Recently my school, Taylor University, held a workshop on using medium format cameras. I was pretty excited about this and decided to sign up. These cameras are wonderful to use and give such clear prints when you focus them right. Now you have to deal with the fact that they are a pain to move around and to see the shot since it doesn’t fix the orientation of the image for you. We were to take pictures and experiment with the camera for about 3 days and then come back at the end of the 3rd day and show what we had printed out. One thing I did like is that these were all contact prints meaning no focusing required. You just lay the photo paper down then the negative over that and press it down with a piece of glass and expose it with light.
Now if these cameras didn’t cost over $6,000 I would defiantly buy one. I encourage anyone who is interested in photography or just curious about these cameras to look around for camera shops that have them and play around with them. The camera I used 5×7 negatives and the cameras were provided by Keith Canham who owns Canham Cameras. Keith is a great guy who loves photography and loves building cameras. Keith also is one of the few private owners of a complete Brown Sisters series of photographs by Nick Nixon. Taylor University had the pleasure of having his collection on display in our art gallery, a rare treat indeed. Here are my better prints from the workshop, critique them if you must.
So it has been a while since I posted anything about design so I felt the need to bring it back. I am in the process of trying to get my college degree in the graphic arts and unfortunately I have to suffer through a 5th year of school. But I am gaining more knowledge so I guess it isn’t no bad.
Currently I am in a design history class that goes through the history of design and we are assigned a project for each major period. For each project we have to design within using the style we are currently learning about. This is seriously an awesome class that gives you great skills that can be used after college, and broadens your design style horizons.
The first assignment was to design and produce the logo and packaging for a specialty match stick company based in Bar Harbor, Maine. But we had to use Victorian style design. Hard to come up with ideas for this one since Victorian style is all over the place. But here is what I cam up with. In my sketches, as you will see once I put them up, I stuck with a nautical theme and went crazy with the anchor. I ended up going with the idea of having the name Birch’s, the sub heading “Saftey Matches and Lighters”, and the tag line I made up to create an anchor around the match stick. I put this final design on a metal tin which used to hold Camel cigarettes and the design on the cover looked amazing. I placed the strike pad on the bottom and used matches that would be roughly the size of a cigarette. Now putting the design on the tin was a challenge. I used a decal at first and that failed miserably, so I am now resorting to finding sticker printing paper to put apply it on.
This is the product I turned in, but some advice from my professor has caused me to redo some things before I decide to put it into my portfolio. The newer version will come later. Enjoy and feel free to say hateful things or helpful things about it. I will also include a picture of the packaging once my professor gives it back.
The Autumn season moves on and I am finding myself to love the fall brews the more I try them. Blue Moon’s summer style was a let down for me, but I figured I would give them a second change with their fall style. I was pleasantly surprised at how wonderful the Harvest Moon really was! It was full bodied with a great smooth finish with a hint of pumpkin. This was very different from the summer brew which was very sweet, which I was expecting with this one. It had the right amount of spice and the perfect amount of sweetness too it making it a great autumn beer. It is getting cold out now so warm yourself up with a Harvest Moon.
So it has been a while since I have posted about any beer, but this was worth waiting for. I have once again tried another fall seasonal beer and it was rather grand. Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale is another great fall beer with a spicy and pumpkin taste to it. It’s very smooth and has nice hints of the pumpkin flavor as well as brown sugar. The Punkin is pretty high in alcohol content with 7%, but you can’t even tell it’s that high.
I personally think the Punkin Ale is far better than Shipyards Pumpkinhead Ale making it my favorite fall beer and pumpkin beer as of now. Dogfish Head makes some great beers, but most of them have been on the higher end of cost so I haven’t dared to touch them. The cool thing about the Punkin too is that it was the first brew that Dogfish Head ever made. It was brewed before the brewery was established in 1995. Punkin Ale is still the best selling seasonal of Dogfish Head. I was lucky that I got to try this at a bar in West Hartford where it was rather inexpensive. Defiantly give this one a try this fall before they sell out!
