I spoke too soon. As of two days ago, I’ve been commissioned to work on a logo for a power or engineering company. I’ve sent them a design brief to find out as much information as I can. The Designing Logos book and last term’s classes taught me that. The more you know about a client, the better you understand what they need and the more effective your work for them will be. It’s good stuff.
I am now in the first stages of logomaking. I said I’d make them 3 options for further development but I got inspired and came up with double that. 6 months ago, I would have been less enthusiastic and more nervous about a project like this. Creating logos is serious stuff and I always thought it was something beyond my capacity. I wish I could put my sketches here so far and be able to track my progress here, but I think there might be a confidentiality issue.
Anyway, apart from the logo, they want business cards made (easy peasy japaneasy) and a simple website done. Stress on the word ’simple’, I don’t have any PHP skills yet. I’m trying to fit as much learning as I can but I’m only human and I can only do too much. I promise I’ll get on to that as soon as I’ve got my basics in place. The trick is to learn lots, apply quickly, turn that into a source of steady cash flow and make room for more learning and gradually cutting down on work I do for the sole purpose of surviving and paying bills. It’s gonna happen. Just you wait.
Classes don’t start till March and I’ve been working a lot in the meantime.
However, I fear that having all these months off design have been a little detrimental to my education. At the start, I tried to read a bit here, work on a few exercises and watch a few tutorials but I haven’t really put a lot of effort for over a month now and that’s really not good for my learning.
So I went over to one of my all-time favorite websites TED and performed a search on design. I came up with over 700 videos and had a bit of a browse and some of them are pretty inspiring. I’ve seen a few from before but I’m perfectly happy to rewatch a few of them, like Jacek Utko’s talk on newspaper design.
Will “force” myself to watch a few before calling it a night. Even though I’m still so tired from celebrating Australia Day a couple of days ago.
Some notes from Chapter 2: Logos in the larger context
Logos play an increasingly important role in the identification and personalization of products, services, and organizations.
10 Characteristics of a logo that endures
What makes a logo distinctive?
…sophisticated?
…conceptual?
…relevant?
…versatile?
…cohesive?
…attractive?
…legible?
…memorable?
…enduring?
Yeah it’s the random wikipedia “band title” and the random quote and the random flickr photo for a fictional album cover. Christopher Sly for a band name is pretty awesome.
Printed goodness from Amazon arrived yesterday and today (the 3rd one is a present from a few months ago and only getting to it now). Good stuff! I just realised that the only books I’ve been buying of late have been non-fiction books!
Designing Logos: The Process of Creating Symbols That Endure by Jack Gernsheimer
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy
Will try to update in the next 3 months but I’m not promising anything. It’s SUMMATIME!
I can’t believe how fast this schooling business is going, I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack with all my still-unlaid plans. It felt like I was running in place but now it’s more like I’m falling behind! I thought I was stepping it up but it looks like I’ve got to push even harder! Huhu.
School starts this week but my days are Wednesdays and Thursdays (again). This time I start late on Wednesday and end late. Would you believe that I have classes till 10pm? Insane. That may work out fine for me though creativity-wise. We’ll see if I churn out vastly improved stuff.
Gotta get back on the ball till 3rd week of November then freedom for 3 months! How awesome is that?
So I completed all requirements a day early. I slept in today and faffed about the entire morning. Feels good to have that pressure off, at least for the next week or so anyway.
Among some of the things I learned this term is how to make animated GIFs using Photoshop. I kind of knew how to do it before, but this time I know how to do it properly. Obviously it’s way more limited than Flash, but it’s a good place to start and it’s perfect for simple animations.
I’ve decided that I’d to learn more about animation as I move along in this course. This is where my obsessive behavior will come in handy.
UPDATE: Still need to figure out how to make the GIFs work on this stupid blog. Hang on.
This last one is actually for a CD package design project. We were meant to create a banner to “promote” our CD.
I really enjoyed making a simple website for one of my classes. We started out with a week on sitemap planning, then another week working on the wireframe and layout design on Illustrator (I was thinking of working directly on Dreamweaver but this other method worked out so much better), then 2 weeks to finalise things on Dreamweaver.
There’s a lot of things I wanted to do differently, but I’ll get on that when I know how to actually do them. I came up with 16 HTML docs in total.
