Posts Tagged ‘logos’

Two years ago, I made an incred­ibly rash deci­sion. I was standing in front of a row of boxes, a little worse for wear due to an excess of cel­e­bra­tion the prior evening. A sick feeling set­tled over me, and I decided to run with the impulse.

Two hours later, I was a blonde. (Actu­ally, this isn’t true. It took more like the entire weekend and six boxes of bleach to get there, which ulti­mately destroyed my hair and left me with no option but cut­ting it all off, even­tu­ally, but that’s another story.) For me, it was a mas­sive change, as I’ve always been prone to iden­tify myself by my hair­colour. People often know me as the girl with lots of bright red hair (admit­tedly, I’m still working on get­ting the “lots” part back), and all the varied pre­con­cep­tions and stereo­types people have about red­heads tend to apply to me, too. (Whether that’s an issue of nature or nur­ture, I’m not quite sure, but let’s assume it’s irrelevant.)

So going blonde was def­i­nitely an impul­sive choice, and part of my desire to do so was to play with my own sense of self. It was fun for a while (mostly because I’d show up places to see friends, and they’d look quite shocked), but even­tu­ally I went back to some­thing akin to my nat­ural colour (after testing out almost every other colour com­bi­na­tion avail­able to me. Seri­ously, it’s no wonder my hair ended up destroyed).  The exper­i­ment led me to realize just how much of who we are—both how we see our­selves, and how others see ourselves—is encap­su­lated in our appear­ance. As much as we may try insist on silly maxims like “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “it’s what’s on the inside the counts”, what’s on the out­side is almost invari­ably a reflec­tion of what’s on the inside.

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Everyone (or at least, every designer) loves a good “logos gone wrong” selec­tion. Most of them are just unin­ten­tion­ally dirty or besmirched by awk­ward kerning, but they’re always a good reminder of why you should always show your work to others before final­izing, just in case there’s a visual you might be missing. (And turn it upside down, too, just to make sure.)

So, to follow up on last week’s post about design in transit sys­tems, I thought I’d post a little tidbit I came across in Dubrovnik.

I’d just landed in town, ready for a new lan­guage, new cur­rency, and new adven­tures. I’d had about four hours of sleep, stretched out on a bench in the neon-lighted bar of the ferry from Italy to Croatia, and I was wan­dering about, trying to orient myself, with a back­pack the approx­i­mate size and weight of a bear strapped to my back. I head toward what looks like it might be a cash machine and I come across this delightful sign:

Don’t play with guns, alright, kids?

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About 95% of the work I do tends fall into the “logos and web­sites” cat­e­gory, but every now and again I’m given the oppor­tu­nity to work on some­thing a little dif­ferent. One of my favourite “little dif­ferent some­thing” is the resume. I’ve designed a number of them, and I always enjoy them. They’re chal­lenging from an infor­ma­tion hier­archy point of view, and people really notice them. I’ve heard all kinds of com­ments, in part I think because people are so used to seeing the same boring MS Word tem­plates.

Julie Smith is a Toronto lawyer whose resume I recently designed. She sent her resume out to two dif­ferent com­pa­nies one day, and was given an inter­view on the second. Later, she passed along this com­ment from a headhunter:

Your resume looks fan­tastic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find your­self facing unem­ploy­ment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to rumi­nate on the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate in what­ever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

but appar­ently I’m not. I’ve actu­ally had “update web­site” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actu­ally been upgraded to “update web­site PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to sus­pect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails pow­ered site to a cus­tomized Word­Press site, which could easily handle every­thing my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that man­u­ally editing data­base fields isn’t easy).

I’ve been using Word­Press for every­thing lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really under­stand the point entirely) due to my gen­eral dis­taste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t pos­sibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d dis­cov­ered the power and flex­i­bility of Word­Press ear­lier on—it’s bril­liant and I’m begin­ning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

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It’s been offi­cially a year today. A year of no pay­cheques, no health ben­e­fits, no vaca­tion time. No nine a.m. starts, no staying indoors all day staring at a com­puter screen, no mon­strous amounts of unpaid over­time. (Okay, I lied, all of those things have hap­pened, and worse.) I love that I can say that I’ve been run­ning my own busi­ness for a year and I’m still in love with it.

I’ve had the chance to work with a huge range of com­pa­nies and people over the past year, pro­ducing a range of dif­ferent projects. I’ve done news­paper ads, illus­tra­tions, resumes, and a whole slew of web­sites, logos, busi­ness cards, and brochures. I’ve learned how to use Quick­books, I’ve stream­lined my processes, I’ve learned some AJAX tech­niques, I’ve rewritten my CMS code base, I’ve read about grids and typog­raphy and golden ratios. I’ve lost out on con­tracts, and I’ve taken on projects that thrilled and chal­lenged me. I make an awful lot less money now than I used to, and I prob­ably work harder. But it’s just so much fun.

How­ever, my one-year-mark is a time for serious con­sid­er­a­tion. What’s my goal here? Where am I going? How is my little busi­ness going to grow up? And, most impor­tantly, how can I keep doing what I love, stay sane, and make enough money to keep me in choco­late and red wine for the rest of my life?

I am coming to realize that:

1. Del­e­gate, del­e­gate, del­e­gate. I am a crea­ture of many tal­ents, but I am not any of the fol­lowing: Salesman. Accoun­tant. Pro­grammer. Mechanic. Stop thinking you can do every­thing, and start spending more of your time doing what you are good at and do enjoy.
2. Nothing comes quickly. Projects will take longer than you expected to reach com­ple­tion. A two-minute fix will turn into a two-hour ses­sion of slam­ming your head against the wall. Some­times you’ll put an inor­di­nate amount of time into researching an esti­mate for a project you’re not awarded, only to be handed a bigger and better project a year down the line. A lot of what I do is investment.
3. It is great to be a worka­holic, but make sure you get at least three sec­onds of fresh air every day.
4. Stop taking things so per­son­ally. Not everyone can think you’re the next coming, and some days, you will just suck. This does not nec­es­sarily mean that you are a total failure in all areas of your life, and it is cer­tainly not cause for a mental breakdown.
5. Nancy Reagan was right, sort of. Some­times, you should “just say no”. As a small-business owner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of jumping at any­thing that dan­gles a cheque in front of you, but that’s not really why you’re in this busi­ness, anyway, and it’s cer­tainly not the most impor­tant factor to consider.

These are my mon­sters. I’m hoping that, by this time next year, I’ll have mas­sa­cred at least half of them.

It’s only the most pop­ular ques­tion asked by anyone who knows me over the past few months. And it’s always hard to answer—my stock response is “It’s too soon to tell”. And it really is, but I’m def­i­nitely keeping busy, and new projects keep coming through the door. Every now and again I sit back for a moment and think how lucky I am to be 23 years old and sup­porting myself doing what I love, being my own boss, keeping my own hours, and set­ting my own rules. I never thought this would be what I wanted to do, but I’m utterly thrilled that I get to do it. (more…)

A quick intro­duc­tion to the two major types of file for­mats you’re likely to run across, and what to use when. (more…)