Time flies. It has been a long time since the last news from my graphic design studio. That doesn’t mean there was nothing exciting happening. In fact, work got so exciting for a while that I didn’t even make time for posting anything on this blog. Fall is officially here in Seattle which means productive design times. Today a small show and tell of my latest branding project. Local contractor Dyna hired me to revamp their business brand just before summer. And now, a few months later, all the pieces are coming together nicely.

Stay tuned for the new Dyna web site which will be up next week. I am very excited about this one.

For  a peek into the design process, these are  the logos I presented in the first round:

After having designed numerous books for local publisher The Mountaineers Books, I was asked to design the 50th anniversary edition of the granddaddy of all their books, the “Bible of Mountaineering”, the very reason The Mountaineers Books was founded: Mountaineering, Freedom of the Hills. (More commonly known as Freedom).

The cover design uses the same recognizable layout as the previous edition but now with updated typography, gold for the 50th anniversary, an anniversary logo and a dramatic and thrilling mountain shot. The interior page design comes from my hand too but the 600 (!) pages were produced by a different (very patient and dedicated) designer.

previous edition

Last weekend I was in Brussels and saw this banner on a building in the European Union ‘office park’. Later I realized the banner might have been up since February so I would hardly call this breaking news (but as I never go to Brussels I had obviously not seen it before….) Back in Seattle I did some research and found out the new logo was the result of a European-wide contest open to art and design students in which nearly 3,500 logo designs were submitted.

The winning so-called “Euro-leaf” logo is by Dusan Milenkovic, a student from Germany, who earned 63 percent of the vote after some 130,000 people voted online for one of three finalists.

This reminds me of the uprising of the Seattle AIGA chapter against Bumbershoot’s planned logo contest. The Seattle chapter’s president Jeff Barlow summarized the objection perfectly by saying: “Imagine if it were attorneys or contractors: I want you 10 to build me a house and I’ll pay the one that I like.” Bumbershoot listened and decided against the contest.

Interesting that a large European Union design project was realized in a way that is frowned upon in the design community. I couldn’t find any objections to the contest online. However, Logo Factory did a blog entry on the subject analyzing the design and explaining why not everyone is thrilled with the selected logo.

I didn’t see the logo appear yet on packaging in Holland and Belgium. I’d better take a trip to Europe again next year.

When you park your bike in Amsterdam it suddenly becomes clear why one would spend a free Saturday afternoon decorating his/her old ramshackle bike. By branding your bike you can save endless hours remembering where exactly you did park. A brown, grey or black bike just doesn’t do the job. Similar to any logo design and branding exercise: the goal is to create something unique, recognizable, and memorable.

You can opt for a fun paint job:

Or something more elaborate:

And if creative bike decorating is not your thing, you go to this web site and order an “art bike”: http://www.artbikes.nl/

When I saw this sign painted on a street in our Amsterdam neighborhood it was immediately clear what you can do here. Later I saw the whole thing in action! Note the separate, clever signage for electric scooters.