design
Zone 5 recently sponsored and hosted the preview party to kick-off the Vanguard Designer Showhouse event, which raises money for the Albany Symphony Orchestra.
Kicking off the 2012 Designer Showcase
The annual Designer Showhouse is Vanguard's major fundraiser. The visitors to the Showhouse have enjoyed seeing both historic homes in which beautiful decorative features from the past have been preserved and new built homes exhibiting fine craftsmanship of our own time. This year, “Urban Elegance” was the theme, and our next-door neighbors at 17 Chapel Street showed off their boutique condominiums.
After the preview, folks came over to 25 Monroe Street for the party! The expert designers had this to say:
The modest façade of 25 Monroe Street belies the sleek, modern, sophisticated interior of Zone 5, where the loft-like setting inspires the creative juices for this award-winning communication agency. When the doors slide quietly open you are greeted by high open ceilings, beautiful wood-paneled walls, a gorgeous wood-encased wine cooler stocked with vintage wines from some of the best vineyards, and you know you have arrived at one of Downtown Albany’s very best kept secrets! Is this really Zone 5 or is it Hernando’s Hideaway?
Floors of bamboo, cork and gorgeously mottled slate lead you through high energy spaces that promise long, challenging conversations or brief but inspiring encounters. An outdoor deck provides views of the Capitol and the hidden beauty of the Arts and Business District of Downtown Albany.
We’re so flattered! The showhouse continues through May 20, so see their site for more information.
Project Hewlett Martin is my codename for the three sessions in which I try to teach two of our fabulous designers how to do CSS.
This has been a long time coming. We need to be more web designers (not just print designers) and as such, we need to be more web savvy. They've been interested in HTML5 and CSS3, so I'm trying to get them more involved. The hope is that the web developers will be able to build HTML templates that the designers can style with CSS. If they can't, no harm in trying. And even if they can't it will inform their designs, probably irreparably.
So today was our second day. I started by going over the box model with them. This is best done on a white board. It really helps if you can draw nice rectangles, which apparently I cannot do anymore. I listed a few "block level" elements and a few "inline" elements and explained the differences between them.
And then I made them write code.
I figure, you can watch all the tutorials you want. I can wave my hands at it for hours. You're never going to get it until you have to do it. So I had each of them tinker with a CSS file for twenty minutes. They accomplished a lot, really. They got the gist of background and foreground colors, margin and padding, and we went over how CSS treats italics completely different than bold. They even changed an unordered list into something that looked like a real menu.
It's been interesting. Code and design are really two completely different mindsets. I understand code, they understand design, so we're trying to fuse our ways of thinking and produce something new. It's also been interesting for me to see how things I take for granted are actually kind of stupidly confusing.
The Mini design team is taking cues from other design disciplines and offering up some very clever solutions to usability issues that have plagued automobiles since there were enough of them to fill a parking lot.
Check out the double-hinged door for access in tight places, and more info over at Core 77.
Interesting discussion about the design and typography decisions behind Wellesley College's logo redesign process.
Wellesley Identity Video Presentation on Vimeo.
Typedia is a fascinating site and a great place to get lost for an hour or two. Created by a team that includes Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh and Dan Cederholm, "Typedia is a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them. Think of it like a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. Anyone can join, add, and edit pages for typefaces or for the people behind the type." But before you even start browsing the type listings on the site, check out John Langdon's blog post on the design process behind the site's logo. An interesting glimpse into the back and forth design process between talented people who love what they do.
Fun, cool and pitch-perfect packaging design for the Brooklyn Fare gourmet food store by Mucca Design.
Wolda (Worldwide Logo Design Annual) has announced the winners of its 2008 logo design competition, and without exception the designs are clean, elegant, timeless, and place a premium on concept. No drop-shadowed, beveled, reflected Web 2.0 logos here. Interesting, too, to see so much typographic cleverness.
Speaking of logos, here’s a redesign that just hit it out of the park. In preparation for the 100th anniversary of the Good Housekeeping Seal in 2009, designer Louise Fili did a wonderful job of capturing the brand — the new seal looks like it’s been there for every one of those hundred years. Check out the swooshy “modern” seal it’s replacing on Brand New, where they discuss some of the confusion over which version is actually the new one. (We’re so ready to expect a wrong turn from corporate design that there’s almost a double-take when they get one right...)
Logo Design Love shows us some of the early iterations considered by the Obama creative team. Lead creative Sol Sender: “We developed a lot of logos. Usually we only develop two to four, maybe five. There were 15, 16 options, and we focused on three.” They explored quite a few variations on the 08/OB juxtaposition, and it’s interesting to see the early version of the final logo — the relatively small change to the red stripes makes a huge difference.
Saatchi & Saatchi has unveiled revisions to the iconic American-Typewriter-and-red-heart “I Love NY” logo created by Milton Glaser in 1977. Although the logo hasn’t been “revised” so much as it’s been “accessorized” — festooned with small, generic illustrations, different graphics for various purposes. The version with the squirrel seen here represents the “parks” theme. Jim Edwards at bnet has more images and lots of reaction links; hard to find the cheerleaders for this one. The brand guidelines pdf is especially interesting reading. No mention, though, of how all this might affect the business development brands created over the last few years that have remixed the logo elements: NY Loves Business, NY Loves Film, and many others, including a couple that Zone 5 has had a hand in: NY Loves Nano, NY Loves Clean Tech and NY Loves Bio.
A site for those who love the grid (and what designer doesn't?): The Grid System is a great collection of articles, templates and cool tools to help keep your designs in line.
Ideo CEO Tim Brown’s talk at the 2008 Serious Play conference about the role of play in creativity and design work.
The first thing that pops into my mind when Saul Bass’ name is mentioned is the classic title sequence from The Man with the Golden Arm, one of just many amazing title sequences he did for directors like Hitchcock, Scorsese and Kubrick. Here’s a reminder that his logo work resided in the stratosphere as well: 12 iconic brands that have really stood the test of time.
