For all to see

The sea is so big, and my contribution is so small …

On the bright side, it's a darned nice looking sea in which to bob about. (Look, ma, I'm in a museum!)

Designer Lisa Park-Steskal just sent me photos of an exhibit she helped create for the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, Calif. Lisa commissioned me to create spot illustrations for it. You can see two of them in the picture above, if you know where to look.

This is one of several opportunities to work with Lisa, including signage in Old Sacramento (and here and here) and an Arts & Crafts-influenced promotion.

The museum exhibit describes raptors, or birds of prey such as falcons, hawks and eagles. My job was to illuminate key design components of the raptors' talons and the birds' lightweight bones. The white illustrations on blue backgrounds are supposed to evoke a diagrammatic, blueprinty feel.

Here's an example:

A Swiss cheese of air and strutts and bubbles make raptors' bones so light.

They were the size of coffee saucers all the time I was working on them, through several iterations.

Even though my head told me they were meant to support larger ideas about raptors, my heart started convincing me these were gonna be marquee features.

In the end, they're just right in a sweeping, clean, engaging design.

Lisa had the illustrations affixed  to disks so they float off the display, like medallions. The understated circle gets vigorous and intelligent use throughout the museum displays here, cuing and drawing visitors to isolated bits of information.

Maybe someone will take a good look at my spots and come away with the rather cool concept that raptors have a way of locking their talons closed, so they don't have to waste any muscles holding dinner tight while they fly away.

Forced to answer, without a moment's hesitation, what I'd really like to do with my work life, I'd say designing museum exhibits.

Museums fascinate me for meta-exhibition — not only for what they contain, but how they present what they contain. It's science and dark art, finding the right ways to convey information to all visitors in as many possible ways, and to move them through the arenas. In my limited museum world-view, I'd say it's an extremely difficult job to do well.

As a teacher, my unreachable goal was to engage students as much as possible, so that learning became enjoyable and overcame boredom. It's small wonder that kids clamor for field trips to museums; sure, it's a day off from the tyranny of routine, but it's knowledge in which, done well, they can immerse themselves and touch and twist and discover.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium does this well. I once convinced my wife to stay from opening to closing, half to talk in the vast volume of data, half for the countless means and media to impart the data.  

It's design and illustration and communication writ large and re-writ constantly to meet consumer needs. I'd love to do more of this.

Best logo ever, secondary education division

"Yes, our spirit will conquer all …"

My pick is my alma mater, Cabrillo High School, Lompoc, Calif.

Yeah, I'm biased. Also — one wouldn't break a sweat arguing — lazy. But I'd wager a lot of hard searching would transpire before one found a better high school logo.

To start, it's unusual. Of all the violent, oppressive mascots one could conjure to represent secondary education, few could measure up to Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and the conquistadores. Only one other California high school, in Long Beach, calls itself Cabrillo High. Though named after the same guy, the Long Beach school chooses as its mascot the jaguar. Huh? Cabrillo College in Aptos, Santa Cruz County, is home of the Seahawks. (Strange typeface, too.)

Wimps.

Of course, Cabrillo High in Lompoc has eviscerated, stuffed and prettified the conquistador for safe student use, so that he's no more a threat than a cuddly Disney™®© pirate. But I feel sorry for the students of so many other high schools and colleges, with their cookie-cutter mascots. Lions and Tigers and Bears. Oh, boring. I attended Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a university world renowned for many majors (none of which I studied); its mascot is the Mustangs. Boring and bland.

Secondly, the Conquistadores mark has gone remarkably unchanged and untrammeled since 1965, when the Lompoc school began, named for the Spanish explorer and destroyer of worlds who sailed the coast nearby.

(I guess that's why the high school is so named. My junior high's mascot is the Minuteman, and since it's the school serving an Air Force missile base, I'm guessing it refers to the nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, though the figure is a revolutionary war hero. The missile would have been funnier and more fitting.)

As with the Monterey Bay Aquarium logo, this mark's maker is unknown, but I'd like to meet him/her. Long before I thought about illustration and graphic design as something to do, I was drawn to this logo's conquistador in profile, with stark shapes in white to define the face in a black mass, and just enough detail to delineate the helmet and plume.

This is the full mark (above), with a variation on the Spanish crest (castle and lion). I'm not sure about the four stars; they might have filled an otherwise large dark space in the mark.

