By using the powerful knowledge of an experienced graphic designer we’ll analyze several leading candidate’s campaigns to reveal the true intentions of each potential mayor. By analyzing their advertising for subtle nuances and repressed themes, the discoveries made in this post will not only give you clear picture of each candidate’s personal motivation but save you hours of mind-numbing research.

It should be noted that this post does not reflect any views or opinions of the blog owner nor has this technique been approved for actual voting purposes – although it may be one day. This post is also not a commentary on a candidate’s prior behaviour or personal character. With that cleared up, let’s jump right in.

Ric McIver:

Campaign breakdown: This is a campaign for the ages – all the ages. The conservative and traditional nature of the red, white and blue signage would feel equally at home in any era. The Arial Black choice for the main typeface makes no attempt to be anything other than a solid and trustworthy partner of the boring check mark – an exhausted excuse for election imagery. The photography used in the campaign is unremarkable, utilitarian and lacks any hint of creative flair. A strong design correlation between this campaign and a typical North American vehicle dealer is expressed strongly in his signs, website and posters. Ironically, his campaign headquarters is a vacant Chevrolet dealership on the corner of Glenmore and Mcleod.

Future Predictions: By analyzing the the design of this campaign it is clear that Mr. Mciver has clear intentions of moving Calgary along a linear path of low risk, low return trajectory that may not differ much from the ideals that guided mayors since the invention of civic government. In four years, Calgary will be very similar administratively, satisfying to most residents, and a tad less stylish.

Barb Higgins:

Campaign Breakdown: For semi long term residents, it gets difficult to remember whether Barb Higgin’s advertising is for a mayoral election or a nightly newscast. The crisp, clear imagery is classic Higgins, it’s well designed, bright and convincing. Myriad is a modern font choice with deep roots and is used effectively in all situations. The light blue is calming and reassuring, the dark blue is strong and solid. Overall, the aesthetics are pleasing to the eye but her signage does not offer much in terms of useful information.

Future Predictions: It’s clear from the campaign design that Barb Higgins will improve the way Calgary is perceived by residents and visitors alike. The glossy, professional nature of the campaign reveals that perhaps Ms. Higgins may look the part and be able to the talk the talk, but when it comes to getting involved in the day to day, she may be hesitant to roll her sleeves up. If Higgins is elected, we may see a future Calgary that presents well but may have deeper issues that do not see resolution.

Wayne Stewart:

Campaign Breakdown: This campaign may just be the most intriguing of them all. The design is an awkward hodge-podge of unrelated elements that somehow serve to give the campaign a memorable look. How is this possible? Let’s break it down. Using stacked text is a common format for film posters. Add the word “Wayne” from Wayne’s World, the Wal-Mart corporate colours and font (Helvetica Black) and you’ve got yourself something familiar. Despite the familiarity, the campaign sends mixed messages about focus and speaks to a poorly hashed out platform without a sense of priority. From the layout of his signs, it’s also quite apparent that Mr. Stewart may be distanced from social media and is not comfortable with technology.

Future Predictions: If Calgary becomes Wayne’s World, there may be some question of the priorities the new mayor has. He may gather information from multiple sources and remix it for a new perspective on the way Calgary politics usually looks. His campaign speaks to a certain level of versatility but a scattered and priority-less style of leadership. At the end of his four year term he may have started a number of projects that have not been completed.

Naheed Nenshi:

Campaign Breakdown: Nenshi’s campaign is new. Scary and new. Not that scary really, maybe just for the older folks. The use of purple is brave, daring and used without regard for tradition. Most signs advertise texting as a method of communication which is unheard of in most local voting circles. It promotes texting-while-driving – which is generally regarded as a dangerous practice. The use of the purple to black gradient and the arms-crossed posture is a strong sign of hidden things lurking beneath the surface. Whether these mysteries are good or bad discoveries is obviously yet to be determined. Remember to be aware of this as you cast your ballot.

