My weekend project which turned into my multi-weekend project: the nookbook. I took a standard hardback sketchbook from the nearby art store, carved up its guts, used a little Mod Podge, and had myself a pretty nifty (if I do say so myself) protective case for my new nook.

Oscar Wilde in his nookbook

I was hoping to use a Moleskine because I liked the idea of having the built-in rubber band that holds it closed, but the Moleskine dimensions didn’t match up correctly with the size of the nook. So I did the next best thing – found an old Moleskine, tore it to pieces in order to steal the rubber band and the built-in fabric bookmark and re-purposed it for the perfectly sized Cachet sketchbook, et voila:

nookbook in disguise mode / secret compartment / moleskine poseur

Immediately after I finished my project, I came across the Book Book which puts my creation to shame. I now have more work to do to up the ante, but that’ll have to wait for another weekend.

Besides, Kurt seems to like mine just fine:

During the GMail outages this past week, I thought Google needed their own version of the Twitter Fail Whale, so I went about creating one while watching Wedding Crashers for about the 30th time. If for just one disruptive morning, snail mail, the enemy of e-mail, slowly dragged GMail out of the clouds. Google, feel free to use this in a non-evil way.

GMail Fail Snails

Finally, Philly gets the Ork poster treatment it deserves. Clearly Ork heard my complaints and made appropriate reparations. I’ll forgive their treatment of Philly as a second-tier US city because I want one… at a discount.

Where you at, Mayfair?

Aside from my default go-to sites espn.com and facebook, huge timesucks in their own right, I can lose hours perusing through the randomness that is FFFFOUND!, an image bookmarking site. There’s plenty of garbage on there to be sure, but the photography, advertising work, and especially the graphic design work can draw me in for 20 minutes before I even realize it. Just today I came across these posters by Ork which are pretty cool representations of the neighborhoods of various U.S. cities. Here are just a few of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in… (click to see the originals on Ork’s site)

Boston – Downtown

New York – Hell’s Kitchen, Lower East Side, and Clinton

Philadelphia – Mayfair Wouldn’t you know, Philly gets second-class treatment, yet again.

[Ork Posters!]

So once again, a decade later, I find myself playing on a rugby club at Northwestern, however this time it’s for the Kellogg School of Management’s grad student team. And once again, I decided our logo needed to be brought into the 21st century. This was the