no smoking

21st of May, 2008ce* in: blog, japan

I went to a no-smoking pub in naka-meguro.

While I’m not adverse to a total ban on smoking in Japan, entering a pub where no one is smoking was kind of strange. I haven’t been back to the UK since the smoking ban was enforced, so I had no idea what it was like.

You can smell all sorts of new and exciting smells, like; wood, beer and sweat.

Needless to say I gave up after one pint and got a drink at my local where all the normal people were.

Webconverger

13th of May, 2008ce* in: dadako, logos/fonts, print

A good friend of mine asked me to develop a logo and visual language for his startup company (webconverger) distributing an all-in-one linux based portable web browser. We mulled over a plethora of daisy designs, finally choosing the most vibrant one for it’s web 2.0 charm.

The daisy represents convergence.

Instead of going for a custom font on the type my friend wanted (or rather insisted) on using the open source font Gentium. It was a bit of a challenge getting this font to behave, and like Linux it is constantly being upgraded and amended by the community. A bit of kerning later and we have something we are happy with. We’re trying to use the logo in the open vector “SVG” format where ever possible.
This project is truly a logo in action and more about active presence than refinement. It’s interesting to see what happens when you hand over “the keys” to a project like this and watch it grow into t-shirts and so on.

Logic Lingo

ce* in: dadako, logos/fonts, print, websites

A good friend of mine asked for a identity to support his new translation company. I settled on an optical illusion for the logo, with two L’s fused together a la M.C.Esher. The font is the wonderful Neo Tech™ with a little bit of hand kerning.
In addition to the logo I delivered a simple bilingual website and business cards.

eat creative homepage

1st of May, 2008ce* in: eat, websites

http://eatcreative.jp/

As part of the may 1st reboot, we decided to create a new look for Eat’s homepage, which has been out of date for quite some time.

Although in need of a facelift to something more web friendly that reflects the type of work Eat do, and the web standards it preaches; time has been in short supply.

Sometime in late 2007 I was drafted in to come up with an idea, art direction and make it work. I picked up this hot potato and ran with it!

Features include:

no menu. I wanted the sites content to be the navigation. Was hard to wrangle the idea of sitemaps and menus away from Eat, but eventually I think we all agree that it works well without pre-defined menu items.
accessible. One of the major concerns was to get google to pick up on the content and let users bookmark articles and so on.
basic, content driven interface.

As the site grows and becomes an archive of everything Eat produces, it will start to take on a life of it’s own.