Here To Stay

Designing logos can be incredibly challenging. The trick for me is to spend a lot of time with the idea away from my desk where I feel pressure to be putting ideas into documents. 4C602E15-810F-47EC-B361-F5E3467870BA-1-2048x1536-orientedIdeas have to begin in the fertile fields of imagination and be allowed to graze for a while.

It’s nice to have a smartphone on which to sketch out ideas when they come to me from out of the mists. iOS has a cute Notes application where I can make sketches with my finger. When the idea struck me to use the You Are Here pin icon as part of the logo, I sketched it out on top of a Treasure Map X and filled in the edges of the X with arrows. The idea was that the X and the <O were denoting Here and the arrows would denote Staying.

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Filling the Reservoir With Cement

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Finally finished. I’ve stared at this way too closely for way too long to be fully objective about it, but it turned out really well except for the parts that make it look like a vacation photo from Uncanny Valley. Continue reading Filling the Reservoir With Cement

Oops

Sometimes things just don’t line up properly. When that happens, you can throw the rubber ducky out with the bath water, or you can make a strategic edit. Today while joining two photos into a panorama, I noticed too late that the fences weren’t lining up. The fence stretched the length of the entire photograph, so I couldn’t just pick one and go with it; they had to join together. What I chose to do isn’t optimal, but it’s the best way to hide an obvious mistake so it becomes non-obvious.

Two images join imperfectly, but we've hidden it well

Hiding the dark fence join seam in the dark water reflection was the best place to hide in plain sight. This is, by the way, the same way JPEG compression works. By taking advantage of the way the eye passes over subtle color changes, we can hide imperfections in a photo that allow us to make a file size smaller, or save us hours of editing time making something perfect that doesn’t really have to be, not for our purposes.

Let the viewer’s brain do some image processing for us. It’s one step better than doing everything in The Cloud.

Broadway and John LLR Station Mural, Part 2b

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This edit involved both Photoshop and Affinity Design.

In photoshop, as discussed earlier, I added the Obeebo dance steps sculpture from further up Broadway as if it were a zen garden at the foot of the station where the Central Coop will someday be built.

Continue reading Broadway and John LLR Station Mural, Part 2b