I’ve previously posted about kubb, and since then it’s become even more of an obsession. I just completed a new logo for Kalamazoo Kubb, our local kubb club. Last year, before we ever competed in any tournaments, my group of friends founded the club to promote kubb in our area. For any organization to really succeed they need a solid visual identity, and since I’m a designer, that responsibility fell to me.
This was no easy task. It’s been some time since I had to develop a logo so I thought it’d be fun to document some of the steps involved. Here’s a little peak into my process and some insight on how I arrived where I did.
After quite a bit of time sketching and playing with different ideas, I started to think about what was special about kubb. I wanted to show elements of the game and possibly allude to the Swedish and/or viking heritage of kubb. If possible, I’d even throw in something very Kalamazoo.
Thinking about those qualities, I finally narrowed it down to six basic ideas (each with a variation). I showed these to club members and gathered feedback. Number one (top left corner) and number 4 (middle right side) were the most popular.
Now that I had it narrowed down, it was time to figure out a color palette. Normally I’d be looking for something that really said kubb or Kalamazoo, but neither has much of a color history. I set out to create a handful of colors that worked well with other and could be turned into an official palette for our group. Here are some early experiments. I may have gone slightly overboard on this step. Shout out to Design Seeds for a lot of inspiration.
I finally arrived at what I thought was the strongest logo and color combination for our kubb club. I felt the crossed batons and king (all elements of gameplay) made the logo say kubb. The shield and overall coat of arms feel gave paid a nice tribute to the heritage of kubb. On the top of the king, you may notice the two Ks, the initials of the club, and the shield’s golden color is a little nod to the many fine beer breweries in Kalamazoo.
It was important to me that the logo could easily scale to a small social media icon and be simplified to a one color print. I think this final logo achieves all of those goals and I’m excited to start applying it to t-shirts, stickers and more. Be on the lookout for Kalamazoo Kubb. We have some big ideas and events planned for the upcoming year. 2015 will be the year of kubb in Kalamazoo!
To start we were considering various materials. Since we wanted it to be durable and last for years, it had to be something sturdy. We wanted to be able to pick up the trophy in celebration. We ended up with a combination of wood and metal pipe.
To start we sprayed the entire thing with primer and then a coat of white paint. After that dried, I placed on some star stickers I cut out on a friend’s Cricut. Then I painted over those stars with blue, let them dry overnight and then peeled of the stickers. This left perfectly sharp looking white stars. The stripes were a similar process, but with painters tape to create sharp lines. We left the silver of the metal pipes and chains for a little shimmer and contrast.
A long, long time ago, in a gala… I mean when I was but a mere student of graphic design, I designed a really cool website for the Frostic School of Art along with fellow student, Max Millermaier. When it was time to build the site, I was hired on after graduation to do so. So in the summer of 2009, I was so psyched to launch, what at the time was, a bleading-edge, video-background website. Fast forward four years and the site was starting to feel sluggish, dated and disjointed.
The next step was to make it mobile friendly. I’m a huge fan of responsive websites and have dabbled with them for a while now. I recently did a project that used the 
One of my graphic design professors is retiring. After 39 years (not a shabby run), Bruce Naftel is “Beginning New.” Last week we celebrated with a “Big Night” retirement party. Obviously, the theme was Bruce’s initials B and N. Bruce’s former students (including myself), some colleagues and friends all came together to create a special project for Bruce. We each created a composition using the letters B and N. Here a few I came up with.
A recent example for me was called Hours. It was an iPhone app I had designed screens for. The project was going to serve up business hours on top of the foursquare database. We were nearing launch when foursquare announced they were adding hours into their main database. The months of time and effort we had invested was all for naught. Foursquare had beaten us to the punch. Our spirits were broken and even though our standalone app could still be useful to non-foursquare users, it was never finished.