Branding / eightyone design / graphic design blog

Retro VW Campervan Advert Designs

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Retro VW Advert Designs

If you are a regular visitor to the Eightyone Design Blog, I am sure you are aware that both Steve and I are particularly passionate about retro and vintage artwork. Team this up with our love for VW campervans (we have blogged about our own and have another blog dedicated to them as well!) and you get some of our favourite adverts ever created! These retro VW adverts are clean, simple and each one sends a clear message to their audience. The sense of continuity is spot on and their word play and copy really does set the standard (if you can put up with the sexism!).

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Posted in Branding, Design Inspiration

Eightyone Design launches a brand new website

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Eightyone Design Launches brand new website and blog

Sorry for the lack of blog posts and Twitter updates lately but we have been hard at work getting our new online graphic design portfolio and blog completed. It has taken us 7 months to develop, build and launch the new Eightyone Design website and we thought we would share with you the process we went through to design the site as well as some alternate designs, thought processes and other discussions along the way! (more…)

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Posted in Graphic Design, News, Web Design

eightyone design christmas card designs

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Tis the season! Yes it’s that special time of year again where vector snowflakes, christmas trees and stockings are in abundance in the design world! There’s no escape from the festive look and by now it feels like they have been around for too long (especially since Christmas seems to start in September)!

We thought we’d share our Christmas card design for this year with you and get your thoughts.

We want our Christmas card to be a reminder of us and therefore be quite strongly branded. We always have our contact details on the reverse and our logo repeated a couple of times.

Last years card was really quite simple as we wanted to really push the logo. We went with a silver snowflaked logo on white with our company green in the centre to add some spark to the card. (more…)

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Posted in Branding, Colour, Graphic Design, Logo Design

Web Design Case Study - www.growwithit.org

Monday, December 8th, 2008

We love playing with textures and layering here at Eightyone Design, so when Exeter based IT Company Switch Systems called us for a website visual with an underground / above ground feel we jumped with joy at the opportunity to create such an unusual site. In this article we discuss the website design visual and the elements used to create www.growwithit.org.

The campaign that Switch Systems developed was called Grow With IT and they wanted a website to reflect the idea of natural growth. We loved the idea of using soil textures for the content section of the site with the bottom of the header being at eye level so you can see the roots of the grass and plants right up to the elements above ground and the sky. (more…)

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Posted in News, Portfolio, Web Design

Design and Development of The VW Camper Van Blog Website and Logo Design

Monday, December 1st, 2008

As you are probably well aware over here at eightyone design we have a huge passion for VW campervans. We have written a couple of articles on them (When should a graphic designer stop designing? and VW campervan logo designs) and love to tinker with our own VW T25 Camper Van. We had been thinking of creating a blog solely dedicated to our hobby enabling us to write endless articles about various events we attend, camping, plans for our van as well as featuring other peoples vehicles. We finally launched www.vwcampervanblog.com last month and we are really pleased with the overall look as well as how it has been received by the VW Community. In this article we outline the design process we went through to design the blog and where we drew inspiration from.

Overall Style

We decided upon a vintage / retro theme as the blog would feature all different vans from 1950’s and 1960’s splitties through 1970’s Bay Window Vans and also the more modern VW camper vans.

Logo Design

We started at the beginning - with the logo design. Knowing we were after a retro feel we hit the usual inspiration hot spots such as Flickr. We found some great examples of vintage and retro drinks signs aswell as petrol / oil signs which we really liiked and seemed to suit the subject matter really well. (more…)

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Posted in Blogging, Branding, Design Inspiration, Graphic Design, Logo Design, Personal Projects, Web Design

Rip Curl Boardmasters Festival - Poster Designs

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

We spent a very wet weekend at the annual Ripcurl Boardmasters Festival held in Newquay, Cornwall. The Boardmasters event celebrates surf, skate and music with the Vans Skate competition, the Ripcurl Surf competition and the Unleashed Music Festival.

We were wondering through Newquay and found a Ripcurl shop sporting all the usual surf gear as well as all the previous posters promoting the Festival. It is interesting to see how the event posters have evolved over time.

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Posted in Branding, Graphic Design

When is it the right time to re-design your website?

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

After reading David Aireys blog post ‘Why are designers never 100% satisfied?’ we got thinking about our own online presence and whether it was still saying and doing what we wanted it to. The current version of the Eightyone Design website is now about 18 months old and I wonder whether it is time for a rethink.

The branding and visual style of the site is still in keeping with our offline branding (stationary, business cards, etc) so we are not thinking about re-branding, but a lot has changed over the last 18 months so when it is time for a website re-design?

When we designed and built the flash based Eightyone Design website, its purpose was to be a very simple, basic site that would showcase some of our portfolio. We wanted to keep it simple so opted to have four sections to the site:

Home Page - with a brief overview of who we were and what we did.
News Page - to feature small news stories.
Portfolio Page - a simple image viewer showcasing some of our portfolio.
Contact Us Page - for our contact details and a email contact form.

We chose to build the above sections into a small and simple flash based website so we were able to animate and add some depth to the simple content. The only exception was the news page which used php to pull an RSS feed onto a html page in order for google to better rank the content. (more…)

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Posted in Branding, Featured Articles, Web Design

Gender in Logo Design

Monday, July 28th, 2008

There are two of us here at Eightyone Design Steve (male) and Me (Lucinda - female). We can never stay out of each others projects (even when told to!) and often collaborate on work, particularly logo design as this is something that we are both equally passionate about.

My interest in gender and logo design started about a year ago when we designed a logo for a economic consultant. She held a brain storming session with some friends and colleagues to get some feedback on the designs we submitted. This was a very helpful session and there was a general consensus between the group on a particular logo, type face and colours. As a simple exercise the group went through the logo’s and gave them a gender, (which is something I had never given much consideration to when creating a logo to appeal to both sexes). It turned out that all the logo’s that I had created they had marked as female and all the logo’s that Steve had created they marked as male. Which lead me to wonder if subconsciously we do design logo’s that appeal to our own gender?

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Posted in Branding, Graphic Design, Logo Design

WBR World Beach Rugby Summer 08 T-shirt Design and Development

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Beach Rugby is the game of tag rugby played on the beach. The WBR World Beach Rugby clothing brand was created by Lovell Rugby (The UK’s leading Online Rugby Store) in order to fill the quiet gap in trade between the end of season and pre-season training. Back in 2006, we designed the logo and the initial collection which went to retail in May 2007. Now, almost 18 months on and after having sold over 10,000 garments, the clothing range has been expanded to meet with the demand for the rugby fashion wear. In this post we show how we went about creating the Summer 08 range and the promotion to accompany the collection.

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Posted in Branding, News, Portfolio, T-shirt / Clothing design

Design development for Wakeham Asbestos

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Back in February we were approached by Wakeham, a new company in the asbestos industry who offers training and consultancy. The company required a full set of branding as well as brochure and website.

As with every design project, we start at the beginning - the logo. They felt that their industry was particularly male dominated and wanted a logo which was strong and bold yet quite simple. After an initial discussion we concluded that the logo could center around these themes:

Utilise the “W” of the company name
Focus on the “A” in the company name highlighting Asbestos
Use the three strands of the business (training, management and surveying)
Focus on some imagery or representation of asbestos

Other than requiring a strong, bold logo, Wakeham didn’t have any other specific requirements in mind. The logo was to be used online as well as brochures, stationary, invoices etc, therefore it had to work on all types of media. (more…)

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Posted in Branding, Graphic Design, Logo Design, News, Portfolio, Web Design