Good morning friends. Happy Monday, March 19th. I hope everyone has recovered from any St. Patrick Day celebrations they may have experienced on the weekend. Thankfully I didn’t need much of a recovery. I have been pretty busy this past week and weekend trying to stay ahead of the workload. Unfortunately, I haven’t done the greatest job at that. Which means today’s post will be another recap of a design piece I have done in the past that hasn’t previously been shown.

The purpose of this piece was to experiment with different letterform designs relating to form function and spatial organization. To complete this goal, 8 new characters were created to fit into the current Roman alphabet. Then using some of the newly formed letters, a fictitious word was created and defined.

After choosing my 8 characters, I figured out what current letter forms were required to design my characters. I found that the best way for me to create my characters was to manipulate current roman characters by flipping and rotating them.

I chose to use Garamond Pro as the typeface option for my characters, because of the cupped serifs it has, as well as the consistency it has in the width of the rest of the anatomy. This typeface also has only slightly curved descenders, which allows for cleaner characters when the characters are joined. The font chosen for the sounds and the word definition is Helvetica. This is because the Helvetica typeface is easy to read especially when the point size is really small.

The word choice was the most creative part. To come up with the word, I just started going over the sounds the current alphabet, and my new characters make, until I had a word that sounded fun. I then took these sounds and put a definition to them.

Here is what the final layout looked like. Click on the image to see the full size.

Well that wraps up things for me today. Hope you all have a good week.

Good morning friends, and happy Monday. Hope everyone is adjusting well and made it on time to work, class, or wherever, this morning with the clocks moving ahead on the weekend. I am still struggling with the adjustment, but part of that has to do with a recent purchase that has kept me awake later at night.

This weekend, Nicole (my wife for those that my be wondering) and myself each purchased a set of Lego. She bought “Oliva’s House” from the Friends collection, and I bought “The Fire Station” from the City collection. I had looked for a new hobby that would continue  to enhance my creativity and design work, but let me play as well. There were a couple of different options I looked at before settling on building Lego.

Friends Lego - Oliva's House

City Lego - Fire Station

The first one was amigurumi, which is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. I was considering this skill set because it would allow me to build my own toys, modeled after some childhood characters. The drawback to this hobby was, I felt it was too feminine. My reasoning might be a little sexist, but hey, I am who I am.

Amigurumi of Yoshi

I started to consider Lego as a possible hobby the day I discovered the Architecture collection. This collection takes famous landmarks and creates a scaled down model out of Lego. I would like to have a couple of different sets from this collection, but most of all I would like the Robie House (first designed by Frank Loyd Wright). Since I wouldn’t want to ‘play’ with sets from this collection, I decided to not start a hobby with this collection. But after browsing the Lego website for a couple of months, and convincing Nicole that it was something we could do together,  I decided Lego was the hobby I was looking for.

Architecture Lego - Robie House

After browsing the many collections to choose from, I decided to start with the City collection. This will allow me to start to build up a city with the intention of expanding to the Alien Conquest collection and wreaking havoc on my city. I foresee some creative storytelling through photography in the future because of this hobby. I know, I am a geek.

Anyways, enough chatting about Lego. I need to go and finish building it. I will leave you with this even more geeky poster I quickly made with Lego in mind.  Enjoy your week.

Keep Calm and Build On

Good morning friends. I hope everyone is having a good Monday morning. Today, I wanted to briefly talk about a topic that isn’t design related, I will still share a visual, but will be a trending topic in the province of Ontario, and especially my house.

On March 2nd, the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, posted a message to the public about his hopes and plans for the future of the education system here in Ontario. The video has a well crafted message outlining a lot of the positive things about our education system and then briefly shares the cutbacks the province will be seeking from the teachers.

This message seems harmless to most people who don’t understand much about the Ontario teachers and their collective agreement, but the timing and platform used for this message are very insulting to the teachers. Timing of this video was meant to shock the teachers and gather sympathy from the public, it was posted just days before the first scheduled Provincial Discussion Table (PDT) talks, which ETFO (the teachers union) has decided to not take part in. The platform of this video was chosen to not allow the teachers to see it first hand, since YouTube is banned in most government buildings, including schools. Most teachers had to wait until the end of their teaching day without getting to see it, but still had to talk to certain parents who had the ability to watch it.

The province is asking for the agreement to be settled by mid-March, but with the collective agreement not set to expire until the end of August and the two sides so far apart, I am seeing a long and public battle looming.

It is with this in mind that I have created these two posters:

My hope with these posters is to remind everyone that both sides have a long way to go, and hopefully they can both do it without panicking, and getting the public to stress out needlessly.

That’s all I have for this week. Hopefully everyone will have a nice week and Keep Calm.

Good morning friends. Happy Monday, February 27th. Today I am going to share with you all another fun idea that I learned about in school.

In class, I was introduced to TinyMeat.com,  which sell wallets and passport cases. The neat thing about them is, they allow you to have their templates to create your own wallets and passports. The templates are a lot like the Phidias Gold Paper Dolls I posted about here.

