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.

mast_font

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

Flickr

After a few months of sorting through my photographs — and a fair bit of editing — I have completed the slow migration from arcade.withoutnations.com to my account at Flickr. There are a few reasons I felt this was necessary:

  1. Gallery is a wonderful, robust open-source platform for hosting and sharing photographs on a personal website. Unfortunately, the larger the database gets the slower it runs. The interface, while infinitely customizable, isn’t particularly user-friendly (an aside: the beta for 3.0 looks very promising, and I would encourage others to give it a try). Flickr exists to host and transfer tremendous amounts of data to users quickly.
  2. The social networking aspects of Flickr are unparalleled and steadily growing. Flickr can be seamlessly woven into dozens of applications and services — and where a gap exists, an API sits ready.
  3. The community at Flickr. As I connect with others and add contacts, I am committing myself to a community that encourages sharing and networking. Hosted here, I am only responsible to myself. Two years passed as I delayed uploading photos from my trips to Europe. With a firm deadline and the knowledge that people will be actively viewing new images, I pushed through and finally finished what I started.
  4. A simple, transparent method for implementing Creative Commons licensing.

The first attempt at integration with this site will be via the Flickr Gallery plugin by Dan Coulter. There seems to be quite a few options out of the box, but it also looks to have excellent support for the Flickr API search method, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

The existing albums at arcade will remain live indefinitely. I was less selective when posting photos to Gallery, so there may be value in the additional images that haven’t been migrated.

Shades of Grey (with a bit of color)

The business cards I ordered from Moo arrived today. Considering they have been digitally printed, the quality is certainly good for the price. I particularly like the recycled card stock, a very subtle smooth texture with a visible grain. The design was rushed out this weekend in the hopes that they would be delivered in time for Glug — which I’ll be attending tonight. Selecting Caecilia for the typography was smart, and the color actually matches what I intended. Next time I order though I’ll make sure to make the design a bit more interesting.

p1050197

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Vegan Garbage Plates

It is my intention to craft a recipe for the notorious but delicious Nick Tahou’s Garbage Plate that will not only be free of meat and dairy products, but will retain the greasy and gritty taste of the original.

This will require research — trial and error — based on an admittedly fading seven year old memory. I expect there have been attempts at this before, however the quality is likely comparable to the dozens of other misnamed knockoffs throughout Rochester.

For those unfamiliar, see the description here and here.

Peacebones

After more than a year and a half of procrastination, false starts, and restarts the redesigned www.tomhurlburt.com has launched. Under the surface the site is a custom wordpress theme with a few very specific plugins that attempt to give the appearance of a more dynamic infrastructure, without all the necessary programming. Consider the design a perpetual work in progress. Tom is a Camera TD at Blue Sky Studios.