The Slow Orange Fox

Happy Easter from us.

We don’t know about where you live but here we usually expect spring weather for Easter and usually are still stuck with winter, particularly when Easter comes so early. So this year’s Easter card is perhaps not very Easter-y but it’s spring-y, as in wishful thinking. We started with bunnies but then somehow ventured into different associations and steered away from the Easter bunny.

It started with carrots.

Bunnies multiplied.

And then there came a fox.

Spoiler: the fox ended up a vegetarian. Mostly, we just wanted to have a little fun with stop motion animation before we do a more ambitious (or at least longer) one, as we’re planning to. Except we don’t expect there to be any rabbits. We’re undecided about foxes yet.

Here’s the gif version of the animation, which hopefully will help you make sense of the above stills.

And it is also our way of saying have a very happy Easter!

The longer version without gif grain on Vimeo: The Adventure of the Slow Orange Fox.

Spring Cleaning

Unfortunately, no real post today due to an attack of vicious dust bunnies. We’ll be back next week, hopefully posting from a freshly cleaned place.

Domino, but with Dogs

For R’s birthday last week I wanted to get him something homemade to add to our board game collection and realized that we did not have a single game of domino. I loved those as a child and particularly when they had pictures of something else than dots so that’s what I picked (bonus: there’s probably not a single simpler game to make).

I designed six canines on a geometric grid, in a limited number of colors, printed them out of home printer and then realized that it wasn’t the simplest game to make after all, when I had to cut the tiles out (or carve them out, more like) of three-millimeter-thick cardboard. Long and painful story short, I only ruined about eight and had to run a small reprint of those.

Compared to the tiles, the box was a piece of cake (or a piece of pre-made packaging, to be precise): I used a gift box and only designed the cover to put onto it.

The Cake Is a LEGO

We celebrate tomorrow’s birthday of R (and it’s the round number) with a simple picture above, combining some of the many things R loves: cakes, LEGOs, dogs and typography (sort of). All the best!

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.

A Brochure for NDI

Quite a while ago we designed a small brochure for NDI, a local development and construction company. Many elements came directly from the logo: the square format, colors and Compacta typeface (the super-condensed and thick Helvetica variant that is often hard to use).

The elements that do not come from the logo but determine the character of this particular brochure is the silver color on the cover and architectural drawings of the client’s buildings (all the drawings by Joanna Kurowska). Orange, beige and dark gray complete the color palette.

Contents page.

Spreads from the brochure. Photographs show the client’s buildings, focusing mostly on architectural details.

Fourteen Books to Love for February 14th

Here at re:design we heart many things – LEGO blocks, huskies, bacon, The Good Wife, Christmas Eve and I could really go on – but books are definitely in our top three. And now that Valentine’s Day is upon us again we profess our love for literature with a series of (literally) heart-centered covers.

Heart is a fun shape to work with and surprisingly versatile. Each cover uses the shape as the center of the composition around which a symbolic illustration and typography are arranged. The books range from pulp romances through venerable classics to postmodernist experiments but all feature some version of the eternal love theme.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, an ambitious and rather pervy, if read literally, take on love.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, a decidedly unambitious take.

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler (a more physiological interpretation of the theme).

Fatalistic view of love and life in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz.

In Search of Lost Time or in love with the past, by Marcel Proust.

Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Ireland by Frank Delaney.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves.

Nana by Emile Zola, a socially critical anti-love story.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Another classic, The Gambler by Dostoyevsky.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, love in Japan.

Title page for Lolita, with the logo for the series.

Series of spines. For typography we chose a combination of Scala and Stag. We picked a limited color palette of reds and grays with some greens and yellows.

The logo of the series, consisting – predictably – of 14 hearts.

And we wish all of you a happy Valentine’s Day (either spent with your beloved person or with your beloved book).