Design Mind for Design Minds

I was surfing my RSS feeds the other day and came across this new magazine from the famous frog design studio. It's called Design Mind and they have a great online version of the mag too. I've already checked out a few blog posts and online articles and they appear to be well-written and thought provoking. Might be worth your time.

(BTW, I'm in no way affiliated with frog design or its magazine. I believe in the "We are smarter than Me" philosophy of my good buddy Steve Gordon and I'm just passin' on the knowledge.)

I Love My Job!

Being an in-house designer, I get a huge variety of design related tasks: everything from boring forms to photography to design, to a bit of Flash and everything in between. Some days, the job just rocks, though, and today was one of those days!

I was tasked with developing food allergen icons for our redesigned website. There are eight major food allergens are: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, nuts, peanuts, soy, and wheat.

I wanted something simple that would read well super small (we'd use them in print too), but would convey the meaning quickly. I wanted to use the letters if possible, as I felt that would give me the result I desired. But just doing the letters by themselves didn't seem like it would be the answer. So I did a bit of research and soon it struck me that I could use the asterisk in the icon! Asterisks are commonly associated with notes, warnings or other info.

I originally wanted to put the letter inside the icon, but that just didn't read well at all, so I ended up put them side by side. And as soon as I did that, I just knew it was the answer. My face lit up and I was giddy as little kid again. This is what design is about: finding that one simple yet elegant solution that does its job and looks awesome. Today was a perfect day for design and this is what I live for!

Feel free to share why you love your job and/or the great projects/jobs you've had where you really felt in the at the top of your game.

Here's how the icons turned out (click to view the entire image):

Font Conference

For designers, typographers, or anyone else who loves/works with type, you will love this video...it's a great use of fonts...

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Helping Singles to Not Be Single

Yes, I'm 34 and I'm still single. Sometimes it's great: do what a want when I want, nobody to check with, nobody to wake me up from an impromptu nap. But really, it would be great to find that one special woman, the love of my life. I'm not the best at asking women out, and I figure that there are more great guys like me out there that are in the same boat.

I began to think on this problem as I kept in mind one of mantras "Design your life." So I got to thinking. I wear a lot of t-shirts. I figured that if I could advertise on t-shirts, maybe I could spark some interest in, well, me! So I put a few keywords on my t-shirt of who I am and who I'm looking for and had Zazzle print me up a shirt. I've just ordered my shirt and I'm expecting it to arrive next week. I've also developed a line of products called me+u singles and posted a few items for sale on my Zazzle store. So far I've got a men's and women's t-shirt as well as men's and women's profile cards. I may add more items as demand grows.

It will be an interesting social experiment to say the least. And at the best, it could be a cool way for me to use design to help others.

Here's the shirt I designed for myself:

Cool Leaves

I was out mowing my yard last week and I found a clump of leaves that had freed itself from my tree in the front yard. I was about to toss them into my yard waste bag, but I took a moment to look at the leaves first and discovered that they were beautifully textured, so instead, I put them aside, finished my yardwork and when I was done, took them out back to this old wooden bench and shot some photos. I did enhance the photos a bit, but it helped that Mother Nature made them neato-cool to begin with. BTW, if you like these images, they are for sale here.

Shameless Self Promotion, Part 2

I've just completed a redesign of The Easy Way Out website. The Easy Way out is a locally owned and operated personal chef service that caters to families and busy professionals. The previous site was not getting updated and did not have the structure necessary to accommodate new offerings such as the classes she teaches. Since the chef’s specialty is Latin American cuisine, I kept the color palette warm and drew the pattern by hand in illustrator to give a more authentic Latin American feel to the site.

I kept the design simple and clean to showcase large photos of the chef’s beautiful recipes. Although I disagree with the decision to choose the same red as the top and bottom friezes as well as the decision to remove the black border that would have distinguished the background from the active site area, I think the resulting site turned out very well. The chef is very pleased with the redesign; she felt that we successfully achieved the objectives outlined in the creative brief.

Below is a screengrab of my preferred version, visit www.theeasywayout.net to see the live site.

Sugar Coated Evil Comes to Zazzle

I've used the saying "Sugar Coated Evil" for quite some time now just in jest to describe myself. And I was thinking it might make a good t-shirt...so after a bit of work I've developed a Sugar Coated Evil line of products on Zazzle. I've got just a few items to start and I have plans to add another line or two of items down the line. So for now, you can just enjoy being evil.

Unfortanate Packaging

Or at least price label placement. I was recently out purchasing Mario Kart for the Nintendo Wii and noticed this other game...



...either the employee at the game store was being very clever or the package designer needs to take a minute to think about how the final package will appear on store shelves. Either way, I was amused!