Future Predictions: If Mr. Nenshi becomes the favourable choice of Calgarians, this Mayor will be in the media with greater frequency than the current mayor. We may be surprised by and interested in decisions that are made. The way council conducts business is not something that will not continue in its current form. There will be a general uproar among older citizens. And don’t forget the mysteries that lie beneath – they will make themselves apparent during his term.

Considering voting for Joe Connelly, Bob Hawksworth, Jon Lord, Craig Burrows? Find out what their campaigns say about them in part 2 of this exciting series. Coming soon!

Update: It seems as a part two to this series, although half written, is not necessary after the majority of the other candidates have decided to throw in the towel.

Mozy

I personally cannot recommend this online back-up service to more people. Mozy is an easy to install program that syncs your computer or multiple computers to a remote server. With unlimited data transfer for $4.95/mo. and the unlimited peace of mind that comes with knowing all your artwork is safe from disaster is a deal you can’t refuse. And if you do refuse this deal, they have a FREE 2GB storage account as well. How can you refuse free?

Dropbox and Dropio

Both Dropbox and Dropio offer you the ability to share files with other people and users. Dropbox gives you the ability to sync files between multiple computers. I use the free 2GB account on a regular basis as I’m typically working between various work stations around the office. Both are easy to use and offer a great way to get your print ready files to the printer.

Firefox/ColorZilla/Measureit

I’m almost positive that you’ve heard of these extensions for Firefox. Measureit gives you the ability to size up any on-screen object that needs to outfitted with a specific graphic element. Just drag the ruler and take your dimensions to Photoshop. Colorzilla is another useful tool that picks a color off a website for you. Great for matching specific shades.

OpenX

Similar to Google Ad Planner, OpenX is built by a well supported community of open source developers who have created an awesome ad sever for the web environment. Host affiliate ads or paid ads on your site with full control over how often an advertisement displays and to whom it displays. OpenX has been configured to serve ads for our advertising purposes and it comes highly recommended.

Woopra and Click Density

In addition to the mainstay of Analytic world, that being Google Analytics, there are a variety of up and comers that offer stats and behavioral tracking for your websites. Woopra is a free option which offers WordPress implementation through a plug-in. Click Density is another that shows heat map overlays for your sites in an effort to help you discover what content you have is hot and which is not.

Hootsuite

If keeping in touch with tweeps is a priority, check out HootSuite. It’s a Twitter management application that gives you the flexibility to tweet to multiple accounts at once or at a time. You can also track the actions of your followers and create nice looking charts and graphs to put up on your filing cabinet.

TinyChat

Have you been looking for an easy way to video conference or chat with colleagues and clients in a private online environment? Well you’re reading the right post. TinyChat supplies the world with free, disposable online chatrooms. When used carefully, this can be a great tool for video conferencing with a number of people at once. Be forewarned however, that the public chat rooms are unsupervised and can contain some strange and perhaps disturbing behavior.

ProofHQ

Go green, save paper and impress your clients with this online proofing platform. ProofHQ can provide the tools you need to collaborate, revise and approve print proofs or online mock-ups. It’s full of a wide array of functionality that will make you wonder why you didn’t use this service sooner.

What the Font/Font Burner

Met your match with a font that will not be identified? Try uploading it to What the Font. It will detect its distinct characteristics and render a verdict. If this does not provide the desired result you can also post your mystery font to the forum where a number of font enthusiasts will solve the case before you can say “Arial Rounded MT Bold.” Another useful font site is FontBurner which is a service that embeds non web-friendly fonts for easy inclusion on your website.

Icon Finder

If you are on the hunt for an icon, start your search at IconFinder.com. Recently outfitted with a shiny new robot mascot, this site will locate the icon of your dreams in seconds.

Please feel free to make additions to this list in the comments!

Logitech Keyboard and Mouse

The Logitech diNovo Edge and the MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse are both great peripherals that combine the convenience of wireless connectivity and a smooth user experience. The diNovo keyboard in addition to being sleek and modern in it’s design complete with touch sensitive navigation, is also equipped with bluetooth wireless technology and is fully rechargeable. The MX1000 is dependable, accurate and has a long battery life. I have two!

