A banner week…

We created and produced a large format banner for Oysters & Ale to hang over H Street near the plaza in Arcata.

Local character caricature…

The event will feature a fund-raising auction which will be conducted by Rex Bohn, a larger-than-life, local personality. We 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.

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.

Oyster shell glyph…

We decided to create a simple, oyster cartoon, based upon an engraving (left). The illustration needed to be simple enough to serve as a logo glyph, and we needed to match the style of the logo banner (below).