Tag: graphic design

Pleased AF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Often times, upon completion of presentation of a project, I wait a little bit afterward and then look at it again, to see whether or not I hate it yet.  So many times in my life I’ve made something, been very pleased with it, but then 1-2 days later I’ll look at it again but instead be completely disgusted with the things I create.  Regardless of what people might think or say about the things I make, when the day is over I am my very own worst critic and the true litmus test on whether or not I decide something I’ve created is satisfactory depends primarily on how I feel about it a little after it’s been out in the world.

Technically speaking, I am the creator of Arby’s Saucy_AF typeface they’ve released, as part of their marketing juggernaut team that I can proudly say that I know several members of.  I’m not the one who made the intricate characters out of sauce, nor was the person who photographed them, but I am the designer who vector outlined everything, and turned said artwork into a fully-functional typeface.  If I knew how to find out how to view the credits of a typeface, I’d totally show off the screengrab my name in them, but for now I’ll just have to settle with the private satisfaction of knowing that this is my work, and that I can also proudly say that I got to legitimately be a contributor to the Arby’s marketing team that is the envy and a shining star of marketing creative throughout the industry.

Few things are more satisfying than working with people you know you work well with and producing creative that I can be proud to say that I had a hand in.

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If this is what constitutes acceptable design, I need to change careers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

what the fuck is this shit

Were the exact words that my brain said when I looked at the new Creative Loafing Atlanta website.

I thought maybe the site had been hacked or something, and whatever Russian or Chinese hacking organization was deliberately using a 4-bit retro Oregon Trail looking interface as their ransom page demanding some Bitcoins in exchange for control over their website again, but after a few minutes, not seconds, of figuring out how the new navigation worked, it was pretty much confirmed that this was in fact, the new Creative Loafing Atlanta.

To cut to the chase, this is basically the worst redesign that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  It’s worse than when Pepsi tried to use the Golden Ratio and the Vitruvian Man to explain their logo, which was pretty bad considering it literally cost Pepsi $1.4 million dollars for a PowerPoint so inflated with bullshit that it could have incinerated Palo Alto if it caught on fire.  But that’s just a logo, on a line of products that lots of people otherwise enjoy to indulge in regardless of what logo was slapped onto the bottles.

Creative Loafing Atlanta was already a publication in more or less rag status, and they’re an entity that can’t really afford to fuck up on design when whether people admit it or not, love to judge books by their covers.  And yet, here we stand, with a website that looks like an unintentional glitch, or your monitor fell face first and when you propped it back up, pixels are dead and busted, resulting in the horrific interface that currently loads.

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When in doubt, change the name, make logos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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Real-life Difficult People

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently I started watching Difficult People; it came recommended to me when I said that I was a big fan of Parks and Recreation.  The parallels to Parks and Rec were that it’s also single-camera shot, Amy Poehler is an executive producer, and one of the co-stars of the show is Billy Eichner, who played Tom Haverford’s flamboyantly intense sommelier in Parks and Rec. 

However, those things aside, I think the comparisons kind of cease, and so far I have to admit that I’m not quite getting into the show as I hoped I would.  Sure, the show shouldn’t be more of the same Parks and Rec formula by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ll admit the last episode I saw (Italian Piñata) was actually really funny, but what it boils down to is the fact that it’s nowhere near as good as Parks and Rec.

The thing is, the show is based on two assholes who go around acting like vapid dicks, living in a sandbox.  Difficult People doesn’t actually go anywhere, and I just recently realized that I’ve been watching the show kind of out of chronological order, but haven’t really noticed, because every episode is self-contained, and it’s just a different story of how Julie and Billy can be shitty people.  This is a far cry from the Parks and Rec formula that had a continuously forward-moving storyline with characters that grew, developed and actually cared about one another.

However, this isn’t a post about how weak Difficult People is, or how much superior Parks and Rec is over every other show (The Good Place, however, is an excellent show, coincidentally created by Michael Schur, one of the founding fathers of Parks and Rec).  What really inspired this post is the fact that I realized that there’s basically a Julie and Billy in my life right now, and that I’m sure lots of people out there have their own variants of Difficult People in their own, whether they realize it or not.

