Elbowruminations Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews

Is the economy letting you down because the economy getting your clients down? If this is the case, you might be looking for other means of employment. Even if you are not in a position where you need to look for new work, this post provides some hot tips where to look and where not to.

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.

Today the new identity chosen by the Province of Alberta went live to the jubilation general disinterest of the population.

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.

How does a blog start? Well, if you’re Elbowruminations, it starts over the phone, in the summer of 2006.

“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.