Well, if you’re like me, there’s always someone in the family that will quickly throw your name in the hat to help out. That someone was my wife. Go figure.

To be honest, I have a great relationship with my in-laws and have shared a long history with their family. A lot of the adventures and experiences that the family has shared have been told to or experienced first-hand by me. When the concept of a tree-of-life was mentioned, I gave it a lot of thought. What better way to convey the many adventures they’ve shared together over 50 years, several states, three kids and a smattering of grandchildren? It made perfect sense and I was honored.

Now, I know this isn’t the first tree-of-life illustration to grace the planet, but it would be my own personal rendition of the idea. I would take the many details and experiences from the family and try to depict them in icons, collected together into one, robust and sturdy tree. Since it would probably get pretty busy with all the different colors of everything, I tried to limit it to just two shades of blue. And, to make the tree even more special, I would draw the lower boughs into the shape of the number ’50′. See if you can make that out in the last photo.

Some thumbnail sketches from the sketchbook.

And, some details from the finished illustration.

Needless to say, they were very touched with the result. Big smiles on their faces, and even some tears – that’s always nice to see. The best part is watching them pore through the different icons and interpreting the significance of each symbol and discovering details they hadn’t noticed before.

It was certainly a great way of giving back to people who’ve made your life that much more complete – in their own way.

This one is particularly compelling as it is the second Logo Nest book that I have been a contributing writer, as well as a logo designer. For LN02, I was asked to write pretty much anything logo-related that I thought was relevant to our times, and might be particularly useful to the logo design community. After much thought and deliberation, I chose to write my article on Longevity in the Logo Business. After a fair amount of time under my belt myself, I thought it was something I can really talk about. You can read an excerpt of my piece here.

I must say I am always a bit nervous sending in some of my writing for a book. As a designer, I’m not as comfortable with writing as I am with my design work – so be kind. I hope it reads well. There are some other great logo designers and contributors that were selected to write as well, such as Alen Pavlovic, Richard Baird, Nemanja Veselinovic, Jeff Fisher, Josh Hayes, Gareth Hardy and Jacob Cass. Be sure and check out their articles, too. There’s lots of great information for some very diverse subjects within the logo design industry.

In addition to the writing, I had 12 logo designs selected to appear within the pages. It is especially flattering considering the limited amount of space, the print run and the level of work. See my previous post.

I think this latest edition went pretty well overall. There are some noticeable improvements over the inaugural volume and I’m certain the momentum will continue to the next one. Make sure you order yours soon, before they’re all gone.

If you’re not familiar with iheartlogos, it is a logo design site and competition that has a slightly different approach – all the entries are collected, then voted on by the other participating competitors in the season. In essence, the group picks the best work to appear in the book. If you make it in, then your peers thought it was nice work as well. It’s as simple as that.

So, in short, this season’s volume did not disappoint. I thought the variety of work was strong and balanced, with less work appearing that seems to over-saturate the many logo design blogs out there. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels that way, which is a testament to the iheartlogos voting structure.

The paper quality was pretty good, but hopefully next season’s volume will be able to budget a stock with less show-through of the surrounding pages. Overall, pretty good for a short-run printing of only 1,000 copies. If iheartlogos continues to grow and gain some traction, I’m sure the quality will improve exponentially in the coming seasons. Also, another nicety would be a directory in the back with corresponding page numbers for each designer’s logo entries.

Overall, I’m proud of the work that got selected and am glad to participate in the competition. I look forward to Season Three. Don’t forget to enter your work.

Needless to say, a website that is near and dear to my heart has got to be iheartlogos.com. It’s a competition platform centered around the premise that logo design shouldn’t be judged by a handful of select people, but by the logo design peer community. Amen.

So, when I was approached by the folks at iheartlogos to participate in their new Designer Conversations series appearing on their blog, I of course, said yes. You want to know what my favorite logo was that a client killed? Funniest thing I’ve been told by a client? What did I wish I invented? It’s all there for your perusal.

My conversation is the one to kick it off. How cool is that?