Veteran designer Paula Scher has been influencing the design community with her brilliance for nearly four decades. Her autobiography, Make It Bigger, is a first-hand account of her journey from budding beginner to practiced principal at the New York design firm Pentagram. While the graphic design profession has continually changed over the course of Scher’s career, Scher herself has continued to refine personal design techniques without feeling the need to cave to current design trends. As a designer, a historian, and a trailblazer much can be learned from Paula Scher’s long line of professional pursuits which are all a part of her book Make It Bigger. Continue Reading…

A few weeks ago I was reading the Logo Design Love blog and came across a poster designed by Jason Dean called the ABC’s of Branding. The poster uses no ink and is instead created through a stamp and emboss treatment. It is being sold in a limited edition run with each poster numbered and signed by Jason. Being an aspiring logo designer I couldn’t help but buy the poster for inspiration. I was very excited to see that my poster had arrived today.

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If you are anything like me you need the right environment in order to work effectively. Whether it is good lighting, quick access to resources, or a coffee in hand we all have an ideal work environment that helps our productivity.

I am fortunate to finally have my dream work space. With a new desk and matching filing cabinet, my LED Cinema Display, the Magic Mouse, my ColorMunki, and a good set of design books for reference I couldn’t be more happy with how my home office turned out.

It also got me thinking: What are the three items I almost always have while designing? It wasn’t a hard question to answer. My three would be a good variety of music playing, a cup of coffee, and my pen and sketchpad. What do you all like to have while you work?

Home Office Desk Setup

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Truce Logo by Turner Duckworth

Truce Packaging by Turner Duckworth

I have found my new logo design hero: Turner Duckworth. Duckworth is a logo, brand, and package designer. You may have seen some of his work: the Amazon.com logo, the Palm logo, Dolby logo refresh, packaging for Coca-Cola and PopChips, as well as many others. The above logo was created to brand a new vodka and cognac liqueur mix. As you can see the word truce is cleverly flipped and able to fit perfectly inside itself. This is an example of a great conceptual design using carefully crafted type treatment. I think it is just brilliant. Be sure to check out the rest of his amazing portfolio.

Vespa Sun Logo | Jeremy Bolton

In design (like life) we sometimes have no choice but to work with the cards we are dealt. Or in this case, the company name I was dealt. As part of a class project this quarter we were given two random words (pulled from a box) and were told to use these two words to design a logo. As far as words drawn I was rather fortunate to draw “vespa” and “sun”, though a link between the two was not immediately apparent. Continue Reading…