A typical 19th century French galerie... or is it?

Ikoku Meiro no Croisée, or La croisée dans un labyrinthe étranger, was a pleasant surprise and one of my favourite shows this season. Even though Junichi Sato is only doing series composition, it still feels like Aria. We have girls leaving their homes to go to a strange foreign land and learn about it, set to classy music. All we have to do is trade MANHOME for Japan, Space-Venice for Paris, 23rd century for 19th century, and strings for clarinets.

But there was one thing that caught my eye and has bugged me ever since.

Why does this text on my window look so round?

Now, I’m not a graphic design student or anything. I just think typography is cool, so please bear with me as I play amateur type historian. I’m also not that confident in my ability to identify typefaces on the spot. I’m relying heavily on Linotype’s excellent sans serif history articles and Robert Bringhurst’s excellent The Elements of Typographic Style for more general stuff. I’ve been using a combination of Identifont and FontBook to attempt to identify stuff. Anyhow, I expect I will say some wrong things.

A few months ago, I got the chance to read through some type history for a paper. While most of it was on neoclassical type, which was late 1700s/early 1800s, I did skim through 19th and 20th century stuff. Armed with that knowledge, I thought it was a bit weird seeing stores with sans serif signage in general. But other than the problem of sans serifs possibly existing before they were created, they just felt wrong because they looked too “new”. Croisée is set some time in the second half of the 19th century and a quick search revealed that the earliest sans serif faces showed up early in the 19th century but didn’t get big until almost 100 years later.

An attempted reproduction of the above

So I’m pretty sure this is Futura. If it’s not, it’s definitely a geometric sans serif. And as it turns out, geometric sans serifs are products of the early 20th century, with Futura being created in the 1920s. Geometric faces are born from attempts to form idealized letterforms out of circles and lines, coming out of the whole Constructivist movement. It’s a pretty huge contrast to anything from the Romantic era, which is why it look so strange hiding among all of the old shops in the Galerie.

Definitely not Arial

Here, we have what appears to be Helvetica, that venerable Swiss typeface that is used everywhere nowadays, from subway signage to being slapped on photos on tumblr. Or, at least, I’m pretty sure it’s Helvetica, based on the G. The problem is that Helvetica was created in the 1950s. Of course, that’s not a lot of letters to go by and it could be one of Helvetica’s ancestors, but the earliest of those seems to have appeared in the 1880s or 1890s at the earliest. These typefaces, called Grotesques, were pretty popular in Germany, but didn’t catch on elsewhere until the 20th century. This might make its appearance in Paris a little strange, although I’m not sure of the exact timeline.

The lowercase letters were especially helpful

On this cart, we have a gothic sans serif. Gothics are a British creation from the late 19th century and early 20th century. These are recognizable as the ones that show up in old-timey newspaper headlines. Again, I’m not sure about the exact timeline so I’m not sure how it propagated in Europe, but they were pretty popular in the States. However, it’s my understanding that very few gothics were drawn before 1900.

It was annoying trying to take screens with this lady in the way

Finally, here’s what appears to be a humanist sans serif, based on the R and the C. Humanists are supposed to resemble writing more than the mechanical construction of geometrics or grotesques, but it’s hard to tell from just the capital letters. And again, since there aren’t too many letters to go by, it could turn out to be something else, but I don’t recall seeing anything that resembles that C when going through the other early 20th century typefaces. Anyhow, I feel like that could’ve come straight off of a Windows 7 screen or something.

What other typographical shenanigans are hiding on those storefronts?

I focused on sans serif typefaces because they’re relatively easy to pick out and differentiate between. I’m not pro enough to be able to distinguish between serifed fonts yet. But, this little exercise makes me wonder if there isn’t any typographical weirdness lurking among the signage set in serif faces.

I got started on this entire thing because I remembered Mark Simonson writing about the fonts on the maps in the Indiana Jones movies. I actually didn’t think about it until that Le Papillon d’Or sign caught my eye and made me go ‘waaaaaaait a second’. It’s the first time I remember doing that for anime, probably because most of the time, the signs are in Japanese. I guess the fact that it’s trying to present an accurate historical depiction of Paris also creates a sort of uncanny valley effect and things that would normally get passed over start to pop out.

Anyway, everyone should watch this show, because clarinets and cheese and baguettes and 19th century weeaboos and Yuneeeeeeeeee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I decided it’d be interesting to go through how I come up with stuff. I hope that this’ll help those of you who just play around with Photoshop filters and don’t know anything about design to create something that looks passably decent. This post will go through the birth of the Trail Mix happy face logo.

