As noted in yesterday’s post, I made the transition from a predominantly blue, red, and white design to a blue, beige, and black design for MANOVERBOARD.
In order to take away design elements, though, I lost some things that I’m happy are gone, though it took almost three years. They include:

• The strange, red-colored outline of a man holding up small business cards near a board. He served not so much as a brand but as a mascot and I was soo, soo tired of him. Of course, I have tremendous fondness for him and he’ll make a return someday.
• The shades of transparent color over a photograph of waves that just looked pretty but felt increasingly meaningless. I still adore transparency and the unusual effects it can have on light and image density but I’m done with it for now.
• Too-light gray color text. While I find gray text inherently sexy and sharp, I have a real hankering for darkness (not The Darkness, though) on sites. Douglas Bowman’s Stop Design site is beautifully, richly dark, and his work is always an inspiration.
• The color red. For the longest time, the MANOVERBOARD logotext was treated in a dark, bloody red that registered passion, strength, and ardour. But black is better. Now the the same logotext in black feels strangely impersonal yet more secure and historically oriented. The color black (and I *still* say black is a color and not the absence thereof) lends punch to the overall feeling of the site that was lacking before.

I won’t be ashamed. I won’t be admonished. I won’t be adjectival. But I am happy to announce a kind of successful redesign of my “corporate” website MANOVERBOARD.com.

I’m fascinated with the YWCA’s new branding, which includes (nay, is a tagline. This is a veritable first: the tagline, set in Helvetica bold (or a slight variation), acts a signpost for the logo, which is “ywca,” set in Helvetica bold, or something like it.
Branding and identity consulting firm Landor put the whole shebang together and wrote about it: eliminating racism, empowering women, ywca.

Subscription-based PDF magazines have now begun to hit their stride. I’m fascinated by them because they offer tremendous possibility with regard to design, content, and format and are inexpensive to produce, easy to carry, and are archivable and searchable; well, they’re all the things that companies have been promoting for years.
A new design-related title is coming out called Design In-Flight. The first issue will feature recent luminaries like Armin Vit and Damien Newman, who I like quite a bit.
Having said all that, I hate reading long PDFs and I find having and storing them on my computer means I’ll never get to them. Printing them is painful as you watch the wads of color ink dispense from you printer. And the lack of tangible goods in a subscription just seems well, odd. Yet, it’s interesting that this format for distributing ideas and images has taken on new life and I’m paying attention to new PDF publication dispersal methodologies.

Although PDFs have been around since 1991 (the technology was originally called Interchange PostScript and we’re all thankful for the name change), PDF files continue to litter my desktop like tiny red-bannered bunny rabbits. I download at least one or two of them per day from many different technology, design, and other sites, and half the time, they go unread. The other half the time, the PDFs are read and promptly discarded. For some reason, the ones that go unread end up in a file on my desktop called “useful.”
Two recent design-focused PDFs that may be of interest are:
10 Years of Photoshop by Jeff Schewe, which can be found on Design by Fire’s site. The PDF itself is rather ugly in a designerly way but the history is rich. There’s even a photo of the off-the-shelf Adobe Photoshop 1.0 box, which looks surprisingly like the Adobe Photoshop 8.0 box.
Budget Design by Didier P. Hilhorst and Daniel S. Rubin, which can be found at Sinelogic Press free for another few days. The focus is on workflow, which is boring, but I like the design of the document.

Very interesting that after yesterday’s post about the paucity of online design group weblogs, I noticed that three features indicating that design itself is becoming an increasingly viable profession, a respected career, and a potentially lucrative job (well, let’s hope so).
They are: Today’s Op-Art piece in the Times by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm called Opinion > Op-Chart: Where the Jobs Are” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13COXX.html”>Where the Jobs Are (in case it’s gone, here’s the graphic from the piece); Fast Company’s cover story Masters of Design which I can’t read perhaps because it’s all about industrial design and you might not read perhaps because the magazine’s online content is limited to subscribers; finally Doug Bowman, the smartie of Stopdesign, has rebuilt with much fanfare and deserved kudos Blogger.com. The new Blogger interface is quite luxe and is a tribute to the possibilities of our collective online future.

Reuters/Yahoo today posted the proposed newflag for Iraq. It somehow completely denies the symbology of the former flag (which nonetheless represented course evility) and I can’t help but think it looks a number of non-designers pulled it together over a period of days — the blues are the colors of sleep medications and the yellow the color of mustard. The crescent looks far too much like a “c,” stretched and pulled and smashed down. Maybe it’s appropriate afterall.

It’s been a very hectic few days but I’m always eager to give credit where credit is due: the new issue of Reservocation is out and there are some excellent pieces on illustration, typography on the Web, and other good design stuff. Relatedly, I have not gotten to one item on the list from Sunday. Help me, people.

I’ve been looking around recently for some new typefaces that I can exploit in my serious and casual design escapades with clients.
Currently in love again with the Nobel font, which I’m using for a z-fold brochure, I revisited its founding foundry Font Bureau, which still has one of the finest typeface sites around. I fell in love with just about every font on the site. Hard to do? Hyperbole, you say? I placed every font in the “cart” and tried to punch out, credit card in hand, and guess what — my browser crashed.

I’m completely elated that Barneys.com, a MANOVERBOARD designed site, received the Macromedia Site of the Day award today. Flash partner CLR Media got noted, too. Total dream.