Since my post on collecting business cards my collection has grown by at least 200 cards. I’ve already had to buy more collector sheets, but this time splurged and got proper sleeves for business cards.

I love it. Keep sending them people.

The most interesting card I’ve received was from a fellow designer at Podcamp Michigan Sara Apol. It had a unique handwritten quality with a compelling pitch. Some other highlights of the collection design wise are pictured below. I love the crisp cleanness and restraint of these designs. From the deadly minimalist Purl and HellaBoss, to the informative and descriptive Keith and The Girl podcast card.

Carryboo, Edward Ocampo Gooding, Gerbera Design, Hella Boss, Keith and The Girl, Key West Gourmet Foods, NorthBound Leather, Purl, Spooky in the City, Starbucks.

One thing I thought I’d mention is that the majority of the cards I have collected fail to make a connection between the site and their card designs. The few selected here do a god job maintaining that consistency but a few of them are also great examples of mismatched design.

Think your card is the bee’s knee’s? Send them my way!

I discovered “From My Bottom Step” through the monthly Geek Dinners in London when owner Greg Fowler started attending regularly earlier this year. I was impressed with the content he was publishing, but I wasn’t with the sites design. Particularly the photograph he was using as a logo in his sites masthead.

Greg needed a proper logo and a more cohesive brand, so I approached him with some concepts at the following meet up and he was sold.

As with any logo the first step was to sketch out ideas, I’m not terribly good at drawing (as you can see) but this process helps flesh out ideas and often allows new ideas to flow much easier from revision to revision then possible on screen with a mouse. Once a handful of concepts are on paper I can then take the best of them to the computer and mock them up in Corel Draw.

The primary concept I went with was to represent the step aspect of the name in type using perspective, size and weight. However the divergence in my sketching was in deciding how to include the image of Greg as a child on his Grandparents steps, or if to include it at all.

I experimented with the figure and the various perspectives to go with it, but in the end it seemed out of place, forced even, to include it despite having so much brand equity. Rather I settled on a simple typographic logo set in Futura with varying degrees of kerning and sizes to create perspective as if looking at a set of stairs. The colour black was selected for it’s strength and versatility, giving the effect more visual impact. The website that followed used the same colour pallet to give the content more prominence and alleviate the noise often found on news websites.

I did end up finding a way to include the iconic image of Greg during the development of the new website by making it the sites favicon, as well as putting it in the footer as a logo for “Fowler Media”, a parent brand for Greg to apply to his network of sites. At launch the reaction from people was overwhelmingly positive at it’s continued inclusion, instantly being a favorite element of the new site.