There were some interesting specifications for the logo. Since the church wanted to make this look nice, I was allowed to use colour in the posters, and thus, the logo as well. However, since the poster would also be used as a flyer for the church, it would also need to look decent in grayscale, photocopied. Finally, the logo was to be used on shirts as well, so the logo had to both scale well and look decent in colour and black and white.

The first thing I do before anything else is choosing a font. Those who know me know about my dealings with type. For a logo that consists of mostly words, choosing a font is important because it sets the character of the text. There are tons of examples of how poor type can ruin anything with a substantial amount of text, from posters and cards to books and academic papers.

Since Trail Mix is a kids’ day camp, the font had to be friendly. The usual choice for something like this would be some kiddy and overly nauseating, awful typeface like Comic Sans. Obviously, I refused to go down this path. Kid’s fonts are not the automatic solution to designing for kids. It might be a bit harder, but it’s not impossible to design something decent for kids using normal typefaces. Even though they may appeal to kids, those kinds of fonts betray a lack of professionalism and good taste that may affect the kids’ parents.

I chose to go with Avenir. Avenir is a humanist sans serif typeface. Obviously, serif faces look way too formal for something for children, although I did use it for a flyer advertising something for children’s ministry helpers, but that was offset by a pile of Lego bricks, and everyone knows that kids love Lego. Also, humanist faces are more natural and less plain and cold than the other types of sans serif faces.

Avenir is used for everything that has to do with Trail Mix (or at least, everything that I had to do with Trail Mix). The rest of the poster is also set in Avenir. And to my great satisfaction, the back of the shirts, denoting STAFF or 1/2 STAFF were set in a heavier Avenir, which remained unstretched, as an inexplicable number of people are want to do.

The next challenge after setting the right type was figuring out how to change the logo from “trail mix” set in Avenir to a logo. Since the logo was to be printed in both colour and black and white, the logo’s shape was much more important. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the i’s are actually upside down! Yes, the dots of the eyes form the happy face. This was inspired by the “mix” in Trail Mix. In addition to that, I decided that reversing the letters in “mix” would help. Unfortunately, only the m got reversed, as x and i are both symmetrical.

The first challenging part was choosing colours. I hadn’t really had any chances to design with colour seriously, since everything I’d done was in grayscale for photocopying. I knew that I wanted to restrict myself to two colours; the problem was which ones to take. My thinking lead to something to do with real trail mix, the stuff with nuts and raisins. I tried using my eyedropper on a few photos of it, but the brown was fairly unappealing.

The raisins were easier. While raisins may be black in real life, everyone knows that deep down inside, they’re purple. I set the happy face to be purple, because I knew that I wanted it to stand out compared to the rest of the piece. The purple gave me the next idea as well. As we all learned from primary school, yellow is the opposite of purple. This is nice, because yellow is sort of how the brown nuts look in contrast to the purple raisins, as well as being a generally happy and sunny colour, like summer! Symbolism! It also helps make the purple stand out even more.

That basically covers the logo portion. However, there is one last bit of interestingness on the poster itself. You’ll notice that there are puzzle pieces and one of them has a face. Well the face was drawn from the idea of the happy face. Summer is boring. But Trail Mix is happy! Good old ASCII face representations! And the puzzle pieces are symbolic of the puzzle pieces that are used in our church’s children’s ministry. Colourful foam puzzle pieces are put together as a safe area to sit on and run around in on the floor.

I am really pleased with how the poster came out. I am also pleased with how the logo has endured, unlike so many other projects. It captures the fun that is had at Trail Mix quite well.

For quite some time now, I’ve been observing how different churches and events do their worship slides. For the most part, slides are not very well designed. There are reasons for this. And this is why I decided to finally get cracking and write up a guide to designing slides.

Why are they bad?

For the most part, slides are designed by one of two groups of people: members of the A/V crew or the worship leaders themselves. There are reasons as to why both these groups tend to produce poor worship slides.

For worship leaders, it may be because slides aren’t really a priority. For the majority of them, it’ll be because playing around with PowerPoint isn’t their thing. Similarly, for A/V guys, design probably isn’t their thing, they’re more concerned about the equipment and the sound. While they may be more computer-y, they’re not necessarily artsy enough.

Why do they need to be better?

