Approval!

Now up on hoardings, and an office building in Calicut and somewhere else I forget. But yay!

Litfest 2011

Fake, I promise. But I remember making one back in the day for the English Academy when I was in college. It was design disaster, but it was new and shiny, so they went with it anyway. That was called Reflections of a Roadside Minstrel or something equally absurd. But I kept this down to the cheesy 'Reflections' bit. I just felt I hadn't given Helvetica it's due, because I honestly think it's such an awesome font when used well. This is a little rough around the edges, but I kind of like it. It's English Academy-ish. Pic 1 is the poster and Pic 2 is the fanfold brochure. The brochure somehow looks nicer bigger, but I had some trouble uploading larger files. I had some variations of the main poster as well, something more minimal, but this seemed like more fun. Working on a few more. Watch this space for more.

Logos!

Okay, so I'll come right out and say it. Logos are goddamn difficult. They maybe small, but they'll totally screw your happiness. Like these screwed mine. I'm still working on more though. Some of them you may recognize from the old blog - but modified it slightly. So far, I'm only digging Wireless Guru, Energy Ideas and Beanie. Office Square was just to fill up space, hehe (I got bored).

Branding for an Event

The title is a bit of a mood kill, but moving on.

The company's called Ak Bhar Cha Productions (translated into English it means One Cup of Tea productions, but bhar is more like an earthen cup, from which Bengalis sip tea at a leisurely pace discussing the events of the world and their neighbour's cat - also known as adda - the activity, not the cat...although that would be a nice name). Now Ak Bhar Cha wants to do this film fest thing, but being primarily Bengalis they don't just want any goddamn film fest - but something with a little more quirk. So they make Ulto Reel (Ulto = Opposite/Topsy of the Turvy fame) which is basically a whole mashup of indie flicks, LGBT films, art house cinema etc. Nothing commercial, mostly pretentious. You get? Anyway, the cause is noble and the films are actually pretty damn good so let's get this prettied up.

For the posters, I stuck to the format I'm currently crushing on. Bright colours, fonts of varying sizes. Minimal, with just the right amount of information. For further details, you'll have to log onto the website. Fonts from the Helvetica family and I've tried different coloured backgrounds.

I wasn't sure if I should have continued with the bright colours for the site, but this is what I finally decided on. Neat and minimal, with a few accents of bright colour. The reason being, there's a lot of material on the site and the more sober the colours, the easier to stare at the screen for longer periods of time. It's a detailed website with the event itinerary, trailers and summaries from the films being screened, categories of cinema being screened, director profiles - all the scoop basically. Ak Bhar Cha wanted to cut down on printing costs and also be environmentally friendly. So sorry, no catalogues, only cyber memorabilia.

Oh but what is branding without something to take home and remember you by? So we have passes, designed in the same vein as the posters. You can use these unusually shaped passes as coasters after the event. Or just stick it up on your softboard. The front is simple enough - event name, date, event logo, company logo. The back is an idea that may or may not be incorporated - but it works for people like me who are too lazy to go through the fine print. It has all the event highlights of the day, telling you how you could plan your day. Oh, but FYI, none of the films in competition are promoted. That would be unfair.

So for that we have the schedule sheet a.k.a. Event Itinerary. It has the entire list of events listed according to time and date (which I haven't done, because obviously this is all make believe and even if I have a lot of time to kill, it would be ridiculous to make up a 4 day long film schedule for a non-existent event and non-existent company).

So there you go. That was fun. For me. Sigh.

Secrets

So, this is a little complicated, because I certainly don't want to put up my secrets online. So I made some up and some are just random not so secret secrets. I'm sure you know this is inspired by the utterly voyeuristic, but totally addictive www.postsecret.com

Story - Shut up - Kiss - courtesy SoodooSen.

Posters

So I've not had much to do of late apart from waiting, waiting and waiting for this stupid commercial to take off. So I busied myself with some poster designs for an imaginary orgnaisation called BRAINSPILL. They don't really mean anything, but I'm bored, humor me. I want to play some more with the fonts. Then, I'll work on the cleverness. For now though - tada! I like the idea of really bold solid colours with illustrations and heavy fonts (I've used Kilogram and Xirod).

Round Labels

Click on Image to Enlarge

There's this site I absolutely adore (thanks Suk!) called The Die Line which has these really cool package designs. Was playing around a bit, having downloaded a whole bunch of cute fonts, and got me some inspiration from DL.

Green Leaf (Mint) - is one of those fancy dried herb thingies in those squat, transparent glass jars with corks.

Royal Riviera - is just some boring, random wine

The guy with mouth - is not really a label, but a lid for a steaming hot coffee cup

Spice (Cinnamon) - is like green leaf

Pure Juice - is a peel off label-lid

Fishy - is fish food - the little dots are the holes

Swiss Mints - are well, little coin shaped Swiss mint chocolates, also in jars with a porcelain stopper

Blue Glue etc - are peel off jello label-lids

Have some more ideas, but very little time. This is fun but.

A-Peel

So here's something fun I discovered online. It's called the Peeled Effect and it's lots of fun. Try it. Had some fun with this dude here and the second picture is self explanatory :)

Obviously not very refined - the edges are a little meh - but I couldn't help the haste. Have fun!

Project Save a Picture

So I stumbled upon a fabulous picture on Yay, which said: Take an ordinary photograph, apply a vintage effect and write something in Helvetica (click to see it)- or something to that extent. True. Very, very true. The effect, if used cleverly can be superb. So I fished around for some very meh pictures in my folders and decided to go give it a go. Surprisingly, I have no digital stills of Victoria - so this one I found online and worked upon (Click on the original image). The rest are a motley collection of mediocre pictures I clicked in and around Cal. The text is bogus, so don't bother. Hehe. So, does it work for you?

I didn't want an extremely over processed look - but you know just enough for a touch of drama and warmth. Personally, I think the rickshaw picture turned out the best - and oh, I suddenly love photoshop all over again :)
This one (in Cherapunjee, Shillong) I did a little while back. The original is a little dark, and hardly represents the magic of the moment.

Bookish

Judge a book by its cover. Here are a few.

The last two are like an homage. The first one is like those 1960s Penguin Classics and the last one is a pulp fiction, horror.

Webby

I love visiting cool looking websites. And of late I've started to develop a soft corner for simple, clean designs. Not too heavy on the flash and interactive stuff. Stark, minimal stuff.

So I was fooling around with Corel and came up with some ideas. They are mostly meant for small businesses. Like this one here, is kind of inspired by YAY!Everyday - a website I absolutely adore. In fact, I liked their layout so much that, I wanted to replicate it - so I started

with that. Then Dot A Lot happened.

(This one's a dummy page that I created - for the real thing visit their website)

Green Plug was a logo I created a while back. So played around with a design for that:

I'm not so sure I like it much - but yeah, the idea is again very low key, minimal.

But enough with minimal. Let's get campy. So Joey's Garage & Toolshed happened. Not campy really - but you know what I mean. It could be a pop up ad, if not a full fledged website. The ad on the left hand corner is Trojan's. :)

Here's a hybrid between the colourful and the classic.

And this one's for the comic lovers.

Working on more - as and when inspiration strikes. But hey, if you have a small business and are looking for template ideas, drop me a line :)