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The Industrial Brand Team wish you and yours a terrific holiday season and a successful 2006. We’re hoping to enjoy a little break over the holidays - and some BBQ, but if you’re feeling nostalgic, revisit a few of our Wishes of Holidays Past.
We love discussions and to be challenged. Did this post rub you the right (or wrong) way? Leave a comment and generate discussion. We need the distraction from work!
The BC Chapter of GDC has been selected among a select few organizations to receive the 2008 Capilano University President’s Service Awards as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations. GDC/BC was honoured for its continued support and contributions to the university, its students and the design industry into which their graduates enter upon completing their studies.
To celebrate its 40th year since opening in 1968, Capilano University will be holding a special President’s Service Awards event on Saturday, November 15 from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Birch building atrium at the North Vancouver campus.
After months of work and anticipation, today is the day. The day we launch our new identity with a new website, blog and an unimaginable list of collateral and promotional item including a new logo, new tagline, new stationery, new promo items, new website, new EVERYTHING.
Design and producing an entirely new brand identity for you own company is both exhausting and rewarding—especially if you’re a design firm! We have to be the hardest client we’ve ever worked for! And this has to be the most expensive project we’ve ever tackled! We now have a whole new sense of empathy for corporate clients that hire us to do brand identity work for them.
Now that it’s over, we’re hosting a celebration party tonight and would love you to join us. Details and RSVP here.
As a Partner and Design Director at a thriving studio, I tend to spend more time bringing in new business, dealing with clients or taking care of administrative duties more than actual design and production these days.
Par for the course I suppose, but I do miss getting into the thick of it on a more regular basis. So when our friend and client Cory Weeds, owner of Cellar Live Records, came to us with a jazz album design project, I scooped it before anyone else could claim lead.
I don’t usually re-post from Gizmodo since so many of you are already following that blog, but since today is Halloween and this kid’s mech costume is so freakin’ cool, I couldn’t resist.
This costume would probably get him enough cool-factor points to last well into junior high. Unfortunately, after that, no matter how much work you put into it, guys in costumes like this never get laid.
Happy Halloween.
The Rubitone, by Ignacio Pilotto: A Rubik’s Cube with Pantone colour chips—now why didn’t I think of that? [props to my man Cory for the heads up]
Dubai. I have a strange fascination with Dubai, I would love to visit the city that seems to change substantially every few years.
You live in a hot climate but like to ski - build ‘Ski Dubai’
If you like to go to Disney land but don’t want to travel as far - build ‘Dubailand’
6 star luxury hotels don’t quite cut it for you anymore - build the worlds only seven star hotel
A regular ‘nature made’ island is not quite the shape you are after - build your own
Giant Ant Media is a Vancouver based moving image company with a great fun attitude. Check out their site and spend time looking at their work. My pics are ‘men anonymous’ and under the ‘flea market’ the second video.
As mentioned previously, Richard and I are co-hosting Likemind Vancouver, which has recently gotten the attention of the New York Times.
So, if you’re interested in 45 minutes of coffee and casual conversation with likeminded creative professionals about whatever issues are on your mind, then join us on Friday, December 5th at JJ Bean Coffee House (2206 Commercial Drive) at 8:00am sharp.
See you soon!
I consider myself lucky to one of the lucky few able to get a ticket to last night’s sold out inaugural Interesting Vancouver conference with some friends. Oops, I meant to say “unconference.” It was the third local event that I’d consider part of the unconference social movement which is growing in popularity, as both a co-host of Likemind Vancouver and an attendee at the latest edition of Pecha Kucha—all in the span of a week.
My friends and I, including CSS guru Dave Shea, his beautiful fiancé Lauren Isaacson, and my colleague Matt SamyciaWood, decided to try to avoid using the word “interesting” during the event, lest the offender be forced to buy the next round. Let’s just say it was good thing we augmented the rules before we were completely sideways and Matt had hit the limit on his credit card. That would have made the night ahead definitely…uh…interesting.
