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Saturday, August 09, 2008
Logos designed by Mark Bult, 1986–2008
I think this logo for the Palo Alto Golf Course might have been the first logo I ever designed. At least, it’s the first one that I actually still like enough that I keep it in my portfolio. I still consider it one of my best.
I made it around 1986 or so. I was a teenager still, and had a job working at the City of Palo Alto’s Parks & Recreation Department, making fliers and signs and newsletters.
I’ve created a lot more logos since then. Here’s a sampling of my favorites from the past 20 years or so. Click on “Next” to scroll through them all.
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Monday, August 04, 2008
Possible new logo
I'm thinking of using this new logo I came up with yesterday. I've been sketching logos and symbols for over a year, trying to come up with a logo that I could use for personal use as well as my design company.
I was playing around with the concept of a coat-of-arms sort of design, where the illustration is symbolic of my ideologies, similar to the way a family's coat of arms tells a story of their history.
It's a skull and crossbones made out of a coffee mug, a pencil, and a monkeywrench ; )
If you don't get it, that's alright. I don't mind. Just means you need to get to know me better.
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Thursday Top 5
Where the hell is Matt? 2008 Matt has simply the best job in the world. It's hard not to be overcome with a general love of the entire planet while watching this video. Yes, even an old curmudgeon like me. And wait for the scene from Gurgaon, India, at 2:33 — it's simply the best.
Christian the lion Two guys raised a lion cub but then had to release him into the wild when he got too big to keep. After a year they travel to Africa to have a little kitty visit. Er...big kitty visit. More about the interesting reunion is available on Snopes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVNTdWbVBgc
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Thursday, May 29, 2008
Metal albums as early graphic design influence
When I was in junior high school, way before I learned there was such a job as "graphic designer," I was into two things: heavy metal and art. Well, okay, three things. Girls were on that list too, but most of them avoided me. Mostly because I was into heavy metal, come to think of it.
We had an art class at school and I was always working my interest in metal music into the art projects. The screen-printed T-shirts I made featured Ozzy Osbourne logos and the pottery lesson turned into a bust of the gore-spewing Ozzy from the cover of Speak of the Devil. Since I was one of the best artists in our class, people were always asking me to help them with their projects. Art class was the only class where I was popular.
Later on in high school, I took art, jewelry making, and four full years of drafting, all of which furthered my interest in commercial art. I was only beginning to think there might be a career for me in graphic design when I took a journalism class and caught the bug, getting sidetracked on that career path for the next four years.
By the time I started my independent newspaper in 1988, I'd already been publishing all sorts of things for years: little fanzines, newspapers, and magazines. I'd even taken a summer school course in "magazine making" when I was probably 12 or so, and I'd been on the "newspaper" staff in the 6th grade, although it was laughable to call that mimeographed atrocity a newspaper. Hell, I was the "Filler Editor" in charge of jokes and word searches to fill in the holes, so that should give you an idea of our 6th grade professionalism.
In the 7th grade I'd started an Ozzy fanzine called The Fellowship of the Blizzard, which I'd painstakingly piece together using pen and pencil art, pictures cut out of rock magazines, and typewritten pages I'd cut into columns like a real magazine. I even sold a few copies on consignment in a rock shop in Los Gatos called Buffalo Trading Co. (sadly defunct now).
In those days of the 1980s (*shudder*), I had two main graphic design influences: Steve "Krusher" Joule and Derek Riggs. Krusher was the art director for the UK's Kerrang! magazine, which I subscribed to at great cost (weekly air mail delivery to the U.S. cost over $100 per year). He was also the mastermind behind the album designs for most of Ozzy's early groundbreaking solo albums.
I copied Krusher's designs for much of my work between the 7th grade and the 11th, when I finally gave up publishing the Fellowship newsletters. You can see his influence by comparing the Ozzy albums above with the newsletter. I designed the Fellowship logo in the 7th grade, deducing the concept of a vanishing point purely be scrutinizing the Blizzard of Ozz album cover. Not bad considering I hadn't even taken my first drafting class yet.
Derek Riggs' work was also influential (as was the music of Iron Maiden, not coincidentally), and I even dedicated a special edition of my Ozzy fanzine to Maiden, with plenty of Riggs album and single covers displayed inside. I would later spend a lot of time avoiding my homework in high school by drawing the Maiden logo on everything from my binders and schoolbook covers to my pant legs and a couple of friends' jackets. If I'd had the smarts to charge people, I could'a made a few bucks.
