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Yellow Car Design Work Featured On National Television Again!!!

ycd — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:25:12 +0000

You may remember that last year we had a photoshop of Steven Harper playing piano featured on The Rick Mercer Report. Ever since then whenever we watch an episode we always say to each other that we should enter again but by the next day have either forgotten or our photoshops are sidetracked to incorporate the YCD mascots, something that while we find funny I’m not sure a TV audience would really be into.

Anyway Vicky finally got round to creating a hilarious image for the ‘Photo Challenge’ and what do you know it was picked for the show! It looks like all those years studying design then working field actually paid off…

The only down-side was that they cropped the image to just feature Michael Ignatieff meaning viewers didn’t get to the full force of the psychedelic imagery as well as my favourite part which is the Harper-Troll which even has that weird hair of his. Below is the image in all it’s glory.

Ignatieff & the Harper-Troll

Twitter Wordle

ycd — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:00:31 +0000

This is a wordle – a word cloud visually representative of what our Tweets look like (click on the picture to see it full-size). Cool, isn’t? Looks like we tweet a lot about design, surprisingly enough If you’re not already a follower on Twitter, find us @ycdesign (Vicky) or @yellowcardesign (Marc).

To create your own customized wordle for your blog or webpage click here.

World Cup 2014 Logo

ycd — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:08:13 +0000

We realise that the 2010 World cup hasn’t taken place yet but today the 2014 logo was released for the next tournament that is to be held in Brazil. To be honest we’re not 100% sure this is for real as none of us are able to understand Portuguese and mainly due to the fact that it looks like a ‘Facepalm‘, the green hands on the top look like hair in a side parting and the Yellow hand is covering tha face like Picard in Star Trek.

Wikipedia describes the Facepalm as ‘a gesture used as an expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, disgust or general woe‘, we hope this isn’t a bad sign for the 2014 World Cup!

If you do understand Portuguese or can get by with a Babelfish or Google translation the link for the announcement is here.

World Cup South Africa 2010 Design

ycd — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:39:27 +0000

Here at Yellow Car Design we’re big football fans so are understandably looking forward to this summer’s World Cup. To be honest: even more so than usual due to being in Canada while it’s on. We get to support England without all the usual hype and ridiculousness that surrounds an English World Cup campaign. Hopefully this time they will forget about the WAGS, play as a team, learn how to take penalties and take advantage of what is a fairly open tournament (yeah, who am I kidding?).

As this is a design blog, we’ll need to bring it around to World Cup based design… First up is the mascot Zakumi who is apparently a ‘Mascot with Attitude‘, although he doesn’t actually display any of this ‘attitude’ and looks like he easily fits in with all those lame characters that aren’t Sonic in any of his games. While better than the London 2012 mascots which it would have a job to be worse than at the end of the day it’s a bit bland. The mascot is an anthropomorphised leopard but could quite honestly be any type of anime influenced cat-boy and with some minor editing to the colours could be used by pretty much any country with some tangible links to big cats. While I understand that the mascot should appeal to kids as well as be fun it really should say something about the country in general as while obviously the football is the main draw an event as big as a World Cup is a massive opportunity to showcase what’s great about the country hosting.

Another piece of World Cup design we stumbled upon was this World Cup Calendar Poster which has somehow received a mention by Creative Review. While for a good cause (Unicef Soccer Aid) and actually quite nice looking in a generic kind of way I’ve got to wonder why it warrants a mention by Creative Review. To me it doesn’t actually say anything about football. Granted: it’s a nice use of text and colour but other than the countries being shown in their respective kit colour (or for the teams who use white their away kit colour so New Zealand football team who go by the nickname of ‘All whites’ are shown in black which to me instantly makes me think rugby but I guess this is a OK solution to the problem posed) there is little else that makes this standout as a football related image.

Another problem is the reverse side is fairly confusing with not much space, the creator posted a link in the comments to show people how it works as many who had commented on the post brought up this problem but while his solution is OK for the group stages once the tournament has left this stage it again gets overly confusing and the lack of space in the later rounds means you’ll have trouble filling in both the team and the scores (especially if you use a big bold marker pen like he does in his example for the earlier game results). Weirdly it also doesn’t seem to have a location to write down the eventual tournament winner (unless he wants you to write it over the grey text at the bottom on top of the sponsors) which to me at least seems a massive oversight, surely this should be the major focal point of the poster as after all it’s what all the teams there for leaving it out is like a massive anticlimax.

