I use my tumblr account for my steady blogging including any design and new work and I just found a happy little script that will add my tumblr posts here as well so stay tuned!
I received some print samples in the mail from a couple project managers I work with regularly and found this on the back of the envelope:
Isn’t that sweet? I [heart] you too Chantal and LMS!
My friend Sarah just showed this to me:
ANOTHER Kristen Cox?! Kristen with a K and no H and an E?! AWESOME! Does this mean I get an Amex Plum now too? Gimme Gimme!!
YAY! So the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 is complete. I’ve learned all about custom-post-types and creating taxonomies (big thanks to Justin Tadlock’s tutorials) and all that jazz but my favorite part has to be the new easy menus and having a contact form that works.
But in more design news, as you may have seen on the home page, I just finished a poster for Park Playhouse’s upcoming production of Annie Get Your Gun.
I’m going to Albany to see the show myself in two weekends so I’ll see if I can find a print one up somewhere so I can get a photo.
As promised on Friday I’m trying to catch up on posting all my new work. My latest web (and more) project was for Park Playhouse in Albany, NY which produces free plays and musicals in Washington Park in the summer. This was especially fun for me since I grew up outside of Albany and went to these shows a lot as a kid and more as a teenager when a lot of the my theatre friends would be in the shows. Park Playhouse recently went through a rather large shift in its administrative staff and came to me to try and update their website a bit. Or, rather, a lot as it turned out.
The one design element they wanted me to incorporate is a “night sky” theme (since this is outdoor theater after all) and after hearing some of their horror stories about webmasters, I wanted their website to be something THEY could maintain without having to learn anything. This ended up being a great learning experience for me working a little more deeply with WordPress (editing .php files!) and I really love the result.
As you can see once, we started with the website, their original logos needed a little love too.  And then while I was at it, I had a go at their current show logos as well.  
The original Park Playhouse logo was dominated by the large hand drawn lakehouse (which is the stage for the productions) which left “Park Playhouse Inc.” to be squished underneath. I simplified the lakehouse drawing and chose a more clean, modern font to compliment it.
The long narrow logos seem to have been working for most purposes but, again, I’d hate for them to be high and dry later so I also created a secondary set of square/vertical logos in case they need them.
And lastly (for now) I updated the show logos for their current shows, Annie Get Your Gun and The Wiz.
I realize I haven’t posted in awhile so there is a glut of new things to share but I’ll start with the oldest and move my way forward:
This winter I did some branding for a consultant who was looking for a logo that conveyed:
…simplicity, trustworthiness, and experience. ¬†The logo should be appropriately solid and not-hip. Though preferably not as sleep-inducing as most consulting firm logos.
Thomer is nice enough to relay all the good feedback he gets about the logo back to me so I know it’s coming across well.
I also did some other pieces to round out his business materials:
Next we have a website re-design for Park Playhouse in Albany, NY that turned into a website re-design, logo re-design, and show logos re-design so stay tuned!
I am always collecting things I see that I love and either adding them on delicious or saving the images to my various “ideabank” folders on my desktop but when I find something so amazing I end up reading clicking “older posts” half the afternoon away, it gets added to google reader. The Holy Grail of Goodness in my world (which I then share with you via the blogroll). Today we’ve had an addition: http://www.designworklife.com/ which describes itself as:
a part of Seamless Creative, a New York City-based design stu­dio. Updated daily, dwl was estab­lished to cat­a­log and share design-centric inspiration.
I like the concept of ffffound but the fact the nothing is tagged always annoys me so finding designworklife is like having a collection of searchable awesome pretty stuff. Like they’re leprechauns or alternate personalities of myself that find all the stuff while I’m asleep.
Right now I believe if I clicked on their “tagged typography” tag I’d instantly go broke. I think I need to step away from the computer.
I have a bunch of new work that needs to be posted but this is kind of a long one so we’ll start here.
Since I used to work full-time with an in-house design department and know all brand and all the players, a lot of times I work like an auxiliary designer to their team when they’re in a pinch.
In the Fall there was a piece that had been waiting on feedback from the project manager and then the designer was going on vacation right when the piece needed to go to the printer to make it in time for an upcoming conference so it’s safe to say with a week left– they were in a pinch. It was one of those “it’s half done, we’re just waiting on copy edits” and then I talk to the project manager and find out it’s more like “we don’t like it at all and haven’t been able to vocalize what we don’t like so that’s why we haven’t given any feedback.”
This has happened a couple of times and surprisingly is a situation I like. I read an article not too long ago that really resonated with me by Andy Rutledge about how Creativity is Not Design (which I got to via Astheria’s Learn about Design, Not Making Things Pretty) so I see these opportunities to really solve a problem. I know, terribly corny.
Anyway here’s a small sample what the files looked like when I got them.
It was a 12 page self cover with various treatments for the tables/call-outs and one page that just has “need one page of filler type here to eliminate ‘white space’” written in big letters with a graph spilling over onto the blue side bar opposite it.
And here’s the solution I provided:
The brand surrounding this piece is pretty weighted to futura and shades of blue (except for the pie chart which remain the colors seen to continuity from earlier pieces) and a lot of times all that blue and all that futura just way too much. I added some coordinating colors and some neutrals to round it out a bit while leaving the blue for the call-outs and the cover (not pictured) and in the process dropped the page count from 12 to 8. Yay! Thrifty designer!
Now I’m not saying it will run out and win any awards but I think anyone who needs to know the information contained within will be able to easily find it and reference it later.
Hm, why don’t we give out awards for that again?
You can take the A List Apart survey too by heading over here.
If you’re free next Tuesday stop by the NERD Center (no really, it’s called NERD: New England Research and Development Center) in Kendall Square¬† (in Cambridge) for Tech Tuesday hosted by the Mass Leadership Council. It’s free! I’m going so make sure to say “Hi!”¬† You’ll know it’s me because I’ll be the girl.*
*I kid! I kid! That’s lingering nerd (lowercase) humor from my days at RIT. I’m sure there will be more than one girl at this event.