providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world
Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
Nick, if you don't watch this, then your education in physical theatre is not complete
Really:
I mean, how do the Dell 'Arte students get into their pants in the morning?
I am watching this at least twice more before I go to bed, so I can smile again and again.Labels: humor, performance
posted at 9:05 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.23.2008
ok, so I am working out right now. even as I blog.
Here's a lovely bit of graphic design interpretation from calorielabs.com. Several states are featured, and I can't decide whether or not I like New Mexico's or South Carolina's flag-as-infographic better. What do you think?
My own interpretation of the Colorado state flag is below:
thanks, Cool Infographics!Labels: graphic design, humor, information graphics, visual information
posted at 9:14 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.11.2008
White Gold: No, it's not cocaine
I just caught this campaign for the California Got Milk? campaign, created by San Francisco's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. It's got a heavy dose of Spinal Tap, but the irony is turned up to, er, 11 (one of the main props in the campaign is a milk-filled guitar). They've hit the internets with a MySpace page, a heavy YouTube presence--even t-shirts for the band (!) and a lot of chatter from the various nonprofit marketing and mainstream blogs.It's a lot of fun to see an idea as silly as this fleshed out as completely as this, and have it work as well as I think it does. The proof will be in the pudding, though--specifically, in pudding made with milk, located in California.So where's the Denver creative crew at, for stuff like this? I mean, we have the creativity, but this is more than that; this actually looked like it was a hell of a lot of fun to do.Labels: agencies, branding, creativity, humor, nonprofits
posted at 10:11 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
4.01.2008
How you know you went to an art school
...when the top posted items in your school's Facebook network are all in Japanese and probably are links to some sort of nifty anime or motion graphics YouTube reel....
posted at 10:14 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
3.25.2008
Yeah, Barack has a posse, and I'm on it.
Just in case you were wondering about my ability to win friends and influence people:Labels: flickr, humor, photography, politics
posted at 4:32 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
3.15.2008
Luck o' the Irish, or good brand extension?
Whilst other campaigns are having a bit of an identity crisis, Obama's is clearly brand-savvy. Check out the special "O'bama" signs they made up for a St. Patrick's Day parade in Scranton, PA. Props to the branding team (again) for making use of the versatile "O" emblem; this one has, appropriately, a shamrock in place of the rising sun motif.
posted at 9:54 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.25.2008
The 8 Types of Creative Directors
Tom Fishburne sends out pithy branding/advertising-related cartoons every weekend. This one, featuring the 8 types of Creative Directors, showed up in my mailbox this past Saturday. Check out the entire cartoon and see which one you identify with/aspire to be/loathe.
Labels: creativity, graphic design, humor
posted at 12:08 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
2.06.2008
memo to clients providing art for your campaign: 72dpi images DO NOT PRINT WELL.
That is all.Labels: design, humor, printing
posted at 4:00 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
done, and done.
Here you go, mateys.
Via:
Be a Design Group
But now what I really want to know is:
[cat photo from dark_mephi. Used under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license.]Labels: design, humor, typography
posted at 12:12 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
1.28.2008
Double-Take
I had heard that this happens. But it was the first time it happened to me.
I am currently developing a concept for a client of mine who designs lighting. Engineers. Very cool folks--I have a couple of engineer uncles and more than a handful of scientists in the family, so it's cool to create a vision for bringing the fruits of engineers' brains to market. They needed a brand for their product. So I did a little market research, listened to the story of the product, and began to make a visual mark for this light.
The logo was a little round thing, with orange and white and a sans-serif typeface. Perfect for the identity of this particular product. The client agreed, and we set off to create a product booklet based on these visual themes.
A few weeks later, we meet to discuss revisions to the booklet. After going through some standard stuff ("let's use more arcs and less circles...let's include more technical illustrations....etc. etc."), they say "there's one more thing." They take me back to a computer and type in a URL. It's for a new competitor's lighting product. I look at the brand:Wow. I actually grasp my head between my hands in incredulity. How did we miss this? Who made this? When did they make it? Why does my head feel like it's about to explode.
- It's orange and white
- Sans Serif typography
- Circles everywhere
- oh, and it has the same NAME as the client's product.
I had heard that this happens. But it was the first time it happened to me.
Of course, this is making us refine the brand for the client a bit. And it will be better than it is now. That's the bright, shiny side of the coin. I am telling myself, as my client told me, that this means we came up with a really great idea that expressed the universal gestalt that exists in the lighting products branding universe at this moment, and we should be proud of that (and they say my version is way cooler, by the way). So it's not a bad thing. But daaaaaaaang. I still have trouble believing that it's not some sort of prank being pulled on us by the lighting industry.Labels: accident, branding, creativity, humor
posted at 8:28 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
1.03.2008
It's funny because it's true
This, from The Net is Dead, via Heather G-M:
The sad thing is this is (mostly) true. You can, actually, do anything a table can do in CSS, but there is a lot of tweaking to make things look lovely in all the browsers your client might require. The bit about Internet Explorer is completely true, and probably under-reports the amount of time we spend making any site work as expected in IE. The folks in Redmond follow their own laws. It's like they are vigilantes in an old-west movie, strutting into town while the marshall is out catching cattle rustlers, occupying his office and saying, "law? Law? Ma'am, we are the law, now."Labels: css, humor, IE, visual information, W3C, web design
posted at 10:35 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
9.14.2007
PMS 187 Runs Thru My Veins
Be an O.D.G, dogg:
posted at 4:36 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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