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Our pretty 2011 Christmas cards!

ycd — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:33:17 +0000

Front

Back

This is the pretty YCD Happy Holiday card – 2011 Edition - that we designed for our clients & friends. It’s always great fun to spend some time doing design work for ourselves and to have carte blanche for all stylistic choices (including the choice of a reindeer photo amongst ALL the reindeer photos available in the whole world!). Thanks to a little print defect, our order was doubled by the printing company so we now have a few extra to spare… So if you haven’t received one and would like your own YCD 2011 Holiday Memorabilia drop us a line with your address at info@yellowcardesign.com and we’ll be happy to mail you one.

2010 Business Cards

ycd — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 19:42:58 +0000

Throughout the year we pick up business cards wherever we go and keep them for whenever we need inspiration (or as examples of what NOT to do, in certain cases). My idea was to sort the cards that we founds during the past year into various categories (best, worst, funniest, most colourful, best illustration, etc.). However, that proved to be a difficult task with my little assistant Steve the Big Ginger Cat who thought that business cards were fun to lay in…. After a few attempts, I gave up and just decided to grab the ones that caught my attention for whatever reasons (yes, I could have put Big Steve into another room and close the door but the poor guy really wanted to be involved!). Anyways, I came across a great website yesterday that list the Top 100 Best Business Cards of 2010 – click here to view – so I suggest you visit that link as well in addition to the “6 best business cards of my personal collection”.

Freshly Printed Business Cards!

ycd — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:36:37 +0000

YCD's Business Card

After designing several business cards for various clients, we finally got some printed for Yellow Car Design! It took a long time but we’re quite happy with the result and can’t wait to start distributing them. We settled on a simple and minimalistic look featuring our logo and contact details. That design goes along well with our soon-to-be-launched new website, YDC 3.0, which is in construction now (should be launched later this fall). For a long, long time we were using Helvetica on all our materials; we’ve sort of grown out of it a bit now and replaced it with another classic font, Garamond. Since most things are better when “homemade”, we printed our cards ourselves on a pre-cut greyish stock that had been laying at the bottom of a paper drawer for ages. For hand-crafted cards, they do look quite professional don’t you think? All we need now is people to give them to!

Our work – Business Card + Logo for Language School

ycd — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:45:45 +0000

Académie d'Excellence Linguistique

Last week I met up with one of our past clients who gave me a few of the business cards that Yellow Car Design created for her company a little while ago. They feature the logo we designed for her language school L’académie d’excellence linguistique. Since most of our dealings with clients takes place over the phone or via email, we usually submit the design files ready for print and do not get involved with the printing process – unless specifically required by the client. Consequently, most of the time we don’t end up seeing the final, printed, result. It was therefore really nice to see “our” business card printed in the flesh. It’s looking good, we do say so ourselves!

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Logo + Carte d’affaires pour L’Académie d’Excellence Linguistique

La semaine dernière j’ai rencontré l’une de nos clientes qui m’a remis quelques copies de la carte d’affaires que Yellow Car Design a créée pour sa companie. Elles mettent en vedette le logo de son école, L’académie d’excellence linguistique, que nous avons également conçu. Puisque les interractions avec nos clients se font principalement par téléphone et via courriel, d’habitude nous soumettons les fichiers prêts pour l’imprimerie et ne nous occupons pas de l’impression – sauf si le client le demande. Nous ne voyons que rarement le résultat final et imprimé. C’est donc très bien de voir “notre” carte d’affaires en format réel… Elle est belle en plus, n’est-ce pas?

Vick.

Instruction Manual Design

ycd — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:18:08 +0000

How-to Manual

This is one of our latest project: an illustrated how-to manual in the shape of a little folded booklet. It is distributed with a new, innovative headband hand-made by Bolivan women which will donate $1 from every sale to a women’s micro-finance institution. The booklet’s purpose is to show how to wear the headband.

We really enjoyed working on this project as it was mostly illustration-based. The drawings needed to be simple and easy to understand, which is why we opted for this kind of illustration. To be cost-effective, 4 booklets needed to be printed on a letter-sized page and then photocopied and cut out. Black was therefore THE colour to be used (to our great satisfaction as it’s our favourite ‘design’ colour!). For the text, we used Helvetica Neue as a sans-serif font always look clearer and cleaner when photocopied and when used as small type. We’re very happy with the result and wish the best of luck to Project Mujer for their fund raising initiative!

Root Belly Theatre – Logo

ycd — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:38:03 +0000

Root Belly Theatre

“Root Belly Theatre is a new Toronto based theatre company dedicated to creating new works that are vibrant and vital; works that challenge preconceptions about art and the world around us. The company is committed to creativity, diversity and virtuosity. Under the leadership of artistic director Jonah Hundert, Root Belly is underway creating its first production, a collectively devised piece of physical theatre based on the Jewish myth of the Golem, expected to be performed in the summer of 2010.”

