Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson (congratulations on the Super Bowl win!) recently asked followers to submit logo ideas for his DangeRussWilson brand. I created a few logo concepts and received thumbs up from a couple of Seahawk fans. It’s kind of hard to design something without a design brief/direction, so I took what I thought would be important to Russell (the crown represents his faith, the #3 his uniform number) and incorporated these elements in the designs. Thanks for the design challenge @DangeRussWilson. The concepts are presented below (click the thumbnail image to view a larger image).
The Blog
A bit of perspective…
With all the dialogue (arguing?) going on these days on topics political/social/sports etc., it’s always a good idea to bring things back into perspective.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Threadless design – Woo Tang.
So as part of my goal to express myself creatively this year (I get to express creatively for everyone else most of the time), I’ve submitted my first design at Threadless.com. You can see the design here, and I’d be most appreciative if you’d click this link and vote a 5 for my design. If it scores well enough, Threadless will print it and sell it. Then you can buy one, and I’ll be like, famous for about 30 seconds. Better than a reality show.
Logo design: Stand Up America Campaign
Thanks to Derrick Boles and his Stand Up America campaign for choosing us to create the new logo for their marketing and branding efforts.
Stand Up America has a primary mission to challenge, educate, inspire and mobilize community based organizations and leaders to “Stand Up “for community empowerment. Our goal is to provide collaboration opportunities, training, technical assistance and funding opportunities for underrepresented populations across America.
Graphic Zen’s job was to take the elements that Derrick envisioned for the Stand Up America logo, (map of America, organization name, Christian reference and “the pinkie) and incorporate into a logo that could be used for their ongoing awareness campaign. The pinkie is the first of five fingers that represent concepts in the Stand Up America campaign, in this case the pinkie represents “Courage”, as it only take the effort of raising your pinkie to take action and make a difference in your community.
After sketching a few concepts, I gradually developed this logo, using the elements described above to create the map of America. The rough font for “Stand” represents that we must stand where we are (circumstances/location) and be who we are. It also includes the Christian reference in the cross-like “T” in Stand. The five stars represent the five fingers that will be defined as the campaign goes on. The pinkie logo is represented and takes the place of the northeastern part of the U.S. while the rest of the organization name takes on the shape of the U.S.
A challenge to create, and very well worth the time!
Secret Peak Taxidermy logo
Latest logo design for Dan Thompson, of Secret Peak Taxidermy. We are currently working on business cards, flyers and a website for Secret Peak, so we hope to showcase those items soon.
Our direction for the Secret Peak logo was Dan wanting something unique, featuring camo if possible, and utilizing his favorite color: orange. I designed this logo with branding and promotional items in mind, and look forward to seeing Dan’s logo on hats, t-shirts and other promotional items.
Social Media Integration
How do you share your blog posts with your audience? We are currently testing a service called dlvr.it (Deliver It) to see how well the service handles blog posts and places them into our social media accounts automatically. We were using Twitterfeed, though lately their service has been pulling old blog posts and not updating as it should. Both Twitterfeed and dlvr.it offer free services to start, and dlvr.it has a nice graphic interface that show clicks and network updates for your social media accounts. I’m going to give dlvr.it a try for a week and see if it handles posts like Twitterfeed. If it works well, I’ll stick with it because of the information in the graphic interface. Update to follow.
Merry Christmas, etc.
Merry Christmas and all the seasonal greetings that come with this time of year. As we look forward to 2012, Graphic Zen will be debuting a revamped website, (work continues on it now), and some new service offerings. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the “snow” that is gently falling on our website. We thank all the clients, friends and associates for this past year, and wish you the very best for 2012.