Another Logitech product that you might find helpful is the Logitech NuLOOQ Navigator which is not a mouse or a keyboard but simply a an ambidextrously alternative to the traditional navigation peripheral. It uses a navring that you push or pull in different directions and four customizable buttons for programmable functionality. It’s a non-dominant hand option for multitaskers.

Samsung SyncMaster Monitor

The Samsung Syncmaster 943SWX is a 18.5 inch monitor that provides the on screen space needed to run multiple windows and look good doing it. The screen’s matte finish is easy on the eyes and so is the glossy finish that surrounds it. It’s great for any design application and the price is attractive as well.

M-Audio Speakers

If you’re not rockin’ K-OS in itunes, you might not be taking full advantage of your music collection for the benefit of your portfolio. M-Audio Studiophile AV 30 is a set of highly rated compact powered speakers from a company that designed with the same critically acclaimed technology that has made M-Audio monitors popular in recording studios. These speakers are loud and clear when they need to be and small enough to stay out of the way in your office.

Wacom Bamboo

The Wacom Bamboo tablet turns your monitor into a notepad. Useful for designers and photographers alike, it’s a customizable and convenient way of touching up photos, bringing illustrations to life, and navigating between tools. It takes some time to get the hang of but those that acquire the required skills swear by it’s functionality.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H20 is an 10MB camera with a price tag that will make you smile. Combining Sony’s practical rechargeable battery and a 720p HD-quality movie capture with a 10x zoom lens, this camera is full of practical features and it’s easy to use.

Drobo Storage Robot

Data back-up is everything. Data Robotics Drobo makes redundancy new and exciting. We don’t have one but we want one. This storage robot is a fully automated, hot-swappable, RAID back-up system that can be modified for Network Attached Storage (NAS). It runs quietly and offers an informative dashboard and simple light notification system to provide data security.

Synology DS209

Comparable to the Drobo is the Synology DS209 Network Attached Storage. If the Drobo is a one trick pony, the DS209 is a thousand trick pony or a herd of a thousand ponies each with a unique trick. This unit does everything! Offering file sharing, scheduled back-up, a mail server, built-in PHP+MySQL, hosting with FTP access, itunes server, and even remote camera management, what’s not to love?

Western Digital External Hard drive

The Western Digital My Passport External Hard Drive is a great external drive for portability. It uses one foot-long USB connector that phantom powers the drive. The Passport comes in sizes up to 500GB and is competitively priced. From our perspective, it has no drawbacks.

D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router

Don’t forget the internet! The D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router is a super fast router that is easy to set-up, Gigabit LAN ports and the latest in wireless security. Dlink’s router interface is simple and straight-forward which makes it easy to get back to what you do best.

What do you use on a daily basis that you can’t imagine living without?

Recruiters
Graphic Designers don’t fit the mold, they tend to run solo or congregate in like-minded groups. With this being the case, recruiters don’t typically deal with designers on a regular basis and as a result, don’t understand how to find work for them. Unless you are lucky enough to have a good connection with a recruiter who knows you personally and feels confident placing you, don’t bother going this route.

Job boards
Your first stop when visiting online job boards should be The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada. Jobs from across Canada are available from a variety of industries. You will also be assured that the design of this website is pleasing to the eye which I’m sure is something you’ll appreciate. Continuing on the tour of job boards, be sure to drop by Freelanceswitch.com and Krop. Both of these sites list design opportunities, however they may or not have local relevance for you.

The Classifieds
It’s important to scour the classifieds, as archaic as that practice may sound, some of your best leads could come from kijiji.ca or craigslist.org. On Kijiji, you will discover the best results by searching your city for graphic design positions. On Craigslist, the well organized categories will allow you to visit art/media/design or web/info design for jobs that may be up your alley.

Career Finders
Perhaps the most traditional of online sources for jobs of any sort are websites like monster.ca, workopolis.com, and regionalhelpwanted.com. Monster.ca is seemingly the most useful of these as it provides you with the ability to save searches and receive frequent email updates that match your specifications.

