Kill Fee Week, Part II

Kill fee: |kil fē| noun. Payment made to a creative for work done but not used.

Such ancient ruins, these. No chronicle of their collapse exists except for what remains of my quickly dimming memory.

The client either had no real authority to commission me, overstepped authority, worked under an assumption about her bosses that ultimately and suddenly proved false, or the project itself died. One of those.

The logos are for a food technology center that may or may not exist.

The project instructions are apparent in the lengthy explanation I supplied for each idea — especially where I chose to ignore them.

These would have been part of the step after very rough pencil sketches.

The project came at a time when I was just starting to harness Adobe Illustrator®™, but before realizing it could do more than geometric shapes. These are inspired by the work of illustrator John Hersey, an early craftsman of digital art whose work still relies heavily on polygon and perfect curves and the simplest of Illustrator™© tools.

Ironic that this project was about the wild and organic.

Kill Fee Week, Part I

Kill fee: |kil fē| noun. Payment made to a creative for work done but not used.

Stuff happens. Some projects die before their time. No harm, no foul. No fee, except for the starting payment, for services up to that point.

I learn something no matter what — in a technique, a relationship, step more skillfully taken. And I have fun.

Here's one project that didn't go to production, for a bicycle motocross racing group in Sydney, Australia, which sought a jersey redesign. Things didn't work out. Here are some of the sketches.

This is from round 2 of illustrations, in which decision makers in the club asked for
designs which hearkened to the look of other racing jerseys. I tried — but I wanted
to give the club something out of the ordinary, harnessing the print capabilities (left) and
riffing off of dazzle camouflage designs (right).

The club asked me to explore Sydney-ish visuals. The city is known the world over
for its still-stunning opera house, for example, like a nautilus disarticulating on dry land.
I played instead with the stylized image of the rainbow serpent that appears on Sydney's city coat of arms.

The rainbow serpent is integral to the myths and creation stories of
the Australian aboriginal people. As fascinated as I am by aboriginal art, especially the "x-ray" style that seems to expose creatures' bones, I'm uneasy about using it.

I feel the same about the entrancing art of the Pacific Northwest, in which native cultures have advanced an extremely spare graphic style. It demonstrates life's interconnectedness, depicting animals whose limbs and parts are made from other animals, all distinctive by their ovoid black, white and red eyes.

I'd love to draw inspired by that art, but I don't feel it's mine to mess with, that it's sacred to those cultures. Maybe I'm glad the racing club didn't choose this.

These designs are inspired by Reko Rennie, a Sydney artist known for his aboriginal-inspired geometric
forms, so simple yet so unsettling in their vibrancy. It would be an obtuse reference, but I figured the
Sydney folks would get it. Just in case, I tucked shapes of the opera house room, the Sydney Tower
and the Sydney Harbor Bridge in among the lines.

A threatened species of frog has become a sort of anti-mascot for the racing club, which rides at part of the
park where the 2000 Sydney Olympics took place. The frog's habitat limits the club's use of its track. I thought
the kids in the club might like themselves enveloped in the frog's long slimy tongue, eventually catching
one of their teammates.

The shirt would have been printed using dye sublimation, which affords subtle variations in color and detail.
I tried to take advantage of this with transparent angel flame-wings, and a gradient behind the repeated
hex nut pattern.

More frogginess

Because who doesn't love a monstrous eyeball on a racing jersey?

The project included the possibility of a logo redesign, from this:

Two-color version of the original full-color look,
featuring a frog.

To some of these possibilities:

The club benefits from a wealth of impassioned supporters, but ultimately the collective passion from many directions could not provide direction for the jersey design under the agreed-upon budget.

Best logo ever, Rockin' Down the Highway Division

Ideal at any speed.

The road is no place for a good logo.

A logo is art most immediate. It must stab you through the heart, convince you instantly. But you have to see it first; you need the moment to consider it.

Good luck if you're also trying not to wreck on the median at 70 mph.

Naturally, most companies who depend on the road for your attention don't even try. Disqualify the Coca-Cola™®s, the McDonald's™®, all those marks that trigger your visceral "consume me!" nerve. They didn't have to rely on the highway to stab you. They've had your whole life to do that. Logos for their ilk on the sides of trucks need no extra effort to attract or repulse you.

I'm talking instead about businesses whose business are the highway, they who transport, whose products and services almost subserve the road. They don't put much design effort into a lost cause, because you can't see them and you aren't the ones buying their services, anyway.

