Interesting online crowd sourcing competition running at the moment over at logomyway.com. For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, it’s a design crowd sourcing (freelancer) site similar to 99designs.com.
Anyway, back to the competition at hand. The folks at logomyway.com have posted a job to redesign the BP (Beyond Petroleum) logo, in light of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The key concepts the logo should communicate are given as:
#1 Oil spill disaster – Toxic
#2 Death of wildlife
#3 Incompetence
The prize awarded to the winner will be $200 and so far 163 designs have been submitted. The contest will be open for another 8 days and some of my favourites so far are:
Simply change to the existing logo, but sums it up nicely.
This one is a great adaptation of the existing logo. And nicely visualises how the ocean will need to have the oil 'wrung' out of it.
This logo is fitting given the 13% collapse in the market capitalisation of BP. Will the company crumble as a result of this?
I don't think BP is evil, but I like this logo .
P.S. For anyone interested, you can view live video feeds of the underwater operations on the BP website.
Jesus! Well, it’s April tomorrow and Good Friday the day after. I don’t know where the time goes… the days crawl but the weeks fly by. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been up to this year outside of work hours, before any April foolery. Nothing personal, just a couple of web projects on the side…
This one I designed for my long-time friend and Melbourne-based producer and DJ, Steve Mowat, aka Matik. Steve and I came up with a bold new identity which set the basis for the site’s structure. Building an HTML5-flavoured WordPress template, I’ve allowed Steve to record his thoughts, creations and findings with ease. With a photo gallery and an emphasis on connecting through social media, this is a hub for both the industry and the public to connect with Matik. A monochrome scheme and confident type makes the site feel like you can understand the professionalism, class and attention to detail that is Matik, before you’ve even heard his beats.
I’ve been honoured to work with Marcus and help him to establish his presence online. He has a fantastic body of work containing iconic poster design, motion graphics and title sequences that make you sit back and simply say, ‘wow’. He also designed this site himself, pixel-for-pixel, before getting me to write the code. Alright, I’ll stop writing and let the work speak for itself.
Yep, that’s me! I’ve finished designing a new portfolio site that is dead simple and uses JavaScript to randomly organise a grid of some of the best sites that I’ve had a chance to work on over the last three years. I just have to finish writing a few spiels, cross the Ts and dot the… lowercase Js. Should be online next week.
That’s right, after a two year hiatus, I’ve decided this March that it was time to rekindle the love of my photography… blog. Hoping to redesign the section within the coming months. Enjoy.
Adobe announced today (or Tuesday U.S. time) that Creative Suite 5 will be released soon and that they will show-off features at an event to be streamed online on April 12th. So what are we to expect in terms of technologies? — Lightroom 3, Flash Catalyst, Business Catalyst, Adobe Story — not to mention updates to the major applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Audition and Premiere with 64-Bit Cocoa on the Mac and Windows 7 support? Whatever. I don’t really care, as long as they put this into Photoshop…
Today I received a link to this. Yeah, I know, it’s funny and to some extent valid. But I don’t know what I hate more, exploitative managers with archaic business models or smarmy graphic designers.
There are a lot of creative job positions out there where people do work for limited or no pay — including but not limited to photographers, audio engineers, production assistants, animators, painters and illustrators. Yet graphic designers (and to some degree, web designers) seem the only ones compelled to spend hours being smartarses about it. I know it’s important to let off steam, but publicly and constantly in such a brash way is hardly satirical. While I find a lot of the content humourous, I seriously get an email with a graphic designer having a whinge almost every week. And it makes me sad to call myself a designer. Because often I or someone I know has put up with a lot worse. We’re lucky to be in a job getting paid to do something we love. There are millions of people out there being exploited or who are in dead-end jobs and have no other choice. Then there are those who have nothing.
I know I’m on rant and a soapbox and I’m not having a go at those who forward these messages on or at the guy who wrote these, but rather at us as an industry.
Edit: I have just read a bunch of the other pages on 27b/6 and I believe that I’m am now well-informed enough to see that David Thorne is a clever and funny motherfucker. But I still think that graphic designers should be seen and not heard… or in some cases neither seen nor heard. That’s it, take down this blog!