In later years I'd dabble in copying the style of Pushead, who was famous then for skate decks and lots of Metallica T-shirt designs, and I'd mastered the reproduction of the logos of bands from Queensryche and Dokken to Dio and Megadeth.
Krusher stopped doing Kerrang! eventually and I'd moved on before then anyway, gathering plenty more "traditional" graphic design influences. Riggs stopped doing Maiden's album art when the band didn't like one of his covers, and they've been done by other artists since, often in a similar style and of course always featuring the famous Eddie.
But even today those two artists stand as possibly the first two professional designers I knew by name, and they've had a lasting effect on my style, technique, and aesthetic. Thanks guys.
Jim Houser interview A typically conversational Fecal Face interview with illustrator Jim Houser. The best part is the ton of pictures of his home/workspace. www.fecalface.com/SF/
The Small Stakes I have this Death Cab for Cutie shirt I really like, and it was designed by Jason Munn, who has churned out some amazing posters and designs over the past five years from his Oakland studio. www.thesmallstakes.com
Consumer Consequences An interactive game that asks, "What would the world look like if everyone lived like me?" You may have played games like this before (sometimes it's more like a quiz), but this one is notable in that it allows you to compare your answers at the end to other people's, including some American Public Media personalities. Thanks to Ynnej for the link. sustainability.publicradio.org
The Superest An ongoing character illustration battle between Kevin Cornell, Matthew Sutter, and occasional guest artists. www.thesuperest.com
WGA Strike: A Love Story The Writer Guild strike continues, but the writers keep writing, while the networks give you reruns and game shows. youtube.com/watch?v=EodzF_orJQY
Watch your (fo)odometer How many miles does your food travel from field to fork? Presented in an interestingly animated fashion. youtube.com/watch?v=p4RCyxgz97g
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Thursday, November 22, 2007
Thursday Top 5
Microsoft's Seadragon/Photosynth Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft Live Labs demos Seadragon/Photosynth, some incredible software that's capable of assembling static photos into zoomable, navigatable spaces.
"Happy" A short animation from Vancouver Film School. This one's for Sage and Dakota. x D
The Russian Avante-Garde Book: 1910–1934 An online exhibit from the MoMA (New York). This one's for Olya and any people who appreciate historical art, design, and typography. www.moma.org/exhibitions/2002/russian/
Carrier Pigeon A well-done video podcast about all kinds of stuff, from designer Dave Werner. minorstudios.com Never heard of Dave Werner? He's a somewhat recent grad of the Porfolio Center. Check out his absolutely exceptional portfolio: okaydave.com
Barista Brat The rants and raves of a Starbucks Barista. Fun and even informative. This link's for Jenny, who recently got a job at a small coffee place in San Francisco. baristabrat.blogspot.com
"Helvetica" A beautiful film about a very pedestrian thing: The most common typeface of all. (I liked the film so much, I pre-ordered the DVD.) www.helveticafilm.com
Leaving Home... A very eloquent, moving, eye-opening story from a surprising source. riverbendblog.blogspot.com
"So You Want To Be a Movie Intern" Apple and the makers of the movie "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising" did some sort of promotion that filmed the experiences of nine interns on this movie. There are some short episodes available on the ITMS and they're kinda interesting. [This link will launch iTunes Music Store to view the videos] phobos.apple.com
Donate blood I'm not sure when the next CNET Networks donation day is scheduled for, but you can always make an appointment at the Blood Centers of the Pacific's downtown location, which is only about three blocks away. I went last week. www.bloodcenters.org
How to take a product-shot photo on a white background A pretty simple method. I tried it out the other night, and while it's a little harder to get a really good result than it might first seem from this tutorial, it works pretty well. www.sxc.hu/blog/post/133
No, this is not OK: Oklahoma fights global terrorism with, um, license plates
This is just dumb for so many reasons. Plenty of others will, I am certain, point out how retarded this is. But since few of them will likely discuss how retarded the design is, let me just do it briefly.
1. Dessert camo? Really? In...Oklahoma? And need I point out how completely offensive it is to presume that all terrorists live in dessert regions?
2. Nice clip art, buddy. Who designed this, an admin? Just so you know, copying a clip art building to make two of them does not exactly make you a designer. And you might want to make it the right building, or at least close. The World Trade Center didn't have big horizontal stripes between floors, you twat.
3. Design 101: Black on red is not readable. Especially tiny black numbers on a tiny little red banner...from a distance.
Hey Oklahoma. This makes you look like a bunch of idiots. And I'm not even talking about the design. I really wouldn't expect much better from a state agency, nor a license plate. I'm talking about the whole idea of commemorating (celebrating?) the "global war on terrorism" with a license plate. That's so incredibly nationalistic it's hard for me to put it in words how offended I am.
