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
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:
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
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
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
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:
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
I don’t know about you, but it took us what seemed like decades to decide upon our name, logo and branding. We went through rigorous brain storming and research trying to iron out what we liked, what our market would like and what would stand out against the crowd.
Our main problem was that we wanted something that was a little crazy and ‘off the wall’ that would make us stand out from the crowd. We thought that having no client restraints would be great as we could do all the crazy design things we had always wanted to. However, we knew that this wouldn’t quite work with our potential clients due to our location as quirky branding may put off our target market (which consisted of mainly small to medium sized local businesses). Once we thought this through we had a much better idea of our market place (our potential clients and competitors) and how we could slot into that, so we started at the beginning (as it’s a very good place to start) with our name. (more…)
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Posted in Branding, Featured Articles, Graphic Design, Logo Design
So you throw your business cards onto your desk and what do you see shinning back at you? Are you struck by their originality? Their striking design? Or do they in fact look like every business card you’ve ever seen - with a white backdrop and illegible text to boot?
When it comes to business cards I think you need to go back to the beginning and understand what their purpose is. It is essentially designed to allow people to contact you. No matter how fancy the design or how striking your logo appears on the card if the receiver cannot contact you due to illegible type face or cluttered design you may risk them not contacting you at all.
There are a couple of things to consider when it comes to the contact details on a card: (more…)
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Posted in Graphic Design
When designing a logo, do you design in black and white? Or do you jump straight in and use all of the many wonderful colours and shades the latest packages allow you to use?
When brainstorming an idea for a logo, consider the worst common denominator - where the logo will look its absolute worst. This is normally a photocopied / faxed / laser printed document. All of these have one thing in common, they will display your logo in black and white. So if you start your design process in single colour, you ensure your logo does not rely on colour to work.
I always tend to start any design with some rough sketches on paper, which of course means my ideas are entirely black and white. Then, when you move to your mac or pc, leave the design in black and white. This will give you one less thing to worry about so you can really focus on the design. You can make sure every little detail fits together without worrying about what colour each part is going to be. It is only when I am fairly happy with the design that I then move into colour. (more…)
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Posted in Logo Design
