September 23: Spotted a sign with this name on it while in Zion over the weekend. I like the alliteration and I love a good Uppercase R, so I thought I would doodle a few new logo concepts.

September 24: Quickly sketched out yesterday’s logo doodles using a variety of sans fonts.

September 25: Still messing around with some logo concepts for this restaurant. I am diggin’ the diagonal element, but I don’t think the composition has been fully resolved yet. 

September 26: Tweaked the logo a bit and am starting to think about its application. I just grabbed this image of a fork and knife off the web, but this idea of incorporating a photographed isolated object is something that I’ve had in my ‘Idea Folder’ for a while now.

September 27: Working on a menu and starting to apply the design elements across other pieces. I like how the logo holds up without the other information and how the diagonal line element can be used throughout.

October 2: Inspired by something I saw in passing today, I wanted to play around with this cut and shifted idea. The piece that inspired this was vertically moving, so I thought it would be interesting to apply the idea diagonally, but it’s not really doing anything for me.

October 4: For days now, I have been carefully choosing places to eat that might have this specific type of take-home box. I crept through google images and Yelp pages hoping to come across an image of what I was looking for, and dragged my friends to restaurants based on the type of take-out containers they might have. And then yesterday I get to work and my wonderful co-worker had brought me just what I was looking for! So thank you Emily Chen, this is exactly what I had in mind.

September 28: Started to think about how I’d like the website to look and Billy Sunday’s site immediately came to mind. (http://billy-sunday.com/beer-wine/) I borrowed a few elements from it to pair with the identity I have begun to establish and it seems to be working well.

September 29: I imagine that the website would be responsive and translate well on mobile devices. One of my favorite aspects of my Squarespace portfolio site is how it collapses the tabs when viewing in a small window, thus I thought the same should be applied to this site.

October 3: Pulling together a few final pieces so that I can photograph the whole identity system this weekend.

October 5: Spanning about two weeks, this identity system ran longer than most of my daily designs have in the past. I let this blog shape itself, with my only rule being that something must be posted by midnight each day, which allows me to follow whatever inspirational path I might be on. The Ray Radigans Identity System was a fun project that I enjoyed working through.

November 1: I wanted to somewhat change gears today and start working on something totally new. As I looked through my ideas folder and notebook, I searched for a new path to travel and eventually landed here.

November 2: Working on a concept for a magazine identity. I wanted to draw these scissors myself, but mine just didn’t look as nice as these.

November 3: Today I created another version of the magazine cover using a photograph of scissors rather than an illustration. I specifically choose this size so that I could wrap it around an existing magazine and bring the design to life.

November 4: I saw some packaging design a while back that used a similar stitched method and I have been wanting to employ it myself for some time. It seemed to go along with the idea, so I seized opportunity. I tried a few different papers, and would have liked to try a thicker thread, but this was all I had.

November 5: Thinking about how the visual identity elements can be carried throughout a web presence.

November 6: Adjusting the design for mobile; thinking about how the components of the page would respond and how the user would interact with the site.

November 7: Testing out some stitched type to go along with the mock magazine I have been working on. I don’t think it goes very well with the clean look and feel I have already established, but it was a fun experiment. It was difficult to make each letter the same height and adjusting the kerning drove me nuts.

November 8: Quarterly quarters: nail polish painted quarters to accompany the identity I have been working on.

November 11: My goal was to laser transfer onto balloons, but the method I typically use was not reacting well to the rubber. In order to get the toner to release from the paper, I apply a natural solvent to the opposite side of the paper and press it onto the desired surface. I tried transferring the design before it was blown up, also after, but more often then not, I popped the balloon. After a lot of trial and error, I was able to get a few to come out somewhat well.

November 12: Wrapping up the Quarterly project, but wanted to take a photo of some of the final pieces together. When I have a direction and design identity already in the works, it allows me to and spend more time executing the idea and testing out new things. These ideas: the painted quarters, sewn packaging, balloon etc., all grew out of screen shots that were living in an ‘ideas’ folder on my desktop. I dump all my inspiration into this folder and it screams until I let it out.

June 12: Random idea for an identity system that involves scaling, symmetry, and shapes. I decreased the size of each new layer and varied the line weight. I then took this same formula and applied it to a variety of shapes.

June 13: Not what I originally envisioned, but now I find myself drawn to the ‘the’ area. Simplicity wins.

June 15: Deviated from the original idea, but I enjoy the simplicity of this composition best.

June 24: Today I was looking at Guest Check slips, receipts, tags, etc. and it got me thinking about some other components for this mock dry cleaners.

June 26: A more developed version of the check slip I was working on.

June 27: A few random design elements that I have been thinking about incorporating into the mix.

June 29: Bringing the design to life!