Not to mention the mind-boggling idea that some official at the Oklahoma State Tax Commission actually had the thought, "Hey, we could make money by offering a terrorism plate."
Maker Faire and the Alternative Press Expo (part 1)
Two of the coolest things I went to in the past few months were the Maker Faire and the Alternative Press Expo. Take my advice: Put both of these events on your calendar for next year!
The Maker Faire is a big fair for DIY gadget enthusiasts. There were some great things to see, including a guy who figured out how to made his own Segway and a massive city made entirely of Legos. But I'll let this CNET Crave video do the talking.
At the Alternative Press Expo I bought a big stack of comics, books, graphic novels, and artwork. I missed this event last year and I'm really glad I got to go this year. It was fantastic and very inspiring. One of the best parts is that, unlike the bigger Wondercon at Moscone, most of the tables are manned (personed?) by the artists themselves. So I ended up seeing my old friend Lloyd Dangle of Troubletown fame (a comic you've probably seen in your local alternative newsweekly), and met a bunch of other fantastic artists. Oh, and I also went to the panel featuring Bryan Lee O'Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim series that I enjoyed so much last year.
The stuff I got this year
"God Made Dirt, and Dirt Don't Hurt" A really cool DVD and booklet of awesome artwork by David Lee and the Triplewide Design Collective. www.triplewide.net
Restitution Press An awesome silkscreened booklet by the guys at Restitution Press, and a signed print by one of the artists, Ryan Graff. www.RestitutionPress.com Their domain seems to have been recently taken over by a newspaper, but their MySpace page (sorry) is still up. You can also see some pictures of their work in this Flickr set.
"Tea Club" Signed by the artist, Phuong-Mai Bui-Quang (a.k.a. PMBQ). Plus a custom PMBQ illustration of a panda wearing headphones and eating toast (also signed). www.tea-club.net
"Lava Punch: First Launch" I bought the zine from Bay Area artist Jillian Ogle, who also did a custom illustration inside it for me. www.soylentworks.com
Scott Pilgrim I got Bryan Lee O'Malley to sign my copies of "Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life" and "Lost at Sea." Scott Pilgrim was my favorite find in the past couple years. It's hilarious. But I fully expect the series to take forever to wrap up, since the third book was delayed by many months, and I just get a sense from O'Malley that getting things done is, for him, kind of like pulling teeth. www.scottpilgrim.com
Troubletown Lloyd Dangle, who I first met around fifteen years ago during my volunteer time with the Graphic Artists Guild's NorCal Chapter, signed copies of his Troubletown books "Told You So" and "Funky Hipster Trash." www.troubletown.com
Optic Nerve I got a good deal on Adrian Tomine's "Optic Nerve" issues 1-7 and 9-11 (I have no idea why they didn't have #8). www.drawnandquarterly.com
"Wet Moon 2: Unseen Feet" I'd bought the first book by Ross Campbell a year ago or so, and the second one just came out recently. A couple freebies came with "Wet Moon": "The Damned" by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt, and "Maintenance" by Jim Massey and Robbi Rodriguez. www.greenoblivion.com/wetmoon.html
Sean Seamus McWhinny Velma got two comics: "Diary of a Catering Whore" and "Head Trip: by Sean Seamus McWhinny. www.seanseamus.com
"Runoff" I bought a three-book series called "Runoff" from an artist named Tom Manning (signed). I read the first one on my trip to Boston, and it was really good. I'm taking the other two to Missouri next week. Apparently the director of "Pan's Labyrinth" is considering making a movie from the comics. www.robotsandmonkeys.com
"The ACME Novelty Library: Volume 17" I love Chris Ware's work. So I finally bought this. quimby.gnus.org/warehouse
"Fleet Street Scandal: Volume One" Artists Kevin Dart and Chris Turnham both signed this book for me, plus a print of Kevin's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" artwork. This book is swaaaank. www.fleetstreetscandal.com
Monster Sex A set of "Monster Sex" cards/prints by the splendid illustrator Jen Wang. I should've gotten her to sign the cool red envelope they come in, but she seemed pretty busy with other customers and I was on a schedule by that point, hurriedly trying to see the entire last aisle quickly because Velma was waiting to leave. www.jenwang.net
That's all just the stuff I bought. You should see the stack of postcards and samples I have! In the next installment Part 2 below, I'll feature even more cool art.
Part 2: The stuff I saw
Update June 2008: Okay, I've had this list for a year and never set aside enough time to grab some images for it, but today I decided it was finally time. Here are the other artists and things I saw at APE 2007. I'm looking forward to APE 2008, coming this fall.