I anticipate that a lot of people are satisfied with their worship slides and will be wondering why I’m not content with the state of worship slides in general. The first reason is simple, that God doesn’t deserve any less than our very best. I’d be skeptical if you were sure that your slides were the best if you had no formal training in graphic design. Reading tons of Photoshop tutorials is no substitute for that. But as much as that reason is true, I really dislike pulling those types of answers. There are definitely more concrete reasons.

It’s true that as the A/V guy, your role is to be invisible. But the work that you do has just as much presence as the worship team up on stage. Just like the worship team, the job of A/V is to help create an environment where the congregation can worship without any distractions. When the congregation can’t read lyrics, that is distracting. When the congregation starts snickering at an ugly background, that is distracting. When the congregation is confused by lyrics that are split up illogically, that is distracting. Poorly designed worship slides will work against that goal.

What do you bloody know?

One of the interests I’ve developed during high school is design. Much of how I served at my church was through design, whether through web, print, or onscreen. So, no, I don’t have a degree or anything, but I have picked up a few books, so I’d imagine I’m a few steps ahead most. As for this area specifically, I’ve done it fairly constantly while I was serving at my church (about four years, to be exact), and I managed to get the opportunity to go wild and come up with the slides for TC 2006.

What’s on the menu?

I intend to make a series of posts, each addressing a different area of design for worship slides. These are things I think about when I whip them up, regardless of whether I’m at home with a week to go or in the sanctuary half an hour before service. These are:

1. Background and colour
2. Typography
3. Positioning

Today, I suddenly decided that I didn’t want my fonts to go to waste, so I looked back at OpenOffice. I’d been hearing for a while that OpenOffice’s (and Office’s) Styles feature acts a lot like markup. You just label sections of text and they become associated with a style. The difference is that there’s no markup visible, because it’s all WYSIWYG.

So I spent a lot of my afternoon messing around with the template and styles. I’d settled on Frutiger Light for my headings and headers and footers and Minion for the body text. I also made up some templates for reports and a template for essays. I love taking advantage of all the features of a program. I’m going to have a look into styling the worship slides later on.

Once all of the text is associated with a style, like “Heading 1″ or “Footer”, it becomes much easier to keep a consistent look and feel across the document. All you need to do is change the associated style. If you change the font size of the third level header, then instead of going through the entire document, changing it, you just need to change the style, and all of the third level headers get changed.

Not only does this help keep things consistent, it also helps to give the author a sense of structure to the document. Instead of thinking visually, in terms of the weight of the font, the size, or the face, the author can concentrate on how the document is going to be organized. That way, after the important work (content) is finished, the author can retroactively apply styles to the document.

High school is not a place that’s known for quality. One of my pet peeves is getting handouts (whether it’s from teachers or students) that has the type change for no reason at all. I’m not even talking about changing font faces (which happens too), but haven’t you ever gotten those handouts with line breaks in the middle or a sudden change in font size? It’s bad because it’s hard to read and hard to follow. Teachers take off marks for shoddy handwriting; why don’t they do the same for crappy typesetting?

I remember when I used to use Word to type up essays and reports. I remember sometimes when Word decides to change the font back to the default Times New Roman, 10 pt inexplicably. Then I’d have to highlight it and change the font again. That’s styles kicking in.

Everything that you change outside of styles is a manual override. When you start up your word processor, you’re always in the ‘default’ style, usually Times New Roman, 10 pt. If you don’t change styles and just change it to become Gill Sans Bold, 24 pt, you’ve made a temporary change to the selected text in the default style. What ends up happening is that the entire document you format is in the default style and you just have a lot of temporary changes.

I can see that Microsoft really intended for Word to be used with Styles. I can also see how, with subsequent versions, they tried to push styles onto users and the users just keep ignoring them. I guess it’s just human nature to make like electricity and follow the path with the least resistance.

Basically, I got a crappy mark on the presentation, which, if it were not for my terribly brilliant writeup, would have brought me down by very much. Part of our mark was based on the site itself. If we chose a bad site, we’d get worse marks. That’s where stuff went wrong: it was the difference between my view of a good site and my teacher’s view of a good site.

Some stuff our teacher was looking for in our sites was the use of graphics, colour, and interactivity. Her rationale was that we’re presenting it, so the more of those things there are, the more interesting it would be for our presentation. Instead, what I did was I chose the most interesting site based on its content, thinking that it would be alright.

That’s not to say that our site didn’t have any of those things. I’ll admit, it was a bit lacking in interactivity, but the site was the most well designed of the bunch, and I felt that it had enough graphics and colour without being distracting or ugly.

