I am pleased to announce that the new website for Wyrley Juniors Football Club is now in the beta stage. With still a few bugs to fix the site provides an online community for the club, whoo are registered charity and one of the biggest junior football clubs in the UK.

Visit the site: www.wyrleyjuniors.net

I was als commissioned to design the official programme for the club’s annual tournament. This was an A5 24 page brochure that was handed out to visitors of the event which was attended by over 3,000 people during the course of one weekend. Preliminary of the programme are shown below:

Twitter is an invaluable resource for any designer. Below I have compiled 15 top design twitterers I feel are more than worth following:

@smashingmag – the twitter account for the popular Smashing Magazine site.

@psdtuts – useful tutorials for all things Photoshop.

@VECTORTUTS – The web’s #1 vector tutorials site.

@Behance – on a mission to organise the creative world.

@abduzeedo – from the popular design inspiration website.

@boogiesbc – from owner of Design Your Way.

@ComputerArts – the official Computer Arts magazine twitter account.

@advancedpshop – official tweets from the Advanced Photoshop mag.

@1stwebdesigner – a web designer dedicated to the world of design.

@digital_arts – tweets from the Digital Arts magazine.

@Colorburned – Design enthusiast, author, blogger, student, and teacher.

@Creattica – Creattica Daily – News from the Creative Republic

@sitepointdotcom – online resource for web designers, developers and dealmakers.

@NewSugar – A young creative magazine showcasing designers, illustrators and artists.

@LogoMoose – Logo design inspiration gallery.

There are a million or more design related accounts on twitter, but these stand out for me. You can follow Down With Design on twitter via: @downwithdesign

What is a BOLD FROG you’re wondering, right? The name stands for Band Of Logo Designers For Rights Of Generations. The initiative was set up by a group of logo designers in order to raise some awareness of good causes. Each affiliate is asked to link to a charity organisation. Down With Design would like to support Action For Children.

Action For Children is a registered charity that helps and speaks out for some of the most vulnerable children in the UK. Please help their cause by Making A Donation

Thankyou.

The question of “What is Graphic Design” is probably asked every day, somewhere. There is even a book with the same title. I think of this question everytime somebody asks me what I do for a living, and it can be sometimes complicated trying to explain not just what a designer does, but also their role within the economy.

A suitable, and perhaps a surprising comparison I came to was that graphic design is very much like being a comedian. I don’t mean telling dirty jokes and playing the bongos, I’m referring to knowing your target audeince & working with them through good communication to get a result you are both happy with.

Continuing this analogy further, I decided that there are two main types of designer. First you have the stand-up comics. These are the guys with a lot of experience, know exactly what their doing, brimming with confidence and ready to design for any audience they come across. A good comedian will be well prepared, having done plenty of research to tailor jokes for the audience, or in the design industry, the client. If the gig is at a Women’s Convention, chances are any sexist jokes will be saved for another date, in the same way a good designer should design for the tastes of the target audience.

Like designers, comedians also feed upon feedback to improve their work. A good comic will tell a joke and gauge the reaction of the audience, if they don’t laugh he or she will move onto to something else he has in mind, but if they do laugh then the comedian knows they are on the right track. This is similar to why good communication before any creative work begins is essential to a successful design solution.

While still classed as comedians, Jester’s are less successful than their stand-up peers. A jester will run on stage with no preparation, juggling, telling all the wrong jokes, desperately seeking a rise from the audience. Almost like when a designer does no preparation or research when starting a design project, chances are the client will boo them stage. The problem with jesters are that they don’t know when to stop, a bit like designers who haven’t read the brief, talked at length about the clients needs and are constantly baffled when their designs get rejected.

At the end of the act the jester is left frustrated, angry and disullisioned with his or her profession until the next job comes along. Like a successful comedian, one of the main attributes of a good designer is being able to communicate by listening as well speaking. If a client doesn’t like the design it is more than likely the fault of the designer than the client. In other words it is our role to make the client laugh, but with us, not at us.

There are currently hundreds of sites/blogs dedicated to logo design inspiration, the most popular ones being Logopond & Logolounge. However, this is not a pretty list of useful sites for inspiring logos, no, this a warning to all identity designers that your works may well be being used for more than pretty eye candy.

It has recently been brought to my attention that www.logos.am (shown below) is simply plucking images from the Logopond gallery to use for their own content, with no permission from the owner of Logopond or the designers of said logos.

This is, in effect, an infringement of copyright. What’s also alarming is that the keywords “free logos” are in the title of the site, so it makes you wonder if visitors simply think it’s a logo stockshop. I have emailed the owner of this site in the past asking for my work to be removed but have yet to receive a response, so if you notice some of your own work on there feel free to email me and I will pass on the site owners contact details.

The second site I wish to bring to your attention is www.logogalleria.com

Now this one is a different beast. This looks like a blatant SEO stunt for the “partners” listed on the site. I won’t link to them until I know for definite, I’m still trying to track down the relevant contact information. From what I can see they are uploading logos from all over the web with no title, description, designer info, or hyperlinks. A clueless client might think that all of the works were carried out by the “partners”.

I am fully supportive of inspiration sites that give designers credit but to simply take an image from another site is theft. If you know of any others please name and shame them. Protect your work.

What I’m about to do is, for some, the equivalent to running down a busy high street naked. The sketchbook is a very personal possesion for every artist & designer as its contents are a visual representation of the owners thoughts. There are no rules in the sketchbook, anything goes, you are allowed complete freedom of expression without someone telling you to change it. Plus, it’s a great way of analysing how you have improved (or not) over the years.

The photos below are snipets of my recent sketches which are random pieces of paper stuck into one blank A4 booklet. Of course this is just a snippet, I chose to leave out my secret ideas, you’ll have to pay me for a private dance.

Most of what you see above, is in use somehow, somewhere, within my work. (And yes, I am fully aware that I spelt “Disorder” wrong hehe).

What I love about design and working within a creative industry the most is that it is constantly changing. From trends, software, clients to working practices, the design world in which we, as designers, live is a great place to be. But is everything really that peachy? Or are we at the peak, waiting to fall?

Competition (literally)

Graphic design is an over-saturated market, no doubt about it. The lure of what seems (from the outside at least), an attractive lifestyle, along with a misconceived acclaim to fame, means that more students are enrolling in design-related courses than ever. Eventually, a percentage will graduate and seek design-related jobs. Also, don’t forget the uneducated hobbyists who claim to be ‘Graphic Designers’ & then, of course, there’s those already established within the industry. With service providers multiplying at a rapid rate & the current economic climate limiting the number of new start-up businesses, is there enough work to go around? I asked 4 top designers for their opinions:

Nathan Sarlow of Nathan Sarlow thinks the education system could help:

It seems that the majority of people that graduate from design school come out with the same knowledge and a similar style. I personally feel that the education part of the design industry needs to be guided more by active designers and less by teachers (that used to be designers). This way, the students would be learning more about current ‘real world’ design and not theoretical design that will only aid to give them a false sense of their worth to the industry. With hundreds of competitions running every week across dozens of spec-work sites, more and more companies are re-inforcing the spec stye of sourcing work is acceptable. Regardless of the quality of the end result, very few of these companies will ever be convinced that paying a designer for their time is of any inherant value.

Unfortunately, I believe spec work will always exist within the design industry, as long as there are people willing to take it on. It doesn’t effect me directly though, and it shouldn’t effect you either, but that doesn’t mean I am saying what these crowd-sourcing sites are doing is right. Fortunately, there are still clients out there wise enough to know that they have to pay for quality, we just need to justify our own positions in the market & our services. As has been said above, being a designer is more than just drawing a pretty picture and sending an invoice, it’s about sellling yourself too. Theres a big difference between selling yourself and selling your soul though.

We could all take the easy option & light our stakes, pick up our pitchforks and run to the crowd-sourcers to point the finger of blame or we could just take a look at ourselves, and look at how we can be improved. After all isn’t that the role of a designer anyway?

On Thursday 21st May 2009, I was lucky enough to arrange a meeting with one of the most sought after creative designers in the industry, Nido of www.thisisnido.com. He only agreed to the interview if I met him in person rather than send over a list of questions via email so we arranged to meet up. Running late for the scheduled time of 5:30pm, I panicked & phoned to check that he was still at the meeting place, Waterstones in Birmingham, England. “Just meet me by the bull when you get here, the shopping centre is closed due to a chemical leak.” he said before hanging up. I didn’t even know what or where the bull is so I instantly felt that this wasn’t going to be the normal run-of-the-mill interview.

I get to a deserted Waterstones at about 5:45pm, and approach what appears to be a smartly dressed character standing outside the doors of the building. As the guy is on the phone I give him the nod as if to say “you’re Nido, yeah?”, but all I get back is a confused if not polite nod back. So I turn around to find a casually dressed character of average height laughing in my face. “I thought you’d be taller” he says as he shakes my hand (i already stood a few inches above him). So this must be Nido…. and he’d set me up to greet the wrong person. Great.

After a small disagreement, we decide to go into Waterstones for a coffee (which I was made to pay for) and a chat about his career in design. Somewhat confusingly, Nido spends the first hour of the conversation asking ME questions, even when I tried to ask him one myself. At that point I knew this was going to be a lot more difficult than I thought, but eventually, I start to get the response I’m looking for.

We spent the following hour or so talking about quantum physics, or at least what nido thought it actually was. That and little pranks concocted by nido, one which included asking waterstone’s members of staff to search out the availability of books that were completely made up by nido, he would then proceed to get frustrated when none of his requests were obtainable. The evening concluded with nido coaxing his bus fare home out of me… and me… I was left driving home up the M6 motorway wondering if the person I had actually met was nido… or was the whole thing a big joke on me!… I wouldn’t put it past him.

During this post I am going to share with you exactly how I designed the logo shown above.

I designed the Otus logo at the start of 2008, initially for a start-up business that produced night-vision security cameras. The company dissolved during the logo design process and unfortunately I was not paid for this project. This is a tutorial which details my logo design process from the point of first contact with the client to delivery. To design this logo I used: Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, a sketch pad & a sharp 2B pencil. Plus don’t forget patience! Okay, let’s go:

The brief from the client was fairly open but they stated that they would prefer some visual reference to a bird since the name Otus means a Incspring

That’s my first EVER blog post done and dusted. If you have any questions I’d love to hear from you & I apologise for any noob mistakes, hehe.