It's the Bombe

 Cryptography! Or as my great-grandpa used to call it, fubswrjudskb!

This has been an ongoing project for my layout design class, and it's finally getting to a point where I'm ready to call it presentable. The project is to construct a tritone newsletter for a non-profit organization. While my classmates are off raising awareness for worth-while organizations like the WWF or GlobalH2O, I decided that I like word puzzles and made a newsletter for non-profit hobby organization the American Cryptogram Association.

The neat thing about making a newsletter for a group dedicated to hiding messages in things is that you get to hide a bunch of messages in things. Take this logo, for example.

This logo is a rotational cipher for the word BOMBE, which is a reference to the machines used to crack the Nazi ENIGMA codes during World War II. If you take 360 degrees and divide it by 26 (letters of the alphabet), you can assign a different letter to each distinct point on a circle. I indicated this by the point on the circle that doesn't have a triangle on it. The outer ring is B, the next ring is O, and so on. The result is a neat little explosion with a neat little hidden message.

This is the cover! The main focus here is the tritone coloring - only the colors used in the entire document are the red, orange, and blue shades along the left edge. The dark brown is a combination of all of these colors, and the raindrop imagery is just lighter and lighter shades of blue. In theory, this entire newsletter could be printed with just three inks.

And here's the interior spread! It's very busy, very rigid, and very wordy, just like cryptography. Because this composition is for a hobby organization, I wanted to include articles and information that would be interesting to casual cryptographers. This is a bit of a departure from the philosophy of the ACA, but its accessibility is perfect for bringing in new members and keeping current members informed and entertained.

A Bit of AMBIT

I posted about this earlier, and now that the deadline has passed and everything is finished I think it's safe to go into more detail about exactly what it is I was working on.

The AMBIT Awards is a ceremony held by the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association to honor individuals and agencies that've achieved excellence in direct marketing. They asked me to design the Call for Entries direct marketing campaign for the event, which I'm choosing to interpret as an honor.

I was given total creative freedom and a set of files and assets from previous years. While it wasn't required, I decided to start from scratch, rebuilding the brand from the ground up. Here's a logo comparison:

The old logo (left) and my redesigned logo (right)

The project consisted of two parts, an email and a mailer. The Potato Awards were based off the art I did for the email, and I continued that theme into the mailer. Here's the email.

And here are some scans of the Call for Entries mailer.
 

A Thousand Miles Apart

Shannon and I have been in a long-term relationship for almost two years now - I live in Kansas, she lives in Utah. We meet every few months, but the distance is still hard to deal with. Video games have had a huge part in our relationship, allowing us to play together even when we can't be together. This is what I did for Valentine's Day this year.

The link goes to a download page for a game I spent the past few sleepless nights making. It features her in Utah and me in Kansas, trying to make it to Colorado (the state between us).

You can download it and give it a try here: http://goo.gl/SEu1Pd

I've included the game's closing cinematic after the jump break for anyone who wants to see the final message without playing the game. For everyone else, spoiler warning and Happy Valentine's Day!