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.
 

The nominees are...

I don't think I'm allowed to release the design for this project I've been working on, namely because it includes tentative dates for an event that has yet to happen. But at the same time I'm really excited to share this design. So I've taken all the pertinent information out.


I think this is a good compromise.

Responsible Design

Luba Lukova is a wonderful graphic designer who makes wonderful posters and prints along the theme of social justice, and as part of a class assignment I've made this fake exhibition poster for her.

The illustration and type was all drawn by hand and arranged/recolored in Photoshop.

The illustration depicts a hand gripping a large pencil.

The type uses letter forms spaced closely together to form groupings known as words.

I'm learning so much here.

Food Truck on a Fork

This is my version of the food truck festival that was selected by the group I'm designing for. I kind of like it. The color scheme and visual style is alright.

But honestly, it was my least favorite of the proofs I sent it. It was sort of just thrown together at the last minute because three concepts were requested and I poured all my effort into the previous two (see here and here).

I'm not exactly going to become embittered towards creation-by-committee because of this, it's just not the direction I'd have taken it, is all. Oh well.

Shish Kabus

Another poster for the upcoming food truck festival. I made another one because the first one seemed too formal for what's essentially a street fair without the carnival rides.

Food Truck or Roast Duck?

A lot of things have been happening recently, but not a lot of them design related. Here's one of the newer ones that is.

I've recently started volunteering for a young professionals organization in exchange for free membership. I'm basically working for exposure at this point, but the exposure is through a group dedicated to networking, so I like my odds.

I don't know if you can tell by the poster, but I'm still waiting on some details about the event.