Opinion BY Armin

Designer Fog

Since we covered Creative Week New York last month I figured it would only be fair to feature a parallel of it from the West Coast. First celebrated in 2006, San Francisco Design Week (SFDW) is organized by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA partnering with the local chapters of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) and it features open studio tours, exhibitions, and talks starting next Monday, June 13. The identity for SFDW has been designed by SALT Branding.

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Opinion BY Armin

Creative Week NY Cuts Corners

First celebrated in 2009, Creative Week New York (CWNY) is a week-long series of events organized by The One Club, the non-profit organization devoted to the advertising and design industries — their One Show remains one of the best award schemes in the industry and their ceremony, the One Show Festival, is the top excuse for all creative types to wear fancy clothes and swirl wine in big glasses. It was the popularity of this event that prompted the start of CWNY bringing together various events from other organizations like Google, The Art Directors Club, The Paley Center, NYC & Co, and the Type Director’s Club. In 2010 Mayor Bloomberg decreed the event as the official “Creative Week” of New York. With the Week getting bigger in 2011 (celebrated last week), the One Club introduced an identity designed by New York-based COLLINS:.

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A B-Side BY Armin

Florian Stephens

Florian Stephens is a London-based 3D artist and designer. Fellow Londoners at Disengised have designed a logo — an “icosahedron (20 identical equilateral triangular faces, 30 edges and 12 vertices) which is colored in dynamically” — that has over 1,700 possible permutations. Case study here.

A B-Side BY Armin

Jakprints

Established in 1999 (I think), Jakprints is an online, one-stop shop for all possible full-color offset printing from stationery to collateral material to apparel and more. The new logo has been floating around since August of last year but it just recently made unto their website.

Thanks to Jeremiah Boncha for the tip.

Opinion BY Armin

A Ligature for Graphic Design in Indonesia

While the United States, UK and Canada have enjoyed the presence of design organizations for many decades now, the idea of an overarching entity that represents and stands behind the practice of graphic design is a recent one for some countries, one of them Indonesia, who saw the introduction of Design Grafis Indonesia (DGI) in 2007 when it was founded by one of its most celebrated representatives, Hanny Kardinata. Its mission is to “[Foster] understanding among Indonesian graphic designers and its juncture in art, design, culture and society.” With a very active web presence, DGI has established itself as the main source of Indonesia graphic design, even hosting a magnificent gallery of projects dating back to the 1930s. This month, DGI presented a new identity that replaces the default typography generated by the blogging platform of their site.

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Opinion BY Armin

ArtDirectorsClubNewLogo

If you don’t mind, I would like to quote a wonderful design book: “As illustrators like Norman Rockwell were blurring the lines between fine art and advertising art during the 1920s, the Art Directors Club (ADC), initiated by Louis Pedlar in 1920, brought together a group of layout artists, managers of art departments, and art buyers to explore the role art could play in advertising. No more than a year later, Earnest Elmo Calkins organized the first juried exhibition; this effort survives, nearly 90 years later, as the competitive ADC Annual Awards, which now receive up to 11,000 entries from more than 50 countries. Its Young Guns Award, offered to the top creative talents under the age of 30, has also seen an increase in popularity and fierceness since its inception in 1996. With a remarkable location in Manhattan, the ADC is host to events from exhibits to portfolio reviews to incendiary programming like 2006’s Designism and its 2007, 2008 and 2009 sequels.” (Not to mention they also hosted this wonderful series). Nearing 90 years of service to the creative community the ADC has introduced a new logo.

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Opinion BY Armin

Best Web Site of the World

Forget Google. Forget Amazon. Forget eBay. Perhaps the most important web site ever put together on the internet is Brands of the World. Thousands of logos, in .eps format, available at your fingertips. Old versions, new versions. Color versions, black and white versions. All a download click away as long as you check the “agree” box. How many times has Brands of the World saved you from clients that keep sending you low resolution GIFs of logos to populate a sponsor-logo mural? Where else can you get logos to modify in subversive or comic ways other than Brands of the World? And all for free. I love Brands of the World.

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BY Armin

A is for A Lot of Dots

The statement from Richard Maddocks, Chairman of the Australasian Writers and Art Directors Association, AWARD for short, states in part: Let’s be clear. AWARD is not a committee, a board or an institution. AWARD is a community. […] AWARD is as strong, dynamic and powerful as the people who participate in it. AWARD evolves as the community that forms it evolves. Based on the latter two principles, Interbrand Australia created a new, living identity that reflects the evolving and dynamic nature of the organization.

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BY Armin

Cheap Printing, Cheap Logo to Match

For most identity designers, companies like LogoWorks, LogoBee or whatever other cute name they acquire, are not to be taken seriously and are only seen as damaging to the industry by lowering (rather ridiculously) prices and quality. For offset and other specialty quality printers, companies like Vistaprint hold a similar position: cheap, fast, mediocre quality. If you have ever printed anything with a quality printer and anything with Vistaprint you know the difference but, let’s face it, most civilians (non-designers) people don’t — which is worth more than $400 million in 2008 revenue for Vistaprint, according to their 10-k. And Graphic Arts Online, lists it as the 40th top printer in North America.

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BY Christian Palino

(Non-) Depth of Field

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) is “the global community for people who work at the intersection of communication design and the built environment.” Their new identity and website has been designed by Pentagram partner Michael Gericke and his team. Pentagram has a post about the project up on their blog where they describe the mark as consisting of “four brightly colored panels that can be interpreted as three-dimensional forms, printed graphics or interactive menus. On the site these panels act as visual springboards for the website content, providing sections for news, conferences, awards, publications and learning.”

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