So today, we found out what the US cover of Spice and Wolf volume 1 is going to look like. It is pretty terrible. It looks like either a terrible teen novel like Twilight or a terrible trashy romance novel that you’d pick up at some supermarket. I understand that you don’t want to publish a book with an anime wolf-girl on the cover, that’s fine. I’m not sure how a naked wolf-girl advances the notion that Spice and Wolf is quality stuff any better though. And of course, their offer of an alternate slipcover in an issue of Yen+ isn’t really enough to make me go out and buy a volume.

So in about five minutes, I’ve managed to think up a better cover design. The problem beyond the cover being terrible is how they plan to make covers for future volumes have the same look and feel. My ideal cover would be some sort of sketch or watercolour of the place they’re visiting, say a field of wheat for volume one or Rubenhaigen for volume two, and Lawrence’s cart somewhere on the cover. There, we have a classy cover scheme that conveys the atmosphere of Spice and Wolf, fits the target audience (light, fantasy, not trash), and can be extended for future volumes.

It’s baffling because their Haruhi cover redesigns were actually pretty good. The silhouette of Haruhi is recognizably Haruhi and the use of a bright solid colour makes it easy to distinguish volumes apart while keeping them visually consistent.

It’s unfortunate, because I was looking forward to buying Spice and Wolf much more than Haruhi. I guess that won’t be happening now.

Unlike other terrible ideas that no one liked, Waterloo decided it was probably not a good idea to press ahead with a logo that was universally loathed. In a rare moment of humility, they even decided to solicit feedback from real people. Of course, all this is for naught if the new logos are as terrible as the old ones.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. It’s pretty terrible. （　´_ゝ`）

Here, we have the first new one. It’s a huge improvement over the other one. The most obvious criticisms of Unlimited Laser Works were the billions of lines and the billions of colours used. The first is taken care of by focusing on black and gold, the school’s colours. The second is taken care of by the slight tilt and cutting the top a bit. That conveys the dynamism or whatever without having tons of crazy lines flying all over the place.

I wouldn’t mind this one at all, although I think some explanation of the process and what it symbolizes would help make it more interesting. Of course, I’m not going to whine and say it’s too plain, because it’s worlds better than the other extreme.

At first glance, this one is kind of unsettling because of the way the E fits in with the T and R. But if you take a look on the stationary (the letterhead and the business card), those three lines becomes a really clever little motif that is really flexible. I think it’s a lot better than the random curvy lines that they’re using now. It’s also not too hard to change for faculty use, just by swapping the gold for a faculty colour.

I think this one grew on me and became my choice. The problem with the other one is that it doesn’t have any strong elements that could be taken on its own, so the use of the giant W is forced upon you. This one also has the advantage of a fairly distinct wordmark.

I will never, ever understand why people think that Arial is an acceptable choice to use for something that isn’t a webpage with lots of text. I get angry when I see it. Unless you have a very good reason for using it, and you will know exactly when that is, there are only two other possible reasons that you use it.

It takes all of about fifteen seconds to analyze the text that you’re setting and choose a more suitable font. It costs nothing to acquire a typeface that works better with your text. If you can think of a sans-serif font that is legible, then 90% of the time, all you have to do is use that font instead. And believe me, everyone should know at least two, unless of course, you are blind. Knowing this, if you still choose Arial, then you are lazy.

The other case happens when you actually like Arial and think that it looks good. I can’t believe that anyone who understands design honestly thinks this. So, if you do think it looks good, you probably have no business setting any text to type at all. You should probably defer the selection of any typefaces to someone more knowledgeable in these matters.

Now that the logo design contest is over, I guess I can finally post my thoughts and explain the process on how my entry for the UWCCF logo came into existence. Originally, I had this huge writeup that I sent along with my submission that detailed every little thing that could be read into the design. On retrospect, and since having heard it read out loud, I’ve decided to revise my intended post.

So I’ve mentioned a lot of times before that I design in type. One of the first things that I knew I wanted to try out was the concept of type pairing. I was playing around with the idea of contrasting the formal air of academia and the friendliness of fellowship and I also really wanted to try and emulate the type pairing that Waterloo does on all of it’s publications (which is all explained in the recently released style guide). However, the two had to remain linked. My choice ended up being FF Scala and FF Scala Sans.

I felt that the logo was a bit sparse with just the text. With my previous stuff, I usually manipulated a letter in some way to keep it from just being plain text, but this time, I couldn’t come up with anything to tweak. The other reason I felt that I couldn’t just leave it as text was because I had a suspicion that the text under the acronym wouldn’t scale too well at small sizes. Because of this, I needed to add a picture.

