A season’s greeting…

From concept to printing, for less than stock catalog cards

Custom quality does not always cost more. Carson Park Design was tasked with designing and producing a holiday card for a client who traditionally purchased stock-image cards with a text-only imprint.  For 2009 he wanted a unique card with a humorous twist that would appeal to legal professionals. We created an image to illustrate his idea and printed the cards with foil-lined envelopes for considerably less than our client had paid in the past for commercial, off-the-shelf cards. A Merry Christmas indeed.

Vector logos: find and extract…

Graphics professionals often face the problem of finding vector or high resolution bitmap corporate logos. Penetrating the corporate veil in order to find the in-house graphics department may prove fruitless and time-consuming.

A quick search of the corporate website can yield results. Here’s how we do it:

If the site has a search function, enter pdf. If there is no search function, go to the site map and look for brochures, annual reports, or any other resources that might logically exist in a pdf format.

Download the pdf.

Open the pdf in Acrobat Reader and search for a logo. Note the page.

Parse the pdf: In Illustrator go to file|open. Select the pdf. A pop-up window will open with a thumbnail of page one. Select the page that has the logo.

Click OK.

Elements on the page may be grouped and could include masks, compounds, and other special effects, so in the view menu, select outline. This puts you in a wireframe mode. Imported bitmap images will now appear as bounding boxes.  Take the direct selection tool (the hollow arrow) and begin deleting all elements except the logo.

When the logo has been isolated, save the document as an Illustrator file (.ai).

There’s a huge database of corporate logos at Brands of the World, but use our method if you don’t find what you need there.

Update: We’ve had good luck finding corporate logos recently at seeklogo.com, so give it a shot!

Basket case…

With a legacy of more than one logo, the new owners of Bella Baskets asked Carson Park Design to finalize a branded identity for them. We fleshed out a look, based upon their signage, which complements the cornucopia of rich, high quality, local and regional products which this north coast California company offers in its gift basket selections.

Our busy client did not want to learn HTML (hey, go figure) so we called upon our friends at Morse Media to design an open source user interface on the back end which allows Bella Baskets to edit the text and photos themselves.

As with all of our websites, the client owns the code without restrictions. This leaves them with design and programming flexibility within a scalable framework.

By the way, make someone you love happy by sending them a Humbolicious® basket.

The fleurons are lovely this time of year…

Just as some of us use italic ampersands in order to liven up dreary type, designers sometimes turn to ornaments in order to embellish text. In the past, red was the preferred color for fleurons, because red was so often set up as the second color on a two-color print run. Dingbat fonts aren’t very interesting, and Adobe Wood Type Ornaments have been raided with embarrassing frequency, but if one keeps one’s eyes peeled, there are other typographic elements which can be employed as decorations.

We recently found an upper case V in a Spencerian script font, which worked well as ornamental brackets for a logo which was done in Roman small caps.

By converting type to vector paths, one can reshape type, combine letters, extend swashes and modify terminals. Sometimes, one might even create a fleuron where none existed before.

Georgia on my mind…

It occurred to us recently that we’ve seen increasing instances of old-style figures (lowercase, non-lining numbers) in graphic design in the past few years. Typographers have always used text figures, but graphic designers have been largely ignorant of them owing, in part, to the lack of affordable extended font families in the early years of the desktop revolution.

Matthew Carter designed Georgia in 1996 for Microsoft’s Web Core Fonts program, and it’s now all over the internet. Why? Because it was included (wisely) in the system software for both Macs and PCs. Web designers use system fonts for all live type (type which has not been converted into a graphic) so that default fonts (think Courier) will not stand in as substitutes for specified fonts.

Georgia has handsome old-style figures, and this has renewed interest in non-lining numbers amongst designers.

Thank you Matthew Carter, and (dare I say it?) thank you Microsoft.

A way with words…

What used to be called a logotype (known now, simply as a logo), consists most often of type (the name of the business) combined with a glyph (an ornamental or representational  graphic).

We, at Carson Park Design, usually sketch some ideas on paper, and then flesh them out on the computer. We show our client from three to five draft design directions, and, after hearing their thoughts, we return with a synthesized idea.

A banner week…

Here you see large format banner, street-spanning banners for Oysters & Ale to hang over H Street near the plaza in Arcata, California.

Carson Park Design has designed and produced vinyl, and woven fabric banners for many years. Let us bid on your next banner project, whether it’s gigantic or small.

Local character caricature…

Auctions conducted by Rex Bohn, a larger-than-life, Humboldt County personality bring in the funds for scores of local charities. Carson Park Design needed to render an illustration, but had only one, low-resolution photo to go by, so we used exaggerated vectors from tracings over the photo in order to get the look. We then colored the inside of the figure with transparent tints, and voilà!

Sepia to the rescue…

We had a digital color, flash photo of the event organizers to work with for the press release.

If you look through family photos, you’ll notice that the quality of the photos deteriorates markedly in the 1970s. The introductions of flash bulbs and inexpensive color film cast a grotesque reality over our loved ones. Picture albums go from the handsome black and white shots of the ’50s to the lurid, crime-photo-like color of the ’70s.

Digital cameras have improved the quality of the color, but the flash still removes the shadows on faces, and lends an unnatural harshness to subjects.

Sepia, worked through the color balance sliders in Photoshop (after converting the file from RGB to grayscale), can help to mitigate some of the damage which color and flash do to modern snapshots.

Finished logo…

We simplified the beer glass in order to conform, stylistically with the other elements in the logo. Now we have all of the print collateral and other promotional pieces to take care of. We’ll need a banner, tickets, posters, press releases etc.

Logo, by the way, is a truncated version of the older terms, logogram and logotype. Modern logos, typically, consist of letters and a glyph (symbol), though they may consist of only letters, or a glyph. All of these terms are derived from Greek.