If you live in the United States in a place where you are subjected to advertisements, then you have seen the recent Snickers® ad campaign. I started seeing the ads on billboards and buses a few months ago, and they frustrated me immensely. My first reaction was one of disgust, as I saw word after legitimate English word get mangled by the churning gears of some ad agency’s marketing machine. Peanutentiary? Hungerectomy? I failed to make the connection between jail time, surgery, and candy bars, and hated the ads more each time I saw them.

After weeks of yelling at billboards from my car, I decided I needed a new coping method. So, like any upstanding designer would do, I made my own versions. I decided that if these things were going to exist in the world, I would have to take it upon myself to create more of them, and make them awful. They had to be bad, but not just tryin’-to-be-clever bad. They had to be so bad that they were good. So here’s what I came up with.

So there you go. I’ve got a couple other ones that I’ll add if I get around to it, but those are my top three right now. I realize that “Menougatrois” is a bit of a stretch to read, but I still like it. I wish the typeface were better — all I could find when I was making these was a sloppy approximation of the Snickers® typeface that I pulled from DaFont. It does the trick, I suppose, but some of the characters bother me.

Anyhow, making these was a ton of fun. And after talking about it with my wife, she made me realize that the just-for-fun, non-sequitur element of this whole campaign is what actually makes it kinda good (!). I mean, not once in any of the ads are Snickers or candy bars even mentioned, and yet you know that’s exactly what they’re about. Pretty solid. I still think mine might sell more product (especially in Seattle), but I suppose the world will never know.

Well, that’s all for now. If I get around to polishing up the other ideas I have for these, I’ll post ‘em. Until then, I guess you should go eat a Snickers®. But do it dirty.

Update: So I was just kickin’ around online and I found this guy’s blog, which I promise I had not seen prior to posting this. It’s kinda eerie. Check it out: http://www.wiggz.com/blog/art/snickers-ad-parodies/

I was scrounging through my files the other day, and I found these fun little items. They’re actually pretty recent (I did them earlier this year), but they were for a contest, so I worked like mad, submitted them, and then forgot they existed. Needless to say, I didn’t win anything, but they were fun to make and I like how they turned out (although I think they’re both due for a re-coloring…applying color to a scanned image in Photoshop with a trackpad is not my idea of a fun time, and I think it shows). In case you have no idea who Flight of the Conchords are, they are a hilarious musical duo from New Zealand. Check ‘em out on YouTube – they have their own show on HBO, and while I haven’t watched a single episode in its entirety, the songs alone are enough to justify a half-hour of TV time. That’s all from me for today; I’ve got new stuff to post soon, though, so stay tuned.

© Ryan Polich 2009

© Ryan Polich 2009

Katy and Ryan's Wedding Invite

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything…who knew getting married would be so time-consuming? Oh yeah. I did. It’s also extra work if you make the invitations yourself, as Katy and I discovered. They turned out pretty freakin’ cool, so I’m posting them. Making them was overcoming a series of never-ending obstacles, and they went from being printed on a home-built letterpress (which didn’t work) to being stamped by hand with pigment ink (nope) to just being printed on a color laser printer. I was pretty sad to miss out on the emboss that the letterpress was supposed to provide, but I’m still happy with how they look, and we’ve heard good things about them so far from everyone we sent them to. As much as I dislike the ease and lack of process control that comes with printing digital files on a laser printer, I do like how the toner lays down on the surface – it resembles screen-printed ink sometimes, so I can appreciate it.

The second piece is a little cardboard journal (made by Moleskine) that had a blank brown cover just begging for some typography. So I designed this in Illustrator, printed it on a laser printer, and transferred it to the cardboard. I’m pretty happy with it – I love how the fibers in the cardboard bring texture through the letters. The typeface is Arno Pro, which (in case anyone cares) comes as a pretty solid font with a ton of OpenType features, making it fun to play with.

So there you go – I’m going to try and dig up some more printed material I’ve done to put on here, because I have a bunch of it laying around that really hasn’t seen the light of day. We’ll see how that goes. Enjoy!

Invite

Detail

Inside

Map & RSVP detail

The whole package

Little journal

Front cover

Cover detail

Well, whatever puts you in the spirit, I guess. Happy Earth Day! Go recycle something!

Here’s a poster I made from some image I found of a badminton player. He really wants to kick ass, which is why he has those orange lines coming out of him. Those are rays of determination.

I’m apparently on a public service poster kick, which I’m quite enjoying. We’ll see what I can dig up next.

That’s all for now. Sleep is winning over the internet, and that’s never a fun battle to fight.

© Ryan Polich 2009

Quick post for tonight. Here’s a brochure I just finished up for the Phinney Neighborhood Association. I illustrated all the class titles for their winter class line-up, and it looks like I’ll be doing the spring brochure as well, which is cool. Here are links to page 1 and page 2 of the brochure (they are PDF documents). I’ve posted some of my favorite illustrations below. Enjoy!

…about nitpicky crap that most people do not care to know about, much less think about. Today’s complaint is regarding the logo of a coffee shop that I go to. The coffee shop is called Fuel, and they’re pretty cool. In no way did I intend that previous sentence to rhyme. I go to this coffee shop fairly often; they make a good cup of coffee, and they recently started serving little homemade single-serving pies that are delicious. They remind me of the individually-wrapped snack pies I had growing up, except that they taste good and have ingredients that come from actual food. But I digress.