The cross loopy thing was definitely the hardest part of the entire design. The problem with coming up with a picture is that what we were supposed to design for was too vague. Consider “UWCCF”. There are basically three things that gave me anything to work with from that name: Univeristy of Waterloo, Chinese, and Christian.

The problem with putting Chinese elements into the logo was that UWCCF spoke English, as opposed to MCCF or CCCF. Pretty much the only thing Chinese about English CCF was that most of us are Chinese. We don’t seek to attract Chinese speaking people because we probably can’t speak Chinese. That means we want to attract people who speak English, and not all of those people speak Chinese. And so, there’s no point of putting anything Chinesey in.

The problem with Christian is that I really, really do not like to throw crosses or that fish into stuff just because it’s a Christian thing. It’s one of my pet peeves. There are more creative and clever ways to work in Christian themes without having to stick a cross or fish in. What you’re trying to communicate about the organization through the logo should be more substantial than HAY WE R CHRISTIAN.

Of course, you’ll notice that I gave up and stuck a cross in. Of course, I didn’t just go and plonk the thing to the side, or overlay it. I tied it into the last aspect, the university. Trying to come up with something for the university was hard too. You can’t just choose a faculty, because that’ll alienate everyone else. Waterloo doesn’t have too many universal symbols that could be incorporated easily into a logo.

The thing that I used to represent Waterloo was Ring Road. The thing that most of my not-Waterloo friends tell me about my campus the most is that it’s a giant ring. And it’s true, Ring Road is a distinctive geographical feature that’s unique to our campus. Pretty much every Waterloo student has seen it in some form, but not enough that it immediately sticks out when used off a map.

The nice thing about Ring Road is that it represents the university both symbolically and spatially. The cross superimposed across the image of our campus communicates a fairly powerful message about UWCCF’s mission. With the addition of the ring, suddenly, the logo doesn’t just say CHRISTIANS ARE HERE, but it shows our intention to impact the entire campus.

Everything up until this point has been designed as a black and white thing. This is something I always try to do, because the reality is that whatever I design will almost always never be printed in colour. Even truer is the fact that it will likely be printed on a photocopier, making anything but black and white look like garbage. And on the offchance that whatever I’m printing will be printed inverted, then I’d need to make sure that the colour I chose was visible on both dark and light backgrounds.

But, at this point, I still add a colour: yellow. There are a few important reasons why yellow adds to the logo. The first is that Waterloo’s colours are black and gold. The second element that yellow adds is light. Everything having to do with CCF and Christ is coloured yellow, while the university gets black or white. I’d done this with the idea of light of the world in mind. And the last bit it adds is that yellow is LOL AZN. Yes, I managed to sneak it in without being explicit about it.

The most interesting thing about so many of these things is that many of them aren’t deliberate and simply show up and follow logically from the stuff that I knew I was trying to incorporate. I’d say about half of the things I’ve mentioned were things I actively tried to work in, while the other half are things that seemed to just show up. Either that, or I just like to read into these things a bit too much.

So I decided to do a very quick change-up of the site. I haven’t been able to have the time to properly do this ever since I came to Waterloo. I had something a lot more ambitious planned, but I couldn’t do it given what I knew how to do at the moment and the amount of time that I had. Oh well. This will have to do for now. I’m fairly satisfied I got rid of a bunch of colours and made everything more clean, but I really wanted to get my new-ish logo up, which I really, really prefer to the old one.

I guess the old site wasn’t as minimal I’d hoped or as it should have been. I mean, the blog’s title is less blkmage, but the site design didn’t convey that too well. I had too much of everything. I had too much colour, too many things cluttering up the sidebar, too many things in my CSS file. I spent much of my time just getting rid of things. In the end, I ended up with a simple colour scheme: black, white, and hat red.

I particularly like the new logo because the new typeface, FF Kievit, is much friendlier than the Trade Gothic I’d used before. Also, for some reason, I thought that mixing weights and colours in it would be pretty cool, but the more I looked at it, the more awkward it became. The nice thing about Kievit is that it comes with a small caps variant. I love setting things in small caps.

To me, small caps and text figures feel very elegant to me. It could be that I’m being an elitist jerk and the fact that very few fonts come with proper small caps and text figures makes me gravitate towards them. But, really, they look so damn nice. It’s the same way when you look at text set with proper ligatures. It feels correct and not cheap, like most printed material today.

In conclusion, I wish I had all the time in the world and small caps and text figures are cool. Use them more.