Working Design was commissioned to develop the Festival poster a few months ago.

Organized by Niki Verzuh and her husband Neil Smith, the Festival featured a music stage and a variety of booths selling food and crafts. Garlic figured prominently in many of the items. I especially enjoyed the roasted garlic (see photo) and garlic sausage.

The event was an enormous success and plans are underway for even better garlicky fun next year.

But the people at Crazy Crayons have been giving the matter a lot of thought for almost two decades.
That’s how long they have been running The National Crayon Recycle Program collecting your old Burnt Sienna and Bubblegum Pink crayons.

Why?

Consider these statistics taken from their website:

• More than 12 million crayons are made in the US, every day. One hundred new crayons equal about one pound. The math looks like this:

• 12 million crayons equals about 120,000 pounds.

• That’s 60 tons of crayons made every day with petroleum-based wax that eventually ends up in the landfill.

Crazy Crayons acknowledge that the task is a big one. Since they launched the program in 1993 they’ve collected 55,000 pounds of crayons which is about half of one day’s production.

For more information on how you can participate check out their site. http://crazycrayons.com/recycle_program.html

(Thanks for the tip on this story from design blog Liquid Treat. http://www.liquidtreat.com/ )

Actually, far from being forgotten in the digital age, beautiful book cover design is still a going concern

I was just introduced to a site devoted to great cover designs thanks to Facebook friend Mary Frances Hill : http://www.lifeclever.com/1000-book-covers-to-delight-your-design-soul/

It features a thousand innovative and interesting book cover designs. While none of ours are featured, we have more than a passing interest in book cover designs since they are among our favourite projects.

Check out the site. It opens up a welcome line of inquiry.

And check out some of our covers too. http://www.workingdesign.net/our-work/publications/books/

A “working design” or drawing is a step along the way towards preparing a finished piece of art or design whether it’s for a magazine, product or something else. It refers to a work in progress.

We like the name because it speaks to our approach of client collaboration as we work together to build a website, a brand, a poster or piece of direct mail.

Also, the word “working” addresses a significant portion of our client base which is rooted in the union movement.

But, most important, we use the term to describe what our designs do : they work.

There are a couple of other Vancouver firms that use the same moniker.

A few years ago, our colleague and videographer Julius Fischer approached us to do some backdrops for a cable television show he was developing. He asked us if we had any thoughts for a name. Given that the focus of the program was telling the stories of working people we suggested Working TV. http://www.workingtv.com/

And late last month at The Cheaper Show http://thecheapershow.com/ we ran across the work of a new Vancouver design team calling themselves Working Format. http://www.workingformat.com/

Clearly, there’s a whole lot of working going on!

The strip of foot-high photos around his van accompanied by some signage on top caught my eye.

Van Horn is working on a project he calls Vancouver 125 to mark the city’s anniversary in 2011.

Currently travelling and living in his van, Van Horn is taking an on-the-ground, on-the-street approach to his project meeting people and capturing images.

He plans to spend 125 days shooting Vancouver and display the work online and elsewhere using super high resolution Gigaspan technology.

It’s a novel idea and his people portraits and landscapes are very good!

Check out his photo blog at http://vancouver125.wordpress.com/about/

For the next five years, the Centre will be doing global research on how its three main areas of concern overlap to shape our lives and health. One overall aim is to inform the development of policy for governments everywhere to target populations in need with appropriate services.

The Centre is headed by Marina Morrow who leads an in house team including Brenda Jamer, Renee Cormier and Communications Director Lupin Battersby. The Centre has five main theme areas its focused on each with their own research teams.

We’ve worked with the Centre since the start of the year, helping develop its brand, logo, and print materials as well as the website.

75 years ago, it was the launching site of the famous Depression-era protest, the On to Ottawa Trek. Twelve hundred unemployed workers clambered on to boxcars to travel to Ottawa demanding “work and wages.” They made it to Regina, where attacks by police ended the rolling protest, though not the struggle. Many historians consider the Trek and the “Regina Riot” a turning point in the fight for social justice in Canada.

The On to Ottawa Historical Society commemorated that first day of the trek with a bronze plaque that will be mounted on the bridge to CRAB park, at the north end of Main Street.

Working Design is pleased to have been able to assist in the design and development of the plaque.

Kudos to two of our friends, Ron Verzuh and Joey Hartman, who are involved with the On to Ottawa Historical Society.

This year’s kudos include “Best Overall Publication” for the Hospital Employees’ Union “Guardian”, a magazine that Working Design has been involved with since 1990 when we did the first of two overall redesigns.

CUPE BC, a client since 1992, also scored the “Breaking Barriers Award” for the their election issue of the Public Employee — a special issue translated into four different languages. Working Design has been designing and producing Public Employee – including this award-winning issue– since 2003.

The Guardian also took home the award for feature writing for “Greening Health Care” in the Summer 09 issue.

We had the pleasure and honour of working with the Kickstart team on their general brochure, festival poster and programme book.

The Kickstart Festival started on March 8 and its first public event was last night with the launch of the Heroes art exhibit at the Pendulum Gallery in downtown Vancouver. Twenty Canadian visual artists explore what it means to be a hero from the perspective of working with a disability. We were especially impressed with the collage sculptures by Persimmon Blackbridge and  Cat L’Hirondelle.

For information about the Festival visit their website: www.kickstart-arts.ca

Unjustified type sets the type ragged on one side. This can also make for an attractive and readable setting.

In order to justify type, space is inserted between words and, sometimes, letters, so that things line up. To a certain extent, this additional space compromises the integrity of the type and makes it less attractive. However, the overall effect can be that the eye has an easier time reading.

At Working Design we use both methods frequently and oftentimes within the same publications. However, we haven’t extended that to our use of type on the web. We are rag right only adherents. And that’s because the web can’t deliver the fine type adjustments that make justified type attractive and readable.

Here’s an excellent blog we ran across recently that underlines that point.

http://www.slaw.ca/2010/01/21/lawyer-type-4-ragged-is-right/