I have a friend who I find incredibly fascinating. This is because he always has amazing ideas for businesses. The ideas don’t tend to go very far, but it’s not for lack of creativity. At one point, my friend came into possession of a still which he set up in his basement. It didn’t take him very long until he learned how to distill honey in to mead (honey wine) which, naturally, led to a business plan to produce and sell the stuff. Also naturally, this called for a logo. I provided the little bee mark you see above.

The mead business didn’t amount to anything, but the logo lives on: cut into adhesive vinyl and applied to the side of my buddy’s Wrangler for reasons that escape me. I am, of course, flattered.

My next goal is to get one of my designs voluntarily tattooed onto someone. Any takers? Chas?

Two years ago, the good people at the Camp Fire USA River Bend Council asked me to work up a T-shirt design. The result was the basic illustration you see on the left.

Created fairly quickly and without a tremendous amount of planning or forethought this illustration turned out to be really popular both with the staff and campers and was eventually adopted as the official logo for Camp Tannadoonah which is an overnight camp in southwestern Michigan. (I’ve yet to have one of my marks tattooed on anyone’s body. For the time being, the Tannadoonah mark drawn on concrete with sidewalk chalk is the best I’ve been able to achieve.)

Unfortunately that left the day camp, Camp Tawanchi without a comparable logo. The challenge was to design a mark for Tawanchi that fit with the existing branding of Tannadoonah while still remaining distinct. Where Tannadoonah is all about spending a week in the woods in a traditional summer camp setting, Tawanchi is more about bringing a touch of that camping experience into the city. Tawanchi campers spend the day at “the Res,” a building located in one of South Bend’s city parks. The intent was to reference this building as a symbol for the Tawanchi experience and to render it in the rough style already defined in the existing Tannadoonah mark.

Both marks were created using expanded brush strokes in Illustrator. The thin font is Myriad Pro Light and the thicker serif font is the extremely elegant free font Nevis, which is available here. I think Nevis compares favorably to the far more expensive (but incredibly beautiful) sans face Gotham from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Just wrapped a very trying project designing these business cards for James Avery of InfoZerk/ZerkMedia. The cards are printed on a solid black stock (no white edges), and feature a white foil for the content area and a raised shiny textured area that forms an off-set “Z” (for Zerk) at the top of the card which is rendered with thermography.

I learned the hard way while getting these cards produced that foil and thermography do not play together well. The reason (as it was explained to me) is that, in order for thermography to render properly, there is an upper limit on the weight of the card stock then can be used.

Unfortunately, foil requires the exact opposite: a thick, firm stock in order for it to apply properly. If it’s applied to a softer sheet the foil press tends to push into the material and the foil ends up “climbing” out of the letterforms. I compare this to a meniscus on a test tube (if you remember high school chemistry). This foil creep can cause the counters of letter forms to fill in, or to put it non-designer terminology: My lower case E’s looked like O’s.

(It’s possible that none of what I just wrote is accurate. If so, please leave a comment and set me straight. I’m going on what I was told by my print vendor).

So the thermography required a soft stock, which made it tough to apply the foil, which I had to use to be absolutely sure that the type would come out pure white, because the whole design was based around the contrast between shiny and dull on the black card, and that required a black stock upon which white ink could potential look slightly gray…and around and around we go.

In hindsight, and for future iterations of this card, I should have asked for Gloss Varnish instead of thermography and specified a thicker, heavier sheet in order to get the foil to apply properly.

Luckily I had a very understanding, patient client and a print vendor who bent over backwards to make things right. All’s well that ends well.

The Ordered List business card design was recently featured on Card Observer, a site which applies the CSS gallery concept to the design of business cards.

The following is based on a description of this design that I wrote up for a Flickr post that pre-dates the existence of this blog.

These cards get love here, here, here, here, and my personal favorite.

These cards also taught me that a great idea and a great client are both essential to creating a great design. If I hadn’t come up with a good idea the cards wouldn’t have been special. What’s slightly less obvious, is that If Steve had been a tool about the content on the card, (”You know…I really need my fax number and mailing address on there…”) there is no way that these cards would have turned out nearly as well as they did.

The re-re-redesign of pray.nd.edu is now live. For a comparison to the version this new iteration is replacing (designed by young, green, inexperienced oak) check out my flickr screen grab for the homepage and the subpage and for that matter, the original green candle page.

The designs

Click the images to check out full size mockups (on flickr).

A look at the process

Wireframe

The wireframe was just to pitch a basic idea to the client. In this case, the major elements of the site where already defined (the candles, the video player, etcetera) because they were already part of the existing site. As you can see, my wireframes aren’t going to win any design awards. My colleague Jim Gosz has been known to refer to these as “priority maps.” In other words, they don’t finalize the design of the page, rather they show what elements will be in the final design and their relative importance. 

I’ve found the more loosely I execute a wireframe the less rigorously I am held to it for later stages of the process. This is good because I start to change things almost as soon as I hit the Photoshop step.

“Noli”

I don’t know a better term for this kind of wire-framing. In my brief foray as an architecture student we referred to bird’s eye view outlines that shaded in public spaces of buildings as “Noli Diagrams” so I’ve adopted that term to refer to this step which is sort of in between wireframe and full mock-up. It sort of allowed me to sketch out the various elements and worry more about the overall contrast of the site. One of my really bad design habits is to plow right into the final rendering without really pacing it out.

Initial Client Mock-Up

The first version that went before the client. They “liked it…” the way most clients claim to, but they were concerned that it looked (I’m not making this up), “too much like a website.” Scarily, I knew exactly what they were talking about, though. After some discussion we decided to go for an “airier” feel.

I’m pretty sure that they saw the solid, heavy blue content area at the top of the page and reacted to how it contained the elements within. Also, the buttons on the right really didn’t have to be positioned there. They sort of distracted from the video, which undermined the general idea of the site. If you compare this to the final homepage design linked at the top of this post, the side buttons moved to the bottom allowing the top right area to focus on grotto and mass requests (one of the three most important goals of the site). I got rid of the blue container entirely and subbed in a very light blue background repeater of other, soft focused candles. There are some containment elements to keep the over all composition under control, but for the most part, I tried to push “light and airy” wherever possible.