Making A Zine: The story behind the covers for HZ-12: Nightmares and Dreamscapes

This is my fourth entry for the handmade HOWiezine (or 'zine) as it is affectionately known, made by members of the HOW Design Forum. After building up my confidence and style on my three previous zines, I decided it was time to go for the gold and ask for the covers. This theme is very near and dear to me, as I have always been fascinated by dreams.

While I was looking for inspiration for the covers, I noticed a great painting while waiting for my haircut. It was pretty abstract, but I could make out some figures and within those figures, I discovered more figures. I had found my inspiration: a sort of hybrid Dali/Escher style where there were images within images. Silly me…art doesn't work that way…as I began my preliminary sketches, I soon discovered that this simply wasn't going to work with my style or patience. So I began concepting some more.


During the course of my research and sketching, I remembered my very cool Egyptian Book of the Dead. So I began playing around with the wedjat eye, the emblem for the falcon sky god, Horus. While the of of Horus doesn't really a direction relation to dreams (the right eye is active/solar and the left eye is passive/lunar), I decided to develop my own two eyes that would be tied more closely to dreams for the covers. I also decided that if you were to put both the front and back cover together, the two eyes would be a complete illustration. I initially thought about doing the inside pages on vellum that were glued to the front cover and the the pupils on each eye would be cut out so you could see the image on the vellum backwards (like how our eyes capture images), however I soon realized that printing to vellum was not a good solution, it was going to be expensive, the ink didn't seem to stick so well and the paper curled horribly, so to keep production sane (as I knew I'd be finishing up at the last minute), I stuck with my tried and true double sided paper for now. (I know, I know, I need to be more paper adventurous!)



The front cover eye is the nightmare eye and is wide open and bloodshot due to the lack of sleep from the nightmares. I used the color red here to convey, anger, madness, energy and unease. The swirl pattern reflects the wedjat eye, looking into the pupil into the nightmares that haunt this person. The burned in stars show the scars that the nightmares have left (see the inside front cover for more about this).



Then I realized I was only halfway done! My standard two zine pages have been side one: illustration, side two: poem tied to illustration. How in the world was I going to cram a poem and an illo together on the inside covers? I experimented with several placement options and decided to "book end" the poems: inside front cover would be on the left, inside back cover would be on the right. I decided to connect the inside cover pages too, so that they could be put next to each other as a diptych.

So I began work on the poems in between thumbnails for the front covers. The poems both seemed to come pretty easily while I was listening to my creative mix on iTunes,which was good, I could spend more time on the illustrations. The dreamscape illo was pretty easy: an image of a serene sleeper underneath the moonlit sky. I added in a few little dream elements: an Egyptian style boat, a couple in love, and a forest of trees that are ghosted into the image to hint at the fertile imagination of dreams.


The nightmare illo was a bit tougher. I had trouble finding the position of the dreamer for this one. And since I decided to mention Morpheus (Greek god of dreams) by name, how was I going to depict him/her? I drew a dude in a dark cloak, kinda a tribute to Neil Gaiman's Sandman and felt that I could work with it once I got it into Illustrator and Photoshop.



Now that my sketches were done and I scanned them and placed them into Illustrator, where I went over them with the paintbrush tool. I used the paintbrush tool and my Wacom tablet to create a variable line width that mimics drawing by hand for the outlines. I then go back in and "fill in" flat color (as a separate layer under the outlines) using the pen tool. I tend to build my files with a lot of layers to the Photoshop end of things go a bit smoother. So I built the eyes (outside covers) first and they came together nicely.

I then worked on the dreamscape illustration and it came together quicker than I planned. Which means only one thing, the nightmare illustration gave me, well nightmares…

I created the dreamer first and then I worked on Morpheus. Morpheus looked horrible! I tried several variations and each one got progressively worse. And with each day ticking away, I knew that I didn't have much time left to figure out how to render him. I decided to let the piece sit and I'd think about it for awhile. That did the trick, I realized that Morpheus did not have to appear as a person. Since I used the crescent (light) moon as the "protector" of dreams, why not use the "new (dark) moon" as the "tormentor"? And instead of a more traditional cloak, why not use those cool twisted stars from the front cover to make up the cloak? This idea worked out extremely well. The stars have nice jagged edges and when I put them into the shape of the cloak, they had the appearance of either being painful and/or bugs crawling across the dreamer's skin.



Now for the type. I originally wanted to have a cool ambigram for the front cover done by my talented friend Nikita. Alas, due to time constraints, it just was not possible. So I went with plan B: I winged it. I had already chosen two different typefaces for each poem. I tried a few different fonts for the title and eventually settled on my old friend Zapfino, which I blurred a tinted a bit, like a dream coming into focus. I then looked at the type for the poems and decided that it would be best to use the same typeface for both poems and use color to distinguish the nightmare from the dreamscape. I then brushed in white behind the type to resemble "clouds" or comic book style "dream bubbles" on each poem to maximize the illustration as well as tie in the type.



That's basically it, thanks for taking the time to read through this, and if you have any questions, just ask!