Daniel M. Davis An Arizona artist with two books of cute monster illustrations and a website with lots of good tips for other cartoonists and self-publishers. www.SteamCrow.com
Pandoras Trunk A cooperative art boutique and gallery in the Haight. Artist Nome Edonna's work pictured here. www.PandorasTrunk.com
Cartoonists With Attitude A group of social commentary and political cartoonists. Barry Deutsch is one of the contributors, whose Hereville webcomic is pictured above ("Possibly the best comic about a troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl you'll read all week."). www.CartoonistsWithAttitude.org
Masheka Wood A Brooklyn, NY, comic artist who debuted his first book, "Deep Doodle," at the expo. www.WhatMashekaDid.com
A Comic a Day A blog that reviews a new issue of a different comic book series every day. AComicADay.blogspot.com
Michael Paulus Interesting artist who works in myriad media. You may have seen his series of cartoon character skeletons. www.michaelpaulus.com/gallery
Ben Walker I really like his style, and his site's pretty cool too. www.benwalkerart.com
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
Know your potential client
Doing freelance design for 20 years has enabled me to hone my client selection skills over time.
What does that mean? It means knowing how to spot whether a potential new client will be easy to work with or hard to work with.
When you're starting out as a freelancer you're often living month to month and it seems like you can't possibly turn any paying client away. But trust me, one of the best things I've done in my career is to hone my skills at determining what kind of client each new referral will be. It has saved me a lot of headaches over the years.
Of course, you don't always know if that person is going to be a micromanaging meddler, or a waffling mind-changer, or any of the other 379 types of clients, but with attention and experience you can learn how to get it mostly right most of the time, and pick clients who will both help you pay your bills and not drive you completely insane.
Perusing the stories at www.clientcopia.com made me think of this one time recently, though, that I slipped up and didn't let the signals and flags alert me to the fact that I had an asshat for a client.
About two and a half years ago, I had decided to take the plunge and look for a "real" job with a "real" company and to stop freelancing. I was sending out my résumé to lots of places and going on interviews and all that stuff. I applied for a Senior Designer or Art Director or something position at this interactive design firm in San Francisco that I'd never heard of, but they called me for an interview, and I drove up to meet them.
I'd looked at this company's site and the work was alright, but I wasn't all that impressed. However, it was a potential job. I was living off a couple small contracts and tiny side projects but was spending most of my time looking for full-time employment and working on my woefully outdated portfolio, so money was going to run out in a few months and I figured I'd better go to any interview that came along.
I probably should have been more selective and maybe put more weight into the fact that their site was not that impressive. Their client list was, however, so I decided what the hell.
I met with the CEO and we had a good interview and I thought it was going well. We talked about my online portfolio a bit and then he asked me for the URL again and I spelled it out for him as he typed it on his keyboard. He was using a Mac, I don't remember what model or anything, but I recall he had a rather old Apple large-screen CRT. I didn't think much about this at the time, until he said my site wasn't displaying right and I came around the side of his desk to see what the trouble was.
For starters, he was using System 9. By this time, System 9 was pretty much an antique OS, so I was a little surprised to say the least. The following flashed through my mind: "WTF is this CEO of an international design company doing using System 9?" but I was in the middle of an interview and didn't want to get distracted by what my mind was saying to me. Mistake #1.
Oh, did I mention that he was also using Internet Explorer on System 9? Okay, 'nuff said.
So the interview continues, I show him some of my print stuff and he likes it, but he says he's not quite ready to hire someone, he's got a few candidates he's considering, including me, and he kind of apologetically asks me if I'd do a contract job for him to sort of test the waters. Five hundred bucks or something, to do one design with three page mockups for one of his clients that needs a website redesign.
I thought this was actually a great idea, because I would get to test the waters too. And while I ordinarily would charge somewhere between $3,000 and $30,000 for such a project, he wasn't actually expecting all the research and associated work I'd normally do, just some quick mockups and only a single design. Plus it was a bit of cash, and I wasn't in a position to say no to any cash, no matter how little. Mistake #2.
He was probably having a couple of his other interviewees do the same thing; then he'd have three or four design directions to present to his client, and he'd only have to pay $1,500 or $2,000 to do them. Ordinarily, I'd frown on this sort of thing, but I made a compromise in this case, thinking, hey it might lead to a job. Mistake #3.
