Evidently it would seem I’ve agreed to take part in some minor cross dressing to raise money for the YWCA of Calgary. September 20th at Olympic Plaza I’ll be rocking a pair of pumps and circling around the plaza a few times. Donate now to support the cause.

After having 24 hours for the Calgary Flames Heritage Classic Jersey to sink in since the unveiling, I still firmly believe the biggest problem is the very modern looking Flames logo slapped onto to the retro style striping. The concept of blending the Flames brand with a retro design might have sounded good on paper, but in practice it just doesn’t work.

To that end I think the Flames would have been better off forgoing their traditional flaming C logo (which I do love) and developing a new crest/word mark that works with the retro aesthetic the Heritage Classic calls for. The Minnesota Wild have done a great job of creating faux retro designs for their jerseys, despite not having a 50+ year old team. They’ve managed to do it not once, but twice in recent years, with great results.

So I can’t help but feel the NHL fans may have reacted better to the Heritage Classic Jersey if they’d put a little more effort into it, and not relied so heavily on the very 80′s logo we’re so familiar with.

The NHL officially announced the Heritage Classic in Calgary yesterday, and the two competing teams, The Montreal Canadiens and the Calgary Flames unveiled the retro jerseys they’ll be wearing on the occasion.

Montreal – Are you even trying? Or are you just gun shy to dig into the old jerseys after this disaster from your centennial celebrations?

Calgary – While the immediate comparisons to a fast food mascot do come to mind with the red/orange stripes. I have to say I don’t hate these as much as some. I think that on ice with the matching pants/gloves/helmets they’ll look pretty damn sharp. But having said that, I don’t think I’ll be buying one, they just don’t quite hit the mark.

The biggest problem I can see with this faux retro design is that the flaming C is just a little too modern looking for a “retro” sweater. Yes it was designed 30 years ago, but the stripping pattern on this jersey is closer to 100 years old. The juxtaposition just isn’t working as they intended.

So far the bar set by Chicago’s Winter Classic/3rd has yet to be cleared. We’ll have to see what the Penguins & the Capitals unveil for the Winter Classic in the US, but I don’t see it topping the Blackhawk’s snappy 3rds.

Despite the lack of love for the Flames Heritage Jersey, I’m sure the game will still be a huge success… anyone wanna hook me up with tickets?

Fun little one off project here, wordmark for TheBrookmanDodger.com, the official blog of George Brookman, CEO of West Canadian.

Heavily lifted from the classic Brooklyn Dodgers logo it pays homage to the Calgary baseball team of the same name owned by his father in the 1950′s.

Not 100% original design by any means, but still fun to work in this style for an in-house one off project. Play ball!

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.

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.