November 10
2009
November 7
2009
Toronto Time
I flew into Toronto last Thursday. It’s great to be back. The city is really unlike any other that I have been and is an exciting change of pace from Whistler.
I’m lucky enough to be staying with my cousin Rob near the corner of Queen St. West and Bathurst St. The neighbourhood is in the heart of the fashion district and is a hub of design, creativity, thoughts, ideas and general coolness. There’s a lot of F**cking hipsters around. Seriously, tight pants, fixed gear bikes and cardigans is your idea of being an rebel, riiiight.
Hipsters aside, there’s some amazing inspiration to be found here. Today I went to 401 Richmond St. a former industrial building thats been transformed into a complex of galleries, shops and studios. It’s a fantastic place! Inside I discovered a design book store called SWIPE. I spent over an hour in the store. They have the largest collection of books on typography I have ever seen! I picked up two. Brooke noticed that they also carried Lego, Glee! Not standard Lego sets but Architecture, how did I not know this! I really liked the Guggenheim.
More to come from this trip. No doubt!
October 27
2009
Bike Co T-Shirt
Check out the new t-shirt I’ve designed for the Whistler Bike Co. based off Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon album cover. I’m told It’ll be available for purchase at the Pemberton store this week!
September 16
2009
Line and Pixel logo
EDIT! Well, I think I may have jumped the gun on this post! No sooner than when I posted this article began to “tweak” the design even more. Something didn’t feel right, it felt awkward. Awkward is not how I wanted Line and Pixel Design to be perceived. Elegant, professional, clean, this is what I want for my company. In short, what I needed to do was simplify.
The Japanese have an aesthetic principal known as Kanso, The basic premise of Kanso is simplicity or the elimination of clutter. This is a key idea for Line and Pixel Design because I truly do believe that elegance lies in simplicity. So I went back to the drawing board. I stared with the typeface I wanted and only added elements that truly promoted the ideals and ideas that I wish Line and Pixel Design to put forth.
The previous design is flawed due to its over complexity. For example, The kerning for the whole logo was too tight. It was yelling, not explaining, itself to the viewer. All caps need space to breathe, it aids in legibility and because that was ignored it, the logo felt cluttered. Additionally the plus (+) in the middle simply didn’t work, it added too much ambiguity, unnecessary flash and colour became a distracting feature. The ampersand (&), with proper spacing, blends in far more and is instantly recognizable as the word and.
The image below shows the old and new versions comparatively. On a side note, the accents on the (i)s in the logo will be variant in colour depending on the situation and placement. For demonstration I have kept them a neutral gray as not to distract. Feel free to post comments you have below.
August 17
2009
Ampersand
With all the discussion about ampersands in my last post I thought it’d be fun to take a closer look at this rather nifty glyph! Here is a small sampling of ampersands from a variety of typefaces:
The ampersand is a scribal abbreviation for the word and which dates back to the roman era. As you can see from the above examples there are several different forms which are all derived from the Latin word et. If you want to get really involved, Wikipedia has a huge article on the ampersand, I suggest reading it.