Marathon meeting day yesterday. Spent 11 hours out of the office shuffling between potential new clients and Maple North, one of our fantastic partners we work with.  Adam Green, Opal and I had a brain storm session on number of upcoming projects that will test creative and implementation for both Design & Develop and Maple North.

Adam also landed on a business card choice.  A basic matt finished card with a spot UV gloss for the words that relate to his service set.  I’m looking forward to these coming in.  I’ve never run this type of a job with our trusted printers over at OP Media.  Yes I am a little nervous.  I hope they’ll be perfect.

Adam over at Maple North has finally landed on a logo, you might remember the first swing at this with the “Golly Miss Molly” post.  Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t been pecking at this for the last month or however long it has been.  No no, it’s been a month of trade-show booths, presentations, diagrams, ads, websites and on and on until my headed exploded in a pixilated Crayola mess of color.  I digress.

It’s finished and I’m feeling a little crispy but overall happy.  I’m not at all too sure where the inspiration came from or the creative energy to get this done.   I will post up a link to the write on our work with Maple North once it goes up on the corporate site.

I was reminded yesterday that the finished product doesn’t speak to the process or work involved.  One of our clients asked if I could point them at the isometric feature in Illustrator.  I’ve been working on a rather large print project for them with some tight time constraints when a urgently needed diagram needed converting for a marketing push.

Innocently enough they were under the impression that this was a software feature and not completely custom.  Fair enough, Illustrator comes loaded with tons of features to make a designers life easier but there are still some things that still require manual work and this is one of them.

Despite my occasionally muttering about “how am I going to make this thing into an icon?”, I do enjoy making these.  It’s a step away from the usual web and print design work.

Now where is that “make lunch” button?

In Frustrating News…

We as a country will be going back to the polls.  After about three years the minority parties have had a no confidence vote and parliament will be dissolved (Reuters Article).

As far as I have heard in the news the average person on the street is not thrilled with the idea and some are expressing frustration.  I personally hope that when the dust has settled from this mess that will cost us taxpayers $300 million dollars, that the minority parties that got this ball rolling end up losing seats to the current majority.  It’s not about wanting the current party in power to stay in power, but rather the fact that as a country we were doing okay in a world rocked by natural disaster, economic woes and growing tensions in the Middle East and Africa.

On the flip side the economic prediction is that our dollar should take a slight drop against the USD.  This would continue to make us attractive to our neighbors south of the border as far as contracts are concerned.

Aspect ration (width relative to height) can bit you in the budget for both web ads and print / magazine ads.  At least with the web the standards are a little more concrete, for example, a full skyscraper is always 160 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall and can safely be distribute on any site that allows for it (click here for the common size over at Wiki).  Print, not so much.  A half page ad in one publication isn’t necessarily going to meet the specification of a half page ad in another and a full page ad wont just ‘scale down’ to meet the need.

Though the ad remains much the same, there is the jostling of type and objects to ensure legibility for the reader while keeping the design interesting. So, that has been my last 24 hours.  A resizing of a print advertisement we completed for LaFert North America.  We have another one in the works, but as always, delays delays delays…. not at our end thankfully.

In Other News…

This recent article in Smashing Magazine has me itching to try a tablet as a sketch page.  I do own a Wacom Intuos 3  that sees a fair bit of use.  However as the article states, it does tie me down to the desktop.  The opportunity to have a digital sketch pad at the ready is a bit tempting. The price however.. well, we’ll see…

Started the day off with some quick header artwork for Losing Our Parents, a charity we regularly help out with.  The dog featured on the ‘Love of Pets’ header is my very own trusty pup Misha.

As Design & Develop we’ve been performing website design & development along with print design services for the past couple of years.  It’s been a pleasure to watch the charity grow and Mary, the founder, come up with new ways to shine the light of growing old and coping with the loss of those we love.

My Personal Fascination…

With Discovery Channels show Curious and Unusual Deaths.  Not macabre or mocking at all, treats the situations with respect while getting down to the science.

Ended up distilling a web page layout into poster form.  VIPER Labs has been busy back in Texas renovating their training space for an upcoming session and posters were needed.   The problem is up-converting the web design elements for print.  Almost all of our concepts and artwork for web site design start their life out as a multi-layer bitmaps specifically prepared for the standard 72dpi you’d expect with screen media.   Suddenly being asked to up-convert a layout to large print can present some challenges and the need to take the artwork into a vector format that allows limitless scaling for print reproduction.

So this is neat…

The Bank of Canada announced last Thursday that new series of bank notes will slowly be introduced over the next couple of years.  The artwork brings the Canadian bank note design yet another step closer to the look of the Euro and other European currencies.  As a creative type I find this fascinating.  Also think I would enjoy the job of being on the team that designs these.  Anyways, there is more over at MoneyVille.ca

Finally finished up the first in a series of banner ads for Bradley Smoker.  This batch was targeted at fisherman.  Graphical banner ads can be a nice break from the usual web design work.  However, it never fails that someone will try to overburden their ad with copy.  A simple catchy line and a call to action is all you should really need.

I really need to share this one.  Adam over at MapleNorth.com tasked us with a logo design project for his new identity.   I had already gone through a first draft that wasn’t quiet what the client wanted when the idea to use his pet Beagle Molly came up thanks to Opal.  So here is Molly, with her proud stride and long Canadiana scarf trailing behind her.

Ultimately the client didn’t gel with the idea and Molly is forever destined to be out of the spotlight save for this entry.  By the way, Adam himself will admit that he is being incredibly loose with his input on direction.  He just wants something Canadian.  Maple syrup and beavers anyone?

They had us, Design & Develop, produce a series of icons for that project involving the idea of a viper.  The logo now needs an update and to follow in the same vein as whats been done.  I have to be honest with you, this has been a slog uphill and I have as yet to receive the first review and revision list from the client.

It has been the year of isometric diagrams.  I have created a lot of these for our Unified Communications client Sipera Systems Inc. over the past six months but now I had a chance to take a swing at This Technology’s diagram for their new SpotLink solution.

The diagram in the foreground is what This Technology started out with and behind that is the final artwork.  At the very least it’s a little more visual engaging for the viewer.  The icons are a combination of custom artwork mixed with stock art and existing icons from other work.

I do enjoy making these and info-graphics.