In early 2009, I did some pro-bono identity work for a startup named “The Daily Blank,” a satire news site for the Chicago area. The founder, Nick Peters, is a young entrepreneur who turned out to be a great contact.

Less than a year after my work for “The Daily Blank,” Nick was contacting me from Oslow, Norway with a new business he was involved with. The company, owned by Tor Kielland and founded by his grandfather, used to be in the textile business but was now moving into the digital age with a rather pragmatic goal. They were interested in creating products for people within new and merging businesses.

My role in this was to create two logos: One for the newly renamed company, BrightArch, and their first product, Organization Weaver.

With the BrightArch logo, the goal was to establish a strong mark that could be attached to future products ̶ meaning a look and feel that was open and easily adaptable to future products. The name BrightArch needed to be established with this logo as well, so a wordmark was necessary. And because this company was still in the early stages, they needed a font that was easily accessible.

The solution was a square (representing a rigid corporate structure) being sliced by a number of arches (representing paths through the corporate world). Ultimately, these arches form an abstract ‘B.’

The base font was the humanist Myriad Pro (modified for the wordmark). Because Myriad is installed with nearly every Adobe product, it was an ideal choice.

From there, the Organization Weaver logo was created, based on the work that had been started with the BrighArch logo. The idea was two abstractions weaving themselves together to create one larger whole. A number of visual metaphors are at work, but the one that I focused on most was creating a sort of road-map feel implying that Organization Weaver would be your guide. Keeping with abstractions creating letters, the mark also works as an abstract ‘W’.

What I like most about these two marks is how distinct both of their shapes are. Particularly the Organization Weaver logo. Both would be easy to draw from memory and look great in black and white (where the whole process started).

To finish this project, I also created some business cards. These were a big help in guiding the future of the brand.

Nick had this to say about the process:

“Chris was amazing to work with throughout the entire design process. From the ideation and concept phase all the way through to the pixel-perfect finishing phase. He has a keen design sense for what will work and what won’t, and focuses his effort on building an ideal design from a solid concept. He also manages to find the middle ground between being flexible and taking principled design stances. We wholeheartedly recommend Chris because of his skill and professionalism.”

BrightArch was a great client and I can only hope to work with them again.

Because it’s very easy to get caught up in the political end of a discussion that involves an issue such as this, we decided to take a very humanistic approach. The main focus of this project was up-close interviews with the members of the EIU division of Pride. I handled much of the cinematography and all of the video editing. We used three cameras per interview, collecting different nuances of the participants. Although I’m pleased with the way the videos turned out, there were some audio issues and a short deadline left the videos feeling a little unpolished. In one respect, however, I like how raw they appear. I would have liked, though, to have made a few of the cuts in greyscale.

My goal with the website was to present the content in a serious tone. I intentionally used grey as my base color with only the rainbow sidebar using color. This approach was meant to appeal to the ambiguous nature of the topic (no black or whites, only areas of grey). This seemed appropriate, and I think the result is very up-front and personal. I learned a lot from the experience and I’m proud to present it to a general audience.

Being that brochures are one of my favorite forms of media to design, I put a lot into this project. It was an exploration in grids and rigid typography, and with little direction from the department, I was able to do a fair amount of design exploration. I wanted to convey the experience of new media and overall progressive attitude the EIU journalism department encompasses. I think this brochure completed that nicely.

You’ll see the fruits of the past 4 months pretty soon. I’ve had about a project per month and I’m just finishing up two of them. Once they’re done, I’ll be sure to post them.

Two of my projects have been some web work. I’ve learned a lot of new web skills in the past 6 months and have decided to my own host and start a new blog. I’ll be either making a whole new theme from scratch or
basing it on another theme and heavily modifying it. The site will be grid-based and reflect my personality a little better. It will also be a better format for my portfolio (which has always been the focus). I hope to blog a little more, but it probably won’t be more than once a week. I may need to expand the focus in order to achieve this. We’ll see.

Anyway, here’s a preview of the new design:

After seeing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s redesign this summer, I dropped all hesitation. I absolutely loved the look and if one mainstream American newspaper could pull this great look off, I had to try it.

As the new managing editor of The Daily Eastern News, I was able to accomplish, with the help of my advisers and faithful Editor in Chief, a (successful) total redesign of the paper.

Most of the touches are entirely inspired by the international (or modernist or swiss or whatever you want to call it) style most papers around the world now adhere to.

Here is today’s front page.

This page was entirely designed by one of our nightly copy editors/designers. She has minimal experience and yet she was completely capable of producing a pleasant front page with little creative effort.

The redesign, introduced in August, is entirely grid-based. Front page sections are 16 columns and inside pages are 15. This ultimately amounts to 5 columns of text. The additional column on the front sections is in order to allow a wider rail or grid-based white space. Unfortunately, this formula was impossible to impose on inside pages with designers who have possibly never touched Indesign.
Each story is accompanied by a thick horizontal rule above, a label, and a headline with 1p6 to 2 picas of space below. This simple tool has allowed white space to be injected into the core of the design and created headlines with more punch at smaller point sizes.

Three typefaces are at our disposal, with only one change from the previous design’s selection: Lucida Bright as our various headers font. Adobe Garamond Pro and Myriad pro round out the body and smaller type fonts.

