Announcement BY Armin

Introducing UC.Quarterly

Very excited to introduce UC.Quarterly, a publication of UnderConsideration, printed quarterly, with a hand-picked summary of the most interesting, relevant, and simply fun-to-see projects published each quarter across our blogs — Brand New, For Print Only, Art of the Menu, and Quipsologies. It’s 48 pages packed with 70 projects printed as a mini newspaper by Newspaper Club and hand-bound in unused makeready and test sheets from Rohner Letterpress, Classic Color, and Doe Eyed that have all been painstakingly rubber-stamped by us — pretty much no cover is alike. UC.Q is available as single issue or 4-issue subscription. More details here and way more photos here.

Announcement BY Armin

Closed for BNAwards Judging

Apologies for the lack of Friday Likes today folks. The week leading up to judging is always a little hectic and we start things early, so there is/was no time to prep a post. Will be back Monday. And good luck to all who entered the Brand New Awards. In organizing the entries I can say that there is a lot of great work and the wins will be well earned.

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New: The Build

I normally hold designs very close to my vest. I do not like people looking at what I’m doing while it’s in progress. So what I am about to do goes against fifteen years of habit. As I have hinted in the past, Brand New will undergo a major redesign. The design itself is loosely set and I’ve started building it out. Normally I would just spring the redesign on everyone but, just like you can see a building being constructed from foundation to beams to piping to glass windows, I will be building Brand New in a semi-live way, posting updates online as I reach different milestones. I’m not sure what this achieves other than opening myself up for feedback early on and perhaps giving code-inspectors a chance to see what I’m doing right or wrong.

So: This is where I’m at, warts and all, on the home page. The site is built on a flexible grid and will eventually be responsive (right now, I’m working on the version for people with big-ass displays). I will be implementing Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ fabulous Ideal Sans through their webfonts service — we are Beta testers.

My main goal is twofold: (1) to build a properly coded and CSS-ed website and (2) get the “B-Sides” out into the main fold (they’ll be called “Noted”) and build in a space for linking to fun logo-y things (called “Linked”). And, yeah, in a month or so, it should be fully working. Comments are welcome on this post and follow us on Twitter to get regular updates of what has been achieved with each upload.

Announcement BY Armin

Team Brand Moustache Finale & Voting

Movember has come to an end and, by now, hopefully most of us who participated have shaved our moustache. To bring closure to this silliness, it is time for the team Brand Moustache grand finale. Our team raised a modest $1,401 (out of an amazing $121,054,525 raised around the world) and we ourselves donated 8 Flaunts, 6 FPO Awards, 13 2010 Brand New Awards, and 12 2011 Brand New Awards books to the cause as prizes for our donors. From our team, Brandon D. Ove was the top fundraiser so he gets a free ticket to the 2013 Brand New Conference.

Now comes the fun part for y’all: voting for the best moustache to see who gets the other BNConf ticket. All team participants are pictured in this post (right-click each image to open in new window if you want to see bigger) so check them out, pick your favorite and vote (on our usual poll, after all the images). Votes will be tallied on Tuesday, December 11 at 5:00 am.

Update 12/12/12: The top vote-getter was Mr. Petteri M., taking 30% of the votes. Congratulations. Voting is now closed (although technically you can still vote.)

(Stupid, catty, and douchey comments are NOT welcome. Yes, we mostly all look ridiculous to different degrees.)

Continue reading this entry

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Newsletter, Now Served Weekly

After six years of running Brand New I finally got my act together and started a proper newsletter for those that have kindly (and blindly) subscribed to our mailing list, despite there being little to no mailing. Brand New × Weekly will be delivered on Mondays/Tuesdays with a recap of what happened the prior week — highlighting the results of the polls, which are very easy to miss — and, for the curious, a few nuggets of readership data. The first newsletter went out today. You can see it here (some details are a bit wonky as it’s not pulling any recipient data).

To subscribe for upcoming Weeklies, you can use the sign-up form on the right-hand column or you can use this link.

Announcement BY Armin

Closed ’til Aug. 1

Through the end of July, we will not be in the office — Bryony is in Mexico and I will be in Guayaquil — so we will be giving the blogs (and us) a little rest. No posts until August 1.

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Highlights Pinterest Board

We now have a fully stocked board on Pinterest with what I think are the highlights of Brand New since we launched in 2006 — only the best-looking work is up there. Makes for a great little oasis of identity inspiration. The current order is a bit of a hodgepodge with old a new stuff mixed in. We will now keep adding highlights as they come in. Enjoy.

There are also boards on our main Pinterest page for FPO, Art of the Menu, and Quipsologies, if you wanted to check those out.

