The Globe and Mail decided to kill all of their serifs on their site today. Damned contemporary hippies.

You may remember several months ago, I asked for a critique of some logo design concepts for TC. The deadline for entries was the day right before the volunteer retreat. On the way to the retreat, the logo contest came up, and apparently, “In the Dash” didn’t refer to a race.

On a person’s grave, it has the year of their birth to the year of their death. In between those numbers is a dash (an en-dash, to be specific). A person’s life can be represented as that dash. So, what did you do in that dash?

Of course, if you saw my design, you’ve noticed that I interpreted dash as in race. I thought that I’d screwed up and that I was done. That was further solidified once I realized that January had passed and that I didn’t hear anything.

Until of course, yesterday. I got an e-mail in my super secret account that very few people know of. Basically, it was to say that I won. Yay! My design didn’t suck after all.

Today I got a phone call from Paula, saying that they found a picture on the Internets that looked very similar to my logo and that they’d discuss it some more. I told her that I’d only used a photo as the base for my design.

Well, crap.

A few hours later, she called again to tell me that they decided that it was original but that they didn’t feel comfortable using it because it bore too much resemblance to that picture they found. So they ended up not using it.

I must say that the timing for this was really crappy. They find the picture one day after they told me my design got chosen. Not only that, but how did they find that picture? It took me forever to find the perfect picture to use as my base. The only resemblance my design has to the source photo is the general shape.

Of course, this has taught me a few things. See, I can’t draw. If I could, that’d be totally awesome and I’d be able to make more cool things. But I can’t. The best I can do is take something that has elements of what I’d like to have in whatever I’m designing and adapt them. Apparently, I didn’t adapt enough and that worked against me.

I’ve been trying to use less and less photos recently, mainly because there isn’t too much I can do with them in Inkscape. So to solve both problems at the same time, I’m going to try more and more to design only with type. I’ve got a good library of typefaces to choose from and I’m sure that those unicode blocks will have some glyphs that are of use.

In retrospect, using type would really have been a good idea, considering that the original theme revolved around a dash. I could probably think up some good ideas right now, but I guess it’s too late for that.

There’s been much talk in the news lately about video games and their hand in the deaths of several people all around the world. This has led to an incredible number of attacks on gaming by critics and legislators. Several states in the US have attempted to draft legislation to prohibit the sale of violent games to minors while simultaneously restricting that right to legal adults in the process.

Of course, this has led to much dissent in the gaming community and threats to politicans. Not threats of bodily harm, of course, but threats of the looming generation of gamers who are growing up to be legal adults and become participants in the democratic process. Basically, gamers will soon be running our governments and the politicians do not realize it. (more…)