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.

Just a quick update about some attention two designs have received recently.

The first being the business cards I did for the NortheastEnder that were previously featured have been featured again by two more sites.

businesscards24.com, a site that features business cards that are the “perfect marketing tool”, noted their unique size and described them as “Simple and memorable”. And Jennifer Farley, a fellow designer and educator at Laughing Lion Design out of Ireland, also featured the design in a roundup of twelve of the best business cards using green.

The second project to be featured is the new logo design for CastRoller, included in the “Cream of the crop” gallery at Logopond, recognizing top notch identity work from very skilled designers. You can also read more about the development of CastRoller’s new logo at bloggingtips.com.

Thanks to all three for noticing the hard work put into both projects.

In March some friends and I attended the London Indie Media Fair, to promote our monthly new media meet up, and I had the chance to sit in on some workshops they were holding. The first I attended was “The Importance of Independent Media” by Anthony Verberckmoes, and while it didn’t explain how it was important, it did discuss how the “mainstream media” is sophisticated propaganda perpetuated by rich white men. It wasn’t a surprise to hear Anthony espouse these sort of views, independent media is often very critical of the way the mainstream media operates and even markets itself, despite some of the similarities between the two, but if independent media wants to gain acceptance as the news source of choice it could definitely benefit from these evil tools of the mainstream media; branding.

Branding the idea of independent and user generated media, capturing its diversity, and building a community around it is key to reach out to those who want to be able to identify sources of passionate and free voices. But better brands are needed, and they need to be better than anything mainstream has to offer before they can grow.

In this article I’m going to take a look at six of London’s most prominent alternative media sources online, and go over what they do well, where they could use some work, and where they fail.
Continue reading ‘State of London’s Independent Media.’

By now you’ve probably noticed the new branding and website, but today I’m going to fill you in a bit on the last seven months of development and launch a new feature that I think is great. So lets start from the beginning, January 2007 saw the launch of the second version of this website and at the time it was a pretty good representation of my design style and the tone of my work. But as the year came to a close I realized that a new look was essential to represent the evolution of that style and tone.

So at the beginning of 2008 I began from the bottom, the brand. Previously the brand and identity system were put together as I went along and required new pieces. The logo was the name in a simple font, Interstate, the words separated by colour. I had always wanted a mark to compliment the logotype so I focused on creating something simple and flexible, and I think I found it. Sketch after sketch I came back to the acronym regularly used by friends LD. This set with a hint of the old typographic mark in helvetica this time resonated with me.

Shortly after the brand was put to bed, the website quickly became the focus, the old site wasn’t bad but it didn’t represent me the way I wanted anymore. It was also constrained to a time of 800x600 resolutions and with the surge of larger monitors dominating the market I decided to spread out a little. The new site is much better, and focuses on some core ideas such as grid based design, typography and minimalism.

I am sill in the process of going though my eight years of work and adding the case studies back to the work section; some of the older work for deviantART, Fort Frances Daily Info, and the campaign for Mayor Dan is currently up with more on the way, but I’m also adding new projects as they are completed like Bryan Johnson Creations, NortheastEnder, and Clinical Depression Show. I’d love to head your opinions of the new look, so feel free to add them in the comments below.

But the real reason for writing this is that this week I will be sending out the first edition of my newsletter in Brief, a quarterly publication highlighting some of the exciting new and work done at Leschinski Design. I’ve built quite the list of email addresses over the years so I’ve added friends, family, and past clients to the inaugural list. You can sign up for it right now though below or in the left column in the sidebar of this blog. If it’s not your thing then unsubscribing is easy and instant, just click the link at the bottom of the newsletter anytime you want to stop receiving it. I won’t cry if you do, I promise (at least in public).

If you’ve read all this, congratulations, and thanks for your support and comments.

Continue reading ‘in Brief’

Over the next three months Leschinski Design will develop a comprehensive identity system and redevelop the user interface for CastRoller, an online podcast discovery and subscription tool.

CastRoller makes it easier to discover, subscribe to, and manage online audio and video content. You can search titles and descriptions to find what your interested in, or use the channels that feature podcasts of similar themes sorted by other users.

Once you find what you are looking for you can listen to it on the site, or add it to your personalized subscription feed. Your personalized feed contains all the podcasts you love and allows you to use a single feed to download all your favorite shows. You can also sort your feed to only include audio, video, or the most popular content, which is great for mobile devices that have limited connections and storage or time strapped consumers.

CastRoller is currently in private beta.