I was asked to design both a book and a website for Carl Harrison, a local, first time author. He had an idea for an image for the cover, but that was about it. He was quite open to ideas and was very generous in his trust of my design skills. A rarity in this business. I think the cover turned out quite well, and I know Carl was very pleased with the end result.
Came home from life drawing tonight only to find out Steve Jobs passed away. It’s sad, but not exactly unexpected. He’d been looking like a human skeleton for a few years now. And pancreatic cancer is pretty nasty.
Most people have wondered what happens to Apple next. I wonder about Pixar. Steve was always in the shadows of Pixar rather than the limelight he thrived at in at Apple. But Pixar is just as much Steve’s as Apple was. Only time will tell I guess.
I’ll assume this will be THE topic of conversation among creatives and tech people alike.
I’m going to try and challenge myself to put together one personal illustration a month until I get sick of it. Has to be either digital or traditional media. This very first one, is a digital piece. Not too long ago, I had to do a series of lottery ticket designs based on fantasy/mythological creatures. They turned out okay, but there were so many time restrictions, odd marketing demands to follow, not to mention a few technical restrictions, that I felt I could do better. So I set about to re-create one of the images as if I were the boss (and didn’t have to worry so much about reproduction restrictions.) The result is below:
So I read in the paper today (yes I still get the Saturday paper) and discovered that Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird did some rather surprising things on his business cards. For some reason he had the Canadian coat of arms gold embossed, removed the Canada logo (and what looks like the recycled logo as well), took out reference to the Lester B. Pearson Building and had the card in only one language.
As a designer, I’m pretty upset about this. Canada’s visual identity is rather hallowed ground amongst the Canadian design community. Canada’s visual identity is one of the most recognizable in the world. Not to mention removing all reference to Canada on the Foreign Affairs Minister’s business cards is rather odd. And the one language. Like it or not, (and as a typesetter I do not) Canada has two official languages and as a representative of the country, I think the business cards should reflect that. Want to change the policy? Fine. Change the policy and then change the card.
There’s other things I could say, like the extra cost for the gold emboss, the dirty pool politics about removing the name of a building that was named after a Liberal PM (Baird is a Conservative) but I won’t. I’ll leave that to others. I’m just saddened that once again, someone in power just craps all over good design strategies and sends out rather mixed messages in the process.
Eye Opening Design 