Announcement BY Armin

If your Brand New Looks Wonky

I had to make some changes to the CSS file — which controls the layout and look of the site — and how it is loaded, so for most of you the site will look broken today. Please click on one of these two links for your preferred layout and that should fix it: Centered main column / Left-side main column. You might also need to empty your browser’s cache.

And Opera users rejoice: the site now works in your minimally adopted browser.

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Awards, Early-Bird Pricing Last Day

Quick reminder: Prices go up tomorrow, Saturday, for the Brand New Awards.

Announcement BY Armin

2011 Brand New Tips

While cleaning my e-mail a little bit today I noticed that my Brand New folder was extra scrollable. I am aware that I get a lot of tips, but hadn’t realized exactly how many. For 2011, give or take, I received 2,086 tips. Many of them are repeats, many of them are for very small brands, and many of them don’t fit our coverage, but the ones that do are always exciting to receive. This is the fuel that keeps feeding Brand New and I am most appreciative of everyone that takes time to tip us. If you have tipped us in the past and have not received an answer, you can now see why: it’s pretty much impossible to reply to 2,086 e-mails on top of the other thousands of e-mails. But please know how important your tips are. Keep ‘em coming.

Announcement BY Armin

2010 FPO Awards, Storefront

The 2010 FPO Awards publication is now available as a 248-page book, a PDF download of said book, and a fancy iPad app: here.

Announcement BY Armin

FPO Awards, Pre-Order

The 2010 FPO Awards book is now available for pre-order at 20% off the eventual retail price. Preview of the iPad app is also available for perusing. See details on FPO.

Announcement BY Armin

Changes to Commenting

Due to the massive amount of comment spam we get and that we have to fight against, the commenting on Brand New hasn’t been the best experience: lots of spam gets through and many of you (real people with real comments) are getting flagged as spam. We will be moving forward with the Disqus comment system. It changes things a bit and some may not like it — that’s okay, you’ll get used to it. For now, I will try this with minimal registration needs, but if spam is still getting through I will have to do an e-mail verification system. We’ll see. So, for now, test the new system in this thread so that I can see if everything’s working properly and so that you get registered in the system for future posts.

Comments from all the previous posts are currently being imported into the system and should show up in a day or two — as we have almost 150,000 comments.

BY Armin

Technical Difficulties

Apologies for the lack of posts these last two days. After moving our server to a dedicated server the Brand New set up was the only one that didn’t make it intact. It’s sort of working now — commenting and publishing entries — but there are still a few back-end issues. I hope to resolve them today.

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Conference, Videos Available

Videos of the 2011 Brand New Conference are now available for purchase and download. $5 a piece or $30 for all eight. Files are 1280 × 768 MP4. Five- to six-minute previews and very brief summaries of each talk are available at the site. You can also catch the opening remarks and my overview of the last 12 months of Brand New activity at the bottom of that page.

If you attended the conference in person or via webcast you will receive an e-mail today or tomorrow with instructions to download your set of videos.

Follow-Up BY Armin

Brand New Conference, Online Registration Closes Tomorrow

The online registration for the Brand New Conference will close Thursday, September 15 at Noon Pacific Time / 3:00 PM Eastern Time for both webcast and in-person tickets.

On-site (walk-in) registration will be available on Friday.

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Conference, 4 Ticket Giveaway

Perk up folks: A random drawing will occur between today and tomorrow to give away 4 tickets to the Brand New Conference this Friday, September 16. These tickets are sponsored by the first ever Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and one of the conference’s Presenting Sponsors. Read on for how this is going to play out.

Update: Winners announced.

Continue reading this entry

Announcement BY Armin

Advertise on UC @ a Discount

Summer went by more quickly than we realized and, while all of our regular advertisers were out working on their tan in a beach somewhere, we somehow have more empty spots for September than we would like. Since it’s on such short notice we will offer a 20% discount off our $2,000 monthly rate (for a total of $1,600) to anyone that signs up before the end of August. Discount applies if you sign up for multiple months. Contact me by e-mail to get more details or if you have an interest in getting a combined 3,000,000 impressions of your logo and banners across all of our blogs. If your audience is graphic designers, a real big bunch of them is reading this too.

Announcement BY Armin

New Blog: Art of the Menu

It’s been a couple of years since we last launched a new blog so we are pretty excited about this one. Art of the Menu, cataloguing the underrated creativity of menus from around the world.

Announcement BY Armin

Brand New Awards, Book and iPad Now Available

The book and iPad app for The 2010 Brand New Awards are now both available. As requested, there is a discount if you plan on buying both. Head on to the repopulated Brand New Awards website for all the details.

Thank you to all who entered and all who have purchased or are about to purchase. We are extremely proud of both the support and interest that led to a very successful inaugural awards.