Anyway it’s still quite nice looking and for a good cause but to me it’s a case of too much form and not enough function that would have been much better had a little more time and thinking being spent on it.

Ugliest Hand Ever Drawn…And it’s all over the city!

ycd — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:22:40 +0000

This is a picture of a pedestrian crossing as seen in our neighborhood. Nothing special… but take a closer look at the hand:

Isn’t it an awful drawing? Floppy, boneless, wrinkly, ‘wristless’ and with the most bizarre manicure I’ve ever seen! This hand is traumatizing enough to come and haunt you at night…

Seriously, I might be slightly exaggerating but seeing bad drawings like this makes me wonder who actually creates those signs that we see everywhere. And most importantly: where did they get the idea that they were good illustrators and how come were they commissioned by the City Council to do the work (because I’m assuming that the City is responsible for putting up the monstrosities)?

I truly believe that by paying a closer attention to details such as pedestrian crossing signs City Councils would contribute to making the towns nicer. Just as flower displays, parks and sculptures, these signs are part of the cityscapes and their design is as important, according to me, as the design of tourism brochure and attractions.

The best example I can think of would be of Berlin’s use of very special pedestrian symbols (named the “Ampelmann”) in the East part of the city. It was cool enough for me to want to take a picture with the actual man from the sign:

The Ampelmann is, in fact, so popular in Berlin that it has it’s own shop and website where tourists can buy merchandise featuring the weirdly shaped little guys. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that the City of Hull could start selling t-shirts and mugs with the hideous hand printed on it…

Fake t-shirt...

Urgh…

Royal Canin: Drooling Dog Advert

ycd — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:18:08 +0000

As owners of two cats that love Royal Canin food to the extent that it has to be kept under tighter security than the gold bullion at Fort Knox this advert really struck a chord with us!

Obviously we’d like to see a version featuring our cats (they’re quite photogenic: Steve only needs to hear the camera turned on to be posing for the camera like Fabio. He has similar hair to him as well… Maybe the mystery of who the father is has been solved! ) but then it would need a speaker added so that passers by would not only get the drool but also hear what we hear everytime one of their bellies rumble (which believe me gets old fast)… So it’s probably better they just stick to dogs.

Here’s what the advertising agency had to say regarding the concept;

‘We booked two billboards (18/1) placed face to face, each on one side of a small street. One of the billboards shows the close portrait of a dog (of the breed Gread Dane) on a plain white background. The dog looks directly to the billboard in front of him, he has a longing expression on his face, is magnetised of what he sees. The sight of the billboard he is faced with obviously makes his mouth water: his drool drops from his tongue and ponds beneath the billboard. (We created this puddle with jam sugar that dropped from a simple installation of a canister and a tube.) On the other side of the street the viewer sees, what fascinates the drooling dog: The huge picture of “Royal Canin Great Dane” dog food!’

For more info and similar great adverts check out: Ads Of The World

Also go to: Best Design Options

Form follows function…NOT – sahre victore wilker

ycd — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:22:55 +0000

Designers sometimes have moments of euphoria when they think of a great concept that will look amazing and will really stand out from anything else. Then we create the ‘great concept’ and realize that, damn, it’s not working at all and to make it work we have to modify the ‘great concept’ and take away a little bit of its greatness so that, at least, the ‘great concept’ can now be used/read/navigate through be it an object, a print or a website.

When you’re a designer with a last name such as Sahre, Victore or Wilker, featured in design magazines, owners of renowned design studios and that you’re organizing a creativity workshop that you know will sell out, you can afford to make websites that follow the ‘great concept’ path without having to worry about the ‘great concept’ being hard to navigate. I’m talking here about the website promoting the six-days creativity workshop organized by Paul Sahre, James Victore and Jan Wilker taking place this summer at the Art Director Club, in NYC. The website’s concept is CMYK-inspired, in the way that we see each layer as if it was its own printed film. The idea is brilliant; however, it doesn’t function very well ie who uses a yellow font on a white background? Also, the tiny blue font made it impossible to read the text on Paul Sahre. Oh well… why bother sacrificing an excellent concept when you know that your $1,200/week workshop is going to sell out anyways?

Hello 2010 - sahre victore wilker

Photoshop 20th Anniversary

ycd — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:26:28 +0000

Our apologies for the lack of updates this month; we’ve been very busy with a combination of design jobs and a semi-unexpected move so the blog has had to go on the backburner until we finish up some of our current projects and moved into our new place.

