MANVIL

There is an old saying that everything worth designing is based on somebody else’s design to some degree. We agree. Anything that worked well once, can be redone in some manner or another to freshen it, bring it up to date, or to broaden the knowledge of the viewer.

Case and point: Horizon Fire’s ’09 Touring Poster.

We’ll readily admit, we didn’t make the image on the left, someone else did. Someone with great skill and a good eye. We applaud them, and if they get their shorts in a bind that we have that image up, well then we’ll take it down. What MANVIL set out to do was to make that image entirely scale-able with Illustrator, and let us just say, it’s a pain in the arse to do it.

Lettering and shadowing, that can be done easily enough. Where illustrator makes the deal tough is in the projection of depth, the implied photo realism. Oh, we could have taken days on this and made it even better with 200 layers of shading and whatnot, but the challenge we set to ourselves was to put it together with fewer than 30 layers. Inevitable there are folks out there who can make it better looking. Innevitably we could have spent a week on this.

We had a day to play so we went for it. And we like it. (Some could do it faster as well, but they might not have had so much fun)

We looked for other work that the Horizon Fire poster might have been influenced by and found these.

Take a look at these General Dynamics annual report covers designed by the Eric Nitsche, we found them on Hyperakt‘s site. If you look closely, you can see where the relatively simple graphic might have gotten some ideas for depth. Beautiful images.

Hat’s off to General Dynamics. For a mammoth defense contractor, turning to Nitsche was a pretty cool and inspired idea. 

It always helps to update old clients graphics to remain on top of their needs and whatnot. atomic auto is no exception for us.

We’ve known Travis and the crew at atomic for some time and they do quality work. That’s why we like working for them. They make fixing cars look simple, so we’d like to make marketing for them look equally simple.

Of course sometimes the graphics guys out-shoot the good ideas for the graphics.

Case and point, the Scandinavian Screaming Chicken Shirt.

Yes, the graphic of the screaming chicken is huge, and at this point it isn’t really owned by anybody who uses it, so it’s fair game. (That and we changed it by +30% at the lab)

Big and bold, the image is made to be recognized from a long way away. The trouble is, it’s an unfathomably hard image to print. Too large, the screen over all the wrong seems, and way, way too much ink for our budget. So there are some issues with production.

If we were Sean Combs, or another large print tee producer who was able to pay well for the production, we’d go for it, but we can’t. (Not this week anyway)

So we’ll simply offer this image up to the tee heavens and hope that someday we can put this together and make an awesome shirt for Travis and the boys. We think it would look rad!

A long while back we saw a video with Jeremy Irons acting in the persona of Klaus Von Bulow. In the clip he says, in a tone well studied and decidedly vainglorious, “Fashion should be fun”.

For best effects in mimicking the proper enunciation, keep your lower pre-molars attached to your upper canines. (It never hurts to raise your eyebrows and look down your nose either.)

What we’re getting at here is that if Fashion should be fun, so should everything else. So today, we take a shot at old school branding. Branding put together as an homage to a bygone era, a time when manufacturing was a big time grit and nasty. No clean suits, no goggles, no rubber gloves and sure as hell no oxygen tanks.

This is a tip of the hat to a time when stacks belched, workers carried tools to work with their hands and a three tonne era-specific super-car had a blisteringly fast 90HP motor… that got them all the way to 90 MPH.

MANVIL has a special love for the huge industrial. We love machines, we love tools and we’re kinda falling for this graphic.

If you want great graphics to be placed on your car, truck, boat or even your fine kids racing cart, give the boys t KolorWerx a call. We’re pretty sure they make beautiful stuff.

That said, and with real sadness that we can’t back Green Bay. Go Pats.

It takes a lot of things to start out in business on your own. Passion, a skill-set, and a client base; the faith that you can move forward each day towards the goal of making things work out for the betterment of your business and your trade; and you have to have a belief that things will work out alright.

A well travelled business owner we know once said “You’ll meet and asshole every day of your life.” and an even wiser sage added to that “make sure it’s not the guy/girl in the mirror.”

With this in mind the graphic displayed is that of a client MANVIL did work for. A client who asked MANVIL to vectorize their drawing. The client later said they loved the finished graphic, and then they took our artwork (the JPEG with a watermark below) and paid an on-line company to vectorize the JPEG. She then refused to pay MANVIL for the work done.

MANVIL made nothing, and although that sucks fiscally, it doesn’t suck all the way.

We got into graphics at MANVIL to make things look better, and looking at the original images provided to us by the client, the final MANVIL graphic is a success. The matching hemisphere lines, subtle thinning on the lower highlight and curiously notched upper and lower apices are balanced in comparison to the preliminary drawing. We think it looks as it should: solid and refined. We even like the design, which is too bad, because we’re not so thrilled with the client right now.

Suffice it to say, the image the former client paid somebody else to vectorize was poorly transferred to their website. It subsequently pixilated badly on their packaging as well, which is too bad, because we’d have made sure that would have looked great. And we like to see our paying client’s succeed.

Karma, she is a fickle mistress.

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If you’re lucky, you just might create a graphic that you yourself love. It could be a large graphic for a client, or a simple graphic that works just for you, but when you’ve built something that you yourself actually enjoy, well, at that point who the hell cares what anybody else thinks.

I mention this because over and above all else, MANVIL believes that good graphics rule. If the creativity works for you, and the image made inspires a positive reaction, (or a negative one if that’s what you were aiming for) then you’ve found joy making something you dig. Muy Bueno! That should be what it’s all about. No!?

Yeah, times are tight, graphics jobs in this town are few and far between, with a lot of competition for every opening, but it’s not at all selfish, or delusional to like your own work. It’s selfish and delusional if you like your own work and don’t put it out there.

Here’s to Ted’s Salsa Lab, may they move towards the competitive circuit! They’ve got a logo MANVIL would go to bat with.

The United States Navy's PT Forces Insignia

While working on a project for the PT-658, (Portland’s WWII PT boat museum) I came across the insignia the navy put together for the PT boat service. ” Cool!” thought I, until I looked closer.

Now I say, “Radical”. A glance with no concern of the details shows a rope, divided by a torpedo, with a few wakes in it. No big deal.

But the design is so much for than that. The rope is inconsistently sized so that twine is thicker in front of the warhead, as well as behind the propeller, thereby drawing attention to the direction the torpedo is facing. It is purposefully creating an oblong image to the eye. I wouldn’t have thought about this twice, but the stitch count is literally lower on the sides parallel to the torpedo. It’s like a moving target. It’s a round patch with an ovoid look, and for this reason it draws attention.

It’s a little thing. Probably nothing, but it is nice to know people thought about this kind of thing. It’s just a nice detail.