I haven’t posted anything on here lately just because life and work have sort of taken the reigns and left no room for writing.

Lately I’ve been consumed primarily with creating the artwork for the band Vestascension. Yes, I’m in the band too, so it has really been a lot of fun working with the other guys to create ideas for the tracks each month. I think what started out as a quick thing (see January’s design) over a couple months turned into a bit to be reckoned with. Each design is sort of like a design aerobic, but it’s a bit more than that. Over time, I’m hoping to build a brand for the band that goes beyond a mark. I’m hoping the brand becomes more immersive than that.

So far, I’ve put together 5 designs that have all worked to created the look for the band. Here they are, 1 is above, the other 4 are below:

As you can probably see, it took us a while to figure out the correct format too, hah! Oh well, I feel like they’re getting more interesting each month.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep it up!

The fact is that almost everything that is created has this fate. There will always be others that come after you that will push the limits of design further than you could ever imagine. Imagine to what extent Giotto’s mind would have been blown if he were around today to see what is being done with 3D animation, hyper-realistic painting, and even photography. In his day, he and his fans got excited about paintings that had perspective. Try to imagine the state of design a hundred years from now.

Maybe I’m moving slightly away from my point. The point is, having a creative nature is a gift. It is a gift because you can, at any given point, take nothing and turn it into something. It’s a gift that comes with a price. In my experience, the way to walk away with truly inspiring work is to make as many versions as possible during the creative process. Going through this process could take hours, days, or even years. But the underlying fact is that the creative process doesn’t end when you release the work.

This lesson became abundantly clear to me during my first collegiate drawing critique. For hours the previous afternoon, I had toiled over a graphite still life in preparation for the critique. I mean hours upon hours of working out the details of this drawing. Upon completion, I had what I consider largely to be a masterpiece. I had unlocked a part of my being that had not previously existed because I had never created something this perfect.

The time for the critique came, and I proudly posted my drawing on the wall. As I sat in the room comparing my work to the work of my classmates, I noticed something. I had only created one drawing, while my classmates had each created at least 2 drawings. I defiantly ignored this fact, and decided that my drawing was on a different level of perfection, and that I didn’t need to worry about anything.

As the professor called upon me to go over my work, she gave me the opportunity to describe my work and to field questions from my fellow students. Feedback was generally pretty decent, but I certainly wasn’t receiving the praise I believed I deserved. At the time, I thought that maybe it was just because my classmates were jealous of the work I had done, and they didn’t want to praise it too much. What followed was a life lesson that I and my classmates will never forget.

The professor, who had been sitting relatively quietly throughout the discussion, stood up and walked towards my work. With a giant permanent black marker, my professor began correcting lines in my drawing explaining that the proportions were off, and the values should be like this or that, and that this doesn’t make sense, etc. etc. My masterpiece had been defaced. To make matters worse, she required a new piece of work from me in order to satisfy the curriculum requirement.

I was floored.

After picking my jaw up from the floor, I sulked and complained for a day or two. I fought through creating a new drawing. Upon completion, I was not overly thrilled with the new drawing, but I was required to hand it in anyway. Once the emotions of the situation died down, I was able to objectively look at my work and compare the iterations. The second one, was clearly better.

Work that you make can always be changed. It can always be recreated. It is not sacred. Sure there’s the argument of brand equity, and building up a brand that shows a united front, but that brand can be changed, modified or added upon. Look at brands like Apple, or Fedex. They’ve been changed and modified throughout the years, and they still rock. The exploration of change and growth leads to stronger work and stronger designs. Maybe the modifications or changes won’t be as strong as the original, but you can’t know that unless you give it a shot.

Truly great creations are the result of thorough exploration never settling for any perfect answer.

I raise the question because it’s a desire I’ve observed in myself not only in the design cycle, but I also experienced the phenomenon while writing music in a band. I think the need for control, or the lack of trust can be found at the root of this desire. It’s interesting though because in my experience, doing everything myself often results in an outcome that isn’t nearly as good as the resulting outcome of working equally with others.

So, what is “everything”? In the case of web design and development, “everything” would include the brand design, the wire-frames and information architecture, the high fidelity comps, client and server side development, SEO, marketing, and ultimately the maintenance of the site. I’m sure you could even add in the initial business strategy piece and a whole slew of other steps that go even further into different disciplines. Point is, there is a lot going on here.