Exceptions are few. Yellow Trucking got known by not being yellow, for example. Its trucks were the color of macaroni and cheese, a thought I thought to myself every time I saw one of its trucks. Yellow has merged with other companies and now goes by YRC Freight®©, and uses two acute triangles to form a road receding beneath its name.

May Trucking — good on a signet
ring or a shirt pocket

Geometric shapes forming roads — a go-to solution for a lot of trucking companies.

May Trucking Co.®© has a catchy monogram, but you'd have trouble placing it out of context.

Old Dominion©®'s interlocking O and D looks like a college emblem.

Knight Transportation™®'s logo begs consideration. That's the trouble: Such an intriguing logo redesign deserves a good long look — anywhere else but the madding freeway.

A knight's profile forms the negative space in a capital K. A lance appears and disappears in the mass.

What could be the reflection of his shoulder armor, or the gathering of his cloak above his armored arm — is also the stylized head of a fierce horse. It's a gem hidden at high speeds, redesigned by a firm called Summation. The old mark simply used a charging knight atop a sans serif K.

Most small-scale trucking companies are variations on airbrush Kar Kulture script — fancy but clean, but sending no more than the message, "I own this truck and I'm damn proud of it."

The along comes Oldcastle®™, a maker and seller of building supplies, an American subsidiary of an Irish company. I passed a truck bearing the logo on my farewell trip from Oregon last month, and wanted time itself to stop.

Seeing how it didn't, the logo won me over anyway, even at high speed.

It's road tested.

I first noticed the strange calligraphic "O," thick below left and above right, thin above left and below right, just as a wide pen nib and a slanted stroke would render it. But sharp and angular. I had to look closer.

Then I saw the simple but mesmerizing image of a castle tower, two cuts into the skewed rectangle and its shadow to create a battlement, a castle tower.

Then, in a moment, the lovely optical illusion: The tower casting its shadow left — solid, stately … or the tower uplit, casting its shadow onto a ceiling or forest dark to the right — dreamy, progressive?

The designer used a simple Helvetica black (or 95 neue) {thanks, Bob Dahlquist!} for the name, timeless and clean, to support the mark rather than draw the eye away.

The name is made up (nothing wrong with that), and the design has a story behind it, which is rare. The story is brief and yet oddly satisfying.

The logo, says Oldcastle® company literature, was designed by the daughter of the company founder. If it's the same person based on my Internet research (and the Internet is always correct, so I needn't worry), the designer is now a popular sex advice columnist and author in the United Kingdom.

Though formally trained in graphic design with her own London design firm, she is quoted in a news profile as saying it wasn't her "idea of fun."

I see her point. Still, being able to create such elegant design, enjoyed at any speed, I might have reconsidered for the briefest moment.

A logo surfaces

This bitty one kept popping up.

Persistent. Prankish — she made as if to disappear for good, even stayed away for the longest time, until suddenly arising in another spot.

Whatcha doing? she asked, or seemed to. Can I play? Can I, huh? Huh?

I tried to ignore her. This was serious business, designing the artwork that would go on the swim caps for the 24-hour Swim Relay in San Francisco's Aquatic Park. I was swimming in it, and director Suzie Dods asked me to come up with something.

Artist at work. Do not disturb. No fun allowed.

I made lists (sometimes the same list redone in different ink and decaying penmanship), checked them thrice. What was legible became pegs on which to hook ideas.

The solution had to say, "This is the first attempt of the craziest damn swim in one of the most beautiful places on the planet!"

It all but bellowed "TIME and SPACE and NOVELTY!" like few others could.

Would I hear it?

Regardless, the solution had to be different, and swimming is a prickly client. Photography may do it justice, but graphic design often fails. Swimming is all slash of arm and splash of water and sliver of rubber-swathed head. Most it it happens out of sight.

Swim logos, as a result, often look like the ransacking of traffic safety signs: Round head, zig-zag line for an arm, two or three wavy lines for water — presto! Logo.

The swimmers in these logos by necessity display bad form — for freestyle anyway, they're almost vertical — to show the head and sometimes facial expression or features.


This event called for something different. Now, to work.

First, time: That's the marrow of this shindig, a 24-hour grind, day passing into night and back again, the feel of it. How to convey it? The movement of sun and moon, an ever-widening whirl? A watch? A Dali watch? Literally the words "24 hours?"


All of the ideas sketched, considered, set aside.

Now, place: A marvel to us outsiders, San Francisco is just as much a jewel to its swimming locals. The City must glimmer in the art.

Next, novelty: Since Herb Caen, late great columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, called The City Baghdad by the Bay, I tried that for a bit, dipping into visual history and mythology to make visual links to the sophisticated city The City is.

Leander, swimming across the Hellespont each night to be with his lover Hero. Assyrian bas-relief, swimmers prostrate and flailing, fully clothed and behatted, as if seen from under water.

So began a spate of sketchy sketches, suggesting the rough hew of the ancient artist. Swimmers formed a circle, suggesting the passage of time and completion of laps.

Nah, I decided, too esoteric. Too far away from crazy damn swim, the unforgettable place.

I was going around in my own circles on this, getting nowhere.

Then look who showed up! The wee sea lion, wanting to play. Up she rose, I realize, from my subconscious.

The sea lion suddenly answered everything for me, time and place and novelty. It's wild, like this swim, and welcoming (not that I'd like to cross a cross one). Sea lions dwell on San Francisco's piers and roam Aquatic Park.

I saw one from afar on my swim of the park; one day I hope to see a sea lion pop up close from the green murk of the Bay, as other swimmers tell, watch it watch me, then watch it swim away.

She became the hook for this idea. I built The City around her, the water and waves and tides.

Ultimately she had come to play with the swimmers.

The water in the final art played multiple roles, surface and volume and sky and night.

I managed to fit in Coit Tower, the TransAmerica Building (a useful landmark for swimming the homeward route that weekend), the Golden Gate Bridge, the sailing ship Balclutha tied up next to Aquatic Park — even the flag buoy known well to swimmers there.

Circles became slash and splash and sun and moon. Swirls suggested a timepiece, a stopwatch, the endlessly circling crazy damned swim — I dunno, I might have enshrined a cliché on that last bit.

On the cap, the sweeping shape is meant from a distance to suggest  horns or Hermes' wings.

At least the sea lion seems bemused.

Addendum: I reacquainted with an elementary school classmate, Jim Bock, at the 24-hour swim. He's a lively member of the South End Rowing Club now, living lifelong dreams in San Francisco. When I introduced myself by social media, he sent me a copy of a chart he had made way back in 5th grade, written on pulp lined paper. It lists the class' and teacher's birthdays. Each student and teacher recorded his/her data, and Jim somehow kept that paper all this time. He and I just happened to have signed on subsequent lines:

We were adamant about adding fractions to our ages. Even then, I notice, I was playing with a logo for my name.

Trending

Let's crunch the numbers, shall we?

Oh — they don't look good at all. Not at all.

— wait — ha! —got it upside down. So Embarrassing! — OK, here we go …

No, that doesn't help. Some of these numbers look all right, but the rest …

I've succumbed — to pride, hubris, what have you. I've fallen prey, and in desire have burned my fingers — the desire to know:

Who's reading my posts?

{Point of order: I don't know who's reading my posts, so worry not. Nor do I wanna know. Although nifty fact: Two people from the Isle of Man have read my posts (not sure how many times) or one person from the Isle of Man has read two posts, or maybe one post twice. Anyway, kudos to you and the Isle of Man for getting a separate distinction in the blogger.com™© toolbox of statistics available to its users.

{I still do not know anything more about you, Isle of Man dweller(s), other than that, and would not seek any more information. Unless you dropped me a note, of course; then we could talk. I love that your coat of arms is a triskelion of legs …

{But I've lost the mooring of this post, so to speak …}

This is my 326th post — you're invited to the after-party this afternoon in the lobby — and I have to admit that every time I post a post, even though I'm writing to retard the regression of my own wits,  I check the counter blogger.com provides, the one that records in real time the number of views each one gets.

I'm doing so now, while you're reading. Creepy, right?

My closest equivalent is a stage mom pushing her trussed-up, gussied-up, tiara'd toddler onto the runway, then peeking from behind the curtain to see who oohs and ahhs and sniffles.

Through the course of days I'll refresh the counter, like leaving the kid out there long after the crowd has left and the lights have been doused and the crickets have come.

What's more pathetic, that fact or its revelation?

Over time I have been able to determine what topics generate the most views, and what the least.

I have not been able to determine what, if anything, to do about it.

When I first wrote a blog about my blog — a metablog! — a friend kindly sent to me the link to a site that would provide a comprehensive analysis of where and how my blog is being used. But I did not use it because I don't think it would tell me what I really wanted to know:

Did you enjoy reading it? Did you really read it, or just click on the link, quail at the wall or words, and resume your life? No judging here. I'm just curious.

Did I make you laugh or cry or retch? Sometimes you tell me, but most leave me to wonder.

Is there something you'd like me to write about? To stop writing about? Actually, the view counts tell that story.

