Design – Page 3 – Confidant Communications Blog

A New Saskatchewan Logo

We have had conservative leadership both in our province and our country for a few years now, with mixed results. I will try not to trumpet my own political views but I feel the need to speak up about a recent action by the Saskatchewan Party.

For you non-Saskies out there, you should know that we have a very nice logo that in recent years has fell out of usage, apparently because its strong agricultural imagery is no longer representative of our overall industry outlook:

When it was first proposed that we develop a new logo, the idea was met with a fair bit of resistance. So for a while, the province resorted to using our coat of arms:

I thought this was a fine compromise. However, in recent years the Saskatchewan Party leadership has quietly begun using the logo below (I found versions in a number of colour variations):

While I could comment on the low-key methods they used to introduce the logo, my main issues are with the design itself. I believe in constructive criticism, so instead of just slamming it point by point, let me show you how I would fix it.

1. Let’s clean up that type shall we? Put the “of” back to a subservient role where it belongs, and go back to good old Helvetica.

2. What are those swooshy things? People flying right over our province, that’s what. What we need here is to change the swooshes to come from within the province. That way we can be known as a fountain of sorts. We export all sorts of good things, so let’s show it.

3. I think we need more swooshes and more symbolism. Let’s put in some growy-looking shapes that are reminiscent of the old sheaf logo, and a sun rising.

4. Green and gold? Identical to the ruling party’s colours? Come on. We are the “Land of Living Skies” (if our license plate is to be believed) so why not use a palette which is reminiscent of a nice sunset:

There you have it: a properly designed, party-neutral logo that properly represents our thriving province. I am against spec work, by the way, so if you want to use this logo you will have to elect me as the leader of some rival party and then vote me into office based on my other merits. If elected I propose that we institute the new identity on April 1, 2015.

My Flash Navigation Experiments

I spent a lot of time experimenting before I finally published the current version of my website.

I was excited about using interactive 3D worlds as a basis of information discovery. I experimented with simple scenes in Papervision3D like below, where the user can drag objects around. As you can see, the performance was really bad even with low-res images. Since that time Flash 3D engines such as Away3D have started using Stage3D to their advantage, so I imagine they would perform better than this one.

[swfobject]120[/swfobject]

Another idea I had was using face tracking as a navigation method. Again, this didn’t perform as well as I wanted and the file size was too large to get a nicely detailed tree. Allow Flash to access your camera to see how it works.

[swfobject]116[/swfobject]

Here is the interface I almost used in the end, but then abandoned when I decided to retrofit the site to use my branded-wood-disc logo. I like that no actual buttons are used, but it maybe wasn’t 100% intuitive.

[swfobject]118[/swfobject]

These are already a few years old now (c. 2009) and I’m still not certain that HTML5 could do face tracking or shape tweening the same way I’ve done here, and have it useable in the majority of browsers. Some day it will, but kudos to Flash to giving this to us so early on.

The Trouble With Fonts

Fonts bug me.

As a designer I actually LOVE a well designed font. I know the hard work it takes to design one. I believe the designer should be paid for their work. I like trying new fonts and I believe they have a big effect on a design. Yet here’s my problems with fonts:

1. There’s too many choices

My computer has 1169 fonts on it. I have done a bit of categorizing using Linotype’s FontExplorer, but who has the time to do it right? Yes, I could visit some website that has it all done for you, but I don’t always know which ones I have already. I could also go to a free font site, but then I have to look through dozens of junky ones before I find a good one. That brings me to my next problem:

2. There’s too many free fonts

Like I said, I think good designers should get paid. But dang it, there’s some really good fonts out there for free and they are always tempting me! Why didn’t you talented designers just make it easy for me and charge money for the good stuff? And what about all those fonts on my computer? Why pay when I have lots of choices already? A new font needs to have a pretty significant design flavour before I can ever get the courage to buy a new one.

3. Font rights are a hassle

Over the years I’ve had a few jobs at different places, and I’ve used many different computers. When you go from one to another, the easiest way to make the switch is to migrate everything you had on the previous computer. I’ve tried to purge myself of fonts that I know I don’t own, but who knows if I did the whole job? THE GUILT!

Furthermore, every new font I get has a different license agreement. And every font handles it in a different way—sometimes in a little readme file, sometimes on the website where you got it. How do I keep track of all this?

4. Web fonts are more hassle

Browsers nowadays finally have the ability to display custom fonts. Problem is, you still need to keep track of whether a font allows you the rights for web use. Then you have to either convert your font to the proper format or else pay an online font provider. If you get a font provider you often have to pay a subscription fee. Then you have to convince your client that they need it. I don’t know about you, but paying a regular fee so my website can have a certain font seems odd to me.

What I want

In a perfect world, every font would be a good one. I could find the perfect one quickly. I would own the rights to anything I wanted to use, and having it on my website would be as simple as naming it in the css file. Lastly, every client would appreciate having good fonts.

When Jesus comes back to make all things new, I’ll be waving my hand to ask about this font thing.