I was excited to learn that one of the several covers I worked on at Standard & Poor’s CreditWeek Magazine won a best in-house design award from GDUSA. Working at S&P and all the dedicated people there was a great experience for me and I still think about it every time I find myself around the financial district.
Pinnacle is the identity I created for a toy shop, which I imaged to sell high-end and vintage toys. The bag, pictured above with a tag, is integrated with the overall identity, specifically because it can be carried (presumably by the parent) or worn like a backpack at the end of a successful trip to the toy store.
For all those who said, you don’t need a business card its all social networking, or, you need a special tool to perforate card stock and it costs a million dollars and you’ll get it in a month, I give you this:
When I set out to design my card I found a lot of examples on the Internet purporting to be “inspiration” or the top 25 best cards ever. These examples had everything from die-cuts to holograms and foil stamps. But I know what a business card is supposed to be, and I wanted it to match my overall personal brand and style, so I tried not to go overboard.
Here are a few examples of inspiration that really helped me focus on what’s important, after the jump. Continue reading…
The Periodic Table of Elements is probably one of the most easily recognizable pieces of design in the world. The work of Russian Chemist Dimitri Mendeleev in the late 1800′s might not resemble our current iteration of the table, but it has evolved into more than just an infographic of the building blocks of the world. Thanks to the ease of dissemination of design on the Internet, now designers have turned the periodic table into an icon, used to display large sets of information in a familiar and understandable form.
One of the most famous spin-off tables is The Periodic Table of Typefaces, which brings the large world of type families out of esoteric design education and into the public. Maybe this Table from design firm Squidspot showed some people that there were legitimate type choices outside of Times New Roman and Comic Sans.
Another evolution covers the possibly NSFW task of cataloging curse words, from the trite everyday ones to the noble-gas-nuclear-bomb phrases that some people might never use in a lifetime. If you’re brave enough, the print can be found at the Modern Toss online store.
These are just two examples, but there are tons more including my personal favorites, the Periodic Table of Funk and Irrational Nonsense.
Groundwire is a consulting company which focuses on applying technological solutions to advance sustainability in communities.
For more stationery and logos check out the Identity page.
Fresh back from my trip to Italy, I have an article on Italian design. Now, when most people think of Italian Design names like Giorgio Armani and Ferrari are always the first. Maybe if you’re a Designer yourself you think of Italian Futurist personalities like Filippo Marinetti, who are long gone in the contemporary design landscape. But, perhaps the most unknown name should be one of the first: Battista Farina, or, to his friends “Pinin” Farina.
Giovanni Battista Farina gained his now formal name Pinin (the youngest/smallest )by being the 10th of 11 children in Torino, Italy. While growing up he worked in various body shops and raced cars until forming his own company in 1930, with the goal of making car body building an independent industry. His work designing car bodies was extremely successful, but really exploded after he partnered with Ferrari in 1952. By 1961, the company had expanded to be a powerhouse of automobile design, whose presidency he handed down to his son, Sergio. Farina the Elder’s last design before his death in 1966 would be the Alpha Romeo Spider, made even more famous for its role in The Graduate.
To say Pininfarina is a coach-builder is not exactly accurate. Through the decades they have branched out and applied their design philosophy towards a wide range of industrial design. Most recently, the company designed collateral materials to the 2006 Torino Olympics, including the Torch and Cauldron.
The company also branched far out of Italy, and has designed car bodies that you might have even rode inside. Pininfarina’s vast archives include galleries of coach bodies they’ve built for Cadillac, Chevy and have created a subsidiary design firm with Volvo. Their work with moving vehicles has also grown to the design and engineering of everything from high speed trains, to buses to electric car prototypes. They’re really no longer a coach builder, but an internationally renowned industrial design consultancy. Pininfarina in its 80 year existence has continued with consistency to do a pretty amazing thing: produce designs of sound engineering and impeccable style, impossible to confuse with anyone else.
I have a feeling their Ferrari work is both my and their favorite.
I spent the last few official paintings for my final semester on Josef Alber’s color theory. While that project definitely helped with my understanding of color theory and was a great education to me I was eager to get back to some of the earlier paintings I had done addressing political subjects.
I’ve worked with the American Flag as my subject several times, but never really stretched my imagination with it in paints. This is more of an intermediate experiment (I really wanted to see what metallic acrylics would do), I gained some experience working with more textures, different paints, and working on a large (30×40) canvas.
I’m already working on another one (with a much more dramatic background), and I’m planning on turning my process with the second Flag Painting into a more detailed post.
This was probably one of my favorite projects ever. Its definitely not a normal opportunity to redesign such a ubiquitous piece of signage. The goal was to come up with not exactly a redesign of the current isotype signage, but an extension for use in gender-neutral bathrooms. Development of the sign included extensive research into the history of the Isotype pictorial language, as well as discussions over the need and messages necessary to display (or not display) with the design. For example, we didn’t want to focus on something too vulgar, or any form specific to any gender. Therefore, what is currently recognized as the sign for a gender-neutral toilet was eliminated as a solution because it depicts both male and female forms. Universal understanding as well as ambiguity to gender was the ultimate goal.
Whereas many solutions presented involved depicting the toilet, our solution depicted the universal (at least in western civilization) act of washing one’s hands to represent the bathroom. While passing our self imposed guidelines like good taste and true gender neutral depiction, it also stood the test of creating a generalizable image. Research into what western bathrooms are called outside the US, for example in Europe they say “toilet” in their respective language, or “W.C.” showed a variety of names for the simple location, and our end solution was an image generalizable to all of these titles.
I don’t remember the first time someone explained to me the concept of the elevator pitch, but since then I’ve used its 30 second standard as a gauge for my own ideas regularly. Its the perfect benchmark for anything productive; can you explain to me your design, your idea, your new… whatever?
Well, whomever is tasked with creating movie trailers knows this concept better than all of us, I’d imagine, which is why I’ve constructed this list of some of the best movie trailers I’ve ever seen. Some of them do amazing justice to the great films they advertise, while others go above an beyond making not-so-great movies into two-minute masterpieces.
Sam Mendes is one of my favorite contemporary directors. The Road to Perdition, American Beauty and Jarhead are three of my favorite movies from the past decade. Revolutionary Road, however was a drab and slowly paced spiral into depression (if this complaint sounds familiar, its because I covered it in The Last Shot). The trailer below, however, points out the contradiction that was the 1950′s and early 60′s suburban life better than the actual movie.  Cat Power’s version of Sea of Love is cheerful and optimistic, but like the era there is an eerie feeling that something is not right.
Because moviegoers cannot subsist on Drama and Action alone, I get excited every once in a while for off-the-beat comedies separate from the Judd Apatow-crewed comedy epics. Balls of Fury was written and directed by the same guy from Reno-911, and I mean, look at this trailer. Its a joke a minute plus Christopher Walken, whose character seems just as eccentric as he is. There’s a ton of characters and they all seem weird and funny, to the point where the trailer is almost a short of one-liners. Hilarious! But as tends to happen with this type of movie, I sat in the theatre for 90 minutes watching the same jokes that were crammed into the trailer, everything else was just space in the movie. What a shame.
Arc Magazine was my final project at American University. I created it as a print magazine of 21st century news, meaning, instead of covering the little stories once served by Time and Newsweek now served by Twitter and the internet. Arc is the Magazine of the Big Picture, with articles meant to provide analysis of just how the smaller day-to-day, week-to-week stories shape human events.
So anyway take a look:
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