Shigeo Fukuda was a graphic designer, sculptor and illusionist, to say the least. For those not familiar with his work — to give you some idea of his capabilities — he managed to create a model of MC Escher’s Waterfall in 1985. I am embarrassed to say that I only found out on Friday that he had passed away on 11th January, 2009.
I had never heard of Fukuda until I saw him speak at AGIdeas in 2005. In his presentation he showed, amongst Escher’s Waterfall and other work, his shadow sculptures and his iconic posters. Although he spoke broken English, Fukuda did not have a translator like other speakers, and yet managed to captivate the crowd with his work as well as his great sense of humour.
Shigeo Fukuda comes from a generation of great designers like Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Milton Glaser and Alan Fletcher. I’m sure he will be missed by many, but his breadth of work and the amount of talent that he displayed was remarkable.
I don’t know what Saatchi and Saatchi did with Glaser’s famous slogan for New York, but the original slogan sure has been getting some attention lately. Either a lot of people love this U.S. city, or someone’s been marketing it like mad. Anyway, there has been some other interesting re-branding happening of late. One only has to look at the most sourced branding website, Under Construction’s Brand New…
[Please note that the following comments are only my opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt... and some oregano]
The Good
Discovery Channel — still has nothing on the elegance and simplicity of the National Geographic channel, but a nice redesign.
Dolby Digital — Nice, simple update to the original mark.
Metallica — …gimme that which I desire! Design company Turner Duckworth brought back to the front, that unnamed feeling… and nothing else matters.
Coca Cola — The same company that reinvigorated Metallica’s visual style, successfully returned the iconic status of this classic beverage.
Toys R Us — I like this one… in a world of ‘Web 2.0′ it’s refreshing to see something playful, yet understated.
The Bad and The Unnecessary
Xerox — I really liked the old logo. Looks like this new one is best viewed with Microsoft Siverlight in Windows Vista with a heavy Javascript library and running on the Myspace API.
Philips — Once you’ve worked out why these two are different, tell me why the new one is better. Unless your name is Luc de Groot, I bet you can’t.
The Athlete’s Foot — Okay, maybe they’re trying to escape the connotations of a foot fungus. But seriously, the world doesn’t need another three letter acronym that sounds like something you shouldn’t have eaten.
Another interesting one is the Safeway rebrand. I’m a bit undecided on this. In case you didn’t notice, Coles recently recently shedded their circular logo, to leave their logo purely typographical. I guess this is Woolworths’ turn.
To cap off, I thought I’d put something I saw in Desktop this month… Reason Clothing’s response to the ubiquitous slogan…
I finally finished reading this book last night, The Art of Looking Sideways, by the late Alan Fletcher. No, not the guy who plays Karl on Neighbours… this guy.
I was given the book by a few friends for my 21st birthday, almost 3 years ago. But it wasn’t until recently that I actually read through it and I can’t recommend it highly enough. To say that it is a design book would hardly do it justice. It features very little — if not, none — of Fletcher’s professional work and it doesn’t try to sell you anything. And the chapters cover just about everything in life, from the perspective of one creative individual. It’s like a really interesting blog, but in book form. Highly, highly recommend.
I have a lot of creative friends. People who I have met over the years, long-time pals and housemates. Today I was blown away by the image above, by my friend Nick and his crew. You can check out his website over there on the right. While you’re at it, check out Chris’ pics, Tris’ words, Steve’s sounds and Dan’s sketches… amongst others. Did I forget you? Let me know, and I’ll put you up over there.
Of course, these are just a few folk who happen to have stuff on the intertubes. There are plenty of galleries out there too. And, because it’s that time of the year, let’s focus on student galleries. I just checked out my old uni’s exhibition, which was pretty cool. Admittedly, I was more fascinated by the Fine Arts than the Visual Communication work, but that’s just between you and me. It’s on until the 28th of November. Also, Northland have their show coming up on the 27th, and there are a couple ofothers worth checking out. But that’s just me and my peeps… tell us about you and yours…
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