There are some graphics I have clipped and stowed away though – that leave me longing to know who the artist is…so I’ll be doing a series and website called: Who’s The Artist? I Want The T-Shirt! I have to leave it up to you kind folks along with Twitter and facebook to help me FIND these artists! I’d love to commission or license their work…these pieces are so striking that I simply must have the t-shirt. Today I have posted on the left two watercolor/high contrast photo meshes…do you know who the artist is? Please let me know in the comments! And thank you in advance!

I don’t know about you, but I have a bad habit of bookmarking a lot of online articles. There’s a reason I say it’s a bad habit (and partially an enabler)…I bookmark with an app called InstaPaper. InstaPaper is a great little app that simply allows you to save the online articles you’d like to “Read Later.” Big deal you say…well, you can read these articles without Wi-Fi or 3G access, InstaPaper stores them locally on your iPhone to read offline.

Now, enter the social media and RSS firehose, Twitter accounts (I have 3,) Facebook and you have a lot of material that might interest you. Me? I fall into the habit all too often of saying, “Read Later,” because somewhere in my brain I think I’ll have the time to read everything I send to InstaPaper. Fortunately (although, that depends on your point of view) InstaPaper only holds 500 articles. I wasn’t aware of this, and to my dismay one day, I was looking for an article and couldn’t find it. That’s when I discovered the cap, which the developer clearly states (and is right) is plenty. If you have over 500 saved articles in InstaPaper, how many do you think you’ll actually get to?

For me it’s a bad habit, chug-a-lugging on the never empty fire hose of content coming at me from all sides. How could I possibly read all of these things? I can’t, but somehow I slide into the habit of pushing that “Read Later” button. It’s pretty easy to say, “Oh wow, this is great! I don’t have time to read the whole thing, I’ll just set it aside for later.”

I have found a way to have my cake and eat it too: Evernote. Evernote is a great app for iPhone and Mac desktop (now also for Windows and Google’s Android phones that allows you to throw everything you want to remember into organized “notebooks.” This has become as embedded in my work-flow and life that it might as well be implanted in my forearm…oh wait…I’d want my iPhone there first… but I digress. Evernote’s notebooks are filled with what are called “Notes” and they can be anything from a screen shot, and entire web page in PDF format (yes, it let’s you do that,) and it even read text in photos. If you want to know more, go here, a post I wrote a while back about the app.

The other day, I thought I’d try a little trick I’ve been doing with Evernote on my desktop. Sometimes I just do a “select all,” copy and paste (for Evernote there are special keystoke for this,) and I have that shipped to Evernote for safe keeping. While on my InstaPaper page in Safari on my desktop, I did the same thing, just for fun to see what happened. BOOM! My entire insanely long page of article links, right into Evernote, all in one note! Amazing! Now those article links that were near the 500 or 499 mark, are saved forever! Not exactly pretty, but they’re saved…

Now, being a scholar of all in the GTD (Getting Things Done) way of thinking, it may not be good for me, but it’s cool nonetheless. Just because I can do it, doesn’t really mean I should. But hey, if I’m ever in a pinch, I’ll know what to do. How do you use Evernote or InstaPaper?

Below is someone’s rendition of what Bass would have done, had he created the TRON opening credits – but I reckon he would have done it without being notified of the actual content – it simply doesn’t match TRON, but it’s still delicious!

Tron vs. Saul Bass from Hexagonall on Vimeo.

Several of them were very cliche ideas and icons that have been overdone to extreme. Lightbulbs will never be a good idea for a company that is service based, though there are some rare exceptions. Fire and flames have become a bit cliche as well, unless, the name requires it and truly makes since. I continued on and on about all the ways a logo can and will be used, from the obvious to the extreme (can it be reproduced on a football field?)

He replied to my e-mail with his picks and then proceeded to tell me that he didn’t think any of the contenders matched the company’s name. Doh! Boy was he right…and I just assumed that this was already covered in the beginning of the project. I mean, really, that is the starting gate first step isn’t it? It is. Take my company’s name: Whiplash Design. I knew once I had the name, I could move forward to understand what I would want the logo to do.

What I had envisioned was something fluid and conveyed movement…hence the arrival at the word Whiplash. I must have brainstormed thousands of words to get the one that stuck. Now, why does it work? Because, once paired with Design, it implies design that makes one stop suddenly and notice, but hopefully not dangerously enough to involve a neck brace. For me it was perfect, the pieces began to fall right into place. Coming up with the icon or logo was an entirely different story.

I was never satisfied with any of the ideas I came up with. A tornado didn’t work, a bull whip cued images of a dominatrix and all the others were just not right. I was on that journey for a very long time. Did I finally succeed? Nope. I instead stumbled upon a solution that is rare. A typographical logo with a series of photos that met my requirement of fluid motion: fruit flying through water. Because I just happened to find a series of the “flying fruit” I was able to give people at networking events a choice of what business card they wanted: strawberries, two different kinds of apples, and a couple of oranges. The photography is stunning and therefore reflects my vision.

As you can see, it all started with the name. If a logo doesn’t convey the name of a company, then it isn’t doing its job. You can nix that rule if you’re a technology company or a huge fortune 500 company, otherwise, you need your mark to be instantly recognizable, and it must conjure up your entire brand experience. Target is a good example, you know when you see their logo, you automatically think, “Low Prices.”

Evernote…Never Forget

Brilliant art work…possibly illegal…yet still brilliant

Photo from Lovely Package

“Seriously Pink is the first rosé coloured liqueur to be made in Australia. For the wine maker, achieving the right colour was just as important as the end result. Its first release completely sold out in just one month.”