A Mystery to Finish

After iconic painters and TV series we are now working on a third group of iconic posters, Iconic Cartoons. We’ve had this idea for a while (actually, it was suggested by one of our commenters – thank you, Ammon) and we made sketches a long time ago, but only got down to it now, prompted by a friend’s request to make a game for children. More on that some other time and we’ll show you all the posters when we finish them. Today just a preview: the first show to guess.

It’s as much a classic series as they come, started in 1969 and still popular. And yes, we do realize it’s a tad obvious but you’re probably older than the target audience will be.

We got some work to do now.

Design That Will Grow on You

The second installment in Project Doolittle will only appear as a preview today for the simple reason that it needs time to develop. I don’t know about where you live but here it’s a tradition that for Easter you put garden cress seeds on wet cotton and after a week of diligent watering you have a spicy and (matter of taste, of course) rather tasty addition to a dinner salad or a sandwich. As Easter just went by we still had leftover seeds and decided to use them for another lettering composition with the Pixies’ song title.

Day One.

Day Two.

Detail.

In a week or so we expect to have a green version of the lettering and then we’ll tell you more about the process and the idea.

A Peace-maker in Progress

We’re currently working on merchandise designs for a festival and this is the initial project to be printed on T-shirts, mugs and tote bags. We chose to use handwritten custom lettering to practice our new-found love for calligraphy, decorated with leafy ornaments and peace-loving doves. The pattern is shaped as a circle, which makes it easily to apply on all sorts of objects. It’s very much in progress but we hope to share final results as soon as they are complete.

This Is Where We Live in, in Alphabetical Order

The officials of the city of Gdańsk decided a while ago to produce The Encyclopedia of Gdańsk, a huge compendium of all things relating to the city in a heavy-book format. We were involved in the initial design stages of the project, designing logo, layout and other materials.

The logo is a simple encircled monogram with a serif logotype. Its design had to enable the creation of various promo materials such as metal pins and bookmarks so the sign consists of one element that can be cut out.

Three versions of the cover were initially designed. The basic one is grid-based, with photographs depicting important Gdańsk-related people, places and events. The second cover is bound in canvas with a paper sticker representing Gdańsk’s crest. The third, over-the-top one is leather-bound, with golden lettering, gilded edges and ambitions to look like it came from a 19th-century bookcase.

Layout is traditional, three-column and grid-based like you would expect from any old encyclopedia. Simple and elegant, designed by our friend Asia Kurowska and polished a bit by us.

The design of book casing to look even more impressive on a bookshelf, should the buyer not cough up for the leather-bound version:

Digital edition:

And the layout of the promotional website.

The Encyclopedia is way out of our hands now and we’re no more sure what the final result will look like than we know whether such a publication is at all needed in this day. Still, it was an ambitious challenge while it lasted.

* Gdańsk is not exactly where we live in these days.

Isotype re:visited

Among other projects we are working on right now is a book that will teach basic ideas of economy to children. However, when we worked on the first layout and concept because of regrettable communication difficulties we were informed that the book is for ages 13-15 while in fact it will be for ages 10-12. This means that most of this project will join the Salon des Refusés and we may only share it with you, not with hordes of children starved for economic knowledge.

The idea was to organize spreads as infographics so that information would be visualized in a graphically simple, easily accessible manner. We used two inspirations additionally to tons of wonderful infographics we collect on our hard drives: Mr Gerd Arntz and FF Dingbats. If you don’t know Gerd Arntz and Isotype be sure to check them out because they were pioneers of our today’s visual language and lots of their work remains exciting and surprisingly current (while, interestingly, also smacks of its own time). And FF Dingbats is a useful dingbats font that we drew from to develop a module of human form.

And here are the drafts. The first spread is about proportions of workers to non-working groups of people and the other about costs of running a small business and the concept of profit.

Even though it’s disappointing we won’t get to work on the project, at least the language is universal enough and we hope to use it as a starting point for some future design.

A Bear Bearing a Barrel of Beer

At this very moment we’re working on an identity project for a local brewery. In this post we’re sharing some work in progress we find kind of cute: a bear with a beer barrel.