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!

Pax

Had a rather long bout of creativity (read: desperation to do something other than design) the other night. We're talking 6pm to 2am sort of creativity. I'd never drawn something directly into the computer before (successfully, anyway). She started out as a random face on a very tiny canvas in Photoshop and eventually spawned into a massive vector poster. I'd say the 8 hours of fiddling (and severe hand cramps) was worth it.

Book Design - Steam

After many hissy fits and several threats to give up entirely I finally finished my book.
PHEW. Am I ever glad that ordeal is over.

I wrote the entire manuscript. Something I never want to do again. I'll be quite happy letting actual authors do the dirty work from now on.

It's got a faux-leather cover, red endpapers, a red ribbon, several stamps (that alternate between gold stamped or blind stamped) on the cover and spine, and a red bellyband (with another gold stamp). You wish you had one of these. They're actually kind of snuggly, if I book can be snuggly.

I won't go into all the drama of the making of this monster.
Needless to say it caused much undue stress and plenty of sleepless nights.

Typeface Design

I invented a typeface!
Am I excited about it? Oh yes. Very. Typing doesn't do this justice.

We spent the entire term sketching, refining, and eventually kerning (that was a huge pain and I doubt I'll ever be finished with the kerning) our respective typefaces.

Other than the actual invention of the typeface we had to create a promotional piece of some sort to help advertise. This is the promotional piece for mine (one of the two - the second suffered through a rather terrible photoshoot and I haven't salvaged a picture of it just yet).
It's a roughly 36" long, accordion-fold, type specimen (and a huge pain in my butt).
Nobody wants to print one copy of a 36" x 5.5" student project. 500 of them sure. But not one.

Other than the usual printing-as-a-student drama I love this. I love the typeface. I love life.
It still needs a lot of work. It's a working typeface (I had a little joy fit when I first typed with it) but it still needs a lot of technical refinement.

The missing thing (which you'll see as soon as I fix the pictures) is a little rocket ship that was a companion piece to the big folded specimen. It was full of white chocolate wafers that had the entire alphabet (upper and lower case) carved into the faces.