By Eric Kidd
January 9, 2013
The lovely ladies of the University of Florida’s Master of Science Dietetic Internship program approached me in 2012 to design a logo and develop a website for their annual continuing education conference. The theme for the conference was “Nutrition and the Brain”. For the logo, I decided to create a cornucopia of brain foods and meld them together to form everyone’s favorite organ. Colorful and detailed, yet instantly recognizable was my goal. I used the profile of the head to encapsulate the food-brain and tie the mark together. I chose clean and semi-formal typography to give the fun-loving mark a serious undertone.
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By Eric Kidd
January 7, 2013
While I worked with Swamped Publishing, I developed this promotional flyer to draw up interest with local businesses. The flyer includes examples from our SwampBugs product site (which I helped develop), as well as the SwampBugs theme itself. I wanted to appeal to business owners by using an informal voice paired with professional (but fun) presentation. The background of the front is active, but not so incredibly in your face that it distracts from the full color images (which are encircled for emphasis and extra interest).
Front
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By Eric Kidd
January 6, 2013
Southern Sustainability is a not-for-profit organization that operates in Southern Illinois. While I worked there, I was tasked with redesigning the organization’s logo. The inspiration for the logo was the phrase “Think global, act local”; while the organization’s efforts are often focused on the local community, the intent is for these actions to ripple out to the greater global community. Southern Illinois is defined by it’s rivers, so this seemed a natural place to begin. The curvature of the Earth gives a top-down sense of perspective to the mark with the sun shining over both the state and the world representing (sustainable) energy.
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By Eric Kidd
January 5, 2013
At SIUC, all seniors graduating from the Communication Design program are required to complete a senior thesis project and display it in the senior exhibition show. This was both exciting and terrifying at the same time. So. Many. Eyes. There were only a few professors who took on senior thesis students, mine was Rob Lopez. Prof. Lopez gave us a few choices on which we could frame our projects. I chose the ‘dream project’ – a re-branding of professional tennis. This made sense for me, I am an avid follower of professional tennis and I have been playing the game competitively since I was 13. This being a creative exercise, I imagined a world where the two governing bodies of tennis, the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) for men and the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) for women had merged into one unified body: the TPA (Tennis Professionals Association).
The Project
With a project in mind, I built myself a creative brief. The deliverables for the project were split into three parts:
- The Brand
- The Ad Campaign
- The Flash Site (cue sighs here – it WAS 2009…)
The Brand
A good brand starts with a good logo. I looked at the old ATP and WTA logos and compared them to other sports organizations logos. What I found was an emphasis on action – exciting shapes, bold sans-serif fonts and bright colors. I set out to develop a logo that matched that exciting flare, but that captured the heritage and class of the game of tennis. I ended up with a four-color tennis ball analog with an emphasis on forward motion (both of the ball and the organization).
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By Eric Kidd
December 1, 2012
The Apex project was an exercise in branding and promotions during my senior year at school. We were tasked with developing, from the ground up, a brand for a high-end luxury ski resort. We were allowed to choose the location of the resort, though the aesthetic had to be modern and chic rather than rustic. We were also tasked with naming the resort. To me, “Apex” seemed like a fitting name – A place at the top of the world for those on the top of the world. It was met with some criticism by my peers; in hindsight, ‘Apex’ does kind of sound like the name of a gym rather than a resort. As well as the brand, we also were required to do create promotional material for the resort. This included the 11″ x 17″ travel poster which you see below.
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By Eric Kidd
October 28, 2012
This poster was designed as part of the 2009 Design Days student/professional conference at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I, along with a few other students, teamed up with local ad agency Arthur Agency to develop a brand and promotional materials for the conference. We designed the ‘design.’ mark (seen above, and again below) to indicate that the conference was a collaborative effort of the two design departments (industrial design and communication design) at SIUC. The conference has and is aimed at engaging students in both departments with alumni who are working in the design fields. We wanted the brand to clearly state that the conference was about design, so a simple yet bold typographic mark fit the bill perfectly.
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