Friday Likes BY Armin

Friday Likes 44

Things revolve around hand-drawn logos, animals, bearded tattooed models and other fine European accoutrements.

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Opinion BY Armin

Maha Music Festival Puts a Bird on it

First staged in 2009, the Maha Music Festival is a volunteer-run event in Omaha, Nebraska, featuring local, regional, and national indie and alternative rock artists that last attracted over 4,000 attendees — 2013 will be headlined by The Flaming Lips. Starting in 2012 the festival adopted a new identity by local firm Oxide Design. I realize this breaks my own criteria of the timeliness of work to be posted on Brand New and for all Omahans who consider this old news we deeply apologize (not too deeply) but, for some reason, today I struggled to find something interesting to post and this project had been piled on with other news since February and, well, it’s interesting.

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Opinion BY Armin

TaskRabbit’s Bag Gone Missing

Established in 2008, TaskRabbit is an online service that connects people (TaskPosters) who need something done and either don’t have the time to do it, the desire to do it, or the expertise to do it with people (TaskRabbits) that have the time, desire, and expertise to do it — perhaps, too, the need (or want) for some extra cash. The premise is simple: say you have a wall that needs to be painted and you post it as a task and establish a fee you are willing to pay, then TaskRabbits bid to do the task by submitting their own fee and expertise, you choose and the person comes in and does the job. TaskRabbit is available in few cities at the moment, like New York, San Francisco, Austin, and Chicago and there are over 4,000 vetted TaskRabbits running around doing errands and jobs. This month, TaskRabbit introduced a new logo designed in-house.

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Announcement BY Armin

2013 Brand New Conference: Registration Open

Speakers, details, registration, and more are all now live for the 2013 Brand New Conference.

A few things:
1) Early-bird pricing will only be available for one month, ending on June 28.
2) Between speakers, sponsor-reserved tickets, and pre-sale registrants there are already 119 seats taken, less than 400 left.
3) An explanation of this year’s hardcore identity can be found here.

Hope to see many of you there.

And many thanks to our sponsors who signed up for launch: School of Visual Arts - MPS in Branding, Squarespace, Neenah Paper, MailChimp, Monotype, and Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Opinion BY Armin

Dutch King Gets His Day in the Sun

On April 30, 2013, Willem-Alexander Claus George Ferdinand (Willem-Alexander to friends and press) became the King of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the Netherlands to friends and bloggers) as his mother, Queen Beatrix, abdicated the throne after 33 years. Willem-Alexander is the first King to take the throne in 123 years. For his inauguration day and the days leading up to it, the City of Amsterdam worked with Amsterdam-based Koeweiden Postma on the “dressing” of the city to celebrate the occasion.

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Opinion BY Armin

Hand Beats Filter in New Instagram Wordmark

Established in 2010 and hundreds of millions of photographs ago, Instagram is a “fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures”. Obviously, that’s an understatement. For its 100 million users, Instagram is as much part of life as texting and e-mailing and Facebook (who we all know paid a cool billion dollars to acquire Instagram in April of 2012 — who’s laughing now?) and its filters have established a new lingua franca for documenting food, clouds, and POV of places you are not in. Point being: Instagram is big. And important. Small changes are big changes. And its latest update, version 3.5, brought along with it a redesigned wordmark crafted by Denver, CO-based Mackey Saturday.

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Friday Likes BY Armin

Friday Likes 43

Today we go full on Nordic with firms and clients from Denmark and Norway and an aesthetic that you just can’t get either on this side of the pond or even in other parts of that side of the pond. What I’m trying to say: They got serious design skills up there.

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Opinion BY Armin

X Marks the Port

Used as far back as the thirteenth century, the Port of Amsterdam is ranked as the number 4 port in Europe, handling almost 93 million metric tons of cargo annually, employing directly (and indirectly through port-related companies) 55,000 people. The Port’s main goal, besides moving stuff, is “stimulating economic activity and employment in the entire Amsterdam port region.” Previously owned and managed by the local government, this April the port was established as an independent, corporate entity with the City of Amsterdam as the main shareholder and a new logo was introduced, designed by Groningen, the Netherlands-based Hole in the Dyke.

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Opinion BY Armin

Facebook’s Radically New “f” Logo

I will spare you my usual introductory paragraph this morning since you all know what Facebook is and what it does and get right to the point. Last month, without much fanfare, Facebook introduced a revised version of its “f Logo” which is meant to be used to promote an organization’s or person’s presence on Facebook. It’s ubiquitous — yet I had never realized there was, officially, a lighter blue line at the bottom of it. Along with the new “f Logo” also comes an official brand page and a revised set of icons for all the different services/pages found throughout the Facebook universe. Obviously this is not the most earth-shattering change in the history of logo changes but it’s my duty to report on it, since, like, a billion people use Facebook.

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Opinion BY Armin

Historic Houses Trust Presses Caps Lock Key

Established in 1980, the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales in Australia protects and cares “for significant historic places, buildings, collections and landscapes with integrity, and enable people to enjoy and learn about them.” Along with twelve of the state’s most important historic houses, the trust also manages landscapes, a library and collections of paintings, furniture and objects. This month the trust announced it would be launching a new, public-facing brand under the name of Sydney Living Museums with the goal of increasing visits and awareness of this cultural institution. It will maintain Historic Houses Trust as the operational name. The new identity has been designed by Sydney-based Frost*.

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