i’m a fortunate girl! i get to spend the holidays with all my family… it’s a lot of travelling for me and my husband (we live on the west coast, my parents live in the southern united states and my in-laws are in Toronto and we hit all 3 locations) but we wouldn’t have it any other way!
all the best to you and yours this holiday season. see you in 2010!
and it turns out the winners follow the losers in the brand new “best and worst of 2009″ post. here’s my personal favourite winner… the redesign of the new york public library identity. it brings the design beautifully into 2009 with updated type and an impactful icon but in a way that completely respects the heritage of the mark. love it.
brand new has posted its top 10 worst logos of 2009, here. my personal favourite worst? this identity for the state of wisconsin. it’s just a hot mess.
i’ll be heading to toronto for part of my christmas holidays, and i think i’ll have to make a special trip to the gladstone hotel. motherbrand has set up a pennysmash machine. for a measly toonie (plus the penny to be smashed) you can get yourself a lovely typographic souvenir featuring the work of no less than typographer-extraordinaire marian bantjes.
also featured are designs by douglas coupland, paul butler and burton kramer. fun fun!
i used to live in toronto, and during my years there, was fortunate enough to make the 2-hour (sometimes 4 depending on traffic) drive up hwy 400 every weekend to my family’s cottage. i live in vancouver, now, and i love it, but oh, how i miss the cottage! two weeks in the summer just isn’t enough.
that’s why today i’m loving this line of dinnerware designed by jules goss and graham hufton for motherbrand. beavers, marshmallows on sticks and little campfires combine for a wonderfully evocative place setting.
love this take on the keep it simple, stupid principle of effective brand management:
Don’t expect your audience to give your product even a moment of thought. We’re all too busy for that. Instead, go the other way. Limit what you say to one spectacular thing about what you offer. (This of course necessitates doing one thing spectacularly.) If you need to write more than a sentence to do this, you might be in trouble. Smart people can make complex things seem simple; it goes the other way, too. When you make things complicated, you scare people away. The best plans and brands can be explained quickly without added verbiage, complexity or defense.
from eric karjaluoto’s new book, speak human. you can see excerpts here (chapter 1) and here (the 10 commandments of branding).
so i asked for a subscription to uppercase journal for christmas and lo and behold, look what showed up in my mailbox today. sorry, mum, i think the surprise is ruined! but thx so much. this publication is delicious. i can’t wait to dig in.
david airey is giving away a chapter of his new book, logo design love, for free! that’s right, PDF download, no strings attached. and aren’t we lucky that it’s the chapter on going from pencil to PDF – lots of helpful tips on the concept stage of identity design. thx david!
read more about the book/order/download the chapter here.
these screen-printed lunch sacs from bee things are just too sweet for words. didn’t stop me from writing about them, clearly. i really like the strong graphic statement. see? there? writing about them again! yeesh.