Outsourcing Sites
The ubiquity of world wide internet accessibility has given rise to the concept of easy online outsourcing. Finding work, or finding talent is as easy as visiting sites like getafreelancer.com, elance.com, and odesk.com or even crowdspring.com (which is more a contest website than a job website). You will find a lot of work on these websites but you will also find a tremendous amount of competition as you are bidding against like minded professionals from many different economic situations . If you are planning on finding work via any of these sites, be prepared to work for a lot less than you may be accustomed to.

Aggregation Sites
Without a doubt, your most useful tool in fighting unemployment is the rise of aggregators in popularity and functionality. These are websites that do the searching for you, visiting all the websites you’d want to check and assembling the results for your review. There are three websites that do this job quite nicely. SimplyHired.ca, Indeed.ca, and Eluta.ca are great places to continue your search without expending the effort of clicking from site to site.

Good luck! Your dream job is out there somewhere, you just have to find it.

The new brand is cursive wordmark that aspires to embody a concept described by the tagline, “freedom to create, spirit to achieve.” According to the brand’s official website, AlbertaBrand.com, the identity development process was a 5 month long procedure with a budget of $4 million dollars. This budget was allocated towards the establishment of an advisory panel and focus groups consisting of normal citizens like you and me, oh and graphic design was in there somewhere too.

Let’s take a quick tour of the options that became runner’s up:

The Albertan may have proved unpopular due to it’s mixed messages. It’s certainly not clear what it’s trying to say. It’s very formal and corporate in it’s approach as well.

This version of the logo is very current in the way it uses gradients, just add a little shine and it would pass as a fancy new web 2.0 start-up.

The lowercase square treatment could make this version of the logo the corporate image of any North American technology company. The use of the period in the “t” is such an uninspiring concept and copied from an abundance of non inspirational sources. This could possibly be the weakest of choice in the set.

Meet the rainbow option. Symbolic of Alberta’s Leprechaun pioneers. That may or may not be true, but it would be very difficult to stand by a decision to appoint this logo for the cost of printing alone. It’s difficult to know what the designers were getting at here.

The Conclusion

Overall, the new brand for Alberta seems adequate. It doesn’t amaze and it certainly does not show off in any way. It’s disappointing that more inspiration wasn’t not shown in very many of the choices, there is no attempt at double meaning or any specific geographic mirroring. Ironically, the creation process of this identity, judging from the results, seemed linear and static, with very little motivation to come up with something new. Even orange was recycled and repackaged from the license plates. Perhaps at best, we’ve put a new suit on our old logo, which had much of the same reserved and bland personality the new one has. The lack of inspiration seems ironic considering we are looking to represent “freedom to create, spirit to achieve” to the world.

The Justification?

Sometimes, being a graphic designer and a normal citizen, I can’t help wondering what an invoice for this project would look like and how it would be itemized. If one graphic designer was hired for this project, the government would be paying him or her $50,000 per hour based on a 40 hour work week. If a team of 10 people worked on this project, for forty hours per week, for 5 months straight, tax-payers would be looking at an hourly rate of $5,000 per hour.

If you ask me, this final product does not deserve that kind of financing. The value of graphic design is not based on who the customer is, or what the final outcome is being used for. It’s based primarily on the time it takes to produce a result and the demand for this service. The concept of getting what you pay for in the design industry has very low ceiling and yet the cost of branding and identity development seems to be driven by the insecurity of clients to feel as though their logo must be very expensive to be good. Fueled by the greed of marketing professionals who are happy to propagate these sentiments through excessive fees, makes affording a graphic designer very difficult and trusting one even less plausible.

Do you have any thoughts on the industry or the logo? We’d like to hear them.

“I have an idea,” Neil was saying. I was in Vancouver when Neil called from Calgary. We were getting ready for my year-long stint with Elbowroom, and Neil was pitching me one of our first collaborative projects. “Whether it’s a newsletter or a website, I don’t know, but we need to figure out a way to talk design with our clients on a regular basis.”