You can get a copy of the TinyMeat templates here:

WALLET

PASSPORT

I designed two different wallets so far that I will share with you. The main theme for the wallets are outer space. The first wallet has a space scene on the outside and on the inside. The second wallet has a scene showing aliens on a planet on the outside and a repeating pattern of the aliens on the inside.

1st Tiny Meat Wallet

Since all the illustrations are cartoony, they fit the overall look that TinyMeat.com portrays. The TinyMeat.com logo looks like a speech bubble, so it has been placed in spots where a character would be saying the word tiny. This is slightly different that most of the site’s wallets, but I wanted to add my own little variation.

2nd Tiny Meat Wallet

The font used on the Space Invaders wallet is ElstonPro Bold. It was selected because it gives off a Russian feel, which can be seen as something from an old alien movie. All the colours in both wallets are solid colours. This helps keep the simple cartoony feel for each element.

Well, that’s all I have for you guys this week. Take Care.

Good morning friends, happy Monday February 20th. Today is Family Day here in Ontario, and I am away for some much needed Rest and Relaxation. But I wanted to share with you a project that I worked on a little while ago.

Project Objectives:

The purpose of this project was to complete the communication material for an Integrated Marketing Campaign (IMC). This project was done in teams of two. I was partnered up with my good friend Holly Walker to complete this assignment. The Client we were working with was HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre.

Backgroung Information:

HopeSpring understands that there is much more to cancer than the physical diagnosis and treatment. They offer coaching services for those with cancer because they are often faced with a great deal of change, stress, and complex medical information. HopeSpring was created to help people to move beyond the fear, confusion, and frustrations surrounding a cancer diagnosis. They offer a variety of programs and services, all designed to create a greater sense of confidence and control. Also, they offer personal and group support, a free wig boutique, and an excellent resource centre. Many people in the KW region have found inspiration, information, and empowerment at the HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre. All of their programs and services are confidential and free of charge. Friends and family of a cancer patient are always welcome, and no medical referral is needed.

There are no direct competitors in the region, but they do compete with any place that offers yoga, reflexology, therapeutic massages, wig fittings, counseling, or group therapy.

Positioning Statement

HopeSpring is the only holistic cancer support centre in the region focused on education about and relieving stresses associated with cancer, as well as coaching their clients towards overall wellness.

Target Audience:

HopeSpring’s target audience varies in both demographics and psychographics. They one thing the target audience has in common is they are either living with cancer, or are friends and family of a cancer patient. There are an estimated 2, 377 new cancer cases for 2011 in the KW region. HopeSpring would like to start to target a younger segment, as well as try to entice more men to start using their services.

Creative Strategy:

HopeSpring would like to update their logo, send out a direct mail piece, update their e-newsletter, and create a new brochure. The logo needs to reposition the brand to boost awareness and increase the number of clients, especially the younger demographic. The direct mail piece and the brochure need to inform and educate the target market about HopeSpring, what they offer, and how they can help. The e-newsletter needs to educate clients of HopeSpring on what is going on inside the organization and provide testimonials.

All messaging must be in line with HopeSpring’s positioning statement. The tone should be informative and persuasive, but stay upbeat and uplifting. The appeal needs to be empowering, making it clear that HopeSpring will offer the client the utmost in coaching and support.

Implementation:

The following are the communication pieces that our team came up with:

Please click on them for a larger view.

HopeSpring Logo

HopeSpring Direct Mail

HopeSpring E-Newsletter

HopeSpring Brochure

Thank-you for taking the time to look over this project. Like always please feel free to post any comments or questions you have.

Hope you have a happy and productive week.

Good morning friends. Happy Monday February 13th. This morning I would like to share with you a neat little project that I stumbled upon. The project is called Random Project 2012.

The Random Project 2012 showcases a growing collection of postcards which are created by everybody. These celebrate the spirit of the London 2012 Olympic games and enable exhibit to visually document the shared cultural experience as the year unfolds – we will all therefore become the artists-in-residence for a historic year.

To be a part of this great experience all you have to do is pick a number between 1 – 100 and email this number to word@random-project.co.uk. They will they send you a word. All you have to do then is create a postcard relating your word to either 2012; London, England; or the Olympic games.

There is some fine print and stuff which I encourage you all to look up on their website here.

Now to my postcard. I was given the word ‘fun’. I won’t tell you what number I picked to get this word, that might spoil some of the fun of this project.

While I was bored in class, late one Friday afternoon, I started to doodle out some pictures. After a little while I started to notice that I had a little pattern going. Every image I had drawn could be related to a birthday party.

This got me thinking of different games that are played during a child’s birthday party. I wanted to pick a game because part of this project is to relate to either the year 2012; the city of London, UK; or the Olympic games. After listing a few different children’s games I settled on “duck, duck goose.” I decided that I would make the children’s head which ever animal they had been called and have the ‘goose’ chasing the child around the circle and back to the spot.

Front of Postcard

Back of Postcard

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Hopefully, this post will inspire you to get your own random word and create a postcard for yourself.

Until next time, have a great week.