Smashing Magazine has posted their latest picks for 50 Beautiful Blog Designs. In their words:
In the showcase below we present 50 beautiful blog designs that literally stand out — either through their layout or through their design or through their attention to little details. Below you’ll find a variety of designs: clean designs, grunge, retro, graphics-heavy designs etc. Most designs presented below risk unusual approaches in the choice of design and content presentation. That’s what makes them different.
There are indeed some amazing sites there. Perhaps the most interesting thought is the idea of risk. As in, the riskier the site, the less intuitive it may be. Designing corporate sites for clients can sometimes be a real balancing act between what conforms to an accepted standard of user interface design and innovation, real innovation. So, the measure really does become one of risk. Risk of misinterpretation, missed navigation, intent, content delivery, usability, legibility, etc that some clients simply aren’t willing to take. Fair enough.
There’s always more to lose when you are a corporation vs. an artist or individual making a statement by bucking convention, but that should not mean boring, conventional same-same design by any means. Hope these inspire you to take things one step further.
Wolda ‘08 Worldwide Logo Design Annual Winners Announced, though none from Canada or Mexico
We’ve kept our eye on this year’s inaugural Wolda ‘08 Worldwide Logo Design Competition hosted by Italy’s Eulda Books. They recently announce the winners chosen by an international three-tier jury, including GDC’s own David Coates. 192 logos (174 professionals + 18 designed by students) were selected from almost 1100 entries submitted from 43 different countries around the world—though not a single winner were from either Mexico or Canada. All winning logos are showcased on their website and in the Wolda ‘08 printed annual available for sale now.
Let’s hope we see a few Canadian examples of winning logo design in the 2009 competition.
As we near the final launch of the our new brand identity, we’re putting the final touches on promo items such as a new demo reel.
For the music, we asked our good friend and frequent collaborator Alan Wong-Moon to compose an original track for us. Called The Industrial Boogie, it features the trombone stylings of our very own designer Steve Mynett, and the trumpet mastery of our friend and client Chris Davis (who’s new album A Night Remembered has just been released on the Cellar Live label).
Stay tuned for our demo reel’s official reveal on November 14th.
Another part of relaunching a brand with as many media touchpoints as ours is all the photography required! Beyond the endless portfolio shots of work is the need for headshots of our team. Enter Sven Boecker, longtime friend, client, collaborator and photographer of choice at Industrial Brand.
Our team had heaps of fun as Sven got us to scowl, laugh, dance, undress (now there’s a visual you didn’t need) and strike all manner of poses, resulting in some really great images that captured everyone’s personality.
Thanks Sven, for making yet another photo shoot a pleasure to experience.
You don’t have to look too closely to see logos or products in films: yellow Asics in Kill Bill, Audi in Iron Man, etc… Design group Antrepo created these interesting posters, re-interpreting recent blockbusters through the lens of branding. Simple layout, no images just a list of brands. You can try to spot them all tonight at SIGGRAPH event “The Nuts & Bolts of Iron Man”.
And Iron Man wears Dolce&Gabbana, nothing else.
My day started today by finding out that I had accidentally saved a crop of a website design yesterday. In the perfect storm of backup redundancies not working (including the most important one – my brain) I was left with one of two options: a) Spend a day rebuilding the file in an already tight timeline or b) finishing production from memory.
Turns out there’s an option 3.
Step 1) Open the affected PSD
Step 2) Increase Canvas Size
Turns out, this recovers around 90% of the data. While I’m unsure of why some of it was saved, and some of it was lost, I’m just thankful to have my file back. To best of my examination layers that I had drawn pixels in with the pencil tool, or “fill with background colour” were lost while smart objects and objects build with the rectangle / circle tool(s) were maintained. The biggest issue is that a lot of the masks were messed up, but nothing that an hour can’t fix. Maybe some adobe junkie and shed some light on this?
Tommy contributed a comment on December 23rd, 2005.
Where you take the photo, I need to buy the BBQ duck for Christmas..
Robert Payne contributed a comment on December 26th, 2005.
You all need some help with your christmas spirit :)..