Wee Food Tour Branding. I recently finished some branding for a friend of mine, Madeline Miller, who is starting a food tour business in Glasgow. Understanding the challenges and excitement of entrepreneurship, and after she played a good host to me awhile back while visiting Scotland, I was keen to help out.

As Scots are very proud of their heritage, particularly now, using the Scottish flag seemed fitting and played well into a plate and utensil design. We went through three quick variations before arriving at a final solution on the logo and progressing to the letterhead and business card.

Displayed above is the final business card and the final letterhead with two earlier iterations. Next in development is the website and I’m hoping to return to Scotland sometime to check out Maddy’s progressing business.

Deseret Book Mother’s Day Catalog in Chalk. In January, I was commissioned to illustrate a chalkboard frame for Deseret Book’s Mother’s Day catalog. As with many projects with a lot of people involved, the original intention for the design to be the cover was switched on my client, the designer who commissioned me, in favor of a more traditional format. The design, in addition to other smaller chalk designs I did, was instead implemented in the pages of the catalog. The image on the right is the board as implemented in the catalog.

Chalkboard Production Timelapse. In January, I was commissioned to illustrate a chalkboard frame for Deseret Book’s Mother’s Day catalog. Once again, I was able to enjoy the diversion from the computer for an afternoon in chalk and handlettering. Now that the catalog is out, and rediscovering why I had a large amount of storage space taken up from January’s photo files, I’m posting the simple timelapse of the production.

Older Projects. Having recently had an archiving mishap, I spent a few days recovering from an external drive. In the process, I got to come across older work that I hadn’t seen in awhile and thought “Hey, some of this stuff is actually pretty good”.

Above are a sampling of icon designs for Adobe Digital Marketing Software (just after the acquisition of Omniture), a logo for an outdoor adventure company, a design and pattern for a Hawaiian company, some product branding options for Braven, and some logo designs for a surf, ski, and snowboarding company with ‘b’ and ‘g’ initials done in the studio days. While some of the usage has come and gone, I’m glad that I can look back and see that the design is good.

Note to self, double archiving may be in order.

Atlas and His Impostors. Six years ago I designed a logo with a friend and former boss of mine, GoFish Creative. He hired me to design the figure for this Atlas Capital Management logo, he directed the color and put together the type.

Since then, I’ve often been contacted by companies wanting to use it and I have to educate them about copyright. They tell me they can’t find that company online, which is immaterial. They want to just “tweak” it and use it, thinking to save cost, which is again copyright infringement, sloppy seconds, and not that way I work on a logo design.

Keeping this in mind, I was using Google Image Search the other night, where you can upload images to the search box to find where that occurs (or variations thereupon) on the internet. Fortunately, much of my work has been reposted with links back to me. However, when I came to this old logo, I found no less than 17 different companies (not including the actual client company), using it for their logo, including one logo company in Australia that was selling it (they may want to beware of lawsuits if they’re selling copyrighted material).

I think of it as a strange kind of flattery to be in such demand, though I’d prefer to be paid for my work rather than to have it redistributed and basically bastardized. Where Atlas Capital Management owns the copyright, it’s not for me to pursue any damages, of course, but I’m in the process now of contacting those companies to let them know that their business is looking cheap and unprofessional, and that if they paid a designer for the logo, they’d want to get their money back and come to me next time to have it done correctly.

Obviously any designer needs to show their work, and the internet is standard now, but it also has that hazard of dishonest individual and companies purloining things, creating mistrust in the economy. Even now, I feel a need to lay over a bit of a watermark on the logo as a precaution even where I’m exposing theft.

Stop Map. Five years of running around the Salt Lake City-Provo Metro, I’ve tracked a lot of traffic and stop lights. Filtering all those tracks for speed, the patterns of where the freeway backs up and which major roads have a better flow versus the ones that are commonly slow. In town, I’m particularly noticing unsurprising areas as downtown Salt Lake, Sugarhouse, Park City, State Street in Orem and through Murray. On the interstate, few people are surprised by the Point of the Mountain congestion, as well as the stretch from north Orem to American Fork, and the I-15/215 interchange. As the graphic shows, I don’t ever remember slow traffic on I-215 or I-80.

Admittedly, these are my own trips which rarely involve a commute, but do overlap all times of day and year. It’d be an interesting project to sort this data over a year among a large group of people living in different areas of the metro.

Business, Freedom, and Discrimination

Recenly, I’ve had many discussions about the ideas and attitudes behind SB1062 in Arizona and SB100 in my own state of Utah. I was relieved to see Arizona’s Religious Freedom or—depending on the spin—Anti-Gay Bill vetoed.

What I have yet to see articulated by any legislator or lobbyist is the distinction between discrimination of service or goods provided and discrimination of individuals. One would be like requiring a Mexican restaurant to serve Japanese food because two customers walked in and craved sushi, and the other is the restaurant asking two Japanese customers to leave because the company or employees have some argument against Asians—something completely irrelevant to the business transaction.

Running a business myself, I can relate to the motivation behind much of the vetoed Arizona bill. I argue that it’s the discretion of the individuals running a business to decide what commerce they support and don’t rather than being forced by the law to provide a service or participate in a project that runs counter to the business owner’s beliefs. As an example, I wouldn’t work on any campaign promoting cigarettes, and it would be dishonest for me to put my talents toward a something I’m in opposition to and I’d respectfully inform such a company that they’d be better served by another designer. However, if an individual client happened to smoke, it’s none of my concern (short of floating sidestream smoke my way).

I say I relate to the basic motivation, however, I didn’t agree with the broad wording and subjective interpretation, something so many bills seem to fall victim to. The promise that unintended consequences wouldn’t happen or that supposedly no known examples of customer discrimination had occurred, is a pretty weak argument. Some articles writing about how gay people aren’t as bad off as blacks during slavery sound like “not that bad” is good enough. In my own state, I don’t buy this argument of anti-discrimination somehow granting “special rights” to some people while taking away the “special rights of other groups”. Equality isn’t a special right. To me, religious freedom doesn’t extend to forcing standards or ostracizing people, and misses to point of so many religions—to care for and respect others.

The personal lives and beliefs of customers isn’t a company’s concern, with the exception of personal beliefs entering into the project at hand. Hence, the tricky part as the often-referenced examples involving the wedding industry. Personally, if a business doesn’t want my patronage, as in the case of the wedding photographer in New Mexico, I wouldn’t force them to take my money, steer other people away from the place, and move on to someone agreeable.

I’m also bothered that politicians cited economic consequences as their reasoning against the Arizona’s bill—as though constitutionality, respect for others, or morality isn’t reason enough. As with so many situations in business or politics, or basic citizenship, it’s like they have to feel the threat of direct pain or punishment first before they chose to act in favor of someone else.

There’s headway to be made on both sides of these issues, realizing that often we could be on either side.