I have gathered up all the posts and their data, and put them into groups. The bulk of my posts — comprising some of my artwork and backstory … rants about odd issues I care for … riffs on swimming and graphic design … is in the largest group. We'll just say the views for each number in the thousands and leave it at that. My ego's raw and exposed enough as it is.

Posts that got three times the average view count went into one small group (most popular). Posts with half the average views (least popular) into another. This post is about these posts. It's all very scientific.

Herewith, my executive summary, starting with the good news:

Put a logo in it: By far the most viewed post — twice as many as the next — is my declaration that the Monterey Bay Aquarium is the best logo ever.

Second most popular was about my declaration that the U.S. Air Force symbol is the best military logo.

(Awkward aside, I realize after all this time I misspelled "division" in the blog title. Even my most ardent proofreader missed that.)

Lesson learned: People really like reading about logos, I guess. Maybe it's a marriage of the visual and computer culture. The Monterey Bay Aquarium post keeps amassing view counts over time, so I picture people Googling©™ "logo" and finding the post. I wrote 56 times about logos so far, the data show.

I like logos, like looking at good and bad logos, would love to read more about how certain logos were created. Every once in a while I'll write at length about logos that enrapture or incense or baffle me.

The one declaring my allegiance to my high school's logo proved popular, as did one about some sketch-logos, really, that I did for someone's fantasy football league long ago. Even a flitting logo for the U.S. Olympics got a lot of looks.

When I trashed the old Montreal Expos© logo, viewers flocked. Ditto for the impending horror of Office Depot®™ and Office Max's™© merger creating an even worse logo, which apparently hasn't happened (the logo, anyway). Even the worst slogan ever got lookie-loos. Folks like their graphic melodrama.

Lots and lots of views, to be sure, but almost no dialogue: Even when I challenged viewers to argue with my highly subjective logo rants and raves, none did.

Get personal … but not too personal: The first I noticed the potential ripple effect of my posts — beyond the usual number of viewers — was when I wrote about my great-uncles, five of whom served on the same ship when they survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. Word of the post went beyond that first circle of viewers, apparently, to relatives, to friends of the Fahlgren brothers who served during World War II, and suddenly the viewer count soared.

The same for when I processed my feelings over the death of a popular and highly regarded high school classmate, which attracted his wide circle of friends and acquaintances … and the death of my father-in-law, drawing a breadth of family and friends.

When I wrote follow-ups for each of these posts, the added interest had died down and viewership fell to usual levels.

Personal posts aren't a given, though. The story of Nancy and me beginning our lives together attracted many viewers, but the story of meeting a half-sister for the first time a couple of years ago, not nearly so many.

Go figure.

To swim or not to swim: Records show I have written 57 times about swimming, with good results. The 24-hour swim I participated in last week grabbed viewers quickly, as did my view on Diana Nyad, who crossed 108 miles from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Fla. in a highly controversial swim.

My paean to a facebook©® page called "Did you swim today?" also attracted a great deal of viewers, many, I suspect, from the facebook®™ page.

Enough glowing and gloating. Now the bad news:

Do they know it's Christmastime?: Do not blog during the holidays, should be rule No. 1. Even if it's a heartfelt wish to any viewers out there in Viewer Land, the viewers are out there rightfully enjoying the holiday or viewing online gift sites, not my blog post. That's true year after year after year.

Even though I make it a habit to post twice a week, maybe I can lay off between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Take me out of the ballgame: Don't write about the San Francisco Giants®© (my team) either, is a fairly clear message. I wrote 36 times about the Giants in some form. Baseball is divisive (some say boring, but I don't listen to those critics), so I understand if only a subset view my Giants blogs, in bad times or good.

Although the oddest thing happened after writing about my first-ever ballgame, Giants vs. Cubs: A classmate from long ago and now far away, a physician on the opposite of the country, wrote me out of the blue about his first ballgame. So even though baseball views aren't big, they're worth the serendipitous nostalgia kick.

Conclusions

I figure I can:

1. Tag more — If I wanna drive traffic to the site, as the marketers say, I need to tag the hell out of each. Often I do. Sometimes I don't tag at all; sometimes I just want to release a post into the current and let it go where it will.

2. Tag each post with "logo," whether or not it's about logos. At least people will view each post, if that's really what I want.

3. Time releases for optimum viewership. I followed my son's advice and began releasing them in late morning Pacific Standard Time, rather than at the break of dawn. But finding the optimal time seems quixotic.

4. Market better. It's true this is a showcase for my artwork. It's also true I can't help writing about things. It's part chore, part organizer, part portfolio, part journal. I post a link to facebook and that's about it. Marketing remains a black science to me.

Some wags may whine that this whole post is just a transparent excuse to get viewers to read past posts, including my very first (also about swimming), which hasn't got a lot of viewers. To this accusation I say: well, yeah.

Or, I can stay the course and do what I've been doing.

You can guess my choice.

Low go

What I had hoped for …

Spoiler alert: I come out of this a pathetic whiner.

Big blue banners framed the altar at our church last weekend, to herald Catholic Schools Week. The banners bear the crest of the school, Our Lady of the Assumption, and each banner holds a word proclaiming an ideal of the school or Catholic education in general: Faith, academic excellence, service, community.

(More idealistic than ideal, really, given my experience, but there I go, whining already.)

As crests go, OLA's takes its comfortable place with all the badges and crests of just about every private parochial school ever, everywhere.

"Our Lady of the Assumption School" floats in a banner above the crest. "Hands to Serve. Hearts to Love," sits in the banner below. Eh — better than the motto of the Jesuit order — "Men for others" — which, when applied to the nearby Jesuit High School, is awkward and vaguely, unintentionally naughty.

What the school has now …

The OLA crest is divided in thirds. An image of the Virgin Mary, beautiful and demure in robes resembling a habit, inhabits the bottom of the crest. In the upper corners, a cross, and disembodied hands which appear ready to catch a disembodied heart.

I get it: Hands, heart. Still …

If it's original art, and not religious clip art or something cobbled by some faith-based apparel company, I'd be surprised. It reminds me of county emblems, in which no resource or facet can be ignored so every inch of the emblem is covered with inch-tall symbols of every resource and facet.

Back when our children went to the school, the principal at the time commissioned me to create a logo for the school. It didn't really have one. At best, it had "OLA" in Hobo type with an illustration of a growling cougar head for PE and sports T-shirts.

I dove into the project, not only because it finally gave me a fighting chance to be useful with my parent-volunteer hours (of which the school expected many), I was anxious to see what I could create that didn't look like every school crest ever, everywhere.

I went into full professional-designer mode, delivering an exhaustive proposal, the whole panoply.

What I enjoy in design and illustration — almost more than designing and illustrating — is researching. Assumption, as I had all but forgotten from CCD class, is the Catholic belief that Mary as Jesus' mother was taken up into heaven — assumed — soul and body. That concept formed the spine of my ideas, of Mary overseeing the school, holding the school in her heart.

Herewith, as far as my shoddy forensics skills indicate anyway, the first mark I ever put to paper for the project:

I repeated this shape for page after page, gradually spinning it into variations. You can see its skeleton in the upper corner of this first page of digital thumbnails:

Neither church nor school had any particular typeface or design uniformity, so solutions were open to a wide variety of type.

They're BBs in a boxcar, these ideas, hitting on every variation I could think of, every evocation of the church in which I grew up, and memories of school.

When I asked myself what I would be willing to wear on my sweatshirt if I had to go to this school, I came up with the image at the very top — Mary in the heavens, Mary of the heavens, radiant, looking upon the school with calm and confidence. Yet still lit from above.

I included this variation, since most people call the church and school OLA:

Then I offered the school three choices I thought worked best, based on the principal's direction.

In addition to the one above, I suggested:

its variant …

and:

Are those robes or is that a beard?

It was a gambit: I figured the simple one was so simple as to deflect meaning and life, and the one made of flowing broken lines too complicated to reproduce and too slight. The clear choice, then, would be the one I wanted the school to choose.

The Murphy's Law of illustration and graphic design posits that a client will usually pick the sacrificial turkey, the least choice, the one cleverly offered to make the other choices look better.

Time went on and I heard nothing. In fact, I learned of the principal's decision by chance, when I had come into the school office and saw the school's report to the agency that accredits the school. There on the cover of the report was this turkey:

Except without the type. It had been cut from the paper sample I turned in, enlarged on a photocopier and copied onto the cover.

"We think it's just fabulous!" said the school secretary.

It turns out the principal had no intention of establishing a logo for the school, despite the request, despite the detailed terms of my proposal. The principal just wanted a symbol for the cover of this report, something semi-official, somewhat religious in appearance, so an agency could decree the school remained in good standing.

The principal just never told me.

The current crest came to the school years after. Our children had graduated by then.

I kept telling myself I had gotten all my volunteer hours and then-some designing those logos. It's still poor salve.

I'll take some cheese with this whine.