And us, Yellow Car Design, were commissioned to come up with a logo that would capture the essence of Root Belly. I think we did pretty well and I would like to use this project as an example to describe the way that we work. Each designer/studio has its own creation process, and our one involves strong input from the client and paying close attention to their feedback, along with a dose of artistic direction from the design pros (that’s us, of course!).

In this particular case, the brief was fun, creative and the name was definitely inspiring, which all help with the design process. We chose right at the beginning to primarily use black as the colour in order to minimize production cost (see, we’re a relatively new company ourselves so we think about this kind of stuff!) and the font chosen for the logo is Garamond, a classic font that looks surprisingly modern, so totally in vibe with the theatre company.

Below, you can see what our very first sketch looked like, scribbled on a random sheet of paper. From that rough drawing we moved on to Illustrator and created many different drafts, a set at a time, that we would then send to the company and modify accordingly once we had received their feedback. You can see the final logo taking shape as a result of our work and of the collaboration that we had with the company.

The project is now almost over (still working on a letterhead design) but we think it’s been a success and we wish the best of luck to Root Belly Theatre. But wait… as it’s a theatre company… Should we wish them to “break a leg” instead? ;-)

Very 1st Sketch

Creation Process

Steve the Mascot Giving his Personal Feedback

Root Belly Theater – Logo (v.f.)

« Root Belly Theatre est une nouvelle troupe de théâtre Torontoise dévouée à créer des pièces vibrantes et vitales; des pièces qui mettront en doute les idées préconçues que nous avons sur l’art et sur le monde qui nous entoure. La compagnie s’engage à faire preuve de créativité, de diversité et de virtuosité. Sous la direction artistique de Jonah Hundert, Root Belly est présentement en train de créer sa première production, une pièce collective de théâtre physique basée sur le mythe Juif de Golem qui sera présenté à l’été 2010. »

Et nous, Yellow Car Design, avions le mandat de créer un logo qui allait capturer l’essence et la vision de Root Belly. Nous pensons avoir bien réussit et aimerions utiliser ce projet pour parler un peu de notre méthode de travail. Chaque designer/studio a son propre « processus de création ». Le notre mise sur l’implication du client et sur l’attention particulière que l’on porte à leur feedback, le tout bien arrosé d’une bonne dose de direction artistique des pros du design (ça c’est nous!).

Dans le cas de Root Belly, le projet était amusant, créatif et le nom était définitivement inspirant; cela facilite le processus de création. Dès le départ, nous avons suggéré l’emploi du noir comme couleur principale afin de minimiser les coûts de production (vous voyez, nous sommes une compagnie relativement nouvelle nous-mêmes, donc nous pensons à ce genre de trucs!). La police d’écriture choisit pour le logo est Garamond : classique et moderne à la fois, donc tout à fait en harmonie avec la compagnie.

Ci-dessus, vous pouvez voir de quoi avait l’air notre tout premier croquis, dessiné sur un bout de papier. Par la suite, nous avons transféré sur l’ordi et avons fait plusieurs esquisses sur Illustrator que nous avons envoyées au client et modifiées selon le feedback. Vous pouvez constater l’évolution du logo à travers les croquis, résultat de notre travail et de la collaboration avec le client.

Ce projet est désormais presque terminé (nous en sommes à créer le papier en-tête) et a été un succès. Nous souhaitons la meilleure des chances à Root Belly Theatre. Ou, puisque c’est une troupe de théâtre, peut-être devrions-nous leur souhaiter « merde »?

Rogers: Celebrating Small Business

ycd — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:50:56 +0000

Rogers: Celebrating Small Business

We realized yesterday that October is the Small Business Month (at least here in Toronto!). See, we consider ourselves as Graphic Designers and tend to forget that we also have to be business people since we are, after all, the owners of our studio and its success depends entirely on us. Anyways, to celebrate Small Businesses, Rogers is giving small company owners the chance to win $20,000 in free advertising and the opportunity to upload a banner onto their website for free. So we did it yesterday, not sure of if it would work or not, and it did… We saw it live a few times this morning. Looks good doesn’t it? Hopefully, we’ll win the money as we could really do with some more advertising Wish us luck!

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Octobre: Célébrons les petites entreprises!

Hier nous avons réalisé qu’octobre est le mois des petites entreprises (ici à Toronto, en tout cas!). Vous voyez, on se considère designers graphiques avant tout et avons tendance à oublier que nous devons également être des gens d’affaires puisqu’après tout, nous sommes les propriétaires de notre studio et son succès dépend entièrement sur nous et sur nos actions. Pour célébrer les petites entreprises, Rogers offre aux propriétaires de celles-ci la chance de gagner 20 000$ en publicité gratuite et la possibilité de télécharger une bannière publicitaire sur leur site, et ce gratuitement. Nous avons donc créé une petite bannière subito-presto, et l’avons soumise au site, sans savoir si ça allait vraiment fonctionner… Mais oui! Nous l’avons vu live, quelques fois ce matin. Pas pire, hein? Espérons que nous gagnerons le 20,000$ et/ou que des clients potentiels verront notre annonce!