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It seems like forever since I designed the patches for the Baltimore Area Council contingent’s trip to the National Boy Scout Jamboree. In fact it has been nearly two years, due to amount of drafts, revisions, manufacturer bids, proofs, more changes, and approval from Fort Mchenry itself as well as the national BSA. If you want to check out the patches, you can read my original post here. Well the Jamboree finally happened last month, and the patches were a big success. One of the patches in particular (the one that changes color in sunlight) was so popular it had to be double ordered, bringing the grand total to over 40,000 patches printed. The patches were even made a part of the side banner of the National jamboree website:
I also had the opportunity to design some other patches for the jamboree. This was one of my favorite ones, an achievement award for the National Jewish Committee on Scouting:
All in all I’m very pleased with how it all turned out, and I’m looking forward to designing more and more patches in the future.
Its been nearly three years since I’ve made any major changes to my website so look out people cause its about to be “fresh.” Pardon my dust as I add/subtract/update content and work out the bugs. I’m also unveiling a new identity for Justin Lloyd Design, so check out the new logo:
More to come…
While waiting for some laundry today I opted to do a quick and dirty edit of the now extra famous British Petroleum logo. Aside from the obvious environmental devastation and various other affects of the oil spill, its also a PR disaster for BP. After something like this I almost think the company should change its name to “xfinity” and say “what spill?”
As some of you know, and many of you don’t, I am a child of two worlds. Although I was raised Jewish, my father’s side of the family is Lutheran, so when December comes around, there is a whole lot of celebrating. Mind you I don’t “celebrate” Christmas in the traditional sense of the word, but I do celebrate it the way most people do, with gifts, and food, and family. Now if someone like me wants to send cards out to his family and friends they can do it one of two ways, they can buy “holiday” cards, non-denominational happy December season’s greetings, OR they can buy two sets of cards, one for Hannukkah, one for Christmas, and one for Grand High Climax for all your Satanist friends. This year I discovered a third option. Ladies and gentleman, the Chrismukkah card:
Now I know what your first though might be, well maybe your second thought, the one that comes after “blasphemous heathen!” Its “where is the ‘t’ in Christ?” Well its gone, you know why? Cause its a made up word, and I can do whatever the hell I want. (totally misspelled it by accident, liked it typographically, and kept it) So to all my friends, colleagues, and readers celebrating this year, happy/merry Chrismukkah, and if you don’t celebrate these holidays, you might want to pretend to cause I hear you get presents.
So this week I got to collaborate with illustrator/designer Annie Wu on a poster for the Galhaus Revue(new MICA Burlesque club), which is having their first show at the end of January. Annie was responsible for the illustration, which gave me a fantastic color palette to work with. A little aquamarine and some bold gothic type formed it into something reminiscent of a 60′s era bond movie poster. There is a subtle texture overlay of dirty metal to give the paper a rougher, more aged feel to it and to allow the figure and title to pop above it. All in all I think its one of the better pieces I’ve done in a while.
The event is January 30th at 8PM at the MICA Gateway Building in the BBOX theatre. You should definitely come and see the show.
More to come.
In order to stay sharp its always good to do the occasional design competition. I recently stumbled on a site litterally called graphiccompetitions.com, whose soul purpose is to catalogue all major design competitions. I figured I’d give a few a go, so I started with a cool one from Hugo Boss. They have a reoccuring competition at hugocreate.com where they give you a topic, and you make a design based around said topic, and their unique/extremely manly fragrance bottle. This time around the topic is “travel snapshots.” Not being one who travels much, I actually had some trouble thinking of what to do, but for my first go at it, I thought about all the photos I have of my friends and I rock climbing over the years:
Not a complex design mind you, but my main intent was not to be like every other person on the site and place the bottle dead center in the page. I am in the works of another idea where the bottle shape is cut out of the middle of a paper roadmap being held in front of the windshield of the car, and through the bottle cut out you see a landmark(to which I have not decided on). My delay with this is that my family, now having GPS systems, has thrown out most of our big maps, and this one I found of Delaware just won’t do(sorry Delaware).
More to come…
Much like any business, Best Buy is jumping on the social networking bandwagon. For a while now my store has talked about starting a twitter and facebook, especially after a number of other stores have done so and claimed success from doing it. The idea of this is not just to advertise, but to open up another line of communication to our customers. Many businesses like Comcast have used twitter as an opportunity to speak to the customers who won’t tell them what the problem is but will complain online without hesitation. Other businesses offer special deals to twitter followers, which is how I got my father’s birthday gift this year from following Rockler, one of the major woodworking retailers.
As far as the Twitter homepage itself, its pretty simple:
I started to go nuts with it, doing this giant collage of vectored electronics with burst of colors and shapes and then wound up deleting it all. Sometimes you have to remember that the customer’s aren’t grading you on how ridiculous your site looks. Then I made some posters to put up around the store to get the word out:
So if you live in the Towson/Baltimore area and are on Twitter, follow us at twitter.com/bestbuytowson. More to come…
For over a year now I’ve been working with the Baltimore Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America to design their 2010 National Scout Jamboree patches. The patch set is comprised of 16 patches in all, and is themed to commemorate the battle of Fort McHenry. The patches are presented in three groups, representing before, during, and after the battle. Although some liberties were taken with the design by the printing company, they still look pretty damn good if I say so myself, and its nice to finally see them in there embroidered form after a year of looking at them on a computer screen. Here are the main 12 CSP’s (council shoulder patches) for your viewing pleasure:
If you are saying to yourself, “what’s that all white one?” thats called a “ghost” patch, a not so fancy term for monochromatic. What makes this patch really special however is it uses a photosensitive thread that changes color in sunlight, so when you look at this patch outside, parts of the patch will fill in red. It’s pretty sweet, trust me.
So I’ve been out of the game for a while but that doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting around twittling my thumbs. This week I got the honor of designing a business card for my father, who is a high school principal. The company his school goes through for business cards charges $90 a person for a set of 250, which is ridiculous, so he gave me the task of making a new (and not so boring) card and getting it printed. Although this is not the final, I think this is the iteration I liked the best:
[SinglePic not found]I got him 500 cards from Vistaprint for $15, which is a lot different from $90.
Then Best Buy threw another design task my way, asking me to redo an insert our service center created to encourage people to take our survey. Its nothing earth shattering but I had fun doing it and any time I can make something mundane and ugly look slightly more appealing I jump at the chance:
Unfortunately it will wind up being photocopied in black and white (booooo!) but never the less, its better than the old one I assure you.
I am about to take on a major task of branding a new company a friend and I are considering begining. Nothing in stone yet but if we do go for it, I’ll be spending the next year creating an identity, collateral, website, etc. which should be pretty exciting. I can’t say much about it yet but its a meeting of graphic design with the music industry. We don’t even have a name for it yet, but the brainstorming sessions will be starting soon.
As always, more to come…
My new business cards as promised, made to match the new site header:
