colenielsen.com/blog

typophilers UNITE!

2008-07-01T03:07:00.002-07:00

The opening credits to the 4th annual Typophile Film Festival continue to rake in the awards. Currently it is a finalist for ADAA and an Honorable Mention in the I.D. Student Design Review.

Pictured above (L–R, row x row):
Joshua Kessie, designer; Ashley Mackay, designer; Chris Crosby, designer; Micah Anderson, music composer; Sam Gray, designer; Archie Sessions, writer & designer; Me, art director & designer; Matthew Chrislip, writer; Jeremy Ames, writer & lead designer.

the children kids blog is up

2008-06-16T23:19:00.001-07:00

I’ve talked on here some about Children Kids, but now there’s another forum for that. Introducing: Children Kids, the blog. Spread it around. ~!

spécimen général

2008-05-18T20:21:00.004-07:00

This is a French type specimen book filled with beautifully amazing type and ornamental borders. I borrowed it from my friend Sam, who borrowed it from the BYU Library. To give someone the benefit of the doubt, someone then in turned borrowed it from me. The problem is that I’m not sure who that someone is or when (or if) someone intends to return it. I imagine sharing a few samples here would only make others want to “borrow” it more than ever before. But… if you borrowed it—or know who borrowed it—if you would unborrow it, me and Sam and the Harold B Lee Library would really appreciate it. Thanks.
Otherwise, just enjoy the samples that I scanned from the book before it’s disappearance.

things (Sagmeister has) learned…

2008-05-11T23:07:00.004-07:00

Recently I have been smitten by Stefan Sagmeister. I know it’s a little late, I know! And it’s not that I haven’t liked him or his work before (aside from his Rolling Stone’s album cover). I really like most of his work. I guess the thing that I regret is that I didn’t jump on his book, Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far before now. But after seeing it at the MOMA bookstore and at Bardhi’s house this past week, I can’t believe I don’t own it. But—like the shoes below—I hope to own it soon.

Here’s a video that documents a bit about his installation at the Dietch Project, based around the same themes as his book.

brand jordan

2008-05-11T21:46:00.005-07:00

This isn’t typically the blog I use to talk about basketball related topics, but this one is less about the sport and more about the design—and specifically the design of brand Jordan.
Recently I’ve been reading Driven From Within—a pretty nice book in terms of photography, typography, and the philosophy that drives both Michael Jordan and his brand (and you can get the book at Borders for like five bucks right now; it’s a good buy). MJ’s story is told first person by Michael himself, with a ton of insights from close friends and family, including Tinker Hatfield, the famed designer at Nike and the genius behind the majority of the Air Jordan shoes.
Excerpts from the book…

“The shoes we created over the years were not contrived from a temporary fad of flavor-of-the-month thing. There is a pure foundation. I am most critical of the design work when I see someone throwing elements onto shoes just to make them look cool. There has to be a soul to the process. There has to be a real story.” — Tinker Hatfield.

“The products, companies and people who stay true to who they are usually end up being around for a long time.… If you are trying to make your way through a maze, and your decisions come from the inside, from your gut, nine times out of ten you won’t find yourself running into a wall.… As long as we stay true, stay honest, stay stylish, stay innovative, stay focused on quality over quantity, then no one will catch us because we’re always going to be leading. Fads are fads; they come and go. That’s not what brand jordan is about. And that’s not who I am.” — Michael Jordan.

This past week in New York, I spent a good chunk of my free time eyeing/drooling over the plethora of beautiful basketball shoes in the midtown athletic shoe stores and the Soho sneaker boutiques. But there’s something magical about the Air Jordans. Something that makes my gut churn and my mind warn me: If you don’t get these now, you’ll regret it. I never got the XXIs and I regret it. I didn’t get them, fyi. Maybe someday…
I think it’s interesting that the same icon that inspired me as a kid on the basketball court is the same one that inspires me today as a designer.

For amazing images of Jordans 1 through 23, click here. Enjoy. But a word of caution: If you’re a shoe person, be careful; you may not come out for quite a while.

2008-05-11T20:05:00.002-07:00

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about this anymore and I want to hold to that, but I can’t stop other people from talking about it, right? Here’s a pretty cool article from Font Shop’s “Unzipped” blog about the piece.

do more.

2008-05-08T22:23:00.004-07:00

I head back to Utah on Saturday, so the New York trip is quickly coming to an end. I’ve met with six studios and possibly a seventh tomorrow and have received a lot of positive reactions as well as some “You better step up your game if you plan to play with the big boys” type reactions. I’m most thankful for the latter; it gets me excited to get back home and get to work on some of the pieces that have been kind of sitting in limbo for the past year-plus.
And with that, I’ll sign off with the co-slogan of the Provo Care Center project and my favorite model in larger-than-life size:

one show…

2008-05-08T21:50:00.003-07:00

A couple nights ago Jeremy Ames, Micah Anderson, and I went to the Design One Show at the Chelsea Art Museum to receive a “Silver Pencil” for ours and other’s work on the Typophile Film Festival Opening Credits.
To see all the winner’s work, click here.
To view the piece and to see details about our piece, click here.
I want to thank Punchcut/Typophile, Brent Barson, Eric Gillett, and Linda Sullivan for providing both the opportunity to work on the piece as well as creative direction throughout.
And also thank you’s to everyone else who spent long, long, long and often frustrating hours working on it: Sam Gray, Chris Crosby, Ashley Mackay, Archie Sessions, Joshua Kessie, and Adam Johnson.
And now, I think I am officially sick of talking about this piece. But thanks for listening to everything up to this point.

update… nyc

2008-05-05T01:56:00.005-07:00

I’m heading to New York in the morning to attend the One Show this Tuesday. A piece that I worked on last year is up for a pencil—more on that after the event. Last week, the same piece—the opening credits to the Fourth Typophile Film Festival—won a silver cube at the Art Director’s Club. Bardhi, Ashley, and Matthew were there to receive that award. I honestly don’t fully understand exactly what these recognitions mean, but I hear it’s something to be proud of.
For a higher-res version of the video, click here (and wait for download):

Anyways…
In preparation I put together a little portfolio book to show around. I’ll post some more images of it in the near future, but for now just this sheet, pre-cut, of some of the personal work I’ve done with the New Orleans Hornets brand:

There’s a million other things I could post, but I’ll keep it brief and leave some stuff to talk about during the week. For now, I’ll just leave you with this cool shot from my last stay in the Big Apple.

portfolio

2008-04-30T09:44:00.005-07:00

Finally finished a rough book of my stuff. Here are a few samples. Check out the rest here.

new orleans hornets

2008-04-29T02:18:00.002-07:00

Perhaps one of my favorite projects that I undertook during school was a rebrand of the New Orleans Hornets. I’ve been working on it for well over a year (with huge gaps of time between productivity, for sure… but over a year, nonetheless). I just barely finished this jersey mock. I thought I’d share. Hopefully I’ll have more to share soon—as in, less than a year from now.

U—leave me a Alone!—NiQLO

2008-04-24T12:49:00.006-07:00

(p—as in pre—s: if you’re reading this in google Reader you’re missing stuff. Either go to the real blog or be sure to check the links below…)

UNiqlo has a pretty sweet, creative, and fun site up right now. I know that alternate forms of advertising and interactive media on the web is the new thing right now, but rarely do I get too caught up in them. This one, I really like. Check it out for yourself. Enjoy.

oh, yeah. And this is amazing, too.

I just think UNiqlo gets it, y’know?

HTF Didot Letterforms…

2008-04-22T16:55:00.003-07:00

I was working on a wordmark for a client today using the HTF Didot type family and I got sidetracked because I was so incredibly mesmerized by its letterforms. I started turning them on end, backwards, and upside down to take them out of the expected so that my eyes could better appreciate the shapes and the lines. Take the lightest set of letters, for example: at first glance, it almost looks Arabic or Thai or something. Really crazy. Crazy beautiful.

NEWWORK magazine

2008-04-21T17:13:00.003-07:00

I love the posi/nega-tive interplay in these grabs from NEWWORK magazine.

we do, it's true.

2008-04-18T19:19:00.001-07:00

come August, we’re moving to NYC from Utah. More details to come…

children kids…

2008-04-18T19:08:00.002-07:00

This is Zack, of the Chilren Kids.
Get familiar with him. More to come later.
You may recognize some of the “graffiti” on the lockers from this book—a local favorite for scrap collectors.

circles, squares, triangles…

2008-04-10T22:37:00.004-07:00

This piece from Wyeth Hansen reminds me a bit of this piece I did one day playing around with letter shapes and lines. Hansen’s piece has great play of shape and color.

Hendrik Werkman

2008-04-10T16:01:00.002-07:00

Back in college—my first year in the design program at BYU—I discovered Hendrik Werkman. I totally and completely fell in love with his work. At the time I was working on a project in class where we were designing a trilogy book jackets. I was doing mine on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Slapstick. Something about Werkman’s prints and Vonnegut’s disjointed, (black-) humorous writing style seemed to me to be the perfect marriage of art and literature. So I sampled some of Werkman’s prints to produce these:

I was extremely proud of these pieces. I felt that I had really nailed the look I was conceptually hoping for. And then someone brought up the point of plagiarism. They questioned whether my use of Werkman’s prints was ethical. I argued that it was, that it was like being an art director and hiring an illustrator (that line is often fuzzy as a student). For the most part, I altered or added to everything I found, and on the back covers I attempted my own Werkman-styled illustrations. They turned out ok.
Looking back now, though—and realizing that Hendrik Werkman’s work was not some diamond in the rough that I thought I discovered, but rather an extremely influential designer in European Avant Garde design—I do feel that using his prints as I did may not have been the right thing to do. Maybe not as much on an ethical level because I wasn’t attempting to cut corners on the project or trying to pass someone else’s work off as my own. But, something about it doesn’t sit so well with me now. I should have played with wood blocks and ink of my own.
At any rate. That’s the story. I love Hendrik Werkman’s prints. I love Kurt Vonnegut’s books. And I really like the pieces that I coordinated. Vonnegut and Werkman make a good couple.

1828 Roman

2008-04-04T16:49:00.004-07:00

This is an awesomely quirky face by Darius Wells form 1828. Wow.

2008-04-03T20:18:00.004-07:00

Kinda took the day off today, recovering from a few late nights working on the Provo Care brochure and posters. Sam called me up and told me that Jared Benson from Punchut/Typophile was coming to BYU to speak and asked if I wanted to go with. I did. Gladly. Jared talked a lot about starting a studio as a relatively recent grad (3 years) and what he did to lead up to that point. He talked about some of the philosophies that shaped his current studio—Punchcut. He shared so much valuable information, but two things in particular stood out to me:

1) He talked about context. “Context is Key” he said. And then this really got me—He said, instead of thinking of a TV as a “TV” that they call it a “Large Format Display” and just like that the context is altered in a way that allows you to think outside the typical paradigm of the television. Things that one might shy away from doing with a TV may be perfectly suited for the Large Format Display. I thought that was really cool.
2) He said his studio is founded on the concept of “Life Balance.” Isn’t that the Holy Grail that all us designers search for? Obviously that includes going home at night, enjoying weekends, etc. But also he brought that line of thinking into the office by initiating the frequent office party, setting aside half days to carry out office-wide projects or go bowling or hold a Rock Band contest. He said that he strives to make his/their downtime as constructive as their uptime, just like—get this, this is brilliant—positive/negative space in design. Bam!

