Pete Fry

For Vancouver

Tag: art + design

  • On Vancouver’s new logo

    On Vancouver’s new logo

    The City’s new logo is not a lot of things.
    It’s not inspiring, it’s not reflective, it’s not exciting, it’s not very good — but at $8,000, it’s not a rip off.

    I’m not at all suggesting this was money well spent — it’s not. Of course the actual cost of implementing this logo across the city’s print collateral, web presence, social media, mobile apps, signage, et al will cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands (at least) of dollars. It’s a bizarre priority for a city with so many real priorities like affordability and housing and homelessness.

    That being said, $8k is not a lot to pay for a professional redesign of something as important as our city’s logo. I’m happy that our city did not resort to the exploitive “design competition” model and actually paid an apparently local business for product.

    But as they say, you get what you pay for — considering the ultimate outlay of cost to replace the logo city-wide, as tax-payers we would have been better served if the city took the time to get it right— and $8k doesn’t buy you a lot of professional design team time to do it right.

    Sure, it’s scoff-worthy to look at the logo, easily replicated with the Gotham font and low end desktop publishing software (*with no manual kerning ability, apparently) — but in truth, the road to get to that logo probably took a lot more submissions, versions, and revisions that we can ever imagine. I’m confident in suggesting that no self-respecting designer would have submitted this particular work as their top choice. It reeks of what we refer to as “design by committee”.

    I suspect the real problem here was who exactly approved this design. A majority of city councillors (none of whom have design backgrounds as I’m aware) approved the logo — but who shortlisted this particular version into the staff report that was ultimately approved?

    I suggest the real lost opportunity here was not tapping into the wealth of local creatives in our city to guide this design process, to critique and approve the final version.

    It’s a visual manifestation of irony: in a city hemorrhaging its creative potential that we can’t even get our new logo right.

    Read the full staff logo report here: http://council.vancouver.ca/20170222/documents/pspc3.pdf

  • Digging in the Crates : Posters

    Digging in the Crates : Posters

    Like the cobbler’s kids not having shoes – I’ve notoriously neglected to document or promote my own design and illustration work, despite over 25 years of successful and award winning self employment. Poster work was what first got me into design, as a natural extension of drawing comics since my teens. While posters where my first love, I must confess I haven’t done many posters for at least 15 years now. Most of these pre-date cheap color printing and widespread web use, some even pre-date digital output and most are from stacks of undigitized paper archives- posted here as a small snapshot of 1990’s Vancouver indie scene.

    I’ll keep adding as I unearth more archives. Here’s a sampler, in no particular order, filed under posters:

  • Kamandi – The Last Font on Earth!

    Kamandi – The Last Font on Earth!

    As a young boy, my absolute favourite comic-book was a Jack Kirby penned, DC published epic: The story of Kamandi – The Last Boy on Earth!

    Bascially, sort of a Planet of the Apes rip-off, a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, with young protagonist Kamandi as the last surviving teenager on the burnt out husk of a planet, now populated by talking animals of all sorts. I later grew to fully appreciate Kirby’s visual style and it became a huge influence on my own illustration work.

    I created this typeface many years ago for a series of gig posters, as tribute to the comic title. I dug it out of the crates and am releasing it into the wild as an Illustrator eps download

    Enjoy.

    (If you use it, please send me a sample!)