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Collaboration — and fun!:
Updating design materials for the Human Rights Campaign
For the third year in a row, I’ve been volunteering with a few stellar folks to help make the annual Human Rights Campaign golf tournament a success. The HRC is civil rights organization that works to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. Our New England chapter puts together an annual gala and golf tournament to raise money and promote these values.
Though I play only a small part in getting this project together, I’m proud of the design materials that have come out of this collaboration. (Of course, it helps that I’m spoiled by my peers — volunteering is always so much more rewarding when you are eager to please your colleagues!)
This year we decided to refresh the design approach and update our tournament lockup. We achieved texture with the use of turf in our original designs, so I knew I wanted to keep this moving forward.
For the updated invite I created a layered pattern, with a little help from Photoshop, to emulate the craters of the ball. I knew what I wanted: saturated color, overexposed light but no loss in contrast, and slightly yellow to suggest a little vintage. (Did it work? You be the judge.) Hopefully this got me something a little unexpected.
The display typeface on the ’08 – ’09 designs felt harsh with this imagery adjustment, so instead I chose Avenir — a clean, soft, round face — something that paired well with the circular pattern. The 2010 lockup has a smooth round “swoosh” with a double line for movement expression, while its two-year-old sibling needed only one strong line to suggest the ball’s path. You can see the updates in the images here.
(If you would like to learn more about the HRC or how to volunteer with us, visit hrc.org or email me.)
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
Air type
Walking to the T the other day, I had the opportunity to grab a few frames of some impressive, aeronautical typography.
Five aircraft, flying in unison, drawing bitmapped type in the sky with a precision that—adjusted for scale—rivals the accuracy of many desktop printers. Cool.
I don’t know much about sky-writing, but think about the variables. The aircraft are likely flying at well over 100 mph, and there’s wind, and they have to take perspective into account—which is particularly impressive, considering they’re flying in circles over the city, rather than flying in a straight line.
Aside from being impressed by the technological aspect of the performance, and it was certainly a performance (most people on the crowded sidewalk stopped to look; I heard a number of mumbled “I’m sorry’s”), the type itself was crisp and clean. Engineer’s type. Type rationalized for use at altitude and speed.
But then nature and entropy take over. What was pristine becomes distressed; air currents expand and warp the letters so they are transformed from crisp dashes to soft cotton balls; from the hard edge of technology to the (on that day) gentle corrosion of nature.
Beautiful.
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
Is that recycled logo good news… or just old news?
It’s become a ubiquitous little symbol, and maybe so much so that our eyes pass over it without a thought.
Postcards from the cable company, magazines, catalogs, even your daily newspaper—all likely carry the original recycled mark or the logo of one of the associated advocacy organizations (FSC, SFI, among others). Each has its own unique significance (amount of recycled content, whether it includes post-consumer fiber, if wind power was used in the manufacturing process, etc.).
But what does it mean to you?
We know that a strong, clear brand is one that resonates with your customers and supporters. And if environmental stewardship is important to you, it should be an important message to send to your followers.
I often encourage our clients to include some version of a recycled logo, or even language that spells out things like how many trees have been saved because of the use of recycled paper (talk about a good story to tell!). Sometimes they haven’t necessarily cared about that message themselves, but the reaction they’ve gotten from their constituents makes them sit up and think differently.
How can we, together, make old news new again? The environment is ours to take care of, and we’re all in it together, as they say. Being green is becoming a way of life, despite what Kermit the Frog once said.
Is environmental stewardship important to you? Does it make a difference in your decisions about what to buy, who to support, and who to engage?
Categories: Branding, Design, Outside the Square
The cult of Moleskine
Barnes & Noble hawks dozens of journals decorated with cats, flowers, and owls—a fitting gift, perhaps, for a tween suffering from ennui—but really, how many notebooks does a person need? And who writes with an actual pencil anymore?
But then there’s Moleskine. I NEED to have that set of 2 Volant Notebooks in sky blue!
My colleague Meg admits to owning 10, and can tick off the specs like a grocery list (black grid, lined, blank; mini red; mini pink; mini daytimer…). Another officemate owns 3 Moleskines, all in green [I'm a little obsessive that way. —Ed.]. My husband keeps a black Pocket Squared Notebook for each segment of his life such as Wedding, Car, Yard Work, Baby.
What IS it about these notebooks? And what’s more, how do they stay relevant in the age of digital?
Moleskine has a number of things going for them. First, they have a really great story. And the story is simple: if you are smart, creative and well traveled then you use a Moleskine—just like Hemingway, Van Gogh and Chatwin! The story is so compelling that I thought the brand existed long ago and was revived. But according to their website, the company, founded in 1997, simply turned the “nameless black notebook” into a brand.
Second, they’ve devised a meaningful visual system. The notebooks are black or solid color and are packaged in a beautiful palette of contrasting colored bands that correspond with the page format (orange for lines, green for plain, etc). The band has a mini diagram of the notebook’s format so you can understand what’s inside without opening the packaging. The design is easily identifiable whether seen from the cover or the spine; they look fantastic lined up together on the shelf.
Third, Moleskine serves a variety of purposes and personalities. Yet, unlike Starbucks’ ventures into teddy bears and airport-quality breakfast sandwiches, Moleskine keeps their products tightly reined in to the brand system. Whether you choose the Passion Book for wine collecting, The Hand of the Architect special edition, or the City Notebook for Boston, they’re clearly identifiable as a Moleskine. Once you’ve accumulated a few, there is satisfaction that you have developed your very own personalized system (and probably should expand upon it!).
