December 21, 2009

HA HA HA Happy Holidays!



My 2009 Holiday card and series of desktop wallpapers to celebrate the season. Enjoy!
1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200, 1680 x 1050, 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440.

December 20, 2009

Graphic Design Favors



As a designer we all do favors for friends and family and I'm not opposed to it. I usually take on a bit of a slacker focus to these kinds of jobs and don't really guarantee a turn around time since it would be most likely harmful towards paying work. Lunchbreath did this awesome poster of The Dreaded Killer Jellyfish. :) Loving this poster!

December 08, 2009

MyVomit-A-Pedia

This morning the White House streamed a video conference announcing the Open Government Initiative to promote transparency in government. During the announcement they used the government site MyFood-A-Pedia as an example of a data set that was released to the public. In this case one containing the nutritional data on foods commonly eaten and the site is to help with curbing childhood obesity issues. But seriously this is what you came up with?



This REALLY hurts my feelings (and makes it just a bit difficult to keep my lunch down). Not only is the logo and site awful, if you search common foods such as "Big Mac" or "Whopper" things people do eat that can lead to obesity issues it doesn't give you anything. Are you serious? The nutritional content for these foods is available on the back of the sheet that comes on your tray at McDonald's and Burger King. If their thinking is that people can just get this info elsewhere how helpful is it to make this site in the first place. It NEEDS to contain all the data, not just bits and pieces. And for God's sake get a real logo!

December 02, 2009

McGreen

Originally found at Brand New



The German outpost of the fast food mega chain, McDonald’s, recently announced that around 100 of its restaurants in Germany will change their well-known red backdrops to a deep green by the end of 2009. McDonald Germany’s VP, Holger Beeck, stated that the move is “out of respect for the environment.” But Germany isn’t the first to go green, France has been leading the European greening since 2006, when it launched the internal L’Eco Journal and its web site now features the logo against said deep green. This move is part of a bigger effort by McDonald’s to actually be green philosophically, more than just aesthetically, as chronicled in the McDonald’s 2009 Global Best of Green report. There are a couple of items for discussion: a) Is literally going green too lame? And b) does it hurt the brand by moving away from the very recognizable red? My take is, on the former, yes it’s kind of lame but at least they picked a nice green and, on the latter, McDonald’s has such a broad palette of brand icons — from the mnemonic Parapapapa sound to the Big Mac to the yellow arches — that substituting red is no big deal… in fact, just look how cool and recognizable it looks against black in the U.S. web site.