Summer is nearly over and fall beers have been pouring into the store by the boat loads. I really wish I wasn’t on my way back to Indiana, the land where anything other than Budweiser is shunned, because I really want to try out the fall styles like I did with the summer beers. But I did at least get to have a taste of what fall beers taste like and I was pretty pleases.
I decided to try Shipyard’s Pumpkinhead merely for the name and fun little label, but now I have a new reason to buy it again. Just as the name would suggest it has a spicy pumpkin flavor that just screams the fall season. I personally LOVE pumpkin so it was a given that I would fall in love with this beer. It wasn’t too sweet and had a great kick in your face with the fall spices. It was smooth, very drinkable, and had a medium body. Perfect little beverage to enjoy after raking up the infestation of leave amongst the yard. Pick it up and enjoy it!
The benefits of working at a liquor store is that when it is your birthday your bosses give you beer as a gift. This year they got me the best gift yet, Chimay’s Grand Réserve. One of my bosses, Geoff, told me that this was the best beer he had ever had until he tried another high end Belgium beer than knocked his socks off. I can’t remember the name of that beer, but I will be trying that since I have now had the best beer I have ever had!
The Chimay Grand Réserve was about as expensive as most bottles of wine, coming out to around 16 bucks, and boy was it worth it. I guess it would have been more worth it if I had actually bought it, but it was equally as satisfying to receive it as a gift. When I opened the bottle it was like opening a fine champagne. The cork went flying and so did the aroma into the air. The light roasted malt taste is spectacular and is so smooth it’s scary. The right amount of bitterness and the greatest chocolate taste in the finish maybe even a light taste of coffee and almonds. This Trappist beer is by far my favorite beer and I am only dreaming of having the one that will top this exceptional Belgium beer.
It has been a while since I have done a post on beer so I felt it was about time. Lately I have just been enjoying what is left of the summer beers that I had, but I did get to try some new ones that I have never had. Last year when I started my venture to try as many different beers as I could I tried Avery’s Kaiser and man I thought it was pretty good back then when I really had no palette.
So I decided to try it again so I could give my thoughts on it, since I had forgotten how it tasted. Man was I surprised! The first mouthful was wonderful, smooth, sweet, and creamy. But after that first mouth the sweetness was pretty over powering. I honestly had to struggle to put half of this pint bottle down before I gave in and did horrible thing…I poured it down the drain. If you have read any of my other beer posts you know I hate sweet beers and man this was way too much for me. But other than that it was a really nice full bodied beer. It was very creamy and smooth, which was rather nice. I am saddened that I couldn’t enjoy the Kaiser, but I am sure someone else will love it. So go out on a limb and spend the dough on this pint, even though it sometimes will cost as much as a six pack.
For the past 3.5 years of working for M&R Liquors I have found many wines that have very attractive labels and bottle designs, so I have decided to go through some of these. I am doing this partly because I enjoy talking about good design and party because this is research for my own label design that I’m doing for my uncles vineyard. But I digress…I started with Ecco Domani’s Wine labels and now I continue to Francis Ford Coppola’s labels.
Now I must first be more specific with much series or collection of their wines I am looking at, I am talking about their Diamond Collection. The reason why the Californian wine stands out to me is the label of course, which makes the label very successful in its mission.
The label of any wine is suppose to catch the eye of the buyer and be memorable, much like every design. That is so when someone has the wine at a party or restaurant they can come to a liquor store and recognize the wine. If the label catches the buyers eye it also makes it stand out from all the rest, which can be helpful when you go to a store where there are hundreds of different wines, but you don’t know what any of them taste like. If you see one that looks interesting just based on the packaging you assume it must also taste as good as it looks. At that point the designer has become victorious.
That was just a long way of saying that Coppola caught my eye and made me want to try it. Now I have found out from my bosses, who have great palettes, that their wines are overrated, but are still pretty good. And we do sell a lot of their wines even though they are expensive, but no one knows or thinks they are overrated.
The label is very simplistic and are all mono toned which makes them very appealing. When you walk down the isle you can pick it out easily and not have to be distracted by the other wines. The label just looks so clean, smooth, simple, and just doesn’t look cheap. Now I am not a huge fan of the arch in text because it just reminds me of Microsoft Office text art stuff, but I think the text arch works for this design and doesn’t look tacky or amateur.