It turned out the client was one of the world's biggest manufacturers of Flash memory, but they had a totally non-impressive website considering this status. So I headed home, reviewed their site, and with basically no direction and no assets, I created three really good page designs. I delivered them via email to the design firm, and they really liked them, and told me they'd get back to me in a few days, after their meeting with the client.
I uploaded a tiny screenshot of the homepage mockup to my blog and wrote a brief post about it. I sent my bill to the design firm and went back to sending out résumés and working on my online portfolio.
A week or two later I get this angry email from the design firm's CEO, saying that "somehow" the client had come across my post on my blog, and they were angry and it was unprofessional of me to post it and implying that the client was threatening to sue him and demanding that I take it down right away. And oh, by the way, we haven't gotten your bill yet, can you send that right away? Thanks.
First off, I'm thinking, "They 'somehow' came across it? Have you ever heard of a keyword alert, dumbass? Like Google Alerts?"
Then I'm thinking, what exactly is this company worried about? I put a homepage design on the web. A homepage design. Not a product schematic. Not the plans for a nuclear device. Not their patents for the past ten years.
The homepage mockup contains absolutely no sensitive information. In fact it only contains text that's on their currently live homepage! Plus some improved copy that I wrote. And their logo. And a photo. A photo that I had to get from my collection, you asshats who didn't give me anything to work with.
I reread the email and I realized that he'd mentioned that my post was "insulting as hell," which must've been because I slandered them oh so mightily by describing the client as "the market leader in Flash memory, although you wouldn't believe it from their current website".
Which was, um, true. Their site was really bad. This was a multi-billion dollar international company. And their site barely functioned. Not just ugly. Barely worked.
I imagined the scenario that set this guy off. He's sitting in his office, in front of Internet Explorer running on System 9, and the client calls him up and says, "Who the hell is this designer writing about our company and our website all over the Internet and putting up the mockup you just showed us last Tuesday?!"
And the design firm CEO guy can only say, "Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about! What? Where? On a blog? What blog? How do I get to a blog? Can I see it on my Internet Explorer?"
And he goes and (with some difficulty, I'm guessing — probably by following a link in an email sent by the client, and certainly not by doing a search to find it, or, y'know, actually knowing I had a blog in the first place) finds my post, and reads it, and sees the tiny little mockup there, and fires off this angry email at me because he felt like a complete dope for being embarrassed in front of his client.
Which I can understand. I'd be embarrassed too.
But I mean, c'mon. Let's not overreact here.
A) I put up a tiny mockup. That I designed. For starters, that entire design, with the exception of the client's logo in the corner, is owned by me under U.S. copyright law until I get paid for it, buster. Which you haven't done yet. You are a professional in the graphic design industry, are you not? You do understand copyright law, do you not? Asshat?
B) My post was insulting? As hell? What, by implying that a huge company such as your client should by all accounts have a very professional website and it's surprising that they don't? Well excuse the hell out of me for being honest. I can see how they'd be rightfully ashamed, but insulted? Methinks you need to examine your emotions a little bit more closely, friends.
C) What exactly were you angriest about? That you looked like a fool in front of your client because you'd hired some contractor to do your work for you? Or that you looked like a fool in front of the client when you didn't know that it's pretty common for designers these days to actually have a blog, and *gasp* even discuss their work on their blogs! Or was it that you were embarrassed that you hadn't asked me to sign any sort of nondisclosure agreement or even implied in any way that this homepage mockup design was some ultra-secret project that had to be kept from the world at all costs?
Look pal, I could understand them and you being upset if I'd posted something important, but it's a damn homepage with a couple paragraphs of marketingese on it. Get a grip.
(Mistake #4: Not realizing that a guy who uses Internet Explorer on System 9 is probably a few years out of touch with the way the design community — and in fact, the world — operates these days. It's about transparency, pal. It's about sharing, and community, and writing about what you do.)
Okay, so I took the screenshot down, and I deleted the client's name from the post, but I'd be damned if I was going to censor my own (truthful) post. At that point, job be damned, it was pretty evident that I didn't want to work for this asshat if this was the way he did business.
Luckily, I never had to work with him again. Although it was many months before I finally got my measly $500 out of him.
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Thursday, March 22, 2007
LogoMaid steals logo from SimpleBits
LogoMaid.com is a chop shop for cheap, non-original logos. Most buyers wouldn't know that, of course. There are lots of these kinds of sites out there, offering readymade websites, Flash sites, templates, blog templates, logos, etc. They hire contract designers who work from home on the cheap, form all over the world, and these contractors are not necessarily very professional. They tend to take "inspiration" a little too far.
Dan Cederholm is one my favorite designers, and he's extremely well-known and -respected in the industry. He also happens to be the author of "Bulletproof Web Design," which I have recommended to many people.