This little incident helped me see how the non-Internets view websites. Obviously, as someone who likes to blog, has a blog, and was stupid enough to drop money for a blog, and someone who dabbles in design, the way I judge websites is incredibly different from someone who actually uses the Internet because they have to or something.

Take design for example. My standards of design go far beyond what is considered to be ‘good design’ by most everyone else in my class. When the others talked about design, they talked pretty much about the overall appearance. Not even any details. Were the colours okay? Was the type legible? Was the structure of the site coherent? Was there any thought put into design at all?

But the thing that bugged me was the demand for something interactive. Apparently, the future of learning is the Internet because the Internet is interactive and you can play around with stuff and books can’t do that. Except that the Internet is still all about text.

Some of the most compelling content on the Internet is not crazy Flash movies or Java applets, but long passages of text. Another name for them might be articles or essays. I’m not even talking about the news, I’m talking about things that I’ve read that smart people have written and put up on the Internet.

And ultimately, that’s what the Internet is all about. What does a search engine search for when put in queries? Text. The Internet is still a text-based medium, contrary to what else you may hear. The name of the underlying language of the Web, HTML, stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Web pages are just special documents.

When you go look for something on the Internet, is the first thing that you think of when you go through that site “Hm, can I play around with this site?” No! The worth of the Internet is not that you can fiddle around with things and learn with your hands, since most people are visual and not tactile learners. No, the Internet is such a wealth of information because there’s so much of it that you can access easily.

Blogs are the hot thing right now. Most everyone has one. Why are they so popular? It’s not because they’re interactive, it’s because they (usually) have compelling content on them. They’re the receiving end of many of the thoughts that mostly smart people have. The ideas of smart people contribute to the wealth of information that we already have and allow more smart people to find those ideas and make their own contributions.

There is a reason why television and radio hasn’t replaced books and writings. And the same goes for the Internet. There’s a reason why the Internet is still all about text. It’s because it’s still the most accessible way to transmit and receive ideas and ideas are what drives smart people.

Now I know that this place has seen a lot of “redesigns”. They were pretty crap. I just wasn’t happy with what I was churning out. I had this great idea and I had to dilute it down a lot because a lot of the time, I just couldn’t do it with my sucky skills. This time, I think I’ve got it down. Let’s have a walk through it.

Logo

The most distinctive new thing is the logo. For years, I’ve been using the red black mage hat as kind of my symbol. For the past while, that bugged me because I didn’t really draw it, I just gave it a palette shift and made it mine. So I did what I did best: I threw it into Inkscape and had potrace trace the bitmap into a path. Finally, I took the path and added a gradient to it using the colours from the hat that I’d been using, the red and burgundy.

Mind you, it wasn’t as short and simple as that paragraph. Before I’d landed at what I had now, I’d tried a whole bunch of stuff. I really wanted to try and move away from the hat as much as possible. I looked through runes from Lord of the Rings (because runes are magic-y), I’d played around with the letters in ‘blkmage’, and I even had a look at the LoD runes and thought about the Protoss tribe insignias. I still couldn’t come to a good, distinctive picture. I’d say that in the time it took to make the new design, about half of it was spent on the logo.

Anyway, once the logo was down, I had to choose a pretty typeface. At first, I’d settled on Avenir Light in all capitals. It was a nice round font and it looked quite friendly. I was about to finish up, but curiosity caught up with me and I had a look through other fonts. I knew that a serif font probably wasn’t going to work, so I also checked out Frutiger, Myriad, Trade Gothic, and Univers.

Frutiger and Myriad didn’t work probably because they didn’t look distinctive enough. Nowadays, we see Myriad everywhere because it’s Apple’s official font. And Vista’s new font, Segoe, is apparently an exact copy (and rip, I might add) of Frutiger. Univers was just boringYou know on the TTC, at different stations, there are the station names on the walls? There are three different ones: the distinctive ‘subway’ one that’s unnamed, Helvetica, which is used on the subway maps and Scarborough RT, and the boring one, which is used for stations like Union, North York Centre and stations around it. The boring one is Univers..

So obviously, the choice was between Trade Gothic and Avenir. So I did what I always do again: I messaged one of my friends and asked them to choose one. After a bit more deliberation, I chose Trade Gothic. It came down to the fact that I’d used lowercase and that I had to shorten my name to ‘tim’ otherwise the entire phrase would run into the ‘g’. I liked that.

Site Design

I began by giving myself more space. Before, I had a site that fit in 800×600. Since no one sane uses that resolution anymore, I upped it to 1024×768. This gave me a lot more space to use, and at first, I decided to use three columns. In the end, I decided against it, since the sidebar is so short anyway.