“When you get to Calgary,” he continued, “Let’s figure this out.”

Neil’s idea to transmit design-related content to our clients, suppliers and friends eventually transformed into a widely-read graphic design blog covering everything from new technology to corporate re-brands. Two years later, Elbowruminations has now published a total of 140 posts, which have garnered 105 comments from our readers. Today is our two-year anniversary of the first post on Elbowruminations, and we thought it would be fitting to mention a few highlights of our first couple years.

1. THE LIBRARY DEFENDERS

I think one of the most exciting times to be a design blog like us is when the people responsible for the design piece you just critiqued end up stopping by to defend themselves. Case-in-point is the Calgary Public Library.

Neil posted a piece dressing-down the Library’s mystifying transit ads, labeling the ad “a few letters short of a bad first novel.” Library representative Grant Kaiser was quick to visit the comments section. “Libraries face 200 years of stereotyping,” wrote Grant. “With a $100 million advertising budget perhaps we could begin to fight it.”

We’re not looking to make people angry or hurt their feelings, but we’re excited when they start thinking more about good design. Out of this post and its comments came a design contract and a great relationship with the Calgary Public Library. What more could we ask for? Kudos to the Library for keeping an eye on their web reputation. It demonstrates a progressive, evolving institution – which ends up reflecting very well on the Library after all.

2. LONDON CALLING

Next stop is London. When the logo for the London 2012 Olympics hit the web, Elbowruminations was one of the first design blogs to cover the craziness. It was a zoo of activity around here, with a flurry of comments and inbound links helping to bring graphic design perspectives to a globe of Olympic spectators. While our thoughts on the London logo have evolved a bit, the initial eruption of discussion and noise was a joy to be in the middle of.

3. SASKATOON BLADES

On my favourite posts put together by Neil is his review of the Saskatoon Blades logo. I’d asked Neil to supply his “favourite design contribution of 2007” for our year-end round-up post, and Neil’s submission was a review of a logo for a hockey team in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

To this day, I’m still not certain if he was serious or joking, but regardless of its angle, it accomplished a couple of things. First, it was a glowing, honest and humble tribute to small-town Canada – you never get those get of adjectives on a design blog. Second, it served as an ironic roast of the design industry: in the midst of a post peppered with poise and pretense where people were gesturing grandly about global issues, Neil went in the exact opposite direction and headed to the hockey rink.

4. THE BRANDING OF CANADA

Speaking of Canadiana, Neil mentioned over email that the Branding of Canada post was one of his favourites from the past couple years. A thorough look at the visual identity of our country, this post took a tour of the stamps, passports, flag, currency, signage, and typeface of Canada. The tour led us to the conclusion that Canada’s visual brand was consistent, strong and visually appealing. Interestingly, this assessment of Canada’s awesomeness was recently affirmed by Future Brand, a New York consulting firm, which surveyed travelers and discovered that Canada’s brand is second in the world, second only to Australia.

5. THE SECOND YEAR

In 2008, we started trying out a few new things on this blog: first, we decided to get personal. With the recent site redesign, we dropped the corporate facade, showed our faces, and brandished our opinions. The design industry has always benfitted from candor and honesty, and we realized there was no point in pretending to be a huge design blog.

Second, we decided to narrow our focus. Our new tagline is “graphic design trends, tips and reviews” which is a big step away from the old tagline, “Graphic design thinking for everyone.” The thing we realized was, this blog ISN’T for everyone: it’s for small business owners and people interested in design. By making our focus and audience clear, we’re already seeing a sense of ease in the comments, and a renewed sense of clarity in our posts.

We hope you like the new approach. Our intent is to continue to bring you well-informed perspectives on the graphic design industry, in a way that makes you think, laugh, or at least come back again later. Tell us how we’re doing — if you’ve got thoughts about how we can do this better, some tips for stories we should cover, or even if you just want to share reactions to our two-year commemorative post, please leave a comment below. You’ll be richly rewarded with a lingering sense of satisfaction.