Nate Duval

Here is a clever person indeed. Nate Duval possesses a superhuman attention span and a fairly wild creative flair, and has been commissioned to do poster art for a number of music artists including Catpower (shown here), The Decemberists and Flight of the Concords. One very interesting little fast fact is that he is married to an equally talented illustrator, Jen Skelly. Watch this space for a feature on his girl!

Prints now available at the Boheem Shop!

We are really excited to announce the launch of our new range of typographic prints, now available at the Boheem Shop as well as at our Etsy Store. We've framed a couple of them and have them hanging in our own homes, and they are already proving to be really popular. Some of these ideas have been bubbling away in the background in between client projects for a while now, so it's really nice that we're finally able to share them with you. We hope you like them!

Baggu Bags

We have been fans of Baggu reusable bags for some time, but with the relatively recent introduction of their leather range (top), we are officially wholeheartedly Baggu devotees. The simple designs are delightfully elegant, and the leather is sooooo very soft. We also love the colour options... one for each season plus a couple of extras perhaps? Bottom row is the Duck (book) Bag, the Laptop Sleeve and the Daypack. Note to self for gift ideas!

Farewell Chantel, we will miss you so very much

The studio is so quiet this morning. I'm not really sure how to start my week without seeing Chantel's cheery face and hearing all about her weekend. Friday was her last day here, after 4 1/2 years she's moving on.

What a girl, what an absolute treasure. We consider ourselves very lucky for having had her as such an integral part of the team for so long. Chantel's beautiful work is a result of a perfect combination determination, dedication and care for what she does. We will miss her so very much, and undoubtedly our clients will miss her too. 

Thank you Chantel for your sincerity, for bringing your smile every morning, for the thousands of cups of tea at 9am and 3pm, for embracing whatever craziness is going on – client fun runs, blog entries, Rizzeria printing, AGDA nights, book club, gingerbread houses… we sure have had some good times.

Brief history of Olympic pictograms

Continuing in the same Olympic theme, I thought I'd put a bit of a study together of graphic pictograms over the years. From what I could see, the icons used in Munich in 1972 were repeated in Montreal in 1976. It's really interesting that they were bold enough to use colour for Mexico City in 1968, but kept them monotone (I added tints for fun) until Sydney broke the mould in 2000. The Mexico City illustrations are also the only ones which don't depend on human forms to tell the story.

Designerlympics

Despite needing to keep my eyes popped open with matchsticks right now due to staying up far too late many school nights in a row this week watching The Olympics, I wanted to do a brief little review for us all on branding and design for this world-class event. Reason being, and I'll cut straight to the chase, is that I've been pretty thrown by the typeface they're using for the London Games this year. Love or hate it… we are not in total agreement here in the studio, but in all honesty I'm leaning toward 'hate'. Actually correction, I'm not leaning at all, I conclusively completely detest it. 

The London 2012 custom typeface is known as "2012 Headline" and was designed by Gareth Hague of Alias Foundry. I'm wondering how on earth the designers so successfully held the wool over the committe's eyes, to convince them it was a good idea to go with something so clunky, irregular and quite frankly, uncomfortable. Perhaps it may have worked as an upright typeface, especially since the 'o's are not slanted anyhow, but to me the decision to italicise something already pretty awkward just seems to make it visually choke. 

I've had a dig around the net to see what people have been saying, and my favourite was a succinct comment found on a forum which said, 'where THE F did they manage to find a font uglier and more moronic than comic sans?' Funny.

We look back over the years and although the Sydney 2000 font, ITC Binary has definitely dated, it certainly oozed personality and screamed 'important, big and exciting sporting event with serious competition'. Both Athens and Beijing settled for classic sans serif typefaces, Gill Sans and Frutiger (I think). And then we come to the font "Rio 2016", which is the font designed by the prolific and classy Dalton Maag foundry for the games in Rio (I know, surprising name eh). These guys have absolutely nailed it – this font is a great reminder of why we call type symbols 'characters' – its fluid form really personifies the richness of the city of Rio, its joyful Brazillian people and the energy of the athletes in action. Thumbs up from me.