We used USC's "Conquest" to celebrate touchdowns,
but the band rocked it …

Here's the conquistador's profile in the school's marching band logo (right). Some color is added to the black and gold (seriously awesome color combo, by the way!), and the shapes have been sharpened, but the mark maintains its integrity. The typeface is a bit different from the main mark, but doesn't deviate much.

(The marching band used to wear conquistador helmets as part of their uniforms; now I notice they're more like black vaquero hats …)

My point is, Cabrillo has stuck with the mark throughout the years, rarely getting off track. Even my junior varsity baseball cap bears the gold elongated C on a black field, nearly a quarter-century after the school began. The school's web site displays the mark prominently.

It's almost as if Cabrillo has a graphics standards manual, like many businesses have, dictating the do's and don'ts of their logo's use. I doubt one exists, but I give credit to my old school for respectful and consistent use of its marks.

(I'm sure it wouldn't take long before someone showed me that Cabrillo has muddled the mark on its uniforms and other uses, but don't bother; leave me to my delusions.)

The graphic integrity of Cabrillo's mark, I'd bet, is the exception.

More common is the school where my children attended, El Camino Fundamental High School in Sacramento, home of the Eagles (all but one of the high schools in the San Juan Unified School District are saddled with alliterative nicknames: Mira Loma Matadors, Casa Roble Rams, Bella Vista Broncos; yawn …).

Don't mess with Boston College!

Maybe there's a reason
this eagle is screaming …

El Camino is older than Cabrillo by far, but has no visual center. Any and all eagle graphics, and every conceivable typeface is used for whatever manner and need arises. Apparently, Boston College put down the legal hammer and forbid uses of its mark, which meant El Camino, even though it had changed the B to an E and red and gold to green and white, had to stop using the mark. The football team's helmets still bear the same eagle that adorn the Philadelphia Eagles' helmets, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

El Camino has since unveiled its own mark, created by an art teacher, that combines the E and C into the shape of an Eagle's head. You can judge for yourself how it turned out (above, right); the eagle looks like it's been skinned alive, giving it a sort of Freddy Krueger look (left).

Robert Mott created this for all his fellow fogies assessing progress
on their long-ago dreams and plans.

My friend and high school classmate Robert Mott, who went on to run his own stellar graphic design shop, designed the mark for our 30th reunion (I didn't attend); though it's the farthest afield, graphically, that I've seen the Conquistador mark, Robert maintained its integrity while re-purposing it (man, I hate that neo-word) for this one-time use.

Robert was true to the logo and to his school.

Best logo ever!

Let the arguments begin! What's the best logo?

This is my vote:

It's the Monterey Bay Aquarium logo, sans text (which has changed several times since the aquarium opened). Here's the sans serif treatment used now.

I'm having trouble tracking down its creator, and I find that puzzling, since I'd think someone or some agency would want his/her/its props.

Why do I like it? It's compact and and multitextured and multicontextual, and allows me for the first time to use the word multicontextual. At its core, it's a circle and a representation of the Giant Kelp species that forests Monterey Bay, Macroystis pyrifera. Whoever designed this took great care to show the botanical relationship between the stipe (stem), the floats (bulbs) and blades or fronds of the kelp. 

The logo as it appears at the aquarium entrance.
The typeface? Hm … my son has a nose for this.
Until he chimes in, any suggestions? It has an uncial,
old California look to it.

The kelp curls in on itself suggesting at once the curl of a wave, and fins, many and one. At the bottom, the blades/fins begin to twist around one another, suggesting a DNA double helix. The negative spaces created as the blades blend together toward the center hearken of teeth and a variety of marine shapes. Then you've got the whole cycle of life ethos going on. That's what I see in the mark, anyway.

What the charter members see.

The aquarium itself doesn't divulge much about the logo: its sole page devoted to the mark, embedded somewhere among its history, explains merely, "The logo of the Monterey Bay Aquarium is an artist's rendering of the growing tip of a giant kelp frond (Macrocystis pyrifera)." Some artist. Don't know. Don't care. Sheesh.

Hmm, not sure I've ever seen
this type treatment before …
sorta Peignot-like …

Two things would have made the mark perfect. One would have been to create tessellations of the positive and negative shapes of the floats and blades; that is, to make clearly distinguishable marine shapes of the negative spaces. The other would have been to depict the gorgeous network of veiny ridges that cover the kelp blades, and even the toothy edges of the blades.

But it's not bad, considering.


The version of the mark at the top of this post perplexes me. If it's from the original rendering, then imperfections are easy to spot, and I would have guessed this was rendered digitally. But the top edge of the blade on top is not a continuous arc; instead, it has a point at the top that interrupts the perfect arc; some of the blades and joining places are also rough, and the shapes indicating foreground and background are kind of clunky and uneven. You can see it more closely by clicking on the image.


The imperfections suggest to me that the mark was drawn by hand, and never cleaned up in digitization. Is that possible?


What's your favorite logo or mark? And who created this one? I'm dying to know.

Unveiling the Logo Overlook!™®©

Built slapdash against the Haul of Wonders,©®™the Logo Overlook!™®© is open for business!

Visitors who can somehow overlook the questionable construction will get a glorious overlook of the air conditioning units snaked across strip mall roof after strip mall roof. That blue line in the horizon, beyond that smudge of trees there? That's the ocean. Or a creek. Or haze.

Resting their eyes from all the beauty, visitors can look over or overlook (it's all about freedom of choice here at the shawndrawn®™ complex) the eponymous logos, on display as frequently as Itch-a-Sketch©™®. Which is to say, not often.

(I don't create a lot of logos, don't market as a logo designer; still, I enjoy them, especially the visual haiku they force on one's creative skills, to conjure something concise and memorable; consequently, the logos on display at Logo Overlook™©® may get dusty waiting for changeouts.)

What I call Juan Gris variations, after the Spanish
cubist painter and sculptor.

First exhibit: Logos done for Daniel Roest (say "Roost") a classical guitarist who performs with orchestras, runs an association of classical guitarists, and books his own gigs (weddings, anniversaries, conventions). Daniel needed a mark to represent his gift and his business.

He recently asked for a color version of his mark, done a while back, and that led me on a search of it, where I rediscovered a number of proposed treatments, which I like. More or less.

The final marks, above, are designed for several purposes. Daniel works with a woman flutist (flautist?) in his booked gigs, so I designed the two figures to complement one another; the male figure can still stand alone, and often does: In fact, I have not seen the logo in use with both figures, or with the text below. When Daniel Roest uses the logo, as far as I can tell, it's for the Sacramento Guitar Society; that is the mark he asked me to color.

Early version of guitar man. Eh. It's got
that idea of serving up the music, at least.

I wanted a calligraphic feel of the marks, and attempted to do so with traditional calligraphic tools. I soon descended into loop-de-loop hell, trying to get the swooshes to mix and match in line weight and dramatic angle. Ultimately, I mimicked the brush stroke, with its bristle flicks and imperfections, entirely with vector art in Adobe Illustrator.®™

Early man/woman version.
She looks too much like a
shadow, an afterthough, here.

The rooster guitar was a throw-in, just an extra personal mark that was bugging me to get out, because of the pronunciation of Daniel Roest's name. He liked it, and mentioned after that his childhood nickname was Rooster. Google "rooster guitar," and you'll find it's the fifth image that pops up. So far as I can tell, he does not use his name underneath the mark.

Earlier versions center on the feelings I get from his music, and the settings in which he mostly likely would work. Mosaic came to mind, and tile, and cool fountains made of stone in a plaza somewhere, which is how I came up with what I call Juan Gris variations.

In some ways, they resemble tests for colorblindness, which means they don't stand out strongly.

Eh.

If a credit union played guitar, this would
be ideal.

The hors d'oeuvres version, left, is also supposed to evoke the setting Daniel Roest would play. The staff becomes the little sandwich, the fancy toothpick unfurls loosely into a guitar shape. Eh. Kinda lifeless, and it seems like a lot of unnecessary work went into making it work, which did, and it didn't. Plus, the toothpick sticking out the bottom of the snack? That has always bugged me.

The seasons mark, above right, is meant to embrace the world of variation in Daniel Roest's music, and the many reasons and seasons for playing for others. I dunno; it's kind of generic. My logos tend to be organic and rarely fit a geometric shape, so if anything else, they're unique. My all-time favorite logo, though, does fit all the rules for logo design: The Monterey Bay Aquarium's. That merits its own post someday, in which I sing its praises.

If you survived the Overlook, come back again when you get the courage. Otherwise, it's probably best to step back inside.