The theme of Fuel’s stores (there are at least two, I think) is a sort of retro-gas-station-meets-downtown-cafè-hangout thing, with vintage gas pumps and oil cans neatly arranged on shelves and throughout the seating area. The one I go to has a fantastic brick wall with a sign painted on it (a new sign) made to look like the old billboards that were painted on buildings back before people lost all respect for painted signs.

What I’m getting at is that somebody spent a decent amount of effort crafting a cohesive look for the store, and they cared about the design. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the logo they put on all of their shirts, mugs, posters, and signs looks unfinished. If you’ll refer to the picture, you can see that the sign is modeled after the old gas pumps with the round glass globes on top that displayed the company name. However, unlike said old gas pumps, the dimensional shadow on the U of FUEL does not actually connect like it should (see photo). It just looks like a white U sitting behind a black U, and that somebody forgot to draw the little connecty line that makes it a shadow. I mean, they were obviously pretty inspired by the old Gulf logo (okay, so they kinda ripped it off, but it’s a nice logo that you don’t really get to see anymore, so why not use it?)…but why didn’t they look at the U? FOR GOD’S SAKE, LOOK AT THE UUUUUU! I am tempted to scream that every time I go in, but I don’t, because I don’t want to interrupt the good music and scare the baristas, for they are timid creatures. Fix your logo, people.

Fancy! Looks good from down the street.

Come on.

In closing, here are a couple of logos I found around the Seattle area that I liked. I believe the businesses they come from are both architecture firms. And while the large circular element in the logos makes them a little awkward as far as the space they take up goes, I appreciate their simplicity. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more obsessive complaints about things that no one has probably ever noticed.

I don’t know if this means anything or not (as far as my abilities as a designer are concerned), but I design things in my free time. I’m slightly obsessed with it. I’m constantly coming up with excuses to design things, and I sometimes spend inordinate amounts of time doing so. That being said, here are a couple items that fall into the “design for the hell of it” category.

The first is a poster that I was going to hang in the bathroom at my office, because it frustrates me that people grab fistfuls of paper towels to dry their hands, when they could probably get by with just one. Stupid and wasteful. Anyhow, I haven’t put it up yet, because of a recent episode of The Office involving passive-aggressive community notes that left me debating the effectiveness of such a poster. So there that is.

© Ryan Polich 2009

The second piece for today is a result of my recent explorations in the Google LIFE photo archive. It also only really applies if you’ve seen the 1954 movie White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen. In this movie, Kaye and Ellen fake an engagement so Crosby and Clooney will hook up (it’s more complicated than that; just watch the movie. It’s good). After their ruse is discovered, Crosby chastises the both of them, and addresses Vera Ellen with the line that I used in this piece. I thought it fit pretty well with the old photo of Danny Kaye being…well, being Danny Kaye.

© Ryan Polich 2009

So that’s what I have for today. Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, I should mention a little side project I’m working on with my brother. It’s called Dueling Scribbles (you can find it in my RSS feeds on the side of the page), and it spawned from a game he and I used to play. The way it works is like this: one person draws a scribble – could be anything, as long as it’s one line that doesn’t cross over itself at any point. The next person then takes that scribble and incorporates it into a drawing. Pretty simple. We added the restriction that whatever we draw has to start with a certain letter, which we rotate occasionally. Check it out if you have time – I think it’s pretty fun. The more recent drawings have the scribble highlighted in blue so you know where it all started.

I just realized I haven’t posted anything since September. Pathetic. Granted, I’ve been busy and all, but it’s time to start generating more content…that’s a big part of why we artist-types are here. So for now, here’s a slapdash assemblage of things I have made (some of them recent, some of them old), thrown together at midnight for the sake of making a post. Enjoy.

Just so some sense can be made of these: The first image is a poster I designed for a duo playing at Pegasus Coffee, a coffee shop out across Puget Sound that I have never been to, but is most likely great. The second is a poster I designed for a friend. This friend has never wrestled a large, sweaty, mustachioed man, but he has worn a stars-and-stripes helmet, and that means he gets to be in this picture. Thank you, Photoshop. The rest are drawings I did awhile ago that have since ended up on cards and such. That’s all for tonight; it is now Wednesday, January 21st, 2009, which is also known as The Day After The Most Important American Historical Event To Occur In My Lifetime. Awesome.

For me, this site is kind of what the Internet is about. Collaboration on a widespread scale, art from numerous inspired sources, and strangers contributing for the sake of something greater than themselves. It’s called Design For Obama, and I think it’s a pretty successful venture into the realm of socially-inspired, publicly-available design. One of the things I like most about this site (where designers submit posters having something to do with Obama’s campaign and other site users can view the work and rate their favorites) is that all of the posters are available for free download, so you can print them out at home or work and put them up wherever you want. This is a great way for art to be disseminated to a public that may not normally see it, and for independent designers to have their work viewed in numerous places on- and off-line. I hope more sites that operate in this same collaborative way crop up elsewhere. I also hope to get a poster or two up here myself…stay tuned.