Dan posted the offending LogoMaid logo on this flickr page and a long discussion has ensued between the appalled design community and a supposed representative of LogoMaid.
Big Poppa E's follow-up video "This should serve as a lesson to companies nowadays: Fuck over your employees, and they could strike back on YouTube and make you look really stupid." » www.youtube.com/watch?v=auLCmpCAguI
Is multi-touch the future of UI? You've seen it on the iPhone demos, and astute readers of this blog will remember Jeff Han's demo from when I posted it a while ago. However, this new demo takes it several steps further. » link.brightcove.com...
2007 Bloggies Some well-deserved wins and some interesting blogs I've never seen before. Now all I need is about 43 free hours a week to read them all... » 2007.bloggies.com/
As I was poking around on his personal blog I came across his cool wedding invitation and save the date postcard. Be sure to click on the link to view the popup that shows the whole inside of the booklet. It's really cool. I'm jealous.
After Velma and I decided to get hitched, I started thinking about some of the cool things we'd get to make as part of the process, like invitations. I also harkened back to a post I'd seen a year ago on a blog by a designer whose work I admire, Jason Santa Maria, who had made a website for his wedding and had posted similarly about "branding" his wedding and the associated collateral material he'd made.
I googled it to find the post again, and was duly re-inspired. Jason's an excellent designer with an extremely good sense of how typography works on the web and in print. He's responsible, among other things, for last year's excellent redesign of A List Apart.
Over the ensuing months, I had lots of ideas about what we could do, and kept notes in the little Moleskine notebook I carry everywhere.
From the very beginning we called it a "hitchin'." I'll get into the choice of wording a little more in a later post about the whole process of deciding to get married, but suffice it to say: it wasn't odd to us at all to call it "Mark & Velma's Hitchin' Party," since we'd already been asking each other for months if we really wanted to get hitched.
The save-the-date
Being the excellent event planner that she is, Velma had worked back from our October 7 hitchin' day to select a date to send out the save-the-date announcement.
Usually for a design project I have at least a few days to sketch ideas and browse through some magazines or something for inspiration. But it turned out that I had about a day to plan and execute the save-the-date design, and Velma starts getting antsy (read: annoying) when I let a deadline slide by much.
So, since I had a reasonably good idea of the design style I wanted to project (a little quirky, a little pop-art, and somewhat organic in texture), I just threw something together in about an hour and a half.
The save-the-date postcard was never actually a printed postcard, since we emailed it to everyone, and called the small handful of people who we couldn't email. This has several benefits, such as: postage savings (none), faster delivery, cheaper to produce (free), and the ability to use a totally custom design.
So, while it was never actually physically printed, the postcard intentionally looked like a printed piece. I used real paper for a textured background, and made the type look like it was actually printed on the paper. The stamps look real, down to the authentic postmark, but in reality every single item on the card was composited in Photoshop. I thought it'd be clever to use the "I love you" stamp, and then threw in a twist by using a postmark from Estonia instead of a U.S. one.
The save-the-date not only introduced the M&V circle monogram I used as the mainstay of the brand, but was for some people the first time they heard we'd decided to get hitched!
The website
This was going to be my favorite part, but also the most time-consuming. I'd originally planned to create the entire site as a Movable Type blog so Velma and I could both administer posts, and so visitors could comment right on the site. However, it was already going to be a massive undertaking to just design and build the entire site in a little over two weeks, plus I wanted to do it as an entirely CSS-based layout. So I shelved the MT blog idea and decided I could revisit it when it was all done to see if I had time to convert the static pages into dynamic MT templates. It turned out I didn't.
After the save-the-date postcard's somewhat rushed beginnings, this would be the first item to have a full-blown design, and it would serve as a visual touchstone for the rest of the collateral items to follow, such as the all-important invitations. So, as with any design project, I needed to do some sketches, consider typefaces and styles and colors, and seek inspiration from other people's designs. I also needed to collect and create visual assets like the M&V monogram, the type-based logo and its shield, the green wallpaper pattern background, and the little print-inspired flourishes.
At the same time, Velma was outlining and writing most of the content. When she handed it over to me it was about 85% done. I reorganized a few things to make them work better in a website environment, edited some things and injected a little more strange humor here and there, and started styling some of it for coding it into xHTML. I usually begin in xPad or TextEdit, inserting a few tags here and there, mostly for styling the fonts, and inserting HREFs if I have URIs already or by looking them up in the browser on the fly.