It just so happens to be coincidental that I’ve been watching this show when I came to this realization, and that the people I have in mind are, like Julie and Billy, a loud-mouthed woman and a loud-mouthed gay guy.  And unfortunately, I work with them, so I see them nearly every single working day.

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No logo > bad logo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve observed, people like having logos for things.  Whether or not they actually need one or not, there’s this innate feeling that having a logo makes something official or real for many, which I guess explains why there are so many logos out there in the first place.

Which brings us to Gwinnett County unveiling what’s supposedly going to be their new logo and identity; naturally, it’s hot garbage, and basically a blatant rip-off of well, Google.  It looks like the Chrome logo, and the font is almost identical to Google/Alphabet’s typeface.

Seriously, it’s basically the Chrome logo, if the Chrome logo extended their primary colors further into the center of the circle and had the colors overlap.  But in the case of the Gwinnett logo, the overlapping doesn’t even make sense; red and blue make purple, not yellow, and green and red or blue makes some pukey colors, instead of light blue or light green.  This is some light urple kind of color theory we got going on here.

And then we get to the county’s new slogan, “vibrantly connected” in all lower case no less.  Because lower case is casual and not shouting, and the handwritten typeface tries to double down on that kind of feel.  I’m not sure what it means to be connected vibrantly, because I think a connection is a connection; whether it’s done with energy or not, once a connection is made, it doesn’t seem like something that can be measured quantitatively.

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Having logo ≠ entitled success

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

People seem to like having logos.  Logos for themselves, logos for their businesses, companies or other identities that they feel necessitate some sort of visual symbolization so that they can hope to one day be easily identifiable by an image and not even need words.

However, for every single Nike, Honda, Target and even Chili’s that have successfully ingrained their visual identities with the people for so long that they don’t even have to use actual words in their branding anymore, there are probably a million failures of logos in the world for people, businesses and other entities that in all likelihood, abandoned their ideas not long after concepting their logos in the first place.

It’s like logo design always seems to come first, and then people think they can build around it, or so it seems, based on the frequency in which this tends to occur.  Coming soon businesses announce their presences with nothing more than a generic press release and a logo often way too abstract to interpret.  Restaurants that haven’t opened yet unveil logos, signs and the visual identities of their menus before they’ve even served a plate of food.  And then there are the thousands of pleebs who think they have a great idea for a project, but before they launch anything, they make themselves a logo, share it on social media to farm likes, but then the drive to actually do anything with their project, it runs out of steam and then they log into Steam and play video games, but not after a poor logo is left and abandoned on the internet for others to witness their fleeting false dedication.

Anyway, I’m sidetracking here which is nothing out of the ordinary since I have a tendency to poorly veil rants about other things in posts that initially are spurred by a slightly relevant topic.

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Why change a solid logo?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Supposedly, there are rumblings that the NBA needs to change its logo.  The Undefeated has made a game of potential silhouettes to replace Jerry West; naturally being The Undefeated, ten of them are black guys, and then Larry Bird, almost like an obligation to option out a non-black guy as to not seem too obvious. But the question I really have is, why??  Why change the NBA logo?  There’s nothing at all wrong with it!

This isn’t like the Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves or any other sports team name that triggers white guilt and is always in the conversation of needing to be changed because they’re construed as offensive.  This isn’t like the Vietnamese skin care center that uses a logo that’s too infringe-y to an existing copyright and needs to be changed, so people don’t mistake them as manufacturers of zombie serum.  Or this isn’t like, Wendy’s, whose prior wild western-looking type face made their brand look as old as the era in which the font best represents.

The NBA logo is an icon in itself, and has no need for change, especially for no good reason other than the sake of change.  It doesn’t help when Jerry West, the alleged basis of the silhouette in the logo is all white-guilty and is clamoring for a change as well, but thankfully the NBA themselves continues to deny it as to deny leverage to West.

But really, there’s no need for change.  What for?  MLB has never changed their logo, and you better fucking believe that the NFL isn’t going to change their logo.  Stability and longevity is what gives strength to logos, and the NBA would be flushing 70+ years of tradition and history down the toilet because the world feels like change should occur on some basis other than never, for everything, including long standing identities and brands. 

Brands that want to last and thrive know how to commit and stick with something for the long haul.  The NBA changing their logo for no real good reason is a stupid idea, and I hope they never actually do it.