Vancouver photographer Rachael Ashe recently asked me to design her business cards. As part of the project I also created a logo for her that reflects her interest in and use of birds in her photography and collage work. The logo has also been adapted for use on stickers, stamps and labels to further brand her artwork.
More images of the work are posted in my online portfolio.
#2 Misuse tools
It is snowing again. This might not seem like a big deal, but since it’s snowing outside my window and that’s Vancouver out there, I can assure you it is. It’s snowing on top of the snow that arrived over Christmas and they’re not just those big sloppy pseudo snowflakes usually delivered to Vancouver, they’re the ones that mean business – the small, dry innocuous ones that slowly, deliberately and patiently bury your car and maddeningly delay your bus.
The newly re-designed version of kirstiwakelin.com went live today. Thanks to the tireless work of Arash Ramin of jinnius Solutions Inc. for the web development side I now have a brand spanking new site that works like a dream and is fun to update with its handy new admin panel.
Along with this site update, this blog has also had a bit of a face lift (courtesy of Arash) to tie it in with my main site.
My website redesign has taken me about 5 years. My hard drive is littered with discarded design ideas. Starting with a complicated, illustration heavy versions, the mockups slowly shed useless elements until I arrived at the current pared-down state.
The design was also influenced by the needs of resolvedesign.ca. Because the two sites share the same code base and functionality they needed to be as similar as possible and we spent quite a bit of time discussing how we wanted our work to be viewed. This helped me narrow down a structure for the site – I find it’s always the most difficult to design (or illustrate) something when it’s a completely open road, with no rules, no guidelines and no parameters. Darren (Resolve Design) and I fortunately share the same design aesthetic. The sites exist to display the work as cleanly as possible without design elements getting in the way. The navigation is intended to be as straightforward as possible, while still allowing us to show as much work as we can.
It’s really fun populating a brand new empty site with work. It’s akin to moving into a brand new empty house. There are so many wonderful possibilities. But then I start to unpack the moving boxes and find… old, worn belongings from the old house. Many don’t reflect my current taste in decor. And somewhere along the way there’s a box or two missing… Updating a website is a sure-fire way to reflect on one’s career. And that can be, and has been, exhausting. But it’s still pretty inspiring. There are so many new project spaces to fill up… so many possibilities.
The final challenge with the new site lies not with navigation, functionality or portfolio fodder but with the biography. Oh how I hate writing biographies. I hate it just as much as that inevitable question that pops up when meeting someone for the first time… “so, what do you do”? Because what that question really is is “so, what are you?”. And there’s no simple way of answering that. It needs to be a quick bite. One sentence that sums up a lifetime of work experience, expertise and interests. I always feel a bio is a bit fluid. What I write in January might not really reflect how I see my work in August. I inevitably feel like I’m lying through omission; I’m not telling the whole story. But how can I in 200 words or less? I tell stories in pictures. Shouldn’t I be telling my own that way too? But the biography page is the necessary evil that I’ll have to deal with. Expect it to change frequently. I’d like to say it’ll evolve over time… but I think all I can promise is change.
The newly realised website for the Vancouver motion design studio Resolve Design Inc. is now up and running. Resolve Design specialises in film and motion design for marketing, interpretive and exhibitry applications.
The website design was a collaboration between myself and principal, Darren Carcary. My personal portfolio site is next in line for development, based on the same structure as resolvedesign.ca, it should be launching within the month.
Resolve Design also launched a companion blog which will be home to, among other things, behind-the-scenes looks at productions.
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…new books for Christmas.
It was a booky Christmas. I gave some books, I got some books, and I just couldn’t help myself… I bought more than a few for myself in the process. We are now officially experiencing bookcase overflow.
Gift books from the top:
The Last Wild Wolves – Ghosts of the Rainforest, Ian McAllister, Greystone Books – I first saw the documentary and then some weeks later came across the book while Christmas shopping. I immediately bought it for a family member’s Christmas present. As it turned out, my mum had also bought me a copy. This is a beautiful book full of gorgeous photographs documenting the unique behaviour of a population of genetically distinct wolves. But, as it seems with any fabulously untouched ecosystem in this world, this place, along with its unique wildlife, is being threatened by human industry. The author Ian McAllister was interviewed on the Quarks and Quarks holiday book show on December 15th and he touched on this issue at the end of the interview. I am always amazed at how biologists can maintain their composure when discussing the possible demise of the corner of the earth where they have spent so much time studying, and in this author’s case, living. It must be incredibly heart breaking. It is from where I am sitting, hundreds of kilometers away in the city where the largest predatory mammals around a with unique hunting behaviour are cat-eating coyotes.
Play Pen – New Children’s Book Illustration, Martin Salisbury, Laurence King Publishing (there’s a review here with some images from the book). There are lots of inspiring illustrations and biographies in this book. It’s also nice that the illustrations are shown in page format with the typography. This book does make me a bit sad that we don’t have access to the more ‘brave’ European-style books here in Canada.
Jenny Saville, Simon Schama. Sensual paint. Brave, beautiful, loose, form-building, spontaneous-yet-intended brush strokes. Enough said.
Process Recess vol 2, James Jean. Some lovely draughtsmanship in this one.
I’m looking forward to putting aside some time to really get into these.
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Kirsti Wakelin 