This Spring we spent a day on a Tryk product photo shoot. Mark brought along his Lomo and captured these moments. They have a voyeuristic/espionage mood… not exactly what we were looking for in our brand story, but definitely cool enough to share. Have any great ideas for captions?
Aaris Sherin, assistant professor of graphic design at St. John's University, has included an excellent 16-page case study about Tricycle in her new book, SustainAble, a handbook of materials and applications for graphic designers and their clients. Not only is the content great, but the design utilizes make-readies for the cover using what otherwise would have been trash. This means there are quite a few different possible covers, and lucky for us, the publicity photo features a sheet from one of our spreads. What They Think has a two-part interview (1 & 2) with Aaris about writing and designing the book. Get yourself a copy at Amazon.
For several years we've resisted compiling a view book of our communication design work because we felt it would create brand confusion. After launching Tryk® last year the lines between our products and services were clearly delineated and it opened the door to showcase this body of work under the Tricycle® brand. We decided the best way to organize our projects was to group by client, exhibiting milestones from those relationships instead of simply categorizing them by medium.
We seek clients that come to us with broad questions rather than specific requests. "How do I improve the perception of my product line?" is a better request than "I need a new logo." The former indicates awareness and collaboration, the latter indicates DANGER. Sometimes savvy clients know exactly what they need but in my experience it is rare — most tend to be inwardly focused rather than outwardly focused. It's not narcissism, it's simply the reality of being in the trenches day after day. Design professionals help their clients sort this out... to see the big picture, to connect the dots, to maximize ROI. Cliche phrases, I know, but they're true.
The projects selected for our book are vignettes in the Big Picture. They are captured moments that summarize objectives. We intentionally kept descriptions to a minimum, simply introducing the challenge and then showing a collection of projects achieving it.
Download a PDF of "What You See Is What You Get" by clicking here.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an educational site about global climate change. It presents key indicators as well as evidence, causes and effects of our changing climate. The information is gathered from more than a dozen Earth science spacecraft and instruments in orbit studying Earth's systems. Some of the data has been tracked for decades while other information has only just begun to be studied.
The information is sobering, while we understand human activity has accelerated the natural progression of Earth's climate, there remains no clear answer on exactly what the result will be or how much of the consequences can be averted. Encouraging signs can be found, like reduced levels of ozone depletion thanks, in part, to accords reached in the 1987 Montreal Protocol.
One interesting feature of the website is the Climate Time Machine. It visually illustrates the changes in our climate as evidenced by yearly changes in things like polar ice, sea levels and average global temperature.
