In expensive personal computers, user friendly software and the world of graphic design is your oyster. So in the spirit of everyone is a designer, builder, artist and even photographer we developed this stationery suite for Sydney based photographer Karl Schwerdtfeger.

We followed the typical design process, establishing brief, working through responses, working out the look and feel, establishing the elements and then the realisation is left up to Karl. Welcome to the world of “D.I.Y. brands”.

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It is 4 months out from Christmas and now is a great time to think about developing the world’s greatest Christmas card design. In recent times it feels like the world has lost it’s taste for a decent card and many Decembers are awash with well intended charity cards and lousy ho-hum e-cards.

In a recent clean up this card by Gallaher + Associates appeared. Over the years we have got much pleasure from this goofy card and it prompted us to question the Christmas card thing, the low communication values put in this process and out of it we have developed a project to roll out of a Christmas card range for order clients and lovers of our work to order in 2009.

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This Christmas card produced by Gallaher + Associates is one of our all time favourite cards sent to our office which has survived many new year culls.

Produced in 2004, this poor little dog in sheep’s clothing by photographer J Geoffrey Badner, summed up the idea of the silly season. It reminded one of what I loved and learned working with Alan and Andrew at Gallaher + Associates back in 1994 – a belief in the process and strength in producing creative works that are centered around the delivery of a single, evocative, sometimes inspired or provocative image.

Visit Gallaher + Associate here.

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Sign up for our Christmas card project

The studio produces a card every year and we are committed to making an impact in very clichéd space. In 2008 the studio produced peace dove, which happened to be one of the most inventive, impactful and inexpensive options that has rolled out of the studio, and we are charged to do it again. We have devised a studio Christmas card project for clients looking for an effective design and production solution. We invite you to join us and make a Christmas card that will blow away the raft of boring cards forever.

For details call 03 9525 9844, production cut off is 15 November 2009.

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We get all sorts of comments, mostly complimentary which we rarely publish… don’t get us wrong we appreciate the feedback, however with a family moto “Don’t believe your hype”, one is programmed with a brutal modesty filter.

Infrequently we get some comments like Bruce’s that get us thinking. One face value Bruce’s comment was a little alarming, with a little more thought Bruce’s comment raised an interesting line of thought – who own things that we all own in a way?

From wiki:
An asterisk (*) (Latin asteriscum “little star”, from Greek ) is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often pronounce it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C* algebra). The word “asterisk” is often mispronounced as “asterick” or “asterix”.

The asterisk is derived from the need of the printers of family trees in feudal times as a symbol to indicate date of birth. The original shape was six-armed, each arm like a teardrop shooting from the center. For this reason, in some computer circles it is called a splat, perhaps due to the “squashed-bug” appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.

Many cultures have their own unique version of the asterisk. In East Asia a character with a similar use (?) looks like an X with dots surrounding it. This mark looks like the Chinese character for rice: ?. The Arabic asterisk is six-pointed. In some fonts the asterisk is five-pointed and the Arabic star is eight-pointed.

In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, pointers, repetition, and multiplication.

Written text

• The asterisk is used to call out a footnote, especially when there is only one on the page. Less commonly, multiple asterisks are used to denote different footnotes on a page. (i.e., *, **, ***)
• Three spaced asterisks centered on a page may represent a jump to a different scene or thought. See Horizontal rule.
• One or more asterisks may be used to strike out portions of a word to avoid offending by using the full form of a profanity (f**k), to preserve anonymity (Peter J***), or to avoid profanation of a holy name (G*d).
• Asterisks are sometimes used instead of typographical bullets to indicate items of a list.
• Colloquially, asterisks can be used to represent *emphasis* when italics are not available (e.g. email).
• Asterisks are used to represent ratings of movies, restaurants, etc.: see Star (classification).
• A group of three asterisks arranged in a triangular formation ? is called an asterism.

It is amazing how compelling design can be, take a studio like Frost who has adopted a typographic mark like an asterisk, then fill their world with it’s simple black and white form, until people disassociate the original intention of the mark, as a open usage typographic tool open for for anyone’s use, and see the graphic as a brand. Frost also use the sticky dots with a turned up corner, they also love bright colours like day-glo orange yellow and green.

It is not uncommon for studios and other organisations to adopt such things, we love to use similar devices – at the moment a collection of eyes, ears and mouths as our new web masthead, Cornwell Design love to use a tight gallery of fonts, Design by Pidgeon use geometric fonts which they have developed in their research, guess what colour Yello likes to use for their branding? In the instance of this series tea towels we used the asterisks to link., or footnote a prominent image with a narrative contained in the detail of the overall image.

Getting back to the asterisk. The truth of the matter is that it is such a common typographic tool that no one could possibly own it. Winfield cigarettes adopted an asterisk in the 1970s, Wallpaper magazine adopted an asterisk, Frost have adopted an asterisk, and we adopt it in it’s traditional form – to link or footnote ideas, thoughts and narratives together type set in the fonts we selected, which happen to look similar.

The overlap of ideas and forms used by any organisation is infinite and it is something that we all have to get used too. The context of expression is what makes an idea, form and notion unique, and for now we will continue down that path of activity.

Visit Frost here, Visit Wiki’s excellent asterisk article here

* only kidding Bruce, however we enjoyed your comment.

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