In preparation for the snowboarding season, I encountered a local company here in Utah called Revolution that manufactures custom snowboards. It sounds like the quality of the boards is good, possibly not for heavy use, but for my level, I’m not terribly concerned about a high-performance board as yet. While I already have a board to use, I thought it’d be a good design or illustration project. It’d be good to have a board with a pattern I really enjoy on it, also. Now I just need to come up with that design. Started roughing a few things out, but ‘rough’ is the operative word. Anyway, another project to advance on before the snowboarding season is very old.

I can’t leave my site alone. I get in a discussion with my buddy Brad about how to randomly rotate his background on his Therty Brand site. I go and figure it out (probably nothing new to most people), then try to figure out how to make my flash movie transparent so I could do backgrounds… just for GP, of course. Instead, I end up adding a random image generator in the flash movie to show some random glimpses of my sketchbook. Some are honestly pretty old. The example here is from my internship days at Shannon Associates Ah well, it’s just to add… I was going to say texture, but maybe clutter is a better word, I don’t know yet. Maybe just a warning about what you might be getting into if you’re looking further into my site.

Reading my friend Brad’s blog this evening, brings to mind my unnatural obsession with maps… and sets me off on a bit of a rambling blog… and not really related to design, other than the fact that my portfolio has perhaps a disproportionate amount of maps. As anyone around me knows, I tend to take my GPS receiver just about anywhere and save the tracks– that and bore everyone with some sort of stat about our location or speed. Google earth is my friend. Especially when i discovered I could convert my GPS tracks into files which Google earth can open (thanks GPS Visualizer). Knowing that, I do silly things like trace a track on Coronado Beach (see the striking red line):

…or check out the flight path over the Great Lakes (see turbulent green path):

How does this relate to design now? I don’t really know. Maybe there’s some environmental art project out there involving gps tracks across a large area. Sounds like a goofy trip idea. Mostly I enjoy maps for the daydream of what it may be like in so many different places and perspectives. Maps can also be beautiful at times in their abstract combinations of color and lines. I’ve sometimes wondered why the poles counter a circular continent with a circular ocean, balance in design, I suppose.

So I’m going throught my website again tonight to revise the descriptions for each piece and trying to hold back from giving too much of the story on each. Just the professional stuff, right? Seems like a few of those have some typical story of being rejected for being too weird, or are the result of something toned down to meet the common ground of a large committee. Ahh, the typical plight of designers to have to produce the bland in some corporate attempt to please everyone. Perhaps I get a wild hair all too often, but I think I’m supposed to in my line of work. One such example is Indigo. In the early days of designing our corporate I.D., there was a matter of debate over what color ‘indigo’ really is. My solution was to simply abandon blue altogether, and make the logo orange. I figured it avoided the comparisons and brought added intrigue and attention to our little logo. Of course, reality sets in and despite having all our team being on board with the idea, owners will require the most logical and straightforward option and thus the logo is blue.

Then there are times when we design something we’re all behind and joyfully have the option of tactfully telling a client to take a hike. Example: Baghaa. A snowboarding, skiing, rollerblading, etc. company needs a logo to put on the gear they manufacture. Their initial suggestion is a ‘b’ and a ‘g’ where the loops form the eyes, and the descender of the ‘g’ forms a smile, with kind of a kid-drawn crayon look to it. But, they said, they’re ‘wide open to ideas’. Never trust a remark like that from a client. It means they’re married to their original idea and they want you to make it look good by some miracle. We, of course, quickly moved on from their original idea and designed a logo to fit a wintersport genre, involving the ‘b’ and ‘g’ integration, but aiming for something more sporty (see above). The client rejected it as being too weird for extreme sports. We, in turn, suggested they present both logos to a focus group, and of course we never heard from them again. Good luck to them. I’m glad we kept to the design that we knew was good, and not allow design by dictation. If a client wants that, there’s little point hiring a professional designer.