Design is worthy toil.

Wow. My love for Before and After has been sung from the rooftops before, but here is some more. Read this.

You might look again at what you do. You sit with a full tummy in your warm office at a blank screen with an ad to make, and you’re thinking, “Jeez, I have to come up with something original and clever and it better be soon.” That’s not how to think. As a designer you have a privilege, one that others do not. It is the privilege of making visible that which others can only imagine, feel or think. When you do this, you open a window through which your audience can see, know and understand.

The publisher's letter that he wrote reminds, too, that my pursuit of better design is likewise worthy. I often cut myself down, for I'll never be a hot, trendy, renowned designer. Regardless, I do okay, and strive to do better. That's what's important.

Giant word search rocks!

While I tend toward digital geekery, I must admit that a necessary staple of any camping trip or decompression break at the coast is a word search book.

A love of word finds, a taste for precise and simple design, and general dorkitude made me squeel with delight when I saw this wall sized word search.

From Blik Surface Graphics. Which has all kinds of things I've love to waste my money on. Like their Wall Decals. It's like stickers for adults. (Remember collecting stickers in elementary school, girls? I'm SURE you do! Don't deny it.)

I hate Pepsi. And their logo, too.

I'm pleased by the popularity of simplicity in design. Out of the late 90's and early 00's "more is better... and even MORE is best!" aesthetic for busy busy busy graphics with as many whirligigs and wing digs as you could cram in has come what you could call design for after the hangover sets in.

I'm not a fan of Pepsi. Both the regular and the diet versions have a strange metallic tang to my palate. I drank one yesterday at Toki Teriyaki as it had been a while and with habit changes can come changed perceptions... but I still hated it.

Nor am I a fan of their new logo. It looks like a mistake. The waves were so iconic, and the motion they created were so clear and forward-moving that if I were the printer that received the new logo, I would have called the designer and said, "Whoa, something happened with one of your vector pieces there in the wave thingie; it's all f'd up."

This logo looks confused. And the direction and energy it creates is not clean and forward moving but curling back on itself in part and creating unsavory crashes of resonance. It's the area of a creek with no outlet which ends up a morass of conflicting waves.

This wouldn't work on it's own if it were a new, unknown product. But it fails doubly when it's meant to be an evolution of an existing feel.

In Design Talk, Before and After's blog, they have a great piece about this. (Before and After is the single best design resource I've ever known. I originally subscribed to their print version back in... 1993? Clear information about design basics and how to use them—and if you know enough about that, how to abuse them for good effect as well. Yes, I'm pitching them, but for no reason other than THEY ROCK and I want them to keep on a rockin'.)