We Are The Champions!

We have just been informed that the Boston Valley Terra Cotta Sample Box we designed last Fall has won a place in the 2011 American Package Design Awards! Sponsored by Graphic Design USA magazine, the competition highlights excellence in USA-designed packaging. We are part of the 15% of winners chosen from the over 1,500 entries submitted from all over the country.

The winning sample box design will be featured in an upcoming issue of the magazine and available online as well.

Here is what the OtherWisz Creative website says about this project:

"The product packaging created for Boston Valley Terra Cotta replaces an existing color sample board of terra cotta chips glued to a large and heavy masonite board.  OtherWisz Creative designed a custom, compact box to showcase the company's color line. Made with recycled cardboard and modifiable inserts, we developed an affordable and flexible way for Boston Valley to ship and showcase both color chips and project-specific product samples.  Wrapping the packaging with full-color illustrative photographs, the Boston Valley Terra Cotta Sample Set is an architect's resource to the company product line."

Good job OtherWisz Creative team (Dan, Jill, Mark)! and the guys at Hawver (box manufacturers)!  
Above, rockin' box photo by Joe Cascio.

Control

The Buffalo Business First newspaper released it's ranking of top Web Design Firms in Buffalo in it's December 31, 2010 -- January 31, 2011 issue and OtherWisz Creative Corp. continues to rank year after year.  We are in at #21 in a list ranked by 'number of websites designed in 2011"-- but we all know it's quality, not quantity!

This year I was quoted when asked what is the most common request from customers in 2010 and I cleared my throat, and clearly stated...

OtherWisz Creative Corp. "Customers are always looking to manage their own content, link into social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook), and have a custom-designed site and not a cookie cutter template design."

And that is a fact! I hear these things all time.

The thing that happens when you get ranked in a fine business pub like the Biz 1st is that for the next few weeks you get offers to sell you a fine plak with the article/or listing captured (& mounted) for all of eternity to hang in your paneled-office waiting room.  I have been getting these inquires for years, as we are always ranked in this list and have had our company featured a few times.  Always great to be in The BizOne! Once I actually received one of these nice wooden laminated plaks unsolicited. It was for the Best Buffalo Web Firms listing if, I think 2003 maybe.... I remember it because it had engraved art of a guy surfing a wave on it. It was pretty rad.

DENTIST'S COLLECTION BECAME BUFFALO HOCKEY MUSEUM The following issue of Biz 1st (first 2011 issue) had a nice photo and feature of our client, the Buffalo Hockey Experience + Museum.  With Dr. Joe standing in front of our Sabres 40th Anniversary display cases, it had a color photo with our fine work in the background.

Check it out, posted on the BleedForTheBlueandGold.com blog, rightee here.

Good press for 2011 so far!

Round & Round

The Olympic Committee revealed the branding for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro on New years Eve last week. A smooth flow of 3 hand-holding figures with a scripty wordmark, the logo was developed by a Rio design form called Tátil.  According to the Logo Lounge website, it was chosen from 139 submitted logos from agencies across Brazil.

LogoLounge noted:

"In addition to the requisite vibrant colors and sense of celebration, there’s a lot to see in the new design—people uniting, of course, but also the shape of the city’s landmark Sugarloaf and the subtly embedded word 'Rio.'"

The controversy is already brewing as critics compared it to the logo of the Telluride Foundation as well as “The Dance,” by Henri Matisse.  You can be the judge.  I like it's smooth flow and think it is better the the goofy Vancouver logo from the last Olympics.  I can see the similarties in the figures and the shapes as compared to the Telluride logo as well as some of the colors... but the Rio logo seems to have taken it a step further.  And any smooth set of naked dancers are going to compared to Matisse, especailly if they arere holding hands!

Read the LogoLounge post here.
The Rio 2010 Olypmic website, read here.

Red Skies At Night

The awesome typeface blog Fonts In Use posted a great piece on a unique design technique that is rooted in the distant past of all graphic artists (well, us old ones, anyways...)- the Type Specimen Page.  You have probably have seen this layout where rows or different point size fonts are layed-out to visual explain a font's characteristics-- the fonts in use, weights and widths, and how the characters look in harmony with each other.

Sam Berlow's Fonts in Use article notes that the 'big red book,' the original font specimen book created by the American Type Foundry, is most likely where this layout originated.  It might also be rooted in old time Western posters or printer-designed playbills, as one of the commentators on the article posted.The funny thing is how this font marketing technique has indeed become a page layout design used in graphic design everyday. This technique is created by stacking different lines of different sized rows of the same font-- you will see if if you look at book jackets, signage, magazine layouts and, of course, posters.

I think it is a great technique in a designer's too box. First, it forces you to use a single font face, second it's a great space filler, and thirdly if relies on tight, exact and well balanced kerning- a staple of any good designer.

Read the full article here- Fonts In Use.