Finally, Moleskine has maintained relevance because they encourage a relationship between paper and digital. A YouTube search for Moleskine produced 1,760 results including the official Moleskine channel. A blog called Moleskinerie had such an avid following that it was acquired by Moleskine.com a couple of years ago and the blog’s Flickr photostream has over 71,000 photos and over 14,000 members. Primarily the videos, images and discussions revolve around artwork and projects penned in Moleskines, as well as hacks and spin-off products like the DODOcase for your iPad.
The Moleskine has not lured everyone, to be sure. But while taking an informal poll about Moleskine ownership in our office I heard a murmur in the hall, “Maybe I need a Moleskine….”
Do you own a Moleskine? Do you balance your creative process or your system of organization between paper and digital?
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
New workshops to advance your brand
We’re pleased to roll out a new series of workshops today, focusing on four of our most important areas of collaboration with clients: brand strategy, messaging, visual brand expression, and social media.
Each one of these modular, half-day (and customizable!) workshops offers your organization the opportunity to learn how you could more effectively be communicating with your audience (both internally and externally), and how to make more significant connections with the customers, constituents and community members that matter most to you.
Sound good?
We’d love to work with you to help you do what you do even better.
Drop us an email via the form on the Workshops page to get in touch, or give me (Meg) a call at 617-266-8577.
Categories: Branding, Design, Nonprofits, Strategy and Management
Branding, social media, and the challenge of “flexible design”
We’ve been talking a lot recently about the flexibility of design systems in the context of ubiquitous access to image manipulation software and social media—it’s a reality potentially filled with potent toxins for rigid brand systems.
Even flexible brand systems—say JetBlue’s variable livery designs, or 2×4′s logotype for the Brooklyn Museum—require skill and finesse to develop and manage. They’re flexible, but not accessible…so they don’t really confront our new reality.
One aspect of that reality is that the logo—as sacrosanct standard bearer of the brand message—is growing ever more vulnerable to misinterpretation and reinterpretation (not to mention recontextualization). While mega-brands like Google and Coca-Cola might be able to withstand, or even thrive upon, occasional hijinks and folk interpretations, not many identities possess the ubiquity for such feats of stamina; they’d emerge from the experiment diluted or destroyed.
People are tech-savvy these days, even if they’re not visually savvy. They may not intend harm, but they will—with the best of intentions—cut’n'paste, scale, color, crop, and even redraw logos as they see fit. There’s not much to be done about that…unless we can start designing logos—or, perhaps more aptly phrased, “visual grammars”—that embrace the vulnerability that technology has foisted upon them.
Can we come up with visual systems that busy, tech-savvy (or not) people without the time or inclination to read a brand standards guide can intuitively understand, recreate, embrace, and promulgate?
One possibility is a flexible, rules-based system that doesn’t rely on proprietary software, images, or even colors; but instead presents a formula that embraces variety while delimiting possibility.
The rules would have to be simple enough for anybody to follow, and require no special technology (or, for that matter, any digital technology at all). But, they’d have to produce an outcome that, upon repeated applications of the rules, was always recognizable while being almost always unique (Sol Lewitt comes to mind as a parallel in the art world).
On the spur of the moment, here’s a quick test of the idea. A set of rules for my monogram (ASB); let’s see if it works…
- “a” and “b” should be in lower case; “s” in upper case.
- all three letters should be white and contained within a red shape.
Can I break it? Here goes!
Did I break it? Can you?
Vacationland
Clockwise from upper left (images are cropped): Robert Indiana, V/H (9); Angela Adams, Forest Floor rug; Dahlov Ipcar, The Cat at Night; Jennifer Judd-McGee, ledger diptych.
It’s been hot and humid in the South End. Bostonians have escaped to the beaches and mountains for holiday; even our favorite bakery shuttered their doors for a week at the beginning of July.
While our blog editor would love for me to write something about branding (Ed.’s note: There’s always a next time!), in the spirit of rejuvenation I’m sharing a few inspiring artists and designers from my home state of Maine, where I recently enjoyed a short vacation stay.
These in no way represent the breadth of talent associated with this special place (Nevelson, Wyeth, Hopper, Katz, Porter to name a few) – just some examples that I connect with as a designer. Creativity and the things that inspire / provoke us are, after all, an important component and driver of what we do here at Sametz.
Here’s a bit more detail behind the images you see at the beginning of this post:
- Robert Indiana claimed he was not inspired by Maine; rather, that his art came from within. I can’t help think that being in Maine freed him to look within. His numeral and type treatments are mysteriously symbolic and thought-provoking.
- Angela Adams grew up on an island off the coast, and makes rugs that evoke the natural landscape found there. Texture, pattern, and color stimulate a sensory experience that takes you beyond the walls of your living room.
- Dahlov Ipcar is the illustrator of the beloved children’s books The Cat at Night and The Little Fisherman, among others. Her graphic and colorful illustrations endlessly stir the imagination of young readers.
- Jennifer Judd-McGee’s patterned line drawings and collages depicting the folk villages, harbors and natural settings of Maine evoke wonder in the scale and interconnectedness of humanity and nature.
What did you see on vacation (or a quick getaway, or even a day trip) that inspired you?
Categories: Design
Smart Quotes: design in our lives
Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.
Tim Parsey
Categories: Design, Outside the Square
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