Archive for August, 2009

Valley Distributing and Storage Co. design

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

For over 50 years, Valley Distributing & Storage Company has been the premier provider of supply chain solutions in the Northeast; and when they needed a design firm to communicate that sterling reputation to an online audience, they turned to BlackOut.

We designed a new site that reflects the full range of Valley’s logistics services including warehousing, transportation and distribution. Valley needed a web presence that was innovative and elegant. See the results at the Valley Distributing & Storage Company site.

The Font Isn’t Always Right

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

When designing, we tend to rely on fonts to assist in doing our job. Possibly one of the more important tools we can have is a good library of great fonts at our disposal, as well as an understanding of how these fonts will layout, their letter forms and spacing. Sometimes though you really like the font, but not every letter form works for you. No one ever said you had to use it as, that’s one of the reasons why Ai has a convert to outlines options

In this particular case the font was already designated by years of use with the client, and when asked to design an anniversary logo for them, I went straight to their logo font Eurostile (Bold Extended 2). When I laid out the tag line however I found some letters in the Eurostile alphabet fighting with the extended width and rounded corners indicative of this typeface.
Eurostile straight out of the box (more…)