Moving day!

So I'm moving on over to a real URL! Updates will be stopping here, so please head on over to www.kevinpowell.ca and subscribe to that RSS feed if you want to keep getting updates!

Chalk - Web based drawing 'app' for iPad

If any of you follow my twitter feed, you might have already seen this from there, but after playing around with it some more I feel it's worthy of a full blog post.

37signals were inspired by their own offices in creating a new app for the iPad called Chalk. It's a simple chalk-board with white and red chalk, and an eraser. It doesn't sound like much, but it really does everything you want a drawing app on the iPad to do as far as I'm concerned. While other apps try to get fancy, this goes to the basics, and of course, it's free, yay!

They've also found a way to circumvent Apple by making the app web based. Before you complain though, my iPad is wifi only, but as long as you bookmark the page, you can access it all the time, on or offline. You can save your pictures as well, which is nice.

It's a nice, clean and simple, everything I look for in a well made app. They had an idea and executed it brilliantly. Even my wife (who isn't always a fan of technology, despite buying me the pad), who sometimes gets frustrated with certain apps and just starts hitting the screen with all her fingers was able to use this with no trouble nor instruction.

A bit of a rant

This post doesn't necessarily deal with a thing or concept so much as the attitude of the people around me, and may be akin to my old days as moderator of a Star Wars related message board in which I was most well known for Jediman's Bitching Board (as I had the very original nickname of JediMan84), which after a quick search I sadly could not find, even though I suppose that really is for the best.

As anyone who reads here on a semi-regular basis knows I am still in school, and am set to graduate in about 5 month. I'm excited, but have been a bit put back by my lack of work that I would consider portfolio worthy. Because of this I look forward to every project we get at the moment, hoping to do what I can to turn even the mundane into a great piece (not that I always succeed, but so be it).

Sometimes we get projects which at this late stage of our program are rather mundane (another stationery set? You've got to be kiddin' me!), yet people plug away at them without caring very much. Then we get something interesting, and you'd think everyone would be overjoyed (I know I was). Rather than be happy they have something which holds tremendous potential to be a portfolio piece, they instead complain we don't have enough time, that it is too complicated (because they are close minded... no offence of course), and that the requirements should be changed.

Let me put aside that I think it's a great project though. We are graduating in 5 months and they are saying 18 hours (working time over three days) isn't enough time to design something? And that's a SOFT deadline. What the hell are these people going to do when they get into the industry? Tell their boss they don't like the project they were assigned?  Tell their client that time is a bit tight and they'd really appreciate if they changed the scope of the project?

Now I know that I shouldn't be complaining because these are people I'm going to be fighting for a job, and the more adverse to actually doing work they are, the easier my life should be when it comes to first finding, and then keeping a job, but it's just something that drives me up the wall. I am a big believer in the 'sit down, shut the fuck up, and get the work done' mentality. Sure, something might be hard, but all the more reason to do your best at it and make something god damn incredible.

I am one of the people in the class who is often finished first, as are three or four other people. We get our work done, and more often than not people really like the work we do, but they pass it off as "Oh, you're good and know what you're doing." Why am I good? What the hell separates me everyone else? Well, I actually follow the creative world outside of the classroom, following designers blogs, tweets and subscribing to or occasionally purchase design related magazines. What is stopping these other people from doing the same? Laziness? A lot of them go on about creativity, they are passionate about it, but don't invest time into it! Don't sit back and complain that you have no ideas when you refuse to brainstorm or pick up a pencil. Fuck off that you can go straight to work on a computer, when all you do is bitch that you don't have enough time. Why not think of a new approach then? Maybe you don't have time to trace a fucking raspberry in 6 spot colours in illustrator*, so don't god damn do it! But 90% of the people in this room get an idea and go to it without even thinking of a second (perhaps better) idea, never mind actually researching, brainstorming etc.

*We are currently working on a product which comes in multiple flavours, and we must design the packing for any three of our choice, and it has to be done as a 6 spot colour job. Who cares why, that's our constraints. So what do people do? Livetrace a raspberry, realize it looks like shit, then rather than realize their idea isn't very feasible, they decide to make a realistic tracing of a raspberry using 6 spot colours and say they don't have time to do three flavours.


The people around me cannot think for themselves either, they ask about everything. 'Why are the registration marks on your example* of the dieline not aligned?' was probably one of my favourites to come up recently. People don't take the time to think (I mean who gives a shit about the example on the board, obviously yours should line up). When a problem arises or the teacher doesn't give full information. They must ask, and then when the teacher shows them how to do it, it invariably becomes 'it didn't do that when I did it'. They can't accept that they fucked up, but rather it is the software or the hardware or the teacher for not teaching something fully. When I can't figure something out, my last resort is asking the teacher. I want to figure it out on my own, because then I'm likely to remember it, or at least know I can work around a given problem. Whenever I asks someone, I tend to forget how they did it for me rather quickly.

*the example was a sketch on a white board


I suppose all this frustration comes down to the point that I'm at least a little worried about who I'll be surrounded with when I will be working. I am of course dreaming of a fantastic job right out of school in which I will be surrounded by the the greatest and most creative minds in the field, and this of course is just that, a dream. But god help me that I'm thrown into nightmare of a team of people who can't problem solve, who don't know how to brainstorm and who are as stubborn as a bloody mule.

Inspiration

I'm slightly obsessed with the TED conferences. I really can't get  enough of them and it's a struggle not to link a whole bunch of them to here.

Now that they have the TED iPad app (and my wife got me an iPad as a wedding gift, yay for me and a big 'thank you' to her) I've gone on a bit of a binge. The app is awesome in that it allows you to download talks for offline watching, and has an 'inspire me' button which then asks you to pick a category (inspiring, funny, etc.), and how long you have, so as to find a video that will fit your time constraints. Overall an awesome app, and even better, as with most things TED (apart from actually attending a conference), it's free.

I've been watching a lot of the talks about creativity for the past day now, and there have been some really interesting talks (such as the 12-year old Adora Svitak talking about what adults can learn from kids, and bringing up how kids have the advantage of not knowing what constraints might exist, to Steven Johnson talking about where good ideas come from).

What all this brings me to is my current project at school which is the open ended "design a t-shirt". Can't get much more open ended than that, can we? And when things are open ended like this, I tend to have zero to no inspiration to work on them. Sure I have a sketch book with a bunch of random stuff in there I could just plug into a t-shirt design, and why not? Well none of it is great, and I want to make something great, something that I would wear. I looked through my book and didn't see anything that I really wanted to expand upon for this particular project (sometimes it does work though). I looked over websites and saw a ton of amazing and creative designs, which just made me wonder why I didn't think of that first.

Being so open ended just gives me too many possibilities. I have some fun ideas in my sketchbook that if I were to expand upon them they'd probably make a design, but what if I could think of something better? When I'm stuck like this I like to try and come up with a theme for myself, at least to help start focusing. So I did that, and then ended up coming up with so many themes and ideas I'd like to explore, I  was even more overwhelmed than when I started.

Great ideas are often something that need time to mature, but do I even need a great idea here? It's not like I'm trying to stop world hunger... even though if I were, how would I design a shirt around that? That has been my thought process over everything I've thought about or read for the past 18 hours or so, and I'm starting to go mad.

Advice for design students

from DavidAirey.com

So just as I'm really starting to buckle down and figure things out, David Airey puts out this great and resourceful post on his personal blog filled with past advice of his, all nicely organized.

For those of you who don't follow any of his now 3 blogs, what are you waiting for?

- www.davidairey.com
- www.identitydesigned.com
- www.logodesignlove.com

Time to start thinking about my Portfolio

For those of you who read one of my older posts, you know I'm graduating in about 6 months time. Knowing that, I've started going through my work to find what I might start to put together for my portfolio, and how I'm going to assemble it and what not.

After going over a bunch of sites (such as this one by Jushua Blankenship that I liked) and a Layers Magazine article from their last issue  I'm starting to get a good idea of what I should be including and I've got a few basic concepts for how I want to put my physical one together. I find all these sources funny though. Some will tell you that they'd like to see a lot of your work, while others say the less the better. Some say a fancy presentation is necessary to stand out, and over/undersized portfolios are a good thing, while others won't even look at them if they are too out of the norm. It almost becomes a 'you need to stand out without going out of your way to stand out'.

Overall I know that certain styles will appeal to certain people, and I think the right approach is to go in one direction knowing that while some people will dismiss you right away, others will love your approach. It's either that or you're stuck in the middle of the road for everyone, and never really making a huge impression (be it positive or negative).

My biggest concern now is what the hell do I put into it? I seems a lot of people think student work isn't always worth looking at (probably because relax time constraints + a lot of it sucks), which obviously makes it hard to put something else together. I have some pieces I like, and while some of them get nice comments from my teachers and excited remarks from classmates, they don't make me go 'wow', so why would they make someone else go 'wow'?

The other problem is I've been told, and have read from multiple sources, that you want to target a certain job with your portfolio (lots of web based stuff for web design, lots of photoshop/illustrator stuff for ad agency etc...) but I don't have a bunch of anything, but a few select pieces of each that are worth presenting.

Obviously I have to make-do with what I have, and I will, it's just a daunting project I guess, and I want to be able to put something together that really is great. Once it's done I'll get some photos of it and put them on here, even though that's awhile away from now, it's still something to look forward to.

Designer Lightbulbs

too awesome

How great of an idea is this? Available for pre-order from Plumen in the UK and Europe, with everywhere else to follow. Bit expensive though, at twenty pound / thirty euro a pop.

Photography

Around a month ago, for a class project, we had to head down to a local farmers market to take some pictures. The subject matter was up to us, and while most people chose to take pictures of the various foods that were on sale I really wanted to try and capture the people who were there. There we so many people and all so different from one another. I also saw it as more of a challenge as it's a lot harder to get good pictures of people, rather than static fruit and veg.

So here are some of the pictures that I managed to get. I'm rather happy with the results, but I wish I had a bigger memory card so I really could have gone wild. It's rare I get much photography in these days, and after going out and taking these I really would like to do it more often.

The Lost World's Fairs

The Lost World's Fairs has been put together to show off WOFF now that IE supports it. Fun stuff, check it out. 

Keeping up with the Industry

I'm currently wondering how far behind my current skill sets are, simply because my school is still stuck using CS3. We were told shortly after CS5 launched that an upgrade was imminent, and then told when we got back from our Christmas break that it was be ready to go. With approximately six months left of classes, I seriously doubt it's going to happen before I leave.

I realize that what I am learning using CS3's software is relevant and good to know. My biggest concern as I try to keep myself up to date on the new features and workflow present with the new software is that many of the techniques I'm learning are now outdated. People leaving my school have no idea about Refine Edge in Photoshop for example, which if it could be taught, would be a great asset. Now I think it's important to know how to make a very good selection in Photoshop without Refine Edge, but it's something a lot of people in my school have no idea about, and which could help speed up their work tremendously. It's not a hard feature to learn, but it's something that most people I know are oblivious to and wouldn't necessary learn on their own (and knowing my classmates, most won't learn it on their own).

InDesign also came with a lot of updates which I haven't followed as closely as Photoshops, which is a shame because again I feel like I'm missing out on something. Does it mean I can't do a job because I don't know all the features? No. Does it mean that I can't learn them once I get my hands on CS5? No. Does it mean as it stands now (and when I graduate) my current knowledge will be lacking? Possibly.

I mean say I get on a stage and I'm sitting there working on a project doing things the way I know. For example lets say I'm trying to select a girl with her hair flying around using channels (something I had to learn on my own in the first place, as we weren't really taught this properly, which makes me wonder what else I'm missing out on), when Refine Edge could do the same job in half the time. While I might not look like a fool, if I keep doing things in a slower way than the current software allows me to, whoever is supervising me might question my skill sets and not bother hiring me once the stage is done.

I'm not personally worried about my chances of finding employment (well not too much anyway), and I'm doing a lot to keep up with the industry outside of what my school is prepared to teach me, but what about everyone else in my school? Are other schools stuck in the same place as me? Am I being a bit paranoid or are my worries justified? I guess I'll find out in 6 months.

So What I am Suppose to do Next?

I'm graduating in ~6 months from now and I need to start figuring out what the heck to do next. It's finally time for me to get a real job (and a haircut, from what my fiancée seems to be trying to tell me through the use of a certain song).

In about three months from now I need to finalize what I'm doing for my stage, and I want that decision to reflect where I plan to be once I graduate. I'm not saying I will be hired where I do my stage, but it would be optimal. Even if I don't though, I'd like my stage to at least resemble what I'll be doing once I do start getting a pay check. I also could go the freelance route (for my stage as well), but I'm a bit worried it would be too much pressure on me for the stage if I'm just starting up, because to pass I'd obviously need to find clients and get paid to do some work. I have been thinking about launching my own company once my wedding (Oct. 2nd, god it's close) is over and done with and I have time to start concentrating on other things (and the money needed for a start up). If that's the case, in the two odd months I have between now and when I need to figure out what I'm doing for my stage (at least on a preliminary stage), at least I'd have an idea if the whole freelance thing is feasible or not.

If anyone out there in internet land had any ideas, don't be afraid to drop me an e-mail and give me some advice, or tweet me, or whatever other (not so popular) form of communication you might prefer.

Once the whole process starts coming into focus I'll make sure to post some updates here, obviously sooner than later if I do decide to launch my own company.

Typography resources

Just a quick post today. For all of us who want to know more about fonts, FontShop has an educational section on their site that has a few really well put together PDFs. I saw Meet Your Type a month or two ago, and I thought it was fantastic. I was rather happy today when I found out they had so much more.

Meet Your Type is a rather long document (52 pages), but a very light read written in a romance style. It's fun and informative, what else can you ask for? They also have the Type Anatomy, Type Tips, and the Right Font for the Job.

While I'm generally not a fan of documentation put out by a company trying to sell me something, I find they've done a great job on all of these and suggest you check it out if you enjoy typography.

And for those of you who are really into typography, there is a great blog (which sadly isn't updated regularly enough for my tastes) with tons of info in it's archive. If you just want to get a nice taste of a few concepts the FontShop stuff is great, but if you want to dive deeper into understanding type, I Love Typography is a great place to start.

And I just ran into this and thought it fit in pretty well. Buy it for $15 at The Birds and the Beasts.

Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy | Video on TED.com

Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy | Video on TED.com

Old, but great video on design and happiness. It's only 15 minutes long, go watch it.

Vintage Packaging Labels

There is something about vintage labels I really love. The way the typography all works together is something you don't always see these days. I wonder if all these look great because we only keep the good ones, or if more attention was actually put into the work back then. I realize great packaging is still around today, but lots of really bad stuff is out there too.

The Beauty of Complex Graphic Design

Last week I posted about the beauty of simple graphic design and referenced the STM's new brand identity to get my point across. I think simple graphic design can have a huge impact, but when trying to convey certain moods or messages, I'm not sure it's 100% effective. Don't get me wrong, the simpler something is, generally the more I like it (look back at my Mini ads for some of my own work, which was very simple). Certain themes just cry for something with a bit more going on though. More colours, more patterns, more action and life (not to say simple design can't portray life or action) are sometimes needed.

I was again inspired by a metro ad for this post, and I really wish I could find a better picture of this, but it seems hard to come by. What I'm talking about though, is the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts 'We Want Miles' exhibit. The poster is wonderful. Whenever I looked at it on the metro it made me smile, and it really seemed to convey the feeling of Jazz. The different colours and movements that it captured, and the pop they have against the rest of the image really worked fabulously.

Now outside of the main body of text, this is a simple design. Really everything about it still is rather simple. There is no over-crowding or excess, but what is there has a wonderful level of complexity about it. The composition of the colours is wonderful. The flow of the text is so great. I just can't help but smile when I see it.

This is often the case with great design. While the main execution will have a nice clean look, the attention to the more complex details can be rather extreme at times. The little things help make the bigger picture all the better.

Another fantastic design I recently saw comes courtesy of where Ty Mattson, upon learning he was going to have a boy, designed this wonderful birth announcement. In a similar fashion to  the STM ads, his colour pallet is rather limited, but his attention to detail in this just makes everything come to life so well. I fell in love with this the second I saw it. More images of the birth certificate can be found over at his blog.

Photo Retouching Fun!

Back to working with photoshop at school, this time doing some photo retouching. Being self-taught in photoshop years ago, I knew most of the basic things (clone/heal/patch) and being someone who's doing his best to keep up to date I'm wishing we had CS5 so I'd have access to some content aware features, which would speed things up.

But what I wasn't aware of really blew me away, mostly with how quickly and well a really messed up picture could be cured using channels. Really some amazing stuff. Not sure how practical it is to use though, because I don't know many pictures that look as the ones we've been practicing on, but oh well.

Anyway for a quick idea of what I've been up to here are a few really quick family pictures I fixed up this morning, as well as one major retouch job I've been working on for about 6 hours. The hair is a bit flat around the parameter and I should fix up the BG, but I'm a bit fed up with it. Oh, and I changed the body because I don't have the patience to fix that up. (sorry that the others are sideways, again I'm a bit lazy).

Montreal's New Identity

Being from, and currently residing in Montreal leads to me having a bit of a personal attachment to the city. So when I heard about Montreal getting a new visual identify, I was quite pleased. When I finally found the new logo, I was a more than a little disappointed, specially seeing as I'm one of the tax payers who contributed to it's close to half million dollar price tag.

Granted, the logo isn't for the city of Montreal itself, but for the Greater Montreal Area, which the creators explain is made up of "five large entities", listing them as Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, and the North and South Shores. This would explain why the 'M' in the new logo is split into five. One problem though. Longueuil is a city (albeit a big one) located on Montreal's South Shore, which is made up of a great deal of other cities, and covers a ton of space, much of it empty. It isn't so much of an entity, as it is a geological reference that they labeled here in an attempt to be inclusive, and to help divide their 'M' properly.

The colours they use for the main version, which I've included above, are down right ugly as far as I'm concerned. According to the site they have devoted to this branding effort, through the colours "systematic use in communications, they will provide the brand with its unique character and facilitate its recognition. " I looked around but couldn't find any explanation towards why these are the official colours, which must have been picked for a reason, one would hope. To me it looks like they picked them out of a hat. I'm assuming they wanted to use high contrast in an attempt to show the diversity of the combined areas and the peoples within them, but I find it hard to believe they couldn't have picked more aesthetically pleasing colours than these. 

It already seems dated , and they haven't even started to implement it yet. This is supposed to be used to market Greater Montreal on the world stage. To me they've reverted to Expo '67 by creating a logo that might have been used by the then great exposition. Sadly that was over 40 years ago. It was a great time for this city though, and maybe they are just trying to remember or relive those days before the horrors that were the Olympics found their way here.

On a more positive note however, are the variations they have of this logo, which they at least realize is very customizable, and hopefully always will be, so we can avoid the catastrophe of the official version.

Some of these are rather awful in their own right, but at least they show some hope. The red one on the bottom right isn't even that bad, and there are several versions similar to this, which use shades of one colour, rather than a random mismatch, and which actually look half decent.
The question remains how much of this logo we're actually going to see, considering all current city logos will be kept in place, while this seems to be more for international marketing. Personally I think if you're going to take the leap here, why not rebrand all the cities themselves? Apart from implimentation costs, it could be a big step in bringing together Greater Montreal, perhaps having each area using a single colour version.

All in all, it seems like a good idea that's managed to go wrong.

Just another one of those days

Decided to make a simple image to depict how I'm feeling right now, since I really had nothing better to do. My current class is moving at such a slow speed it really is mind numbing at certain points. What's made it most annoying is the teachers insistence on attendance and punctuality (not that it's really ever an issue for me), even though the 105 hours this section of my course takes could probably be squeezed into 60.

We finally get to start playing with Photoshop in (what is sure to be a long) two and a half weeks, and which point I'm hoping to have a few more projects to share here.

My Favourite Graphic Design Blogs

When I changed this over to be a graphic design blog I was hoping I'd be able to use a lot of my school work to talk about since I am only working on only the rare side project. Sadly things are really slow in class now, almost to the point of frustration.

We're working on typography right now, but not exactly in the pure sense. While a lot of what we are learning is essential, the module is too short and lacks some of the minute details I would have really liked. I'm slowly becoming a typophile, and would really like to know more of the minutia in regards to fonts. The teacher we have now is awesome, simply because she is really picky about pretty much everything, and is good at explaining things in clear, concise ways, but I'm often left to my own devices because I find the work pretty simple most of the time. I should be encouraged the majority of the class often takes up to twice as long to complete the exercises we're working on, and often with more errors than myself (not to sound conceded or anything), but it can result in me being rather bored, specially since the school has a lot of sites blocked.

From this I end up reading a lot of blogs and am always looking for new ones to subscribe to. I mainly read other graphic design or typography blogs, which both make me realize how much I still have to learn.

So here is a list of blogs I follow, along with a quick little something about them. If you somehow stumbled upon this site in search for graphic design insight, these would probably much better suit your needs for the time being. These links are in the order that I have them in Google Reader, so there is no real order to them.

•Brand New - Part of UnderConsideration.com, this is one of my favourite blogs. It goes into companies rebranding efforts, comparing their old logos and brands to the new brand. It'll also examine new companies from time to time. While they don't go too deep in to overwhelm, the insight into how they see new brands is educational and they don't hold back on their criticisms, even of efforts they deem well done.

•We Made This - An interesting blog that seems to cover a range of different items, seemingly whatever the authors seem interested in. They offer links to some cool and interesting stuff, and occasionally talk about different projects. While they don't delve as deep as other blogs often do, it makes for some faster reads and it's updated often enough to keep my happy.

•Swiss Miss - I just recently subscribed to this one and I love their content. It's not a deep site, but they put up several posts a day of either great pieces of graphic design, interesting links or simply some cool, quirky stuff.

