Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Jellyfish. All the way down.


Just a little tribute to an adorable movie.
Wrote a report on Pixar for my management class this term. Considering how faboo they are I figured they could use a customized cover. This is it.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Who?


Just a little doddle to make you smile.

Corporate Identity - Vespa Rebrand



This project is still ongoing, but the logo-building is done.
A rebrand of Vespa (when I say that word I want to make an engine sound. I don't understand why. Vrrrrrrrrrr)

These are the two strongest choices out of all the options I came up with for a rebrand. A logo, and a wordmark. The logo is the one that won out. Those spirals were just too fun not to play with some more. At the moment it's in the process of being turned into a style guide, complete with sizing rules and how to use it on everything from business cards to scooters.

I was torn about which one to expand further. Both are fun.
How fantastic is it that Vespa had the convenient V and A as the first and last letter?
And that S in the very center!
Perfect to work with.

Let me tell you a secret: curled gradients suck. They're very cranky and they don't like you on principle. The green logo is a series of layered opaque shapes that overlap to create the curved colour changes.

Organ Greeting Cards




One of the best projects I got to take part in this year was a contest of sorts. An employee of Unisource (a paper supplier, see info here) and one of the YSDN professors are neighbors. She got telling him about the graduation show, and how we were looking for fund raising opportunities. He gave us the coolest fundraiser I have ever seen.

Unisource offered the graduating class 3000 dollars. 2000 in cash, and 1000 in paper...
For six greeting cards.

The deal was, every graduating student would come up with at least one greeting card. It could be seasonal, general, whatever. Any words used had to be bilingual. Out of the 90-odd cards a team of students chose 18 to show Unisource. Unisource then chose the winning six. Those six cards will be printed and sent out to design firms all over Canada to advertise a new line of paper called "Loop" (by Mohawk - lovely recycled paper!)

These three cards are a joint effort between myself and the lovely Veronica Windus, a fellow classmate. We decided to do something a little weird and put stylized vital organs on our cards.
Veronica drew the sketches of the organs (and the swirls) and I did all the digitizing and colour.
The brain I did on my own, since two cards seemed like an odd number.

"Thinking of you"
"You're always on my mind"
"Happy Valentine's day"
"Happy Earth Day"
"You're the air I breathe"

I've got more corny sayings if you want em.

Other than the host of hilarious taglines we could give these, there was a reason for choosing organs. The paper being advertised is loop, so logically we played up the name by choosing systems (circulatory systems, nervous system).

P.S. We didn't get picked :( But that's okay! We still know we're awesome.

Travelling Treasures - Exhibit Design





A full year of work has finally finished.
Blood, sweat, and tears (both literal and figurative) went into this.
Funny how this big ol' booklet caused so many troubles.

It was a challenge getting started. I knew from the start that if I wanted things to go smoothly I had to get the identity of the exhibit organized... and it just wouldn't cooperate. I ended up designing the whole thing without an identity in mind, which tortured me a little. Eventually I had enough similarities in the pieces that I could put together a solid explanation of how the identity would work, and rework everything to suit what I had come up with.

Lesson learned: identity design takes forever. Sometimes it's better to wing it and build the identity out of the pieces of the project that really work.

Business Cards


I might be addicted to those multicoloured droplets.
Just a little. I can quit whenever I want! Honest!