Anyway onto the point of this blog post: as the title says this year is the 20th Anniversary of Photoshop and Adobe have a site up celebrating this milestone. The site which is here is a bit lame actually, the timeline’s a nice way of showing how the product has evolved and makes me feel a bit nostalgic seeing all the old box-art and loading screens but there really isn’t that much else on there save for a video where the creators discuss the product, and a handful of links.

Surely for such a visual product the best way to celebrate would have been with something visual, maybe some examples of images that couldn’t have being created without it such as this or even just some testimonies from people who use it everyday and have seen the evolution firsthand. We recently came into possession of some old graphic design books from the early 90s that although horribly dated showed just how much it impacted upon the work designers were able to create at that time and how much it has changed the way the modern designer works.

The small snippets of images that make up the word ‘Twenty’ that greets you when the page loads are a nice idea but sadly the site could have been so much more. The French language site linked from page shows what could end up being a much better way of celebrating the 20th anniversary of product.

As this is the YCD blog here are a couple of little Photoshops we’ve have done for fun recently. As usual some of them feature the mascots Steve and Bollocks, Steve by the way has being annoying me the whole time I have being typing this post (at the moment he is sitting in front of my monitor blocking the view) so any mistakes can be blamed on him.

Steve the provincial cat

DetecSteve

Jogger in Central Park

Steve Hamish and Bobo MacJoyce

Steve of Duty-Modern Catwar

Little Steven (Harper, not Joyce) Playing Piano

Steve the RockStar

Ugly, but useful.

ycd — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:39:12 +0000

Spot Talk

This “lovely” flyer was in our mailbox today, along with a couple of pamphlets from various pizza places and two bulletins about Toronto’s waterfront real estate market (those didn’t even make it to the apartment – they went straight into the recycling bin). This is a very hideous flyer: the colours are awfully bright and what’s with the thick outline around the numbers that make the two “6″ look like they’re on top of the “4″? Anyways, despite the ugly design, we thought that Spot Talk (a cheap long distance company) had a great idea by incorporating a sticker with the number to dial on the card. No more rummaging through our million of notepads to find their number! It is now conveniently located directly on our phone. Yes, we wish that all designs were functional and beautiful. Alas, this is a bit too much to ask from a lot of companies…So let’s appreciate the fact that they are, at least, offering us cheap phone calls!

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Affreux et pratique

Ce “charmant” pamphlet était dans notre boîte aux lettres aujourd’hui, accompagné de quelques circulaires de pizzérias et de deux rapports sur le marché de l’immobilier Torontois (ceux-là sont allés directement dans le bac de recyclage!). Pour en revenir au pamphlet, il est vraiment affreux: les couleurs sont beaucoup trop voyantes, et c’est quoi le rapport de l’épais contour autour des chiffres du numéro? On dirait que les deux “6″ sont par-dessus le “4″… En tout cas, même si le design est médiocre, Spot Talk (qui est une compagnie offrant des appels interurbains à coût modique) a eu la bonne idée d’incorporer un autocollant avec le numéro à composer sur la publicité. Plus besoin de fouiller à travers nos calepins afin de trouver leur foutu numéro! Il est désormais bien collé au dos de notre téléphone. Oui, nous aimerions que tout design soit pratique et joli. Hélas, c’est un peu trop demandé de la part de plusieurs compagnies, alors nous devons nous contenter de leur offre d’appels cheap!

Christmas Design

ycd — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:24:33 +0000

Gifts

How happy would you be to receive that nicely crafted box of presents? Very happy I’m sure! I took that photo for fun before sending it (for fun + for the fact that with the postal services you never know if a parcel is going to reach its destination… better have a proof that yes, we did bought presents for everyone!). Taking that picture made me realize how great baby blue and dark red go well together, and how it should officially replace green and red as the usual Christmas colours. Anyways, just a thought!

vicky

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Cadeaux de Noël

Aimeriez-vous recevoir cette belle boîte pleine de cadeaux? J’imagine que oui, elle est tellement bien décorée (ahah!). J’ai pris cette photo pour le fun (et aussi pour avoir une preuve que oui, nous avons acheté des cadeaux à tout le monde! Après tout, avec la qualité du service postale, on ne sait jamais si un colis va arriver à destination ou non…). En tout cas, cette photo m’a fait réaliser que bleu ciel et rouge foncé vont vraiment bien ensemble et que ces couleurs devraient remplacer la combinaison habituelle du rouge et vert en tant que couleurs officielles de Noël. Bonne idée non?

vicky