in the real world, and how people might react to it in different mediums.
An uber shiny, reflection crazy icon might look great on a computer screen or mobile phone, but how will it look in a magazine add? Or embroidered onto a t-shirt?
Revisions
Although the client was pleased with the initial 3 concepts, none of them were quite there yet. The typography & style of the first concept was close, but the colour was too pedestrian and the mountains were a little too on the nose. The decision was made to keep the basic style of it, but swap in the more vibrant orange from the second concept and to find a new icon that could serve as more of a good luck amulet or icon in which some one could hold.
So the next round of creative focused on finding an icon to go along with the word mark, something that would speak to the selected name and serve as a good luck charm for the site and it’s users. To that end I explored a number of different options, from tiki gods to abstract shapes with decorative flares.
The Final Results
The final result ended up being one of the tiki god heads, do to some concern about cultural sensitivity the option without the tongue hanging out was chosen, but I still think the version with the tongue was my personal favourite from the options presented.
Now that the party in Vancouver Canada has died down after the closing ceremony I think it’s time to give props to the designs at the Bay(or their agency) for the fantastic job they did with the athlete’s wear this year. All of it anchored with the excellent retro-chique “Canada” wordmark displayed across the font.
In the past Canada’s olympic wear has been just “meh”, stuff that looked ok in the opening ceremony, but not something you’d really want to wear on the street. Typically it was all red & white, and lacked any real character or class.
CANADA written out in a clean sans-serif font and stitched across a red beret just wasn’t something most of us would wear to a hockey game.
But the mark this year (using Avant Garde) was a great mix of classic & modern, yes it looked retro, but the slight letter modifications (alternating the direction of the A’s, sweeping the C/A together) gave it a decidedly modern look. We’ll only know for sure in a few years, but I suspect this will end up being a timeless look, while the official Vancouver 2010 branding (sweeping blue & green organic shapes) will most likely look very 2010 in a few years, I think the Canada wordmark may just be strong enough to outlast it’s year of release.