They have also had some interesting was of promoting their wines. Last summer they attracted a deck of playing cards to the wines. The cards are really nice and have some pretty interesting pictures on them of the wine and women displaying them. The ads I think were doing very well and are just flat out awesome. They make the wine look expensive, elegant, sexual but not too sexual, and very tempting indeed. Their website is also very well done so check it out as well.
I found this cool little site that has 30 creative wine label designs and I have found some inspiring ideas from this bunch. Take a look at all of these awesome designs. I have never seen any of these wines in Connecticut or at M&R Liquors.
**As a side note I am going to try all of the diamond collection wines, but that this another post for another day.
Now I will admit that I am an Apple fan boy, but when it comes to beautifully designed computers Apple is the one that hits the mark. Now most of their computers are pretty wonderful, but I think there are two that were absolutely the best.
This first computer was introduced in 2002 and was a ground breaking design for computers of that era. To be honest the computer looked like something from the future and something not even close to anything being put into production at the time. I still think that even today nothing will look more beautiful and more futuristic than it.
I am talking of course about the iMac G4. This was the first Apple Computer to have a flat screen LCD screen integrated into the design. And boy did they integrate it. I also have to say the clear plastic on the edges if the screen and the speakers and on the key board just made this product look so clean and just all around awesome. But they didn’t just give the people a flat LCD screen but put it on a chrome arm that rotated on the dome base! Holy crap! It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I bought one recently from someone and I play around with it so much that I forget that it’s a computer. And who could forget the playful hidden CD tray than came out of the front, it was to die for. The iMac G4 had personality that you just didn’t find in PC’s made by Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, or IBM. And that’s whats makes this computer my favorite out if them all. Now the screen attached to the arm fell out of the next design mainly because there was no need for it other than aesthetics. The biggest problem I had with it was getting to the actual computer itself. To upgrade anything other than basic RAM and Hard drive needs, it was a huge hassle and extra care on your part.
The second computer design that came out of Apple that rocked my world was something I would have bought before the Mac Mini had I known about it. The Mac Mini G4 was the first Apple Computer I ever bought and man did I love it, but before that ultra-compact desktop computer was made with a G4 chip…there was another. The G4 chip was implanted within a cube…a G4 Cube. This looked so neat when Steve Jobs revealed it in 2000, but when you first look at this you laugh and think, “what the hell did they make a toaster for?”
The G4 Cube was designed to be compact and run quietly, which were both accomplished. The computer ran without a fan by using air flow from the top than ran through the cube and out the base. A convection based cooling system…truly genius. Another awesome feature was the ability to access the entire computer by flipping it over, pressing on a handle, and pulling it out! And the CD-ROM drive was on top of the computer which made it look even more like a toaster and gave it some personality. But this extremely accessible computer was bound to have some problems. For starters all of the ports are on the bottom…that wasn’t a very good idea in anyway, shape, or form. Another thing that killed it was you had to buy a monitor for it when it was already very expensive and the current PowerPC G4 tower was the better option. In the summer of 2001 the project was put on ice and would later resurface with it’s more successful cousin, the Mac Mini.
I always follow the philosophy of form follows function in my design and I think most of the people at Apple probably do the same since the are building functional computers that also look like works of art. But obviously with some of the form choices some of the functions won’t function as smooth as intended. The G4 Cube had a beautiful form, but poor functionality. The iMac G4 had both good form and function.
August is here and soon summer will be at an end…very sad I know. So get out there and try any summer beers you have been meaning to try. Below is a poll for all those who read my blog or anyone for that matter to vote on their favorite summer beer. I am very excited to see what people think. Personally my favorite is Brooklyn’s Summer Ale and has the best packaging I think by far. Alright vote away!
Posted by Kevin Coté 
Posted by Kevin Coté 
Posted by Kevin Coté 
It has been a while since I have done a post on beer so I felt it was about time. Lately I have just been enjoying what is left of the summer beers that I had, but I did get to try some new ones that I have never had. Last year when I started my venture to try as many different beers as I could I tried Avery’s Kaiser and man I thought it was pretty good back then when I really had no palette.
