We love Autism Oklahoma. It is a grassroots organization that supports individuals with autism to reach their full potential, supports families so they can thrive, and supports communities to understand and embrace differences.

They recently chose to go through a rebranding to freshen their brand identity and better represent the community they love and serve. After working with an illustrator who is a friend of Autism Oklahoma they had come to a design they were leaning toward:

After giving some thought to what they were trying to accomplish I suggested some changes to the design:

The goal of this rebranding was to move toward a more unifying mark that communicates the values of the community AutismOklahoma serves, while retaining some familiarity. Thinking about support, inclusion, and bridging gaps led to several intentional elements in the new design:

The “autism” word mark maintains the weight and playfulness of the original mark while creating a fresh visual without the puzzle piece elements. The variations within the letter forms draw the eye to the center of the mark where the “t” element represents a person both being supported by, and bridging the gap between, the elements on either side. This represents the value of each person and the value of the community as being equally important. The letterforms are intentionally adjusted to create a sense of energy and completeness that mirrors our community when everyone is welcome and able to participate.

The “OKLAHOMA” is reduced in weight, so it doesn’t interfere with the primary mark, but is still prominent. The font is intentionally plain and straight, with squared off elements, as a support for the word mark.

Finally, the circular elements behind the word mark create a sense of motion that reflects the energy and activity of the community. The primary colors represent the diversity and vibrancy that are reflected in the individual as a part of the collective.

There is a corresponding horizontal alignment also:

I’m heavily involved in an organization that radically changes the lives of drug addicts, alcoholics, and those that love them. Started over 10 years ago with a single sober living home, HIA has grown into a comprehensive life recovery program being lived out in two dozen homes in 12 different cities, as well as Finding Hope groups across the US.

The next step to creating the highway to health is a treatment center. Called The Healing Center, this new phase of HIA will provide an in-patient recovery program as the first step before joining the community in a sober living home. Future growth will include IOP care, and follow-on therapy.

So, when the founder and CEO sent me the concept for The Healing Center logo I could help myself and offered some suggestions.

The original is on the top. My adjusted logo is on the bottom. First I increased the weight of the font forms in “THE” without changing the scale of the letters to match the weight of “CENTER”. I adjusted the spacing between the words, then I matched the width of the gold horizontal elements to the weight of the secondary lettering and created a formed end where they interact with a letter. Minor changes really, but they improve the look significantly.

I did the same things to a vertical version. The original is on the left, mine on the right:

A friend of mine has a niece that is paralyzed from the waist down, meaning she is in a wheel chair. This is a tragedy, but she doesn’t act tragic at all. She is fiery, determined, self-reliant, and is currently completing her degree in engineering.

Her family wanted to surprise her with a t-shirt that embodied her spirit. They had the idea to have a girl with flowing hair in a wheelchair with the text “Belle on Wheels” in script. They sent me these screen grabs from someone’s phone along with this text “The wheelchair person needs to be a girl – flowing long hair…she also likes the wheelchair icon that is more in motion, like this:”

They also noted that the girl needed to be, well: “also clearly a girl – boobs, but not Hooters boobs…”

I started playing the the wheel chair icon and after several versions arrived at this:

I found several fonts and let them pick one they liked:

When combined and placed on a blue background:

One of my dear friends is a fabulous artist. Farooq Karim makes the most magical pieces from paper. He hand cuts thousands of individual pieces of paper then combines them into individual flowerettes. Then he arranges hundreds of the small flowers into a larger dynamic blossom. All his pieces are the (fill in the blank) Blossom.

I have several pieces of his work in my personal collection and many more in the Kimray Visual Arts Collection.

So, when Farooq asked me to help him create a brand to represent himself I was excited to get to work on something so personal for someone I respect so much.

At first I tried to incorporate Farooq’s art into the concept. I had done other work with Farooq and had used the forms from some of the art pieces in other designs. I also had digitized and cleaned up his very unique signature:

However, the more I tried to work with the familiar forms, the more it didn’t feel right. I started to realize that the brand needed to represent Farooq, not just in the art form he was currently producing. Farooq is an artist in a much wider way. He practices the art of generosity of human experience. Farooq is a true renaissance man. He is profoundly kind and generous. I can’t imagine there is anyone who knows him who does not like and respect him. So, he needed a mark that was him, not just a single component of him.

I started playing with his name, his signature, his initials, and before long the brand emerged:

Over the holidays my sons and I (mostly them) got everything running on my MAME Arcade Cabinet. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. The software emulates the old computer hardware that played the arcade games and uses copies of the original hex code that was stored on EPROMS on those computer boards.

Buttons, joysticks, spinners, and trackballs are all wired into specialized controller cards that convert those signals into what appears to the emulator as keyboard and mouse signals. When it’s all done correctly you can’t really tell that you are not playing the original game on original hardware.

In the process of getting my cab back in shape, one of my sons decided he would like to build a cab for himself. I always wanted to build a second cab, so I was all in. The first step was to determine what kind (shape) of cab to build. I suggested he consider the old TAITO cab. For one thing, I had one in storage that we could use for measurements and possibly parts, and two, I think it is one of the cleanest and well designed cab shapes. He agreed and we were off to the races.

He wanted an OSU Cowboys theme, but not like my cab. I found some reasonably high res images of the original art for this cabinet, as well as a good set of plans for building one.

I digitized the side art and used that as a starting point for the design:

While I was working on graphics, my son was busy modeling the entire cabinet (including every bolt and nut) in Solidworks for we would have a model:

Along the way I also digitized the TAITO logo and a graphic from another cab for use in the Attract Mode Screen. This was the pic I got off the cab:

And the Redrawn art:

I also took the TAITO Logo:

And made it a “PETES” logo:

And then used those elements on the Attract Mode screen: