Today was a day of decisions, meetings and ideas. Alex and I got off to school at the prescribed time with lots of laughs, plans, and chatter. He had a tennis tournament and plans for papers for his year end push. Instead of drinking coffee by myself in front of the computer, I went to Gimme! for a latte and company. It was so much fun with my friend Alan and his wife Marilyn and the community of bright souls that gather there every morning. We made plans for meetings around building projects at the Farmers Market. There are short term plans around where the picnic tables and benches go to the new gate for the entrance to the new Market Managers booth that could happen at Grassroots.
Then, it was back to the office...popping the pork butt into the oven for the second day (jazzed up with garlic, chipotle peppers, salt and pepper) to see if the slow-cooking will finally speed up--an be ready for dinner time. Now that it is past dinner time, the last 9 hours did the trick. Perfection. The boys had seconds and thirds.
Today was the day of more fun with organizing of Evernote, more searching on typography sites for great fonts for my new probiotic friends, and seeing how the type/illustration/research ideas fuse and come together. I searched the idea of probiotic...what did it look like, how is it portrayed in the world, specifically in yogurt, yogurt drinks, kefir, kombucha (a fermented drink made of tea, sugar and the great biological "mother"), of sauerkraut, of pickles, or even probiotic mustard. I discovered that probiotic is represented either as medicine, as supplements...something that is very clinical and logical to that of chocolate and candies with a probiotic add....a frivolity with "gut health" as a mere outflow of it's deliciousness. There is no consistency in the messages, the ideas, the products that his helpful bacterial is integrated in. The best hybrid product design/packaging incorporated a clean approach with simple typography (with a bit of personality) combined with an illustration or some sort of "gracenote" that takes the design off of stark and inapproachable. Interestingly, I started the sketch process working from my gut--and now that I have a bit more understanding--the solution I was reaching for was not even close. The research changed the entire scenario. Tomorrow will be the beginning of that fun.
More discoveries. I was trolling fonts --just to stay up to date which I fear I do not do often enough. I discovered the most amazing thing. FF Chartwell is a new font which takes advantage of the ligatures and glyphs offered in the current InDesign to create standard, customizable charts and graphs (elegant ones at that)--consistently. It is a gorgeous idea and the results are gorgeously consistently perfect. We are going to be trying this shortly to recommend to our corporate client as a tool to dictate graphs and charts within the corporate identity standards to take the creativity out--and add consistency and ease for the consulting designers and agencies. Well worth seeking out if you are a designer. Amazing thing.
Now, I have a wonderful collection of fonts to work with....to create decorative type slugs.
It is late now. It is time to wrap it up with BBC's Edwin Drood on the tube. We are all digging the Dickens these days.