Innovative Packaging with Shrink Sleeves can “Wow”

In a sea of products bearing neon typeface and excessive exclamation points, what can a company do to make their product stand out on store shelves? The solution may just be custom packaging.

Example of Shrink Sleeve PackagingCompanies these days are turning to more and more extreme measures to get their product noticed. Without an eye-catching, professional package many products may be left in the dust, regardless of how great they may be beneath the label. To stay on top of the market there are a few factors to consider in creating an effective package design. Continue reading

Glyphs: A New Tool For Type Design

I am not a type designer. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I lack the time, patience, and skill to design an entire font and I probably always will.

Glyphs uses familiar bezier curves for line control.

Even though I’m not going to produce the next Helvetica, I have found that type design software is still a useful tool to have in the box and here’s why:

Logotype.

Sometimes you want to make modifications to an existing font or build unique characters when designing a new logo or  setting other display text.

The FedEx logo is a great example of this – the right-pointing arrow implied by the negative space between E and x was achieved by designing a custom typeface based on Univers and Futura.

FedEx - hiden arrow

Although FedEx had the budget to commission an entire face from a respected foundry and  also required many variations to accommodate numerous brands and departments, the word FedEx is is only five characters – you could just draw it in Illustrator.

The problem with drawing letterforms is that you lose out on all of the  slick geometry and text effects available in the Adobe Creative Suite. Type on a path

It is just extremely convenient to maintain live type in application software and will generally produce sharper, more precise text in print – especially when trapping text to another color or using a knockout effect.

The Glyphs application for Mac, written by German developer Georg Seifert, is currently in public beta and is available for download at glyphsapp.com (or schriftgestaltung.de for those of you who sprechen Deutsch).

Some of the earlier builds used to construct the Ross logotype were a little buggy when it came to undo and other handy functions,  but more recent builds have stabilized considerably and I highly recommend spending the half day or so it takes to become familiar with the basics of this very useful tool.

If you find drawing from scratch in Glyphs to be overly complicated and not worth the effort,  just draw your vectors in Illustrator, copy’n'paste straight into a character in Glphys, and export an OpenType file.

This extra step to roundtrip your custom lettering into an .otf will definitely pay off if you intend to use it in more than one project.

Making a Mark

We’ve been around a long time. Sometimes you need to make a change in order to feel like you’re moving forward and evolving as an organization.

As we gathered our thoughts here and began to work on some updated branding, we focused in on a couple of guiding principles that seemed important.

Just one color.

Establish a visual language. Our goal was to create a mark that clearly speaks to our work as printers. The halftone concept we hope is familiar to those of you who have worked  in or around printing for a while. (Actually, we refer to this as “the quartertone mark”, since it is 1/4 of a larger halftone-like pattern.) We wanted something that contains identifiable characteristics suitable for use in additional design elements (repeating dots, square shape, spectral vignette). We also need our logo to reproduce well in all production contexts, for example: one color, reversed color, or blind stamped.

Refresh, don’t reinvent. Secondly, we wanted to make a natural progression from our existing identity. So we decided to borrow from the previous typeface and we also maintained the use of a CMYK color spectrum as an additional reference to familiar printing techniques.

We hope that we succeeded in at least some of our original goals and would welcome your feedback on our efforts.