Atl. 40-44.
Friday, I started an account and relationship with a new online printer, PS Print. I’m usually pretty leery about giving expensive orders to online printers whom I haven’t worked with before, but PS Print looks like it can really deliver. They had really competitive prices, recyclable card stock options (important when printing business cards for an environmentally conscious brand) and a digital proofing system that was easy to walk through finalizations on. Plus, they had great customer service and credited our account back when I asked for combined rush shipping. So I uploaded the Plywood business card designs for both Jeff and Gisele to them, and we should be getting the cards Wednesday in time for the Gift Card Giver tour’s first stop in Charlotte, NC this Thursday night.
This post is going to be a lot about Plywood, so I better explain a bit more about that company first.
Plywood is the community of creativity that Shinabarger, Inc. (Jeff’s current licensed name for his consulting work) is soon to shoot off of and, in some aspects, morph into. And I think that this is going to be a powerful new change. Plywood’s tagline is, “An innovative community addressing social needs.” It is going to be a more-than-profit initiative (a for-profit company that backs non-profit issues) to creatively respond to various social problems. It is a “community” in the sense that it is going to “house” several different project formats: Plywood People, a digital magazine that I’ll be freelancing for some this fall that is going to detail a different socially responsible innovator who is impacting their surroundings in every issue; Plywood Goods, which will sell environmentally and socially conscious merchandise that benefits needy projects (one current example: recycled billboards turned into messenger bags and the proceeds go towards new houses for widows in Guatemala); Plywood Events, which will help market events and conferences that benefit communities. Sound too legit to quit? I think so to. I’m glad to be designing for and helping to brand the organization.
Plywood is going to be an official sponsor of the Gift Card Giver tour (which I will try and blog consistently about as I hit up all of the different cities), and so we have been working around the clock like crazy to get stuff together for Plywood to have stuff to show on tour. The business cards went to production Friday; Monday I worked on signage to display all of the Plywood Goods that will be sold, the Twitter account for the company (I do NOT like designing Twitter account images; they’ve got to figure out a better way in CSS to make the images span the page based on the browser size, not the screen resolution), and started construction on a BigCartel site to sell all of the goods online. Tuesday I talked with a local sign printer and got them to rush through the Plywood Goods signage so that I will pick it up tomorrow, and I also designed new tags that will be attached to all of the products that we sell, with a story of how an individual’s purchase is benefitting others (fact: marketing/designing is ALL about telling a story). I photographed all of the Plywood Goods and set them up on the BigCartel store, and tweaked the CSS for the store too. It’s still a bit in flux; as soon as it’s done, I’ll post a link. All of this stuff was just standard Photoshop and Illustrator work. Nothing fancy. Just getting more prepress experience.
The really interesting design project that I am working on for Plywood is based on the brand identity that I helped design, but is actually not on the computer. That’s right, I am now dabbling a bit in applying graphic design to industrial design media for overall experience design. The Plywood identity that I created is basically a glossy-white painted piece of plywood, where all of the chips and grain are showing through, and a green rectangle, multiplied in Photoshop to show the grain underneath, with “Plywood” branded over it in Zag Bold, also showing the grain underneath by soft lighting it in PS. So, this week I have been charged to create a sign for Plywood to go by the booth set-ups. Sure, you could just print a sign but… I actually bought a huge sheet of plywood, primed it, painted it, and then lacquered it, and am now reconstructing the logo in masking tape outlines over the plywood to make a big, organic representation of the branding. It is a long process and is teaching me a LOT about fonts, because I am having to pay attention to the math behind text: fonts are designed based on heighth, width, and angles, and I’m having to plot all of that out and magnify it for the display. Mr. Lark, my high school art teacher, always used to say, “Artists have to know everything. Art is science, and math, and philosophy, and religion, and…” And he was right. Being a good designer is much more than clicking on a computer.
Tomorrow, all of the printed Gift Card Giver materials should be arriving as well in time for Charlotte’s party. So tomorrow night I am setting up a Plywood booth and a Gift Card Giver booth in the Atlanta party’s venue on McPherson Ave. to see if the experience design is going to work or not. We’ll see, but I’ve got a good feeling.
Monday I also presented the Green My Hood project designs to Leroy Barber of FCS Urban Ministries and Mission Year and he loved the urban feel of the spray-painted logo, and asked for zero revisions! So hopefully we’ll fast track that project soon. The logo is done, we’re going to be printing it on shirts soon, and may do reusable shopping bags with the logo emblazoned on it as well. Look out for Green My Hood: it’s an environmental and social project that is going to go huge, I think.
Over the weekend I also created a Behance Network profile, and have already gotten a lot of positive feedback through e-mails and messages - even one request for a freelance contract this fall! So it has been a CRAZY past few days for design, but I have learned a LOT. I can definitely say this whole summer has taught me the ins-and-outs of PR, marketing, designing, and branding.
Now the question is: do I actually want to do this for the rest of my life =)