I iterated a few designs before I settled on one that I really liked. And it was a good thing, because I was beginning to run short on time. Luckily, I'd decided to take a week off from work because I was seriously exhausted from the pace at work during the Webshots redesign process, so I had a week I could dedicate to designing, building, and testing the website.
I chose a lively color scheme of bright greens and light yellow to invoke our nature-inspired theme and to emphasize our somewhat nontraditional take on the concept of a wedding. I counterbalanced that with black and red as more traditional print and ink colors, and chose old-style wood type fonts to give a somewhat retro old-timey feel. I used Georgia for all the HTML text, which is a gorgeous serif font even on the web (most serif fonts are atrocious on screen), and I used several gothics and slab serif fonts to invoke a feel of artisan printing techniques. Last but not least, the tiny flourishes and the minute lines and dashed lines are in orange, as a nod to my bride's hair color and to throw in a fall color for our autumn wedding. The orange thread we used to stitch the invitations later was not just a coincidence.
After finalizing a design template that would be generally unchanged for most pages, I created some header variations for the content area in the center. Some of the pages needed simple headers and some needed headers with sub-headers. I used HTML text for the headers in keeping with good web-standards techniques, and spruced them up by bookending them with graphic flourishes.
After the basic page template was designed in Photoshop, I created the Photos, For Out-of-Towners, and Gifts pages next, since their content would vary most from the other pages, which are largely just text pages with nice styles and spacing applied. I knew I wanted to make something special for the Photos page, but that it had to be pretty fast and easy to implement, and needed to be updatable later with wedding and honeymoon photos. I liked what Jason did on his site but I didn't want to mess about in Flash and didn't know what he'd used.
I decided to experiment with Lightbox, a fairly new and very cool JavaScript library that seemed like it would be fairly pretty easy to implement. I hoped, anyway. Turned out it was easy, and I had our photo gallery up and running in an afternoon once I started building out the xHTML pages.
I spent most of the weekdays on my week off building the xHTML framework for all the pages and the CSS to make it all look good. I use Dreamweaver to do all this stuff, since it just goes about a million times faster than hand coding used to. During the process of making a fairly complex three-column CSS-based layout without tables, I relied heavily on Dan Cederholm's excellent book Bulletproof Web Design, which I can't endorse highly enough.
Most astonishingly, I was able to build a site for the first time that validates for xHTML 1.0 Strict instead of just Transitional. I rather surprised myself by being able to do it.
Later I'd enlist the help of Jason Ables, who gave me his handy little PHP script for the RSVP page. And while I spent an hour or two looking into Perl- and PHP-based scripts to create an interactive poll for our Surname Survey page, I simply ran out of time and had to use a simple "email us your suggestion" link.
I spent a lot of time and effort on the website, and I'm very happy with how it came out. Being the perfectionist that I am, there are of course a few minor things I would have done differently or better, given more time, but all in all it came out about 98% perfect, which is more than I can say about almost any client project. So I'm very pleased with it.
The site was recognized by a number of CSS galleries, sites that serve to inspire other designers and to showcase exemplary use of design and web-standards coding.
The invitations
I'm a pro at doing invitations, I've been designing them for all kinds of events and parties for over 15 years. But this was actually the first time I'd designed a wedding invitation. Designers love to show off how clever they are when making their own wedding invites, and I'm no different in this regard.
Given more time and money I would have made them exceptionally elaborate, with letterpress printing, tipped-in sheets, and other fancy printing techniques. But it was actually more important to make them by hand for two reasons: I wanted to show the personal care and effort we were making with each one. Also, it was important to us to plan and execute a wedding that was fun but not incredibly expensive. It would be against our principles to spend $50,000 so frivolously when you can have a wonderful, memorable time for a fraction of that cost.
So I turned to long experience with designing great-looking collateral materials for nonprofits who never have any budget for printing. I've become somewhat of an expert at this, and I called on all that experience to create a design that was totally professional looking but also totally unique. To top it off, we assembled the entire thing ourselves and probably made and mailed them all for less than $300.
I used a ream of paper I'd had left over from a client project about eight years ago. I used another ream of paper we'd picked up at a surplus store for about $2 (retails usually for about $30). I bought a matching ream of cover stock for the CD inserts and the RSVP postcards, and a box of envelopes.
Velma carved the block designs for the front leaf pattern from oak leaves she'd collected. Velma and I did the block printing in one evening, and by morning they were all dry. I designed the cards in Adobe Illustrator and intentionally made them fit two-up on a normal sheet of letter paper, so we could print everything in-house. The only exception was the RSVP cards, since I couldn't get the heavy card stock to feed through the printer. Instead, I took those to Kinko's and they were copied and cut in about ten minutes.
