Category — Communications Design

Just launched, the new Earth Energy Alliance website. Earth Energy Alliance is a company focused on educating clients on the development and distribution of renewable sources of energy. We developed the branding earlier this year, and a website was the next logical step for them. Both were very exciting and rewarding projects to be a part of.

If I wasn’t a designer, I’d be a truck driver. That’s a fact. Which is why there is no way in hell I would pass up the opportunity to design the trailer of an 18 wheeler. Not a chance. And for the past niner so months, I have been working with the D’Arrigo Brothers Co. of New York to create the graphics for their big rigs, what I like to think of as portable posters, billboards on wheels. Their trucks deliver fresh vegetables from Upstate New York to New York City every morning, and I’m very pleased with the direction they selected—a rolling meadow motif, half road, half corn field. With any luck, you will see one of these bad boys hauling down the highways in the near future. And that’s a big ten-four, Thundershorts.

Peculiar Bliss is an online sketch collaborative set up by good friend and colleague Vaughn Fender and his cronies. They’re mostly good, and I mostly draw crap like my shoe.

You don’t have to be a plumber to fix a leaky faucet. And if your Uncle can do it, all the better. A task that can be completed without having to pay somebody, anybody, is known in the business as a bargain. A steal, really. However, if that same job can be accomplished with added value—a service performed better than can be provided by you or your Uncle?—it is often worth hiring a professional.

Graphic design is like plumbing in that the basic necessary skills of the craft do not drastically differ from the commercial version. Hey, it’s not rocket science. If you define design as the art of planning, as Paula Scher of Pentagram often does, it becomes difficult to argue with that statement. Graphic design, then, is the art of planning utilizing visuals—text and image. Most of us are equipped to handle problems where the solution is reached with these tools. We are taught to draw at an early age, and gain the ability to read and write soon thereafter. This knowledge lays the groundwork for the ability to communicate, to exchange information or opinions. [Read more →]

I had written an email some time ago which then it sat in my drafts like so many drafts I have written often do. I think I was in a library at the time. For the most part, these essays, stories, thoughts, whatever, are forgotten. I rarely revisit them. But I was trying to clean out some of this junk tonight and, of course, I began to read. The particular note that caught my attention was a letter comprised mainly of a long quote from a book. The entire message of my letter was an idea that belonged to somebody else. Maybe that’s why I was interested, and perhaps why I had copied the words into an email in the first place. The post was titled “Suzanne Originality,” because Suzanne was the person I had intended to send it to, and originality was a topic of recent conversation. I guess I wanted to share the author’s take, and so that’s what I am doing now. [Read more →]

On Monday, we were supposed to wear black and white for the company photo shoot. Then again on Tuesday. By Wednesday I was running out of new ideas, so I sported a black tie, and by Wednesday, most of the office was fed up with wearing black and white.