Fairly Useless…

Creating a logo is hard. There are too many choices; colors, style, fonts, etc. Sometimes a logo comes to me instantly, but most of the time it takes many revisions of refinement. Then of course the is the client, and the client has the last word period. When I was an art director for an ad agency we would sometimes try to influence the clients decision to pick our favorite out of the stack, by putting in some terrible logos. You know where this is headed, don’t you? He picked one of the bad ones because it was green and his favorite color is green. Or even worse you get a client that like two and he wants you to mix and match.

Here is an example of the evolution of a logo. First some background, the client wanted to brand her endorsement of products. She would recommend products that were safer and healthier for children. She was the “Better Choice Mom”. So obviously I needed to portray a very warm and caring logo. I think it is important to create a logo in black and white first. Even these days when full color is cheap, its better in black and white. If it doesn’t work in one color, then it isn’t a strong image. Plus it takes color out of the first steps in the process.

OK, I put color in this first one to show that the logo can be warm, but I really want the client to focus on the shape and impression of the logo. This was the initial design. Well I think it is still a good logo, but the image is not right. Yes, it is the essence of motherhood, but the child is to young. It looks like a logo for a prenatal clinic or an adoption agency.

In the next installment, I will show were the logo goes from here.

Found a very innovative Flash game this evening called Sling. The best games, like this one are simple to play, but a tough to master. It seems every night this week I have been side-tracked with some game. As you can see Sling is extremely addicting, that is why this blog entry is posted so late. It gets kind of frustrating towards the end and you can’t look up the answers for this game like the MM dark movie game.

One of these days I going to find time to learn CSS. The best way to learn is to have a real project and a deadline. Here is a great tutorial from Veerle on making a css layout from scratch.

CSS Tutorial

P.S. She has great tutorials on illustration too.

For over seven years FilmWise has been create the best movie trivia on the internet. My favorites are the “invisibles”, the grab screen captures and remove the people from the scene. I don’t think I ever got a perfect score without some help.

http://www.filmwise.com

I played this game awhile back. Well, it is more of an interactive solitaire game of physics and I find it very addictive. It is a java applet the allows you to play water, sand, oil, plants, fire, and salt. The are variations that have slugs, explosives, and zombies. They now have a dedicated site and forum.

http://fallingsandgame.com

Web 2.0 madness! Close the patent office, we are running out of ideas. Here is a website that lets you compare the sizes of different objects. Trendy 2.0 look and feel with some AJAX thrown in via Ruby on Rails.

Can you make the object I tried to compare?
I’ll give you a hint, the ratio is 9 X 3 X 1, no the answer isn’t 27.
http://www.sizeasy.com/

Just in time for Halloween.

Great mashup of my favorites… “Art, Movies, and Flash”.

My time was forty minutes. I stayed up too late solving this puzzle. The artwork reminds me of Bosch which we studied in high school humanities.

M&M’S® Dark Chocolate “Find the Dark Movies Game”

Just got a hold of a JuiceBox. I am in the process of converting to MP3 player for my daughters. I found out that the version I have only supports 128K encoded files, so I had to convert the music that I have already ripped for them from our music server (MythTV). I found a very handy piece of software to do the job.

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.

If you would like to convert your audio from one format to another, Max can read and write audio files in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats at almost all sample rates and sample sizes.

Also, it has a nice bonus feature it supports GROWL!

Have you seen popurls yet? Go check it out. It collects all the feeds in one place, kinda like Google News, but for other sites. I really liked when I first saw it. It has started to spawn other sites that have found their niche. I am partial to the design aggregators.

• http://www.macscour.com
• http://www.dontmeetyourheroes.com
• http://www.originalsignal.com/

We have been making a few short weekend car trips with the kids lately. So I put together a few PocketMods for them. I have the standard sodoku, tic-tac-toe, and capture the squares games. I usually make booklets full of each game. I made some new ones last night. Battleship, you know the one, using paper grids. The other one is called Circuits, be the first to complete the circuit by connecting your dots to make a path.

Download here