Further, a new page planning philosophy has been implemented. Where art use to be the dominant factor in where news went, we have strict in placing the most important news up top. Art is secondary in the decision-making process. The new design can carry a page with little-to-no art and still maintain sturdy immediacy.

As a result, pages have maintained a consistency throughout the paper and copy editors can worry about editing copy. Creativity is always encouraged, but not a necessity (or even a possibility, most of the time, for our inexperienced staff) to creating a useful page. And while this has resulted in some very similar layouts in particular situations, the focus on utility has outweighed any negative results.

Here are a couple pages that I designed (a rarity) for our annual Family Weekend issue.

The bottom page is from our arts and entertainment section in that same issue.

I plan on tweaking the design a bit before graduating this December, because there are a few issues that consistently pop up. Mostly in the way of pull quotes and breakout boxes — our current style requires one too many steps (note: exactly two steps). However, I am otherwise extremely pleased with the new design. I think it suits us in nearly every way and provides the utility a college paper craves.

Let me know what you think.

Since my semester is complete, this blog is no longer a requirement. So, at this point, I cannot say if it will continue. I hope to keep it going, but I also know myself well enough that without a serious passion or deadline, I rarely find the motivation necessary. We shall see…

As a side note: Here is my final video project for my class.

Finally, here are the finished May Fest advertisements.

From left to right, clockwise, is an 11″ x 17″ poster, a 24″ x 32″ poster, an 8.5″ x 11″ flyer (ready for fax or copy), and an 11″ x 8.5″ tri-fold table tent.

I really worked on creating a more deliberate design than many of my past advertisements. Often I like to take the approach of throwing anything at the fan and seeing what works, but because I had a very distinct style in mind, I was able to create a more hand-crafted look. Ironically, I think some of the designs almost look like stock art with blanks filled in. I’m not actually sure if that’s a success or not, but I’m fairly pleased with how everything turned out. I would have liked to include some more details on the cyan (some cracked or peeling ink) and maybe added some folds here and there, but I did what I could within a reasonable time. That said, I always feel there is places for improvement and I think everything came out nicely textured and polished regardless.

Feel free to leave me some comments or thoughts.

6: How This Bear Market Compares

Unlike the graphics listed above, there is not a ton of information jammed in here. However, the little information and the way it is presented is effective. What this graphic does for me is inject truth like no word story could provide. The length of time this recession has taken and how far down the economy has gone is nothing when compared to recessions/depressions of the past. This brilliantly and simply illustrates this. The snippets of information that are provided when a fever bar is clicked on adds just enough to make this more than a simple chart. That said, I would have liked the ability to navigate using the timeline in the lower left. A user shouldn’t feel like functionality is missing — it creates confusion and makes the user question lower their expectations of functionality.

7: Electoral Shifts

Of all the graphics listed thus far, “Electoral Shifts” is the weakest. Very little interactivity is involved and it essentially boils down to a slide show. The animations between are nice, but a user should feel empowered by interactive graphics. I see no reason why the functionality this graphic gives was not deligated to simple images. If flash is used (a plug in that not every device and computer supports or has), then it should be used to its full potential.

8: Oil Prices Reach Symbolic Mark

This is much less an interactive graphic as it is simply an effective multimedia package. The interaction between the narrator and the graphic is both well done and necessary. The loop in the graph is confusing because traditional line graphs map time to the x-axis, creating the appearance of a time shift. However, the x-axis in this functions as an oil consumption meter with bullets showing dates. While it works in practice, I still feel like there could have been a better way to represent the information — possibly through a bar graph. I would have also liked to have seen the ability to click on the bullet points.

9: Serena Williams’ Professional Career

The fact that I am able to add a 7th graphic under the “I’m impressed” category really says a lot about Amanda Cox and her colleagues’ work. This sports graphic goes all out. There are check boxes, graphs, comparisons, summaries and navigators everywhere. If you’re a Serena Williams fan or even just a casual admirer (I’m neither), then you’re bound to find something you want. This has to be one of the most comprehensive graphics I have seen. The effort and time that went into creating this graphic must have been extremely high.

10: In Their Ads, the Words They Use

A graphic from the political season. Nothing spectacular, but certainly telling. As stated above about the bear market graphic, this presents the truth as it actually is. Simple words are not enough to express the comparison a graphic like this provides. Ultimately, the messages of these candidates are very similar and only in their nuances can you find a difference, but that is not as easily understood as a word cloud.

Earlier this morning I was mentioned on the Charles Apple blog. Charles must be an early riser because I was unaware of this until 9:30 a.m. when my Communications Law professor, Dr. James Tidwell, congratulated me. So caught off guard, I had no idea what he was talking about until I did my daily visit to Mr. Apple’s blog. Since then I’ve received a number of congratulatory words from both students and professors.
To clear things up: Charles Apple asked for submissions for this post. He did not choose me, nor did I get nominated for something. He essentially offered free advertising and myself and 30 others took him up on the offer. Not to diminish the awesomeness of Charles’ mention, though, because the publicity for a Midwestern college student such as myself is extremely helpful.

The second reason for this post (the fortune part) is that I was offered and officially accepted the job of Managing Editor of The Daily Eastern News (Eastern Illinois’ student newspaper). I will take the position in the Fall under editor in chief Tyler Angelo.

Note: The Charles Apple post (probably) didn’t influence Tyler’s choice and yes, my ego is as the picture shows.