A friend recently acquired the Edmond location of a local bicycle store. Al’s Bicycles has been around for over 45 years and currently has 3 locations which are independently owned, but operate in a co-op for purposes of online presence, name, and some other promotional areas. My friend ask me to help him update the graphics being used at his store.

Al Webb (1 man) founded Al’s Bicycles (2 wheels) and now my friend whose name is another word for 3 is set to carry on the tradition. Tradition is important. Brand is important. The Al’s Bicycle brand stands for integrity, reliability (free adjustments for life), and family friendly healthy activity. When Al’s was started, graphic design was still being done with pencils, pens, and velum. Hence the vintage look of the “original” Al’s logo:

I was unable to find a font that matches this logo. Apparently, other people had a hard time too and at some point they started using a “close” font to recreate this word mark:

I decided to recreate the original with all the unique parts, the rounded top of the A, the ratio of the vertical and horizontal stroles, etc., but with better balance (so the BI doesn’t scream at you…)

My friend was very pleased. Next I took a graphic that is used in the store and updated it. For some reason the wheel on the old logo wasn’t even centered on the hub, old style word mark, too much space above and below word mark, and decided to upgrade the location too:

The old style bike is called a “penny farthing” and makes a cool graphic brand for the bike store since it is a very recognizable “bike” but does not mimic any current style. Since the bike store carries and sells so many different kinds of bikes, using a bike that isn’t sold works.

Every bike that is sold gets a “sticker” put on it to identify it as a “Al’s” bike and to remind the owner where to go for service or their next purchase. The current sticker was a little anemic so a new design for that was next:

The new design plays on the old metal badges on bikes that signified the manufacturer. The “label” should be made on aluminum “foil” that has some thickness so it feels like a badge.

Swag is an important part of a lifestyle retail business. Stickers, shirts, hats, and other items that are branded, cool, and take-home worthy. The next step is to create options for branding swag:

One of my sons who works for my favorite university (I’ll let you figure one which one) needed to update the header (read logo) of a weekly communication he sends out. He had a great initial idea and sent me a screen shot of one of his early drafts to see if I had any thoughts. Surprise, surprise, I did.

My first thought was that the blue sections of the headline font seem arbitrary and a little unbalanced. I suggested that he use a blue circle the diameter of the width of the vertical elements in the font as the center for the two “Os” and a blue bar as the center for the “D” and blue circles for the centers of the two elements of the “B” and then put blue circles inside the font for the “S” on both ends of the “S” form and flip the eye so that the dot is a blue and the vertical is yellow.

This looked better, but still wasn’t really balanced and seemed to be missing something. We both got busy and didn’t mess with it for a while. Then one evening I got it back out and started redrawing, leading to this:

The logo is based on the “YoureGone” font. I sent it too him and he liked it. It was just a rough mock up, so I did my usually seventeen or so modifications:

Now that I had altered EVERY SINGLE letter form. We played with the “TUESDAY” text, settling on unaltered Nunito Regular in the same blue as the logo pieces.

So far, so good. When he started redesigning the actual communication he decided he needed a wide format banner type logo. He started playing with the pieces:

I decided to try a different take and came up with this:

This made him happy. Good Vibes!

The colors are:

BOOST is an event put on by the Kimmell Foundation for Recovering Leadership to create opportunity and space for leaders to elevate their potential. After talking through the visual elements the general thoughts were upward movement, bold, and orange. The first draft was rough but got us moving in the right direction:

This was a little to blocky and raw. So I created a font and redrew the concept:

I wasn’t happy with the line coming through the letters so some additional effort produced this:

When the team looked at this version they loved everything but the color (which is orange as they requested) so we worked through color selection and then I decided to rework the where the arrow line went and remove the outlines:

A friend of mine, who is a phenomenal photographer, is putting together a group to handle a broader range of visual needs for clients. They intend to handle video, still photography, audio, and other related collateral for a variety of projects.

The name they are using is Dynamic Visual Productions and they asked me to create a brand for them.

I started with the name and the first letters of the name. The first thing that I noticed was the “d” and “p” in most fonts are functionally, if not exactly, the same, just rotated 180°. So, I started with d v p in a font called Swera because I like the way the bottom of the loop of the “P” just kisses the descender.

