Verstyl
An ex-colleague of mine is setting up his own photography studio and asked me to help with a logo for the burgeoning business. I find it very useful to inspect what others have done when it comes to logos. Often I’m both surprised and impressed with how clever and intelligent the final products can be.
As it turns out, photography logos seem to lean greatly toward graphical representations of shutters, tripods, and lenses. Go figure. When it comes to obvious (some might say “cliché”) solutions to design problems, I used to avoid them at all costs. Now I believe that even the clichés have value if they’re done right.
That said, the identity solution I came up with for Verstyl includes, yes, a shutter– however it also integrates the main letter of the company name and can easily be diced up into its parts and still look both complete and stylish. Looking forward to seeing some good things from Verstyl Photography.
Jewelry branch II
I finally found an adequate branch to fasten to my bedroom wall/use as a jewelry hanger. It’s being held in place by one very stalwart nail. I hope the little guy hangs on, cause otherwise I’ll have a lovely mess of earrings on my floor.
HASbags: a step-by-step
Recently, I embarked on a project with a good friend. She creates beautiful, handmade bags that can be folded into an envelope-shaped piece that is easy to carry and quite convenient for things like groceries or library books. My friend asked me to make a hangtag for these bags so that, upon purchasing one of the pieces, the buyer could easily check out the tag to learn how best to fold the bag into its tiny, stowaway form.
After thinking about this for only a short while, I decided that the most useful way to teach people to fold the bag was to fold one myself and photograph the process. Simple enough, I figured, but little did I know that this process would span multiple media and graphics programs and become a project within a project. The image below shows one of my source photographs and its corresponding diagram, drawn in Illustrator.
The diagrams were fun to make; I’ve always enjoyed converting realistic images to vector illustrations. There’s something about distilling information down to the most useful and necessary parts that makes me excited to be a designer.
But enough of the nerdiness: on to step two. Below is an image showing how I reworked the large vector diagram to a smaller, even less detailed diagram that would eventually go on the hangtag, which is shown on the right.
The tag looked nice enough as an Illustrator document with a tan background to indicate the ‘cardboard’ look of a natural hangtag. However, to give a truly solid example to my friend I wanted to show her what a tag might look like in real life. Aside from letterpressing my own tag and handing it to her in person, I could only think of one way to give her the impression of the hangtag in a real context: Photoshop. Fortunately I’m well-versed in the ways of making interesting things look more interesting in Photoshop, so I threw my design on top of another image and doctored it beyond recognition to create…
… as far as I’m concerned, a very realistic-looking mockup of what will eventually be my friend’s hangtags. And there you have it. From the shutter of my digital SLR to the pen tool in Illustrator to the lens blur in Photoshop, this project has journeyed across many programs and landed safely on my website as the newest addition to my ever-growing portfolio. And the beauty of it is that no part of this process felt like work at all.
Jewelry branch
Recently I’ve been searching for the perfect branch to create a hanger for my jewelry, similar to this one from Viva Terra. The form is gorgeous, and I hope to find a similar branch that I can hang on my wall instead of using as a standing piece. There are some cheap knockoffs from Urban Outfitters and the like, but I have yet to find anything as organic and natural-looking as the one from Viva Terra. Apparently manzanita trees are where it’s at.