The poster is, by its very nature, a provocative medium. Its core purpose (its only purpose?) is to provoke you to do something or to think something. It wants to install a specific thought in your head. It wants you to want the product it’s selling. It wants you to clear your schedule because you just HAVE TO attend the event it’s promoting. It wants you to change your mind and vote for THIS candidate or call your senator and convince her to support THIS bill when it comes up for debate. It wants you to rearrange your life and join the Armed Services NOW. It wants to manipulate you. Continue reading →

The final business card design for Eric D. Gowland Enterprises, a.k.a. EDGE

Visit just about any design firm website these days and you will be greeted by a host of platitudinous affirmations designed (duh!) to make you tremble at the awesomeness of their team and their process. You will be told how they sweep into your life, share an intimate Vulcan Mind Meld with you, then return to their swanky midtown Bat Cave where they design some über-cool stuff that will absolutely ROCK your bottom line. You will read bullet points about “leveraging relational synergies,” “creative partnering,” and “strategic asset assessment.” You may even find a video tour of the company basketball court or the corporate half pipe, because mentally healthy employees are creative employees. Continue reading →

Terra Mountain really has a way of putting the “peace” in “piecemeal.” Everything about this organiplacement—all at once an organization, a place, and a movement—has come into being in a natural, go-with-the-flow manner. The concept, which was built on a foundation of voluntary simplicity, sustainability, deep ecology, and community, developed organically through a number of people asking “what if” kinds of questions. The land, as tranquil and inspiring as any tract you’ve ever beheld, became available at exactly the right time. And the right people just coalesced around the idea like ice crystals forming a cloud. When it came time for graphics, the right person turned out to be I. Continue reading →

The final logo design for Hilldale

The identity I produced for Hilldale Alberta Ltd. is, I must admit, a personal favorite. It’s oh so simple, and yet it gets the job done in a clean and clever way. The mark is a balancing act on many levels, and it has to be that way, because the company itself is a balancing act. It represents quite literally the marriage of two individuals.

Hilldale is the umbrella company for all the various business endeavors of a husband and wife team, Doug and Nicole (Daley) Hill, and the name is obviously a mashup of the two last names suggesting a sense of balance, equality and collaboration in all aspects of the operation. My challenge was to underscore that balance with an unaggressive, almost non-branded identity system that could function across an organization with potentially numerous subsidiary enterprises. The solution needed to be simple and unobtrusive yet strong and credible.

Some initial sketches for the Hilldale logo

From the outset I had figured that the logo would need to be either mostly or completely typographic given the potentially broad range of activities it might need to subsume. I sorted through a short list of typefaces that struck me as appropriate for the project—faces that embodied a balance of formality and informality yet affirmed a sense of stability and trust—I was rather content with the simple elegance of some of the initial sketches I came up with. But sometimes you just have to explore the obvious clichés, so given that Hilldale is an umbrella company I took leave of my senses and played with several concepts that incorporated umbrella imagery. I actually developed one version (seen above) in a fair amount of detail, and though I eventually moved away from the umbrella theme, that particular version served a necessary purpose.

Whenever I alter any of the letterforms in a typeface I begin to look more carefully at the curves and stroke weights, and I have a tendency to shift from viewing the letters typographically to viewing them architecturally. This is exactly what happened with the Hilldale mark. Suddenly, I was aware of the strong relationship between the lowercase letterforms of Bodoni, particularly the d and the h with their identical ascenders. I quickly realized that combining the d and the h into one glyph with a shared ascender brought everything together. It represented the initials of Doug Hill, the president of the company, as well as the initials of the two last names, and the curve of the h, when set off in a different color, hinted at the initial n for Nicole.

Cards and letterhead for Hilldale

This revelation alone was enough to convince me that I had found the right solution. If there was any hesitation in my mind, it quickly vanished when I realized that the mark, when rotated 180 degrees, spelled the word “up.” With its connotations of affirmation and prosperity, it was the perfect subconscious element to tie together all of the possible business dealings of a successful umbrella company. This is exactly the sort of synchronicity that occurs when a designer has worked through the clutter and reached a logical and clever conclusion. Done and done.

With the mark complete, all that remained was to polish the typography. I contrasted the informal yet classy feel of the all lowercase hilldale with the more formal, upstanding feel of small caps for ALBERTA LTD. For colors, Doug had requested something bold but tasteful, and since he’s an Edmonton Oilers fan, a variation on blue and orange was a strong choice and one that he readily embraced. When it came time to apply the identity to letterhead and business cards, I carried through the warmth and personality of the lowercase letterforms for the individual names to maintain a sense of credibility juxtaposed with approachability.

The logo for Hilldale Enterprises

The final test, of course, came when Doug mentioned that he would need a variation prepared for, Hilldale Enterprises Ltd., a satellite organization operating in Ontario. I simply changed ALBERTA to ENTERPRISES and modified the accent color for an equally strong associated mark. Two different companies, both under the same umbrella.

As a designer and a philanthropist, I’m always on the lookout for projects that will allow me to stretch my creativity and help the world at the same time. So when I was approached about the possibility of redesigning the web presence for karuna.us, an online charity auction platform, I was beyond excited. The concept behind Karuna was simple. The site hosted ongoing auctions for a broad range of things, much like eBay, but for every completed transaction a portion of the sale went to a charity of the purchaser’s choosing. It offered people everywhere the chance to become philanthropists while doing something they do every day: buy things. Continue reading →