An interesting client / agency analogy – 'But I don't have a broken leg'
Quote from a great little article on Brand Republic by Dave Trott:
Suppose you are a doctor. A man comes to see you and he’s limping, you examine him.
You say, “It’s an easy diagnosis, you’ve got a broken leg.”
He says, “I don’t want a broken leg.”
You say, “That’s understandable, but you still have a broken leg.”
He says, “I’m the patient and I don’t think I’ve got a broken leg. I think I’ve got a sprained ankle.”
You say, “Well I’m the doctor. I’ve seen lots of these, and you’ve got a broken leg.”
He says, “Well I’ve told you the problem I want fixed. Now you can either fix it for me, or I can go down the road to another doctor and pay him to fix my sprained ankle.”
What do you do? Lose the patient, or give him the wrong treatment?
Simple, honest and funny advice on design pricing methods
I found a post this morning which is a great short but sweet explanation as to why there is no universal right or wrong to pricing methods. It outlines a few examples of possibly methods and ways of thinking about the value of your work with humorous real life examples. This really made me smile as it answered the questions I think we all ask when we first start quoting prices for design work.
After 5 years basing quotes on company rate cards at the agencies I was working for, I did indeed ask myself all the obvious questions when it came to pricing the design services of my own company Blink:
Coloured pencils for the LZSY illustration logo design
Logo mascot in its colour variants.
Am still sketching out the typography to go with this.
Scamps, sketches and illustrations… fun drawing skulls and butterflies for a new logo design
I am happy to be working on the branding, website and merchandising for a small startup website called ‘Let Zoe Spoil You’. LZSY will be a fun place where people can read reviews, news and breakdowns on a range of Japanese culture and media as well as click through to buy anything featured on the site. It will follow a blog style format with written and video posts by their spokeswoman ‘Zoe’.
The branding needs to reflect the style and tone of voice of the main reviewer as well as the interests and fashion style of the target audience of alternatives and anime / Visual Kei Band / Japanese culture fans.
Fun little project – Birthday coat of arms logo design
The brief:
“Design and illustrate a logo for a military (but fun) themed 21st Birthday weekend called ‘Operation Pink Menace’ for use on invites, stationary and other items. Include something iconic about the woman whose Birthday it is and also bear in mind she is a professional pastry chef / cake baker in training. She also prefers farmyard animals with ‘good flanks’, preferably cows, as her mascot so one was to be included in the creation if possible.”
I created two versions based on this. A full coat of arms design (loosely based on real examples to add authenticity) including her favourite pink Dr Marten’s boots, a cow. I expanded the chef theme in a clockwise direction by following this with a whisk and a finished chocolate cream cake. The second version used just the boot as a simple alternative. Both work well in either full colour or black and white. The amount of detail on the crest also looks quite official printed onto the aged hand typed paper invites.
Innovative custom headphone design ordering system from iFrogz
As you may be aware I have a favourite brand of headphones – namely Skullcandy Headphones
iFrogz
My love of old and new cameras combined in these retro digital cameras!
I have always loved old film cameras; owning a Coronet Clipper medium format and a Nikon Retinette 35mm as well as my Nikon D50. Until accidentally coming across a nostalgia digital camera called the ‘Rolleiflex Mini’ I had no idea that retro digital cameras were both beautiful and cute due to their small stature. A homage to the past camera greats and somewhat improvement aesthetically on the designs of current digital cameras injecting a good dose of personality into them.
Blink Design Studios – Now on Twitter
I have set myself up on Twitter. I have been resisting using it for some time under the general assumption that it mostly consisted of people describing in under 100 characters what they had for breakfast, then lunch, then how bored at work they are. But to be honest I didn’t really get this opinion from any reliable source, in fact it wasn’t from any source at all. I just found myself with this opinion and upon closer inspection it appears there is a lot of merit in the medium. Micro blogging seems to be more than just status updates – I hadn’t realised how much control users have over their visibility or over who they follow.
Clever and simple cardboard cooker design
I spotted this on Designweek – it is a really clever and simple design idea by Jon Bohmer which is well deserving of winning the Forum for the Future’s Climate Change Innovation competition.
High speed explosive photography by Alan Sailer
I saw an interesting article on the Telegraph website on Alan Sailer’s high speed photography experiments. His pictures involve photographing objects at the precise moment they are destroyed by a pellet from an air rifle. The photo’s have really inspired me as to the beauty that can be found in the smallest things for a fraction of a second, some of his images are stunningly pretty, others destructive and exciting and some just look incredibly fun to shoot.