After all that, the slideshow, the Q&A, and everything, he showed this years Typophile Film Festival. Last year I had the… privilege? obligation? terror? joy? of working on the opening credits to that film festival with my BFA class. I’ve posted about this a fair amount on my other blog, so I’ll cut it short here, but I do want to say this: I am really proud of this project. It is so far from perfect. Parts of it I watch and cringe. I know where we cut corners and I know where we didn’t. And I still watch it and think: If we could have just had another week… But, all in all, I watch it and am very proud. It was a huge project to undertake with a group who had never done anything like it before. We struggled immensely and in the end there were only about 7 of us left out of the original 15 that began working on it. Micah did an incredible job on the music. It took us like 17 tries before we nailed it, but we nailed it. It is perfect. And to bring this full circle and back to Jared Benson, he said today—when he showed the Typophile Film Festival Reel—that this piece was one of the most successful pieces in the four years that the Film Festival had run. He said every time people laugh and cry and applaud and rave about it. There are over 14,000 views of it on youTube (web version) and it’s only been shown publicly 4 times. Not bad.
Anways, here is the film (hi-res, 41mb):

(my roles in the piece: art director, music director, and animator of a few of the scenes)

turntable by Lamosca

2008-04-03T18:09:00.003-07:00

I really love this. I don’t know what else to say. It’s just perfect.
By Lamosca from Barcelona.

provo care center posters

2008-04-01T20:37:00.003-07:00

16x20 posters to accompany the brochures. They’re printing as I write this and look amazing. Hope the brochures turn out.
Part of my step-by-step on designing projects without a budget in two days should include: “Delivering product to client without having a chance to see a test print or feel the paper…” Scary. Thank goodness the poster’s at least look good.*

*ps: there’s a printer smudge on the top of the color poster. bummer. :)

film is not dead v2.0

2008-04-01T17:47:00.007-07:00

Recently I’ve been working on updating the design for the official “Film is Not Dead” webpage—the webpage for the workshop by Jon Canlas. Jon’s great to work for which is good because in the next couple months we’re working on unveiling his completely revamped identity and brand. exciting.
He’s a great client because he comes to you with an idea—“I just need a simple website, an about page, a gallery”—and when you pitch the idea of a 36-page online, magazine-style, flash site with pages and pages of stories, details, captions, and insights for a wedding photography workshop in Hawaii, he jumps on the idea with enough energy and enthusiasm to see it through the setbacks and on to completion. (Same story on the “Film is Not Dead” workbook... images to come soon.)

Here are some screen shots from the site… mostly chapter spreads, it seems:

provo care center

2008-04-01T02:51:00.005-07:00

suzie—my wife, bless her heart—volunteered me to do some design for the non-profit organization that she works for. and, really, even though the circumstances of the project have been poor at best, i’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to work on this.

(how to design a brochure in about a day with no budget)

first
i get a call last thursday evening just before i’m heading home for the day asking me to work on the project. i say yes. they say it needs to be done and printed by wednesday (tomorrow).

then
i get copy friday morning. i browse it over and decide to do a photo shoot with my friend leo. problem is, he can’t shoot until saturday—which means no prints until monday. i call print shops until i find one that offers a deadline later than yesterday.

so
monday we scan the film and the photos turn out great. i meet up with sienna, we brainstorm how to throw it together. we work on some titles, content themes, etc and spruce up the copy. the rest of the day we work on laying out the brochure.

and now
it’s 4am and i’ve sent it off to be printed.

soon
we will celebrate.... knock on wood.

colenielsen(dot)com(backslash)blog

2008-04-01T02:43:00.007-07:00

this may or may not be the best idea.
but i’m taking on the computer, html, ftp and all that jazz to bring you...
colenielsen.com/blog

the purpose of this is to be more design-oriented in the posts—maybe a little less personal?
i’ll post things that inspire me, scrap, links to articles, other designers, and so on.
i will also try to frequently update with images of projects that i am working on.

all the best. ~!

ps: it’s embarrassing to host a design-centric blog as ugly as this. i’m trying. hopefully this will all soon be figured out.