WCS Brochure

Brochure front and back exterior (top), and interior
spread (bottom). Click for larger image.

I used to a lot of print design in the 90's - brochures and booklets, full stationery systems (letterhead, envelope, and business card), ads for newspapers and magazines, book covers, DVD and CD packaging, flyers, posters and more. However, over the past ten years, that work has declined significantly - and the print pieces I do create these days are often handed over to the client for production.

I guess you can owe this decline to a couple factors. First, I trust you may have heard of the Internet. Many of the business I develop logos for these days are almost completely web-based - they still need business cards (I always use VistaPrint these days), but it's rarely worth their time to create offset-printed envelopes (if anything, they print their own labels) or letterhead (a Word template almost always suffices). Aside from those essentials, and some more straightforward business forms and documents (estimates, invoices, even fax cover pages!), these clients don't need much in terms of printing in the 2000's. For more specialty pieces, like display materials (large posters, banners, table tents) they're more than likely to hand the project over to a vendor who may have an in-house design department (or even a single designer) who can put together a design - and then it gets printed or produced under the same room. Who can argue with that kind of convenience? Not I. And small businesses are much more likely to advertise online than in more expensive print publications with longer lead times, less focused audiences and increased fees. What I said in 1993 still holds true: "The Internet is Good." (I never really said that in '93 - '96, maybe, but not '95).

The other factor is home-based printing. Up until the early 90's, consumer-grade printers either really sucked, or they were really expensive - sometimes both. But nowadays, you can get a more than decent inkjet, LED or laser printer for your home business for a reasonable amount of money, and produce your own printed materials in quantities too small for a commercial printer. Even brochures, booklets, and other material requiring specialty finishing (like folding, trimming, or binding) is achievable. If I were a teenager now, I'd have a publishing empire going full speed.

Detail from interior spread. Do you wish the text was larger, so
you could read it? If so, then you are a nerd.

Where am I going with this? The piece here, for a water consulting firm named WCS, was created about four or five years ago, when I was still getting a decent trickle of print work. As is often the case, the client did not have an unlimited budget, so they asked for a two-color piece. I designed the piece in Adobe InDesign, selecting a fairly straight blue spot color, which I used along with black. Initially I tried making the photos into duotones, which means they're created using a percentage of black and the spot blue - but (from what I remember) I was reminded of the crappy, cheap textbook photos of my youth, and so I went with all-blue photos - which are called "monotones", by the way - as if you couldn't have guessed that.

I didn't assist with the printing of the final piece - the client went through a few rounds of text changes (quite a few, as I recall), but once it was finalized, I handed over my InDesign files, as well as a .pdf, and they - I assume - took it from there. This was another of those nebulous projects where I never hear from the client again after my role is complete - I can only assume the client, or one of their vendors, went off and printed the final brochures. I hope they didn't get nutty with my source files and switch the photos back to duotones - that would hurt my feelings.

Mother Goose Learning Center

Click for a larger version.

When I was a young design student, I had a class assignment to develop a logo for a fake product whose name was something like "White Night Sugar". I remember I created three rough pencil treatments for the project. Two were pretty simple, mostly type-dependent treatments, and the third was a fairly elaborate rendering of a knight on horseback. I was pretty impressed with myself - as I recall, it was a decent rendering, though very detailed.

My teacher walked around the room critiquing the designs, and helping us select which one to move forward with to a complete design. He looked at my three treatments, complimented me on the rendering of the knight drawing, but told me it was "too illustrative" and suggested I pick one of the other two simpler pieces to follow through on.

I was a little pissed - I was a Graphic Design Major with an Illustration Specialization, so I could draw better than most of my classmates, and I suppose I enjoyed projects where I could use that skill. Over time, though, I realized I was creating overly complex logo designs, and I needed to tame that instinct. I don't have that knight logo project anymore, but I'm sure if I saw it today, I'd agree with my teacher completely. I feel as strongly now as he did then, that a logo should convey a concept with a minimum amount of detail - the more shapes, colors, text and complexity you add, the piece begins looking less like a corporate identity and the more like an illustration - and the more difficult it becomes to reproduce on different media (clothing, signage) and at small sizes (business cards, websites).

That brings me to this project, a logo design for a preschool childcare facility. I didn't work directly with the client - this was another agency-driven project. The agency came to me because the client specifically wanted an elegant, illustration-dependent logo. But now, being gunshy about such things, I tend to push too far in the opposite direction in trying to keep things simple and stripped down. I submitted three concepts total, and the other two were much simpler, but this is the one the client chose. And I'm okay with it, despite the fact that it's a pretty detailed goose - the colors are limited, the shapes, though realistic, are still pretty simple - it was a nice compromise.


Detail of the logo. Just two colors - but I used tints
of those colors, for maximum effect.

And speaking of the colors, I did something here that I tend to do often - I used only two colors, but I used tints those colors as well. This is an old-school offset printing-based technique for saving money in printing, since if you're printing a logo (let's say it's a pear image with text next to it) in two colors (black and green), and you wanted to include a lighter green (for a highlight), you could still get away with using those two spot colors - you'd just print the highlight as a percent of the green. However, it's very doubtful my client here would ever print their logo, especially using spot colors (they'd probably just go process, as in CMYK printing) - but I still use the tint technique to limit the colors, thereby unifying the design. Now you know - please don't go stealing my secrets.

An aside: for those of you who don't know (and who might care) - and this is real design/color theory nerdiness - here's the proper use of the terms "tint", "shade", and "tone":

tint: when you add white to a basic hue, lightening it
shade: when you add black, darkening the hue
tone: when you add both black and white (or, of course, gray) to a hue, desaturating it



So you see, when people say they like different "shades" of a color, they typically mean variations in the hue - which isn't technically accurate. But if you go around explaining, "Actually, a shade is adding black to a hue", they may punch you in the nose, so don't try it. I don't want to get in trouble. I've already had my own altercations concerning color theory, and I don't want to go through that again.

The only sticking point on this logo was the hat - after doing some research on traditional images of Mother Goose, I first had a bonnet on her - but the client thought it looked too old fashioned. We then went with a wide-brimmed straw hat, but that didn't look right, either, so I found a picture of this hybrid bonnet-hat style, rendered it, and the client was pleased. I didn't consider myself a hero; I was only doing my job.



The alternate bonnets - the first one in an earlier
color scheme, deemed too masculine - also sans
tinted highlights.

And that was the end of my involvement - I submitted the logo and the client was reportedly pleased. My wife saw the logo recently (I think it was online) and went crazy, screaming, "That's your work, my husband! I am so proud that I married you!" And then she baked me a blueberry pie. Not really. I wish that's what happened, though - maybe someday my logo work will earn me pie.