VW Camper Vans / eightyone design / graphic design blog

A tale of 3 very different businesses

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

All you regular readers of the Eightyone Design blog will know, we have passion for VW campervans. We used to own a VW T25 (the brick!) and we recently decided that we wanted a more reliable and modern vehicle and purchased a new T5 Transporter. However, we were being ridiculously fussy with the camper interior and decided to buy a bare van and get a bespoke interior made for us. Now, there are a plethora of companies who can provide this service and from the various VW shows we’ve visited and online forums we avidly use we narrowed the search down to three companies in Devon.
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Posted in Freelancing, Personal Projects

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

VW Camper Van Logo Designs

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Back in June, we posted an article entitled ‘When should a Graphic Designer stop designing?‘ in which we explored when a graphic designer should just say ‘NO!’ and stop adding designs to everything in sight.

In the article we pondered whether to add vehicle graphics to our beloved VW Camper Van (something we are still undecided on). We have had a few comments from people with their thoughts on what we should do. One of the most interesting was from Amanda at Truly Ace Design who made us see that even in choosing the badges, colour scheme and tyres, we were still designing.

Anyway, as a follow up to this post I thought I would post some photos from a VW Event that is held on Paignton seafront every August in which people bring their vans from all over the country to show them off.

I thought it was interesting to see that a lot of the VW Campers have had logo designs added to the side. (more…)

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Posted in Graphic Design, Logo Design

When should a Graphic Designer stop designing?

Monday, June 30th, 2008

As a graphic designer, it’s very difficult to know when to stop designing. I know whenever we have a free minute to ourselves after a long day at work we immediately move on to our personal design projects. Or if there are no personal projects on the go we read design magazines and books or explore the internet for graphic design blogs or portfolios gaining valuable inspiration for the next project. Essentially, we eat, sleep and breath design. But when is it the right time to say, ‘No, I am going to stop designing and do something else’?

A good recent example came when I finished a restoration project on my pride and joy… my VW camper van. It has spent the last 5 weeks at the body shop being completely dismantled, rubbed down, primed up and re-sprayed from british racing green (with a white and maroon roof) to a much more appealing harvest moon beige.

Our VW Camper Van