Fungible Convictions

Good friends of ours are starting their own marketing company. First off, that’s awesome. But just as awesome is that they asked me to design a logo.

They’ve named their business—Bulldog Marketing and Sales, Inc.—after their love of bulldogs. So incorporating a bulldog into the logo was a no-brainer, especially since chances are they will focus on marketing pet products. And after skimming my 1,000+ typefaces, Rockwell Sketch seemed to be the bulldoggiest font.

The funniest part of the process was having one of them sign off on the design but with the caveat, “How much does the bulldog image royalty cost?” I laughed and wrote back, “What royalty? You mean you don’t recognize your own dog?”

Their dog:

My outlining:

And the final head:

Certainly there’s room for improvement, but they seem pretty stoked, and then so am I.

This past week was a complete wash at work, what with one supervisor away, the other supervisor just having left MIT, and everyone else still recovering from the Future of News and Civic Media conference that we hosted the week before. But a week like that was needed, desperately. And it leads, after a few more days, into my first real vacation since my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2007.

With Lindsay and me trying to save for a house, vacations for the foreseeable future will always be to Easthampton, NY, where her family has a lovingly unpretentious second home. We’ve been looking forward to it for months. We’ll take Gatsby, we’ll see Lindsay’s parents, and we’ll even get to see a couple of friends on the last weekend there (starting their own well-deserved vacation as we end ours). We’ll sleep a lot. We’ll walk Gatsby a lot. We’ll barbecue. It’ll be great.

Meanwhile, mostly Gatsby-centric, the latest photos to share…

Gatsby’s was in her shedding season a couple weeks ago. This was the result, after having swept the week before:

Around the same time, my mom was in town, meeting Gatsby for the first time:

Lindsay’s friend/coworker Courtney just got a Boston Terrier/Pug mix named Cagney, who visited us today and was tough keep still:

Not that Gatsby is any better:

And mysteriously, despite loving to chase squirrels, we bought Gats a stuffed squirrel at Petsmart this afternoon, and this is how we found them soon after:

Lastly, completely unrelated but just because I’m proud of it, a Photoshop/Illustrator job I did showing MIT’s most famous building partially underwater:

It’s been relatively quiet at work this week (with the exception of helping put together two conferences). But one of the things that seeps into your bones at MIT is an impatience with quiet.

As I’ve mentioned before, something I need to work on is my proficiency with design programs, so often my way of dealing with that impatience is to do Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials.

Here are two I conducted today and yesterday.

Disco Ball

Papercraft Text Effect

To keep things in line with work, I almost always use the letters “CMS” for Comparative Media Studies when a logo is involved. Even in sillier examples like this.

Of all the Adobe CS3 programs, I’m the least experienced with Flash and Illustrator—just by virtue of not having needed to use them professionally much. So taking a break from my increasingly okay Photoshop tut attempts, I wanted to try out creating some vector images in Illustrator. In keeping with a pattern, I made sure to use the outlines of my wife Lindsay wearing a moose hat, this time in a vector illustration tutorial on how to make a Chinese food box: