Designing Design Jam, Pt 1

For the last quarter of two thousand twelve, I worked with the founders of Design Jam to design and build a website to replace the organization’s existing, partially sewn-together wiki platform. The team was lovely to work with: Joe Lanman, Johanna Kollmann, Franco Papeschi and Desigan Chinniah all contributed their personal time and effort to realize the project.

The project brief was all-inclusive in regards to the design and development of the website, but left out formally considering a revised or new brand identity for the organization. This was intentional, for sake of budget and time. Historically, event organisers had the creative freedom to craft a local identity, which might occasionally use basic visual elements of the parent group.

The identity, so to speak, was a slightly haphazard application of Sketch Rockwell (often substituted with Cabin Sketch).

DJ-templogo

The initial visual designs for the website used an uppercase application of Cabin Sketch, with a bit of kerning and resizing of individual letters; a small attempt at connecting the new website with the existing material.

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The client approved the designs with this logo, and we moved forward.

Except, it bothered me.

The new website was a real step on the founder’s part to bring the impressive collective of events they started two years ago to a wider audience. The group is entirely non-profit, and as such any promotion comes from the founder’s own pockets. I saw a gap in between the serious (paid) effort of the website and the brand they stood behind. The existing font felt uneasy and frail in the new context.

The catch being, of course, that it was out of scope.

The titles, quotations and taglines of the design are set in Quatro Slab. I considered a version simply using this face in the Ultra Black weight.

mast_quatro

The team weren’t keen on the idea. They, quite validly, preferred to keep the casual, hand drawn and essentially unprofessional typeface as it — I speculate — better represented the democratic nature of the events.

I wondered, was there a middle ground?

After a few poor trials trying to fuse the sketch lines of the original with the slab serif, I had a go at it by hand. With a few printouts of Quatro Slab as reference, I penned the nine letters in my sketchbook (my luck to work with a title without repeating letters).

image_sketch

I scanned the sketches and overlaid them on the computer with the precise machine letters. With a bit of manipulation in Photoshop, I extracted rough outlines: texture cut-outs. I then converted each letter to a vector object in Illustrator, with a bit more custom refinement.

image_raster

The result is a mix of the clean, mechanical lines of Quatro Slab Ultra Black with the digitized sketch and shading lines. While it isn’t likely to find its way into a design hall of fame, I believe it is a suitable balance given the time and monetary constrains of the project. The client agrees, and it is finding its way into new configurations, as seen on their Facebook and Twitter profiles.

DJ_Logo_web