Double Silver at GDBA Design Awards 2005

Two of the corporate identity projects that I led for BFK won Silver IDEAs at last week’s GDBA Irish Design Effectiveness Awards*. The rebranding of Campus Oil, which included the creation of a new brand mark and the redesign of all of their retail forecourts and their fleet of vehicles, took the Silver award in the category for identity projects with a budget (including implementation costs) exceeding fifty thousand euro.

The work I have been doing for the exciting Welsh technology startup DeepStream Technologies was awarded Silver in the other corporate identity category. I have not won an IDEA award since 2001, when I picked up a Gold for my Pigsback.com brand identity. So winning two together on the same night was pretty rewarding.

The IDEA awards ceremony itself was better than last year’s, although I am probably biased – having not won anything last year. I do not think I was fully with-it at this gig though, having gotten up at five in the morning to catch the red-eye ferry to Holyhead for an intensive half-day meeting in Bangor and then rushing back for the awards that evening. Consequently I did not do any schmingling: a few drinks with my team beforehand and a quick departure once the ceremony was over.


Now I need to find some time to peruse the new GDBA Annual to see who has joined and who has left and which companies are working for which clients. Although at first glance I wonder what happened to Dynamo? They were the winners of last year’s Grand Prix award and not even members this year. There must be a story there...

(It would be terribly remiss of me not to note that GDBA membership is corporate, and that all awards are given to companies and not to individuals. Of course.)

Technorati Tags: GDBA | BFK | DeepStream | | Campus Oil
Links: Campus case study | DeepStream case study

Some of you know HTML...

My self-taught web-fu is letting me down here. I am not adept at decoding CSS style sheets. I want to correct the size of the two text links under the ‘footnote’ heading down at the base of my sidebar. They are currently appearing at the larger subheading size. Can someone have a look at the source for me? Do I need to add a (UL) html tag before them and then just enclose those lines within (LI) and (/LI) tags? Or will that mess up the scripts associated with those two lines? Any advice will be appreciated.

Typo-Audio

This one is a bit of a curio for the designers in the audience. Typeradio: a comprehensive audio archive of interviews with typeface designers and typographers. The audio quality is not too great on some of the interviews, and most of them could do with some ruthless editing. But for those of us who are typo-philes (and/or iPod alpha-geekoid early adopters), there is a range of content here that makes this an intriguing resource.

I have only listened to the Eric Spiekermann and Lucas De Groot interviews so far, so I cannot vouch for the majority of the interviews. There is a relaxed, informal air to the conversations. And, while you are unlikely to gain any startling insights into the type-design process, you do definitely get a flavour of the designer’s individual personalities. My one recommendation is that you can safely skip the Thirty-Questions introductions that preface each interview.

(And who would have thought that Eric Spiekermann swore so much...)

Link: TypeRadio

Tools 2.0

Seth Godin has written an interesting post where he discusses the availability of tools and the low barriers to entry facilitated by today’s technology. It resonated with me as last week I had a discussion with a taxi driver who enjoyed using Photoshop even though, in his own words “I am not all that good with it”. It does not seem all that long ago since no-one outside of the design sector even knew what Photoshop was.

While I am able to see the point of the “You have a guitar, but that does not make you Jimi Hendrix” argument in Seth’s post, the fact is that the metaphorical playing fields are being levelled as we speak. The key implication to me seems that I have to concentrate on selling what is in my head. That has to be my unique differentiator. As someone else somewhere else will always be catching up with me on whatever craft design skills I have developed, or else leapfrogging those skills with better, smarter tools. I think we all have to run just to stand still and engage in constant learning to compete.

Seth can make us all feel guilty, as we really do not have that any reasons left not to get down to it and write our books now. (Actually my phrasing does him a disservice. Rather than fostering guilt, he is encouraging self-sufficiency and personal excellence.)