I was torn between a dark or light site and I made sort of a compromise. Most of the site is quite dark, with the black background and the dark grey sidebar. However, the main content area remains bright, with black on white for easy reading.

In keeping with the logo, I made the main colour burgundy. This didn’t work out so hot on the grey, so I needed another colour. After a lot of wrangling with colours and colour generators, I had a brilliant idea. I’ll just use the yellow that I’m using right now.

There’s actually something quite significant about the yellow. You’ll notice that I’ve changed the layout just a bit, usually the colours, whenever something significant happens. For example, I changed to a bright blue and green for New Years’. One of the planned things I was going to do was change it up for when I got into Waterloo, because I thought that I would get in a lot later than I didIt was a nice surprise, but soon after, I realized how anticlimactic it was, considering I wasn’t free yet like I would have been at the end of May.. The yellow was taken off of Waterloo’s site, where they have colour samples of what colours are used on the shield with the lions. I used Colorzilla and eyedropped it and there’s the yellow.

I decided that the yellow actually made the page a lot prettier and decided to use other colours too. I went for the green and blue that was a result of the colour matching that I found on the Internet with the burgundy. I think if you check out the hex codes, they’re just the same hex pairs in different spots.

Something that was very apparent in my previous designs was my complete lack of graphics. I just didn’t have the time to implement them in the standards nazi way I’ve been developing for the past year and a bit. I made a concious effort to include some simple graphics to touch up the layout, like rounded corners and gradients.

Finally, there’s the matter of headers. As I explained before, I picked Trade Gothic as kind of like my font. It really isn’t, but it’s nice for a site to have some sort of unity with the ‘brand’. I decided to stop be lazy again and put in all of the ids that I needed to put in for the image replacements and I feel much better for having done it.

Epilogue

So there you have it. Here’s to less redesigning, more writing, and another year here.

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.

Updated — With more attempts!

Design is kind of a hobby for me because, well, I suck at it. I mean, I love looking into the theory behind design, like colour, positioning, and typography, but I really suck at it. I have enough knowledge to give it a stab, but I’m not going to be making any money off of it.

Something that doesn’t help is my horrendous drawing skill, which only gets worse on the computer. If you have a look at anything I’ve made, you’ll notice that I never drew a single thing. It’s all photos and type. Hell, I can’t even do bezier curvesAlthough I think I really should give that a stab too., how am I supposed to do any professional work? The answer is that I don’t.

Now last year, I wanted to try my hand at a logo for TC but the theme was kinda hard to design for. “Live the Difference.” When I hear difference, I think subtraction. Not the most inspiring logo. This year though was different. “Dash” can evoke all sorts of images, particularly things having to do with speed, racing, cars, and running.

So I opened up Inkscape and started messing around with the text. I hit sxc and started searching for photos. Of course, while I should have been studying for my English exam, I came up with three possible logo prototype-y things.

This was my first stab at it. Searching “dash” on sxc brought up pictures of dashboards. I thought about making a speedometer the logo, except on the speedometer, it’d have years on it instead of speeds, which would indicate life. If you look closely at the speedometer, the outer ring and the accompanying numbers are the ones I made, while the inside set was from the photo. I like this one, but there are a few problems with it.

First of all, the speedometer thing takes up too much space. The limit on size was 4 inches by 4 inches. That made the text much smaller. The other thing was that it only looked good if I used Helvetica Neue Thin and that font was way too thin to use on t-shirts. It became impossible to read at small sizes.

My second attempt was more of a readjustment of the first one. The speedometer ring is still there. The “dash” still has the Garamond Italic thing going on and it’s much bigger because of all the room the huge speedometer used to take up. Now, the font is Myriad Pro, which is much more legible at small sizes than Helvetica Neue Thin was. Still, it looked kind of plain, and I decided to have an alternative to choose between.

This is my third attempt. I decided to try something completely different. I got rid of the speedometer and found a sign with running people on it. I changed the font to Oxide and the smaller font to regular Helvetica Neue. It looks like I drew the running people, but I didn’t. Like I said, it’s from a sign that was kinda shaky, so Inkscape’s edge detection picked it up like that. I cleaned it up a bit and here it is.

At the moment, I need constructive criticism from you. I need an opinion as to whether these are good enough to submit and which one to choose or if I need to do anything else to them. Remember, I’m a noob at this, so please, tell me if something’s really wrong or just doesn’t look right.

Updated

And here are the ones that have been tweaked.

I quite like these ones actually.