Allora…

My friend Lauren and I met up on the Upper West Side on Tuesday night to get some good eats and to catch up. Also because I asked her to make a little cake topper for Sophie’s 1st birthday. Photos of that to come (or TK, a we say in the biz).

We met at Kefi, a Greek restaurant I had good things about, with a pretty high profile restaurateur at the helm, Donatella Arpaia. Lauren and I sat at the bar and had some good greek wine, and a few appetizer plates: greek salad, a selection of spreads, and grilled octopus and white bean salad. I sometimes have a problem w/ octopus because of the texture, but this was one of the best things I’ve eaten….ever. I’m glad we ordered it. It was smokey, with a soft, not rubbery texture. We both loved it! The prices were also very reasonable!

To my horror, the website uses the typeface Papyrus. Which is bad and almost as widely used by amateurs as Comic Sans.

There were two lovely, older, greek gentlemen sitting next to us, and they asked us our nationalities, and even tho we aren’t greek, they were so kind as to send us over two desserts that we had to try! Hahah, we couldn’t refuse, and even tho I have no idea what either of them were…we enjoyed them both. Things always taste better when theyre free anyway.

Uncle Charlie emailed me about redoing their logo for their company, MMCIS, Inc. and I’m excited about it, this could be cool! So I started sketching/brainstorming today. He gave me a couple guidelines:

• use the name MMCIS
• able to be rendered with small number of colors (so no gradients, bevels, etc.)
• still look good printed with 2 color process (on stationery, for example)
• steer away from the black/red/gray combo

So basically the man wants a simple, easy to read logo, that works big and small. One readable at every size, in any environment.

Some key words from their site to help w/ the brainstorming: functional, solutions, web, design, develop, program, host, administer.

To start, I’m trying to figure out what could be improved about their current logo, which currently is something like this:

• The type doesn’t line up. The IS (stands for Internet Services) are raised and smaller, and if that is to suggest a lesser importance to the MMC (multi media communications), then it isn’t obvious enough. It looks like a mistake.
• Also looks a little bit like roman numerals, either bc of the all caps, or the typeface, or both
• Tells me nothing about the company if the tagline wasn’t included. The logo should at least point you in the direction of an web solutions business

Goals for logo:
be readable. incorporate it into the website, ads, stationery, etc. hint at their niche, without having to rely on the “web sites that work”.

To the drawing board!

just the black one. also it’d be good to show a design in just B&W to show how you can work w/i a budget. (In printing costs, the more colors you have, the more expensive it becomes to print it).

the pink one. it seems like her.

I thought i needed more logo/wordmarks for my portfoliol. A while ago Jenna mentioned that she’d like like a card, with her name and just her contact info. so i started playing w/ a look for her:

and i think this is working the best. its fun and playful:

Last week I picked out some new glasses (it’d been like 3 years since my last pair). My eyes were hurting way too much wearing contacts all day, staring at a computer screen, and looking at a layout at like 500%. My eyes are sooooo happy now.

Working on putting up a portfolio. Go here and tell your friends.