Blog
If I could…
…just draw silly portraits of old(ish) men for a living, I think I would.
At least for a while until I got bored of it. Here’s my latest contribution to the genre.
Bradner Cold Storage
Logo design, business cards, website design
I recently completed a project for Bradner Cold Storage, a new cold storage company located in the community of Bradner, part of the city of Abbotsford, British Columbia. The first thing they needed was a clean, modern logo to represent them, one that reflected their priorities of efficiency and high-technology. After batting around a few ideas, we settled on the following:
One of the challenges in this project was to stay away from cliches. There are a lot of obvious images that come to mind when you think of a cold storage facility, and when I looked at some of the competitor’s logo designs, I noticed a lot of those cliches had made their way into them. For that reason, my first ideas tended to be quite abstract. One of my favourites from the brain-storming process was this one:
The cool blue colour is enough to make it a cold storage logo and the squares suggest both neatly racked product (with a space to be filled) and vaguely suggest a lower-case “b”.
The client felt the logo was a little too corporate. When I went back and had a look at the other logos and branding in the industry, I agreed that it was a little too different from the competition. One of the challenges in developing branding and identity is finding a look that distinguishes you from the competition, but still places you in the industry.
The logo design we finally settled on has a bit of the advantages of both approaches. While it undeniably makes use of a well-worn image (a snow-flake), it abstracts it enough to make it interesting and unique.
I designed some business cards using the new logo, and put together a simple website that, in addition to providing basic information on their services and location, provides a portal for their clients to their online inventory system as well as gives new and prospective clients a detailed form to submit a quote request.
The website is built on the WordPress platform, allowing plenty of opportunity for expansion as the business grows.
Man and Wasp
It’s nice to spend a Sunday afternoon coming up with silly drawings. This one’s from last week.
Essential Opera II
EssentialOpera.com is finished. Have a look:
I also created a poster for the event. Their first production will be of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, a perennial favourite. It promises to be a great show in a lovely venue in midtown Toronto with a great cast of local talent (including yours truly…). Make sure you come check it out if you can!
Essential Opera
I was asked to create a logo for the new opera group in Toronto called “Essential Opera”. The group’s focus is presenting the very best operas in the repertoire in concert, showcasing emerging and professional talent in Toronto. If you want to keep up to date with what Essential Opera is up to, consider joining their Facebook page.
I presented Essential Opera with three different options for their new logo. After some discussion, they settled on this:
Its vertical version:
I think they made the right choice. Here were the other options:
Stay tuned for a poster for their first event on February 26 as well as a website.
Ludwig Voice Studio
One of the reasons I started designing was so to promote my activities as a singer. It sure is nice to be able to take control of my own publicity materials.
My wife and I recently moved back to Toronto and have started up our own voice studio. We teach voice lessons to singers young and old(er), some of whom have been singing for a while, others who have never had a voice lesson in their life. It’s something we love to do, and it’s great to be able to put our years of post-secondary education to work.
To help get the word out there to potential voice students, I put together a little website about our teaching work, as well as a flyer which will go up around the neighborhood once it arrives from the printer’s.
You can do it!
It’s always nice to see my work out there in the big bad world, struggling to make it on its own, and sometimes succeeding. Yesterday my wife, Julie, spotted my new cover for the Undergraduate Journal of Musicology at UWO on the Faculty of Music home page. The journal’s new editor, Aaron James, wanted a “new, cleaner and more consistent look”, preferably with a color that could be changed from issue to issue. This is what I came up with.
Vector matters.
Aaron requested that the Nota Bene logo used on a previous cover design be kept. He sent me a small jpeg graphic, presumably a scan of some wonderful hand-drawn script of the letters NB on a musical staff.
Since the graphic was fairly lo-res, I decided to convert it to a vector image.
A vector is a graphic that is drawn using anchor points and curves that are calculated mathematically, as opposed using pixels like a jpeg or bitmap image. The benefit of a vector graphic over a pixelized (or raster) graphic is that it can be resized infinitely with out a loss in image quality. Any quality logo should be designed as a vector graphic.
Unfortunately, converting a jpeg into a vector graphic is not just as easy as a click of a button. Adobe Illustrator does have some great “tracing” features, but the result is an approximation at best. In this instance, arriving at the final graphic involved a couple of steps. First I took the original into Photoshop, blew it up, and traced over it with the brush tool, cleaning up some edges and curves as I went, to give me a larger, clearer graphic to work with. Then I took it into Illustrator and traced it by hand using the pen tool.
The Horse: Zodiac 2
Here’s the second of my drawings for Skrawl inspired by the Chinese Zodiac. If you’re wondering, there’s not particular order. I’ve just been going through and picking the ones the most fun (or easiest) to draw first. Enjoy!
The first is to make sure my blog feed is automatically syncing with my Facebook page, as it should be.
The second is to share an illustration I drew the other day. I drew it for the “creative collective” known as SKRAWL. The “drawing prompt” was the Chinese zodiac. I couldn’t resist the urge to draw another crazy-looking chicken, so I chose the rooster as my first subject. I love how easy it is to add a bit of color to a sketch in Photoshop. Just scribble some color over the drawing on a new layer, change the blend mode to multiply (a couple of others would do the trick, too) and Robert is your father’s brother!
Hello all!
Welcome to the new and improved Ludwig Design website. I think you’ll find the new site to be a little more user friendly and intuitive. I’ll continue to do some tinkering here and there behind the scenes for the next couple of weeks, so your patience is appreciated if something appears kinda wonky. That being said, your feedback on the site is always appreciated!
The site now includes a blog where I’ll be posting my latest design projects, and/or my thoughts on life, politics and the best foie gras recipes. Be sure to grab the RSS feed to stay in the loop. Enjoy!