The funny thing about this post is that I decided I wanted to write it back in Sep­tem­ber; Which as you can tell, surely (you can’t be seri­ous), is NOT within any time range that you may call “instant”. Any­way I’d like to share with you a short dia­tribe about tech­nol­ogy and speed and what it means to design­ers today. Also, I used a $10 word: Instan­ti­ne­ity. Pretty cool huh?

Note: The time between orig­i­nal writ­ing and com­ple­tion of this post has been vast, my info might not be cor­rect but I encour­age great feed­back to cor­rect me!

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Strange Love?

Many of us wake up in the morn­ing, stretch, get ready, head to the office, sip our cof­fee, read our e-mails, and get back into the grind of design/developing/quality control(assurance) or user expe­ri­ence mold­ing just like any other day. But wait! E-mail from the project manager/client/requirements team! I must read this imme­di­ately! This might be a com­pli­ment on my lat­est piece of work/finished project!

“The lat­est revi­sion to [component/project/logo/icon] is fan­tas­tic! We love the direc­tion you took it in and the process we took to get here. Great work! But…”

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We have all been in the dilemma of pay­ing the creepy merch guy inside the girl or pay for the cheap rip off t-shirt design from the guy sell­ing them out­side the gig on the street. I’m not afraid to admit as a skint teenager who got to gigs I wasn’t always will­ing to part with my cash at all, rarely buy­ing t-shirts at gigs. But I would always as much as pos­si­ble try and pur­chase a band t-shirt now and again, when my pocket money would allow me. As a stu­dent money for beer and gro­ceries were at a pre­mium but I still man­aged to add to my col­lec­tion of designs when vis­it­ing concerts.

My favourite design changes all of the time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve worn out a num­ber of t-shirt designs due to con­stant wear­ing of the the designs to where you could no longer make of what was a cool band logo or graphic design. Here in this small roundup we  show­case a large num­ber of great t-shirt designs and where you can find them online. Don’t for­get if you buy them tell us or show off your t-shirt and direct us to a photo of you sport­ing your favourite design!

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It’s time for me to finally release this post. I sub­ju­gated com­mu­ni­ca­tions for a long time on this, ended up get­ting a good amount of peo­ple to come out and share some info about their com­pany and their designs. I hope you enjoy the fea­tures, and I hope get to do this again, with more peo­ple, and take less time doing it!

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This is a post I put up on my face­book feed to gen­er­ate con­ver­sa­tion, but it decid­edly flomped. So I fig­ured I’d put it here and see what kind of con­ver­sa­tion we could drum up. Go!

There are 3 big things that design­ers do for com­pa­nies, brand, main­tain and re-brand. Nearly every­thing we can do for them stems from those 3, and 2 of them are very sim­i­lar, but HOW sim­i­lar? Brand­ing is usu­ally start­ing from scratch, from a new com­pany who is just try­ing to pave their way in the world. Re-branding how­ever is once the com­pany decides it’s image is falling behind in the world, they call us to help them rein­vent them­selves. A cor­po­rate midlife cri­sis if you will. Many com­pa­nies lately have gone about this ven­ture, some even to a fault and end up revert­ing back to pre­vi­ous designs (the Trop­i­cana or Gap fias­cos for instance), and some that SHOULD revert back to pre­vi­ous brands and don’t(Pepsi??). Many com­pa­nies seem to just want to get an edge over the com­pe­ti­tion, some do it in response to other com­pa­nies in their field who re-branded recently, oth­ers, the smart ones, re-brand when it is truly nec­es­sary to rein­vent themselves.

• When do YOU think it’s appro­pri­ate to change a brand of a com­pany, or even of yourself?
• Do you do it to make a new impact on exist­ing cus­tomers or get new cus­tomers, or to gen­er­ate more rev­enue or to obtain more critics?
• What should the focus be and how as design­ers can we talk our clients through their decision?