I hand-cut and folded all the other pieces and then our friend April assembled them while Velma sewed the orange stitch in the spine using her sewing machine.
We stuffed the 70 or so invites ourselves and Velma hand-addressed them, and affixed the special stamps I'd ordered from Stamps.com a few weeks earlier. The stamps turned out to be the most costly part of the whole invite, probably around $150 or so — one on the outer envelope and one on the RSVP postcard inside. The rest of the invite's printing cost nothing since we did it all in-house. Needless to say, the design was free : )
I'm extremely happy with the way they came out. They're very distinctive and definitely match our personalities, and they were a collaborative effort through and through (even if Velma felt for a while like I was hogging all the work).
The rings
I don't know where Velma came up with the idea of getting tattoo rings, but I liked the idea instantly. I've been considering a tattoo for a couple years now, and I was pretty close to getting one last winter, but never really got around to it. Actually, until two years ago, I'd never really considered it at all. I didn't dislike tattoos, but was never that interested in them either. At least not having one permanently on me.
But that's one of the reasons I liked the idea of tattooed wedding rings. Its permanence. After all, it would be a strong statement of our commitment to say to each other that we'd permanently wear our wedding rings.
We made sketches of patterns over several weeks, trying to come up with a design that would be personally meaningful and also simple enough to do in such a small space. We played around mostly with ways to try to entwine the letters M and V, but never came up with one we were both enthusiastic about.
Nearing the hitchin' date and needing to decide on something, I took a black felt tip pen out of my drawer and sketched a simple leaf on my finger — just three lines — and showed it to Velma. We had our ring design. The leaf is a significant symbol for both of us as environmentalists and lovers of nature, and the design also happened to be aligned with the design of the invitations and website too.
The other benefits, by the way, are that you never have to worry about losing your ring, and tattoos are a lot cheaper than diamonds ; )
The favors
I had all sorts of ideas for wedding favors I wanted to make, and was probably being way too ambitious considering we didn't have months and months to plan and execute them all, and some of them would've taken a considerable amount of time (like mini photo books).
We were running low on time, and the Sharpie website didn't have anything saying how long it took to fill and ship orders, so we decided to just get the MMs, which we could get with time to spare.
We'd made a huge playlist of awesome songs to play on an amplified iPod at the park, and I wanted to make DVDs with several hundred songs for everyone, but Velma was concerned that some people would want a normal audio CD to play in their cars. That, and the fact that we had less than a week to go at this point, limited us to a playlist of 22 songs on about 75 audio and MP3 CDs we burned over the next few days.
I made two special insert cards that showed which was an audio CD and which was an MP3 CD, and had the song titles and artists on the back. For any guest who didn't get one, we have some extras and I can mail you one, or you can stream Volume 1, a bunch of extra songs we played during the day that didn't fit on the CDs, using this handy little player I found. And if you're savvy enough, I bet you can figger out how to download the ones you like.
The photo & recipe book
This part's yet to come, so I'll update the post when it's actually finished : )
Update: Regarding the oak-leaf motif used throughout the design of our Hitchin' website and invitations:
I recently learned (from a post by J.K. Rowling, interestingly) that the Oak is the Celtic tree associated with the birthdays of both Velma and myself (June 10 through July 7). I'd like to say that I'd pre-planned this symbolism in the design stage, but I didn't. The use of oak leaves was connected to our selection of the Oak Grove picnic area in Huddart Park, and was symbolic to our overall love of nature and fondness for oaks in particular.
But the Celtic birthday association is a pleasant bonus.
tags: hitchin', Velma, personal, friends, music, design, web design
Here's a brief list of clients I need to add to my portfolio page soon. I also want to write up case studies for a couple of these, but that's going to take some time.
Mark & Velma Mark & Velma's Hitchin' Party website, invitations, assorted collateral
Webshots.com website redesign
UrbanBaby.com website redesign (in progress)
Consumating.com website redesign (in progress)
People for Land and Nature (PLAN) Santa Clara County Land Conservation Initiative (Measure A) campaign materials, logo, stationery
Palo Alto Historical Association map for "Parks of Palo Alto" booklet
In the 7th grade I'd started an Ozzy fanzine called The Fellowship of the Blizzard, which I'd painstakingly piece together using pen and pencil art, pictures cut out of rock magazines, and typewritten pages I'd cut into columns like a real magazine. I even sold a few copies on consignment in a rock shop in Los Gatos called Buffalo Trading Co. (sadly defunct now).
"God Made Dirt, and Dirt Don't Hurt"