When I was in a band, we were preparing a few songs for the studio in 2005. At that time, I thought that I knew what was best for the band, and I pushed my ideas very hard. So hard in fact that often my ideas smothered the ideas of others. I had no problem telling the drummer and bass guitarist what to play. I also would not hesitate to tell the lead guitarist (which happened to be a much better guitarist than me) what to play. I adored the resulting songs, but the rest of the guys in the band were never quite thrilled with them. I wonder why.

Enter 2007, beginning of 2008. Again, the band and I were preparing to go back into the studio to record a couple more songs. I happened to be extremely busy at the time working on design projects. I decided to focus more time on design, and I stepped back from the song writing process. What happened next was amazing. The songs that these guys wrote and put together were by far the best songs the band had ever put together. I handed over my initial ideas for the riffs to the guys, and they turned them into something special. I then wrote some lyrics over the music, and we were set for the studio.

Sometimes great results are achieved when one person does everything, so I can’t say definitively that involving more than one person is always a better solution. I mean, look at Trent Reznor. Here’s a guy that had a vision that reigned on multiple platforms in what would appear to be flawless execution. But even then, how many Trent Reznor’s are there out there? And can you imagine what his music would sound like if he worked with the likes of Maynard James Keenan or another musician of that caliber? Who knows, it could result in trash, or it could elevate the outcome.

I think that as a creative person, it’s difficult to trust others with your vision. It’s even more difficult at times to allow your vision to meld with the vision of another. Often though, the old saying is true, “2 heads are better than one”. Being able to take criticism and work the experience of others into your design work is a skill that may take a while to master, but I have to say that I believe that through collaboration, the best work is created.

The first article “Logos are Dead” suggests that instead of focusing on one mark to represent the face of a company, an organization should invest more time into developing a brand environment. The design of this brand environment would honor and present all pieces of content that a company chooses to release. Another article, “The Internet is Hard” suggests that the audience (particularly website visitors) completely ignores appearance and that they are only interested in the “big button” that will allow them to download the latest app, or whatever else they happen to be hunting for.

I’ve been chewing on these different ideas for a week or so now, and I still am not too sure that I know what I think.

Recently I’ve seen sets of branding from Aol. and Burnley that do not rely on a singular mark. Instead the brand is created from stylized imagery. The imagery isn’t necessarily defined by color even, it simply has a “look” that is consistent from one piece of collateral to the next.

Experience and the brand design tradition says that a company needs a logo create a face with which the customer can interface. When a letter or email is sent, it is the logo that identifies the sender. These marks can be used in a variety of ways to represent the different things that the company aspires to be or to provide. Logos can also be used to evoke emotions that help to create a bond between a company, a company’s product and the end user or client. But, with that said, have we reached a point where the traditional logo has become so commonplace that there’s not much ground to be gained by having one? Maybe.

Take for example the user pool in the article, “The Internet is Hard”. This article was written as a response to what happened after this article was posted. Here is a company blog that has it’s own branding. By some strange SEO magic, the article appeared at the top of the search results for “Facebook Login”. Some 200 readers completely ignored the Read Write Web branding, thought that somehow Facebook had changed, and they began searching for the button that would let them log into Facebook. You have to ask, was this an isolated incident or is this the result of brand saturation in our society.

The users that commented angrily all the while thinking that Facebook had somehow changed, were in most cases either very young or very old and maybe somewhat technologically challenged. All of the first 200 or so of those to comment on the article ignored the branding on the page. They didn’t notice that the site didn’t have Facebook’s header, logo, typeface, or even colors for that matter.

As a visual designer, I’m still in disbelief that in this day and age, this happened. I don’t think that everyone has become blind to branding, I think that it’s probably just a select demographic. Also, you could argue in this case that the blame could fall on a combination between weak branding on Facebook’s behalf as well as weak branding on Read Write Web’s behalf. Personally, I dig both sets of branding, but who know’s? Maybe that is part of what’s going here.

Ultimately, I don’t know what the answer is, but I can say that have a hard time believing that branding doesn’t matter.

I think just about anyone who starts a site for similar purposes also has a similar experience. For some reason though, this time I feel like this is going to work. I have a portfolio that I’m very proud of, and I have a voice to go along with it. I’m sure as I gain more experience I’ll look back on this blog and my portfolio and I’ll want to revise it and tweak it, but for where I’m at right now as a design professional, this works.

So, here’s to giving this my best shot. Hopefully this will turn into a spot for some good conversation. Thanks for reading, and enjoy!