Every time we create something we make use of a process, this can be from making a car up to milking a cow. All the things we do are according to the process we’ve learned, this does not make it the same for every body. Different personality’s have equal different processes, especially when it comes to something creative.

So one of the things we had to do for school the past year was to discover your graphic design process, write down how it is and then make something nice to show how you work.

After I made my text draft of how I think my process should be and checked it against the way I really work, the hard part started, how to make a nice display of this process. Looking around the internet gave me a lot of different options on how to display a process, but non of them are original or new. To prevent me from copying something, I came up with the idea of making an info graphic style of display

A good idea, great actually but a huge challenge as this is my first info graphic ever, so again I had a look at all this wonderful examples on the net and I came up with this info graphic. It basically consist of 4 main parts that are all connected together.

The legend.

The process integration against design completion.

The design process against the amount of stress.

The Design process in Circles.

Process, A series of actions, changes, or functions bringing about a result

— Wikipedia

Every color represents a different step, the size op the circle represents the amount of work and the overlapping of the circles indicate how the different steps are connected to each other.

I can write down my process but it;s better for you to look at the info graphic and see if you understand what my process is, the verdict so far is that 80% get it, so not to bad I think.

Click on the below image for the large view.

New school assignment: Redesign a logo

After looking around in the neighborhood trying to find a logo I didn’t like it was hard to make a choice. It was not allowed to take redesign a logo from the store around the corner and they advised not to take a logo of a big company because that will make things more difficult. Well difficult is what I like because it makes you work harder and then you learn more and that’s the purpose of this exercise.

I was having trouble to find something that was worth redesigning till I came across a logo that I see at least one a week, and made the daring decision to use this log and redesign it.

The Schiphol logo was designed by Peter Wagner in 1978 and symbolizes a runway and the path of a plane taking off. The colors resemble the Dutch flag but the red is replaced for orange because that is the color of the royal Dutch family. The logo was redesigned by FHV BBDO in 1998.

Although this logo has a long history I did take the challenge to try to make something new

So the investigation started, the first thing I wanted to do something about was the name Schiphol. Yes it is know around the world and the people who know the name Schiphol also know it is the Airport of Amsterdam. The other fact is that a lot of people have trouble pronouncing this word, so Schiphol will have to go, I will not be using the word Schiphol in my new logo design.

After some word sketching a started to make some scribbles of my thoughts, and I ended up with triangle line designs that are overlapping in a way. Second thought was to try to makes something with the airport code letters (AMS) and I did try some designing on that but not to my satisfaction. The ultimate airport geek thing, longitude and latitude numbers with AMS or Amsterdam airport.

Some of them had the little thing I was looking for but is was not totally satisfied with the results, I needed to start digging up more thoughts. What is typical Amsterdam airport ?
That was the question I needed to ask myself, if I can answer this I probably will solve the issues of finding something nice. (at least for me)

One day walking around on the airport looking for specific things it suddenly hit me. We have a space problem in this country and this is also affecting the airport. Amsterdam airport is growing every year and they need to extend, more traffic equals more runways.
The first five runways that are relative close to the main gate are scattered around, not really organized from a static point of few. And after they created runway 6 this is what is looks like.

This distribution or runaways is so typical for Amsterdam airport I answered my question of what is special about this airport. I need to do something with these runway lines, so I hit my sketch book and came up with to variations. One it the lines as they are the real runways and one is the lines but curved.

Okay that line part was done, although I still had to decide the version I was going to use. After talking about it with school mates I couldn’t decide yet, so I changed my attention to typography.
This needs to be clear and easy to read (small and large) modern and timeless, first thoughts on this, Helvetica. But after making up a list of a lot of different options I decided to go for FF DIN

Now with this done it was time to think about color, I did a fast test on different colors to use as you can see below but I did make up my mind about that fast that I will have to be a red en blue, to stick a bit with the Dutch colors

Now the difficult task to make up my mind about the shape and position of the typography, I made this fast sheet and send it out to a lot of people asking there thoughts about what they like.

The first round was a tie between 4 and 9 but then with darker blue. With that I mind I did a second round with some adjustments and this is the final New logo of Amsterdam Airport.

So finally some time to show the result of the 2 fonts project from school. I was pleased with the fact I got an A for this little piece of work , so that’s pretty nice.

After I glued both papers together the folding started, it actually turned out pretty nice and after stapling (yes I know that’s not a thing to use but I was in a hurry) it together, cutting it clean this is the result.

Fun thing about it is that you get very nice and unexpected results that lead to surprising combinations of pages. To design this is pretty hard to do, I think it was a nice lesson to learn what folding can do, give it a try it is fun.

Part one can be found here.

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When I was in the US in January one day we decided to go shopping in Carolina Premium Outlets Raleigh-Durham. Yes, we did buy a lot of things but the thing that got my attention was all the different typefaces used for the stores and decided to take some shots and share them, so this is the first part.

Lucky Brand Jeans.

Easy Spirit.

Koret.

Liz Claiborne.

Maternity.

Crocs.

Book Cellar.

Gymboree Outlet.

Striderite Keds Sperry.

Jockey.

Get Inspired: ECKO Design

Frilly Bits Typography: Abduzeedo

What is Typography: John Rabbit

Typography: Design by Shira

I love typography: Presentday

I love Helvetica: Myke

Swiss Typography History: RyanFlem

Typography 2: ShaghigBalkejianWork

Typography Poster Design: pkwahme

Typography: Sam De Decker

One of my first Photoshop creations, lot’s of work to get it all together but it was nice to do. In every letter of TYPO there is the same letter of a different font I had on my PC at that moment.
When I created this, I didn’t have to much knowledge of Illustrator but if I make something like this again I will definitely do it in Illustrator just for the simple fact of vectors. The original is made at a resolution of 1280 by 800 (max laptop resolution) so on large screens it does not speak as much as it should do.
Anyway it’s a nice inspiration and although it’s not perfect I still like it very much.

click on the image for larger view !

The text in the lower left corner states the following:

Typography is the craft, art, and science of typesetting, type design and modifying type glyphs.
Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques.
Details involved in the arrangement of type include the selection of fonts, point size, line length, leading (inter-linear spacing), letter spacing and kerning.

A couple of weeks ago a colleague asked me If I could help him with creating a logo for an online shoe store. After having a talk with him the general idea was to have a simple timeless logo with something in it that relates to shoes.

After sketching some ideas on paper I finally came up to use a shoe print as the basic idea. This was exactly something they were looking for. I redefined the design till I ended up with a partial outline of a print from a classic men’s shoe. The font that Is used is a classic, Helevetica, timeless and simple, I didn’t take to much time ending up with this font, easy to read on screen and on print.

After presenting the final design , we decided to add a touch of color to the shoe print to give it a bit more impact. Now I’m busy making the style guide and finishing the business cards.

To be continued

FC Barcelona

The Spanish football competition will start again this weekend, Barca will play on Monday the 31st against Sporting Gijon. As you probably will know by now I’m a supporter of Barcelona and I just thought to recreated the Barcelona logo in Illustrator. Not too hard to do but still fun, and I hope Barca will win the 3 cups again….

For an overview of all the games Barcelona will play this year check the Barcelona site