•I Love Typography - Another one of my favourites, which sadly isn't updated as much as I'd like. It really goes into the 'hows' and 'whys' of type design and is definitely a site worth scouring the archive if you are at all interested in type. When there is an update (seems to be bi-weekly these days) it always puts a smile on my face as the content is always super informative/interesting and really well written. If it weren't for the lack of constant updates, it would probably be my favourite read.

•The Font Feed - From what I can tell, it's a site made to plug FontShop, but it's done is a non-obtrusive way, and the content is just too good to pass up on. Obviously this is another font related site, but rather than delve into the hows and whys that I Love Typography touches on, it goes more into where type is being used, occasionally announces new fonts (from FontShop, of course) and has an awesome, monthly post going into movie posters and media stuff.

•David Airey's Blog - The first graphic design blog I started reading, and probably the most unique I've come across. Rather than delve into design, David Airey instead goes into the world of being a designer. He talks about how to deal with clients, how to land a job, build more experience and all the ins and outs of working within the industry. For anyone who is working in the industry, or thinking about working in the industry, I'd strongly suggest checking this blog out.

•Logo Design Love - Another blog by David Airey, where rather than going into industry details, he now goes into logo design, as the title indicates. The archives here are stocked full of great information including logos he's created for companies and the details of the design process, and new content is put out on a regular basis. If you are at all interested in graphic design, branding, or logo design, I'd say this is a must read.

I have several others I read as well, but for the most part I have simply subscribed too recently to comment on, or feel others I have already talked about are better examples of the same type of thing.

New Logo

I was finding it difficult to portray the idea of transition with text only, with many of my attempts involving the use of changing letter colours. This came across as bad gradients, so tried using gradients, all of which just ended up looking like early ‘90s crap. So I tried to come up with different graphics that could portray the idea of transition.

My first idea ended up being what my final version derived from. I liked the concept, but thought it was a bit too busy and maybe even a bit tacky. I’m a big fan of simplicity, and so I really thought that it was too much like some visual throw up, but one with a solid concept behind it.

Then came this next version, which was even wilder. Despite wanting to make something simpler, I made it more complicated in an attempt to really get the idea of movement going. I think I accomplished the added movement, and thought that maybe it would work well on it’s own (without the text), but that it was just way too busy for my tastes. I debating trying to use it on it’s own, but found it didn’t work at all, even though it probably could with some major work done to it, I didn’t feel like pursuing a road I’d already decided I wasn’t going down.

Determined to fulfill my goal of simplicity, my next design came about. The first version (which I never saved) was still a bit too busy. I had simply made the lines shorter (all the criss-crossing was driving me nuts), but they were still rather thin and the start and end lines were at small, awkward angles. I reduced the number of lines, and then increased their weight to make them a bit more prominent. The idea of black to orange was both to match the text (as far as starting and ending points are concerned anyway), as well as to show a movement from dark to light. A similar idea went into the lines direction, with the vertical line to the horizontal, a sort of ‘standing tall’ symbolism at the end of the journey.

Being happy with this design I tried a few more. One was incorporating an arrow in a few different ways, but I found all of them to be a bit boring and unimaginative. I moved from that to the ‘wave’ concept, which I actually like a bit and think could be rather nice with more development, as it seems to be lacking some life to it. I would have kept going with it, but for some reason it made me think of a bank. I wish I knew why.

To try something else I went with a bouncing ball, from the dot of one ‘i’ to another, but it looks horrible, mostly because of the all caps with on small ‘i’. I probably should try it again with all lowercase letters, but I think it’ll only be slightly less of a failure, so that was that. The last one I tried was the one with the black box, in an attempt to get some irony by keeping the word transition bounded by a black box. In the final version I made the box a bit smaller in an attempt to have the word ‘transition’ escaping the box, but overall I just don’t think the idea works to well for this project.


It wasn’t over here, though. I went with the simple ‘transitioning lines’ one I mentioned above, but I hated how the second line from the right looked, so I then played with a differing amount of middle lines, ranging from the original four, to having as many as seven and as few as one. Anything more than the original was simply too much, and one was, well not dynamic enough. It was pretty much between having two or three, and I felt that three just hit home more for me. It wasn’t overly basic and simple or too crowded. Having only two bars in the middle just lacked a bit of the transitional idea, even though I thought it had a nice look. So yeah, that’s my new logo. I hope you like it. If not, or even if so, let me know.