As the inaugural book, Logo Nest 01 was being conceptualized, I was flattered to be asked to contribute my writing and experience to the effort. Well, I guess they liked the article enough to ask me to write some more. Who knew?

Here is an excerpt from my new article for Logo Nest 02, entitled Longevity in the Logo Business,

When I think of long-term successes in logo design, names like Milton Glaser, Paula Scher, Saul Bass and Ivan Chermayeff come to mind. Of course, these people are the extreme – the pinnacle of design success.

Now, not all of us are poised to appear among the same levels of respect and admiration that they are, but it would be nice to work out a quaint, comfortable living doing something you love to do, wouldn’t it?

When I started out in design school, the orientation committee shared a statistic with us that has stuck with me to this day: Look to your right and your left. Chances are by graduation, both of those people will have dropped out of the program. Do the math and that’s roughly a 66% drop out rate.

Wow, I thought. That’s not going to be me. This is what I really want to do with my life. I never imagined that after going through all those hours of toil, late night study and work that anyone would dream of giving up. But, they sometimes do. Design is not for everyone.

Here is the collection of my work that will be included. Be sure and reserve your copy now.

Avocadoville takes place in historic Orange, California with beautiful craftsman-style homes and old-growth trees – it’s Anytown, USA, minus the snow in the winter time. In the downtown area, there are good places to eat, a handful of antique shops and lots of character everywhere. So, when designing a logo to capture that spirit, the use of vintage typefaces, texture and simple design elements seemed more than appropriate.

After showing these designs to the group, there were all kinds of favorites, so I elected to make them all available for purchase on my Zazzle.com storefront. Feel free to purchase one of your own if you like, and check Facebook for our next event.

This is pretty cool. After much discussion and preparation, the logo design inspiration site and forum, Logopond.com is publishing a design book. I am fortunate enough, with many of the talented logo design geeks of the world to be included in this inaugural volume.

The site has been a great, constructive avenue for me to help critique and discuss all sorts of inspirational logo work over the last 3 or 4 years, and make some wonderful online friends, too. With the amount of traffic the site gets, it has been a creative springboard for many a fledgling designer as well.

So, knowing in a more intimate sense of the level of designers that participate on a regular basis, I am looking forward to seeing the other contributor’s work in all its printed glory. I suggest you reserve yourself a copy.

To be honest, I’ve been rather impressed and a bit envious of some of the work that my fellow designers and illustrators have put forth in the last couple of years. Some really cool stuff has come out of their personal projects, and I’m feeling like I need something that will force me to work a little harder and expand my horizons. And, who knows, I may develop some new styles, techniques and workflows in the process. You know – learn stuff.

By posting it on my Illustrative Designer blog, I’ll hopefully be held more accountable for keeping it going and it should be a nice way to see how the project progresses.

I’m not saying all the work will be stellar and some of it may even suck, but it will be all part of the journey and hopefully will help make me a better creative person.

So, what exactly are you going to be doing?

Icons. Essentially, icons that will be communicating a concept with a very simple and clean visual solution. These won’t be icons that you will use for your average website for things like ‘print’ or ‘payment’. I am focusing on taking two keyword phrases (Ex. orange juice) that are all familiar to us and creating an icon that communicates that idea. They might be one-color or many, simple or illustrative in whatever style I may see fit.

They are not meant to work together as a set, but just an exercise in making the visual communicate clearly. As mentioned in the title, they will be random concepts and really could be anything. Some may be basic and some may have a little humor, I just don’t know yet. That’s the cool part of trying something like this.

Can some of these icons work as logo designs? Sure. And some of my icon design could even be considered illustration, depending on the work style.

Why 300 of them?

I picked 300 to try and design and post them often. That way, it would force me to keep with it, but not have to post every single day. I do enjoy my family and weekends.

When are you starting?

I’m starting January 1st, 2012 and continuing until I hit 300 icon designs, whenever that happens, but during the 2012 calendar year.

There you go. Feel free to follow along on the new 300 Random Icons blog.

Here’s a newly designed logo and identity I created for the start-up company, Nousuon, LLC. The mark is based upon an abstract representation of the geometrics of such phenomenons as crop circles and other unexplained Earthly happenings. Nousuon will be creating, designing and inventing products of various categories in the near future and wanted to have an identity that portrayed both abstract and structured forms in the logo and identity system, which were represented by the mosaic color field. They also still wanted a design that would be versatile enough to work in many capacities for company promotion.

That seems to be the mode that most clients are going for these days, with corporate design pieces working harder. Well, I think we delivered.