Ads in USA TODAY
March 20, 2011I have been fortunate enough to work with the Open Source Healthcare proponent Lybba for the past few months. One of their clients is the amazing non-profit The Starkey Hearing Foundation, which goes around the world advising, fitting, and giving out hearing aids to those in need. Recently, we created an ad campaign for them, reskinned their website, and have been working on rebranding the organization with a new logo. The reskinned website launches tomorrow, in tandem with USA TODAY ads showing up online and in print! Here is a sneak preview of the ads.
Here’s the smallest 300×250 pixel ad:
Here is the “Launch Pad unit”, which only shows up once upon entrance into the Living section of USAToday.com (unless you click the thin pencil ad; then it expands for 8 seconds).
We also have a PRINT ad appearing nationally 3/21/11:
More of this where it came from: we have three more waves of ads coming on 3/28 (Mon), 4/4 (Mon), and 4/12 (Tues), with Miley Cyrus, the new celebrity star pulling for Starkey Hearing Foundation.
Next: I’ll bet you’ve always wanted to know what a ‘reskin’ is.
NAVRMA Identity
March 1, 2011It’s been a busy couple of months. Here’s a completed project from February.
The North American Veterinary Regenerative Medicine Association came to us through a partnership with the marketing company Bullet Marketing. It was a pleasure working with John Hyde. He put out a press release of the project.
Here is the logo we designed:
NAVRMA exists to bring together those involved with research of regenerative therapy at the cellular level. The three rings illustrate cells.
We also created and launched their website:
All in all, a fun, relatively quick project: 1, 2, 3: logo, website, style guide.
From Letterpress to the Screen
January 6, 2011In the latter half of 2010, or the bitter end as it may be, we created holiday cards for our clients. Two holiday greetings employed technologies discovered about 550 years apart. One card, made for Lawyers for Clean Water, featured a letterpress postcard on chipboard, while the other, for Wikia (a venture from the founder of Wikipedia), was an animated GIF. Animated GIFs are experiencing a semi-renaissance due to Apple’s refusal to make its gadgets play Flash animations, whereas animated GIFs will work on just about anything. Not exactly bleeding-edge technology, sure, but compared to a half-millenia ago, I’d call it new.
Printed in one color on .045 inch thick cardstock, slammed with a Vandercook proofing press by Sara Silva:
The animated GIF for Wikia had 8 frames:
Here’s to the new year.
/// mpc
The allure of handwritten text
October 26, 2010
Recently, while working on an identity package (logo, identity set, website), I traveled down the path of handwritten logos. You don’t realize how rough those typographers have it until you try to create your own letters. It is time-consuming and fussy, using parts of my brain generally reserved for the occasional illustration, and demanding in ways that the arrangement of typography is not.
The process sits at the rim of the line of the bitter edge between drawing and text, and a strange one it is indeed. I hand-wrote the business name hundreds of times—following a whim here, an idea there, trying an experiment elsewhere. Upon finishing a run of handwriting, and choosing a clear favorite, I would set it aside for a few hours, return, and realize that my preference had changed to an iteration from three pages back. I’ve been in this game long enough to not be surprised, and instead am fairly delighted at this progression that is still mysterious in many ways. This all goes on behind the scenes, of course; when I finally present a few of the best ones to my client a week later, I’m confident that any one of them could be finalized and serve as a professional mark.
Second Round of a Handwritten Logo
This seeming schizophrenia happens with logo design all the time. As a creator, I get too close to the production of the image, and need to step away for a while to gain fresh perspective. It is hard to remember that a night’s rest can reset one’s creativity and one’s inner critic. Sleep scientists have done work on brain processing during sleep, and the creation of form is a dramatic example of the subconscious shift that can happen.
As a client, it also helps to look at the designs and then “sleep on it” before giving it a second look. I always tell clients not to rush the development of a mark, because what looks perfect one day can be marginalized three days later by an option that was initially dismissed. This change in opinion can be unsettling for someone who has not been through the process before. However, a little time allows a lot of confidence-building, and by the time we get to putting the logo on business cards and websites, both client and designer are assured that it visually represents the business, attracts new customers, and inspires loyalty.
Third Round of a handwritten logo
I have always had a soft spot for handwritten logos; they are so personal and unique, and bring such life and human-ness to the form. Since I have been working on this project, I’ve been keeping my eye out for them. Here are a few that caught my eye—memorable, unique, personable:
and here my particular favorite: a handwriting sample from a French recipe book called Pork & Sons by Stéphane Reynaud (Phaidon):
One final note: there is a difference between fonts that mimic handwriting and actual, pen-to-paper handwriting. The computer-generated kind still feels regular and uniform, even if there are a few different versions of some letters. In real handwriting, each letter is slightly different, which gives a much different feel than a font. However, sometimes this uniformity is just what you want, to denote a measure of control or standardization. After all this talk of handwriting, it is ironic that the final handwritten logo, shown below, was not chosen in the end; a computer-generated font was used instead!
Final iteration of handwritten logo
I’ll be sure to post again when we have completed this company’s identity materials, including a website.
/// mpc
NY Review of Books
August 1, 2010The New York Review of Books is one of — if not THE — most intelligent papers in this country. They get the big thinkers to take a few books, articles, movies, what have you, from their respective fields, and write insightful commentary that contextualizes those pieces within the world around us and the times we live in, all wrapped up in a “not-quite-a-magazine, not-quite-a-newspaper” floppy saddle-stitched volume every two weeks. The writing is smart, crisp, engaging — Elements of Style all the way. I feel like my brain is growing when I find the time to read it.
However. But. Nonetheless. Strangely.
The graphic design leaves everything to be desired. The cover is a train wreck—no rhyme or reason, no structure or rhythm — where random photos float around even more random type set in either an all-caps aggressive sans-serif, in red (100% magenta, 100% yellow), or in some god-awful clichéd font. The design is neither rational, calming order nor effusive, exuberant disorder, and none of it is easy on the eyes. If I saw any of their covers for the first time, I would assume it was a tabloid or an advertisement for a motivational speaker. Today I focus on the cover, but that is not to say that the interior is without design flaws (the table of contents — dreadful!). And the sizing. But one critique at a time.
I have thought a lot about how it could be that such a profound publication—wherein a great deal of care and thought has clearly been expended—ended up with such an awful design. I did some research. I found out that it started in 1963 during a printer’s strike in which the NY Times had ceased publication and the intelligensia was getting fidgety. I found out who started it and who has written in it (famous, interesting) and other historical notes, but I haven’t spent enough time on Google to answer my burning question as to the genesis of the design. I thought perhaps they wanted to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, that one’s inner beauty is what is important. Strangely, their website looks fine, even nice. Aside from their logo. (But that is another story).
Where am I going with all this? Well, a BEFORE and AFTER, of course. Who doesn’t love a BEFORE and AFTER? I’ve added a few articles and changed a few images, but it’s basically the same content as the original June 24, 2010 cover. The NY Review (of Books) only has 135,000 subscribers, a drop in the American sized bucket. I can’t help but think that if they spent some energy on improving their design, maybe they would attract new readers. You think?
/// mpc
BEFORE:
AFTER – now, with more color –
© 2010 Martha Cooper Design
Lawyers for Clean Water website
July 27, 2010
We just launched a website for Lawyers for Clean Water, a small environmental law firm with offices in San Francisco and Santa Monica. The design is clean and friendly, capitalizing on the otherworldly beauty of underwater photography. This 6-page site with text, photos and a video, and without any fancy user engagement or ecommerce, cost less than $2K! Including programming! And the client can update it by themselves, thanks to the genius of WordPress. Check it out for yourself if you’re curious: Lawyers for Clean Water website. Thanks, once again, to Otis of Example7 for his brilliant coding.
Olive & Page Summer Sale
July 12, 2010
Just finished a bit of event branding for Olive & Page’s Summer Sale. Olive & Page is a paper-loving and real-ink-pressing sister company to Martha Cooper Design.
Come join the fun — there are really beautiful letterpress cards for a steal at www.olivepage.com.
/// MPC
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