If you are ever feeling uninspired take a walk and take in nature. We are surrounded by an entire world of perfect color palettes.

A glimpse into the design process and approval processes of Saul Bass and Stanley Kubrick for The Shining poster. I can’t imagine Kubrick would have been the easiest guy to work with. If you haven’t seen the BBC Documentary “Boxes”, it is a great insight into the Kubrick’s obsessiveness. Check out the trailer.

I recently had the pleasure of working with the team at Deen Construction providing the development of a new logo for the first phase of their new brand update.

While there are many visual approaches available to a designer for a construction firm, the strategy we chose was to develop a logo which would visually define Deen Construction as a leader in the large scale commercial industry.

The idea behind this approach was to create a visual that would align itself with the aesthetic tastes of architects, engineers and commercial development firms. By using strong type, bold color and simple yet smart design, the logo provides reference to the building aesthetic and commercial leadership Deen Construction embodies.

As most designers and design firms are well aware of…our work always comes last. My personal mission was to spend as many weekends as it takes to finally finish up our new business cards, letterhead, envelopes, and logo update, and now I’m proud to say, “they are done”.

A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of working with David and Mariah McIntyre on the brand development for their new stylish restaurant in San Diego called Crescent Heights. After meeting with David and Mariah and discussing their vision for their new restaurant, I immediately had a clear idea of one of the logo options I wanted to present to them.

David is very much an artist and his new restaurant was going to be contemporary in its look and feel, but I wanted to also capture the artisan touch of the chef. To best accomplish this visually, I decided on contemporary type married with a brush stroked monogram done by hand.

Creativity comes from the care-free part of all of us…

So there I was, at my desk, with my brush, ink, and a few sheets of paper ready to knock this logo out.  As I began, it didn’t take long to realize, it wasn’t going to be that easy and I was already far from the point of “knocking it out”. After the first 25 or so throw away monograms, I was thinking to myself, “that’s ok, these are just some warm-ups” but by the time I was at somewhere around 150 throw-aways, I felt as if I were 2 more failed attempts from karate chopping my desk in half. Needless to say I was ready to move on and had just told my wife that I thought I was going to have to find another direction. As I said this to her, I absently drew one more monogram while barely looking at the paper. Wahla! There it was.

The lesson I learned on this project was that creativity comes from the care-free part of all of us. But when we become too structured, ridged, and have a narrow vision of the way things are “suppose” to be. We put up walls against our self, which ultimately keeps us from reaching our creative goals.

Final Logo Design

For each ubiquitous logo, there is often a quiet designer behind it. I’ve always admired the Maersk logo for many reasons. Primarily because it is clean, simple, and modern, even when it’s painted on the side of an old rusty shipping container. In 1973 Danish designer and architect Acton Bjørn created Maersk Line’s seven-pointed star logo. It’s initial goal was to signal the build up of Maersk’s new business era. Today, it is nearly impossible to miss once you have noticed it for the first time.

image courtesy of transpressnz.blogspot.com

The Designer…

Acton Bjørn studied architecture and urban design and began working as a designer during the Second World War. In 1950 he founded together with Sigvard Bernadotte design firm Bernadotte & Bjørn Industrial A/S . One of Scandinavia’s first consultants for industrial design. The head office was in Copenhagen with offices in New York and Stockholm. Cooperation between Bernadotte and Bjorn lasted until 1964. During that time, created many design classics such as stainless steel cookware for Modernum (1954) and plastic bowl Margrethe of Rosti Bakelite Factory (1950), which is still produced. For clients belonged among others. a Husqvarna, Bang & Olufsen, Facit, AGA, General Electric, and Electro-Helios .

In 1965, Bjørn opened his own office in Copenhagen, specializing in household appliances, office furniture and packaging. The same year he designed a transistor radio for Bang & Olufsen, Beolit 500. The design represented a simplification of the radio using comparable to the phone. 1966, Bjørn a Danish design award for this work. Acton Bjørn managed to combine practical function with a simple sculptural form.

I stumbled across a user named YUGODROM on Flickr and found a whole treasure trove of really cool magazine covers from the Yugoslavian science magazine Galaksija. Most of the covers are from the 70′s and 80′s, here’s a few of my favorites.

I discovered customink.com the other day and decided to give them a shot at printing a t-shirt for me. For those of you not familiar with CustomInk…in a nutshell they print low minimum runs of promotional products such as t-shirts (obviously), hats, mugs, bags, etc…check out their site.

I ended up just purchasing one shirt and it cost me about $25 with shipping. There are less expensive places out there, but I read good things about this company so I decided to spend the extra few bucks.

As for the design. In middle school and high school I use to find tons of cool shirts in small record shops, many of them promoting old punk bands. More often than not the shirts would be printed in just single and maybe 2 colors. I’m assuming because it was cheap and easy to do for bands to print and produce. So I thought it would be fun to go for this same look. I decided resurrected an old pinhole photo I used for a promotional poster we used a while back. The contrasty image has an old 70′s punk/rock-n-roll feel, which I thought would work great to have printed on a black shirt.

Overall, I’m pretty darn happy with the quality of the shirt, printing, the customer service and ordering process with CustomInk. They are worth giving a shot, if you want to print a shirt or two for fun.

Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)

Here they are:

FULL ARTICLE HERE:

1. Good Design is Innovative
2. Good Design Makes a Product Useful
3. Good Design is Aesthetic
4. Good Design Makes a Product Understandable
5. Good Design is Unobtrusive
6. Good Design is Honest
7. Good Design is Long-Lasting
8. Good Design is Thorough Down to the Last Detail
9. Good Design is Environmentally Friendly
10. Good Design is as Little as Possible

cline-company.com

Designer Saul Bass did a makeover of the Bell Telephone System’s identity in the late 1960s. Instead of pitching his design proposal in printed form, he made a 27-minute film.

Bass’ work in logo design and movie title credit sequences spanned the latter half of the 20th century, with prominent work in each field. He worked closely with AT&T, designing not only the 1970 “bell” logo that was ubiquitous for a decade, but also, upon the divestiture of AT&T, he designed the original “death star” logo, unveiled in 1984.

One reason for this bell logo’s ubiquity? That redesign was the largest corporate re-identity program in the U.S., ever. The redesign covered:

* 135,000 Bell system vehicles
* 22,000 buildings
* 1,250,000 phone booths
* 170,000,000 telephone directories

This film was made by his company as a presentation to AT&T executives. It would have extended to be shown to the public, but a number of his ideas in the film were not ultimately adopted, like his phone booth designs, and men’s and women’s uniforms. But a great many were—including, most memorably, the telephone vans and hardhat designs of the 1970s. He designed down to the details, showcasing in this film a myriad of ideas, right down to the yellow pages book designs, cufflinks for executives, and flags.

Bass’ other very recognizable logo designs that persist today include those for Minolta, Girl Scouts of America, Avery International, Geffen Records, Warner Int’l, and many more. Bass’ design for AT&T was the foundation for the logo that the company has today, redesigned in 2005 by Interbrand.