Vada is splitting at the seems! We have got so much work to do lately, that it is time to expand. Expanding is wonderful, and expanding is hard. At the moment, we are changing our business setup, hiring on some awesome people, looking into building up our physical studio and lots of other crazy awesome stuff!

Growing hurts sometimes though. There is a lot of planning and unseen things that go into the running of vada the company that make vada the studio work so well.  Here is a shot of our new office.  We are working out of a beautiful facility in the Riverwoods Business Park in Provo Utah.

So far it has be wonderful and quiet.  We bump Ratatat and The Fleet Foxes all day and create awesome stuff.  We hired a new mystery designer who has created some awesome new stuff for us. More on him later.

Well, Stay tuned and look forward to a lot of changes and exciting new things coming from vada!

Vada now has a twitter!  Follow us for relavent dribblings about contemporary Graphic Design! Find us here : http://twitter.com/#!/vadastudio

Graphic Design makes my heart sing a little bit.  Looking at the way text looks on a page really does it for me.  Letter forms are gorgeous to me – the way a famous painting might be gorgeous to you.  In my college figure drawing class, my professor tried to dissuade me from being a Graphic Designer and consider becoming an illustrator.  He said to me “so you like fonts?” with a tone of belittlement in his voice.  I had to just laugh.  Fonts – typefaces – are so beautiful to me.  I love them and to me they are art.

I tend to love sans serif fonts.  I tend to love modern (referring to the mid century movement, not referring to contemporary) sans serif fonts.  A few typefaces I love:
Helvetica
Bebas
Bauhaus ITC
Gotham (Hoefler and Frere-Jones)
Copse
There are a few seriffed typefaces i like as well:
Courier
Museo
Acropolis (Hoefler and Frere-Jones)
Archer (Hoefler and Frere-Jones)
Alexandria FLF

Nearing the end of 25 days of monsters, our campaign for this month. We have met many a wonderful creatures along the way! A new monster comes out every day. To meet all of them, please visit our facebook page.

This past month we finished a new webite, ACROdoodle .  ACROdoodle is an awesome community site – everyday they post a new acronymn (comprised of 4 letters) and you decide what it stands for and do a doodle to represent your idea.  After that, members of the ACROdoodle see eachothers doodles, have a good laugh and then vote on doodle they like.  It is really fun.  Right now they have over a hundred members, ranging from moms to kids to college students.  The numbers are growing everyday.  ACROdoodle is a free community.

Working on the design for ACROdoodle was really enjoyable. User interface, web design, graphic design, identity and logo design were all part of the process of bringing ACROdoodle to life.  We decided to go with pink as the major color for this brand – pink brings out he playful aspect of the community and sets it apart from other similar companies which are predominantly green and blue.  We used lots of notebook paper and doodly scribbled children’s illustrations to evoke the purpose and feeling of the brand.

Owner and creator of ACROdoodle, Sean Brown, is a cool down to earth guy.  He created ACROdoodle just because he wanted to have it for fun for him and his friends.  As it grows, he continues to be amazed at the exposure it is getting.  So sign up, it is free and fun . . . heck Vada is a member!

This past little while we had the opportunity to design a wedding announcement for an awesome couple – (at the time_ Jeff Dickamore and Aurora Florence.  Aurora had a vision of what she wanted to create.  She gave me a great and super helpful word document full of 20s-40s luggage tags and tickets and so forth.  Jeff and Aurora are actors, and directly after they are married, there plan is to move to NYC.  Accordingly, Aurora wanted to make a statement that said – “hey everybody we are moving to vaudville!!!” in a classy old timey way.  Here are a few examples we had to draw from:

After consulting with Aurora, we went to work, and came out with a really classy piece.  Producing the invites invovled punching a whole in 750 photographs, rounding all the corners, perferating the edges of all the invites, finding a micro-dater (those things that stamp the date on your library book checkout card) and tying red yarn to hold them together.  The invites included two inserts.  The inserts were really my favorite part – they have some great illustrations from yester-year on them in wood cut style.

The typography was really the most interesting part to work on.  The typography from that era was totally fascinating.  They used such eclectic typefaces – and they used like 50 in one document.  I did a lot of studying of the old bills and tickets from the era to make sure that my graphic design was accurate, and evoked the feeling of the time.

We hope to do many more of these in the future.  It was great to see the Bride’s personal style find a voice in the invites we were able to make for her!  Jeff and Aurora are an awesome couple.  So fun to work with, even while folding and cutting at 3 A.M. with jungle book playing in the background.

Recently Vada was commissioned to create a logo, and branding for {Photoclub}, a blog that gives out photo assignments to an open community of photographers.  The color scheme, as dictated by the client was to be monochromatic and simple.  Black and white.  Yellow adds a few necessary annunciations.

Clearlym Helvetica bold was the correct choice for the job.  Modern fonts, sans  serif, basic, bold, awesome.  These are the buz words for this design.  At Vada we love helvetica.

Helvetica’s name is had for good and evil all over the world.  Since it is the most ubiquitous and pedestrian typeface, some think that is over used, boring and limp.  Others (vada belongs to this camp) beleive that Helvetica is the greatest gift God has given design.  Personally, over here in vadaland, we think that helvetica is the ultimate typeface and love swiss typographic design.  It has such a cheeky vintage, almost classic feel – and we are all over it.

Say what you will about helvetica . . . you probably use it without even realizing it.

Recently we had the opportunity of assisting Giraffon Mobile in designing their first iPhone app. It is called GoTo – it does local search and finds things in like 3 taps. Andrew of Vada was repsonsible for the GUI (graphical user interface), icons, logo, informational design, promotional material and more. Check out these great screen shots and graphics:

GoTo was a great project to work on. Firstly it taught us ALL about the world of apps and iPhones and iPads.  Infact in a way, Giraffon was doing us a huge favor by brining us into the 21st century by letting us come play on the project.  We used a lot of Adobe photoshop and illustrator to get the job done.  The goal was to create something totally modern, totally hip that looked like a nearly futuristic time machine, using kind of an old school pocket watch look.  We think it turned out pretty great.

GoTo is currently available on the app store!  You should deffinetly download it because it is free and it is really helpful and cool – and it probably won’t be free for ever! GO! Download it here.

This project was really great becuase there were some many different aspects of the work. We got to design icons – and UIs, and loading screens, and logos, and clock faces, and compasses, and weather icons, and . . . best of all, we got to design an accompanying website to promote the app.  The website was the most fun, let’s be honest.  You can visit that here.  Mores shots: