Star Waggons Holiday Card 2009

Star Waggons Holiday Card 2009

We just put together this year’s Star Waggons holiday card. It’s yet to be printed¹, so enjoy this 3D pre-visualization instead. We’re also dangerously short on snow here in Los Angeles, but if it were 30° colder outside, today’s rain storm would look something like the simulated North Pole shown above.

1. Actually it’s been printed now! [↩]

Tags: greeting card, holiday, identity, logo, render, Star Waggons, typography

Another day, another Ed Rondthaler quote

The New York Times masthead Comparison from Ed Rondthaler's book

Avid readers of this blog will remember one of the first posts I made, over a year ago, about a redesign of the Star Waggons logo that I had completed at the time. There may have been some hubris, on my part, in comparing my work to that of the lettering genius Ed Benguiat, but while continuing to read Life With Letters …as they turned photogenic by Ed Rondthaler, I came across a rather familiar looking comparison between the old and new New York Times masthead. Looks like Mr. Rondthaler had made the very same visual comparison when he put this book together back in 1980 or so. Neat!

Plus, the illustration was accompanied by a very informative little blurb, which explains that the project was taken on while Ed Benguiat was an employee of Photo-Lettering, Inc.:

     I have been fortunate to witness several great moments in graphic history, but none more overdue than the day the New York Times finally dropped the period from its masthead.
     Newspaper mastheads traditionally placed a period after the name, but by 1900 most papers had given up the practice. Even The Enterprise, my father’s little amateur monthly of 1885, had no period. But The New York Times was not one to rush headlong into such change without due consideration. Meanwhile the period appeared day after day and week after week consuming ink, I estimate, at the rate of $84 a year.
     It was not until 1966 that the Times concluded there was little to be gained trom further procrastination, and decided to bring its masthead in line with popular usage. It was felt, that appropriate expertise should be sought for the execution of this change, and that it could be combined with minor alterations needed at the Same time. Photo-Lettering was honored in having Ed Benguiat selected to perform the amputation.
     The ailing masthead was brought into our quarters on the appointed day. When the operating table was duly set Ed Benguiat, after honing his trusted scalpel to a fine edge, administered four deft strokes of the blade, swiftly severing the period with a minimum of discomfort.
     It was an historic moment. One that will be long remembered in the annals of joumalism. I hope we returned the severed period to the Times as a valuable contribution to its archives.

Tags: Ed Benguiat, Ed Rondthaler, lettering, logo, masthead, Photo-Lettering, Star Waggons, type, typeface, typography, vintage

Our Star Waggons holiday card

Star Waggons holiday card

Star Waggons trailer park sign concept

We were recently asked to come up with a holiday card for Star Waggons, with whom we are working on an identity and website redesign. We based the design on an earlier non-holiday concept we’d created for them. I’ll post more images when the cards come back from the printer.

Tags: greeting card, holiday, identity, logo, Star Waggons

Star Waggons logo makeover

Star Waggons logo, before and after

In the process of establishing a new look and feel for Star Waggons, we created a “look book” that served two purposes. Firstly, it contained our detailed analysis of the existing identity, including our thoughts on its origin, historical value, and efficacy. Secondly, the look book established our goals for the redesign, both verbally and through a scrapbook-style spread full of inspirational design materials.

The Star Waggons logo deserved particular attention. We devoted a page of the look book to the Star Waggons logo, which was designed originally in the late 1970s in emulation of the Star Wars wordmark. Since then, it had been painted on every Star Waggons movie trailer, and it was on every piece of their collateral from business cards to t-shirts and hats. But its execution, from a typographical standpoint, was sloppy, especially in the vector PDF form that I was given. My assumption had been that logo had probably degraded over time, after having been copied by hand over and over and eventually one of these copies was traced into Illustrator when it made sense to digitize it.

The whole “point” of the existing logo, as it were, was to emulate the deep perspective used in the opening of every Star Wars film. Unfortunately, in Star Waggons’ logo, lines which should have been parallel were askew, and the overall stroke weight and proportion of the letters was completely inconsistent. At the same time, the logo was extremely recognizable and popular under its own power; it made little sense to try to establish an entirely new brand theme when elements of the existing one had never been put to their full potential. The last thing the Star Waggons team wanted to do was to lose their logo—it’s quite dear to them. So our mission was clear: we had to give the logo a sensitive makeover, retaining its best features and refining away its worst.

We found inspiration for our task in the revered typographer Ed Benguiat’s rework of the original New York Times logo. Here is an excerpt from the Star Waggons look book, proposing our new direction:

Ed Benguiat’s revision of the New York Times logo.

A perfect example of this type of restoration is Ed Benguiat’s work for The New York Times in the 1970s. As an accomplished typographer, Benguiat recognized the value of The New York Times’ original logotype and was loathe to modify it beyond recognition. Instead, his version includes very subtle tweaks that increase the quality of the logo while respecting its original design. The end result is staggering; it feels as though Benguiat’s version is how the logo always was and how it always should have been. With some careful and respectful revision, we can achieve the same result with Star Waggons’ logo.

And so once we were given approval to move forward, we created the new logo design. It maintains the spirit of the original, but is cleaner, better proportioned, and more rhythmic by leaps and bounds. After delivering the redesigned wordmark, the client told us exactly what we had hoped: it felt to them as though the logo should have always looked this way.

A new Star Waggons employee t-shirt, one of the first items to bear the new logo.

Tags: identity, logo, Star Waggons, wordmark