Unfortunately, the demo of Swera I have only includes capitals so I used the P rotated 180° for the d and then altered the V so the x-height was correct without diminishing the stroke.

I felt this had a great symmetry to it. However, the logo needed more to really represent the group and set it apart. I played with a few concepts but felt that film (think 35mm SLR) was both representative and graphically cool. I found some images of a 35mm strip of negatives to get the dimensions right and started playing. Eventually this was the result:

I liked where this was going but didn’t feel like it was finished. I went back to the actual images of film and using photoshop I created “real” film with the exact dimensions and hole placements of my logo “film”.

However, I didn’t like the fact that the images were random (and not related my friend at all) so a lot more photo shop and these:

Became this:

Some color adjustment and tweaking gives us the final product with a simplified 2 color version and a monochrome version:

One of my sons is starting a business. I think that is great. His goals are to make some extra money doing things he loves doing (and already does often for free) and to get real world experience in running a small business. He asked me a lot of questions, but he also asked me to design a logo.

The business is computer repair and building. The kind of computers that gamers and programmers use. I thought I would use a computer processor chip and circuit board traces in the design. I played around a little and a design started forming.

It took some forethought and planning to get the letter connection points and the chip connection pads to work. Overall, the design works and my son is very happy with it.

Syntrias is a real estate development company a friend of mine is starting. They are connected to two other companies in the commercial real estate space where they provide the construction project planning and delivery to compliment the services of the other two sister companies.

Syntrias is a portmanteau of two Greek words: Syndeo meaning connection and Trias meaning trinity or three. So, Syntrias, by name and mission, provides construction project planning and delivery in compliment to Connect and Trinity, its sister companies.

My friend asked me to create a brand for his new venture. I said yes.

The other two companies have logos based on triangles so he wanted to carry that element along, but differentiate his company at the same time.

We tried on some different ideas but this one was the best by far:

I also developed two horizontal options:

We really struggled with the purple. Purple is a difficult color to use in branding. It needs to be dark enough to be serious without going to black, and it needs a little yellow in it so it isn’t lavender but not too much or it starts looking brown. We settled on Hex: 721c58, RBG: 114,28,88, CMYK: 54, 100, 35, 24 and called it Eggplant.

The word mark, SYNTRIAS, is based on the font Swera. The word mark was altered from the original font forms and therefore the word mark cannot be recreated using the font and we are discouraging the use of the font anywhere else.

The modifying mark, DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS, uses Avenir Next Condensed Regular unmodified. While this font may be used, it is discouraged.

I love to blow things up. The best opportunity I get every year is Fourth of July. We put on a great fireworks show every year. We use an electronic ignition system and this year we fired off 244 two inch mortars and about 100 cake items. Our current system has 32 channels, which means we have to fuse together multiple items for each channel and then “hope” the fusing works and we have estimated the timing correctly.

Next year will be different. We are moving to a new system which has 144 channels and we are getting new mortar tube racks and adding tubes to bring our total to 324. The new control system uses a distributed set of controllers that need to be in cases to protect them from the elements and the fall out from the fireworks.

I could buy cases, but I could also 3D print them. Or more accurately, have the sons of one of my executive team members print them for me. I have worked with these young men off and on over the years on engineering fair projects and side projects. They are very smart, very curious, and very self motivated. One of them recently built a flame thrower, so they also share a love for blowing up and or burning things.

If you’re going to make your own stuff, you should have a brand and go all the way. When I printed out the word “PYROTECH” I noticed the TE which I could make a T3 and the word would still be readable. It’s actually amazing how adaptive our minds are in recognizing familiar words even if they are messed up.

Once I had a word mark I realized I could add this to the mortar racks and the fuel mine tubes easily with a stencil. We would paint everything black and then stencil the word mark on in orange. That meant I needed to create a stencil which requires cutting the letters into sections so the insides are anchored and there are no parts that can lift and allow paint to get underneath.

While creating the stencil I ended up adjusting the original because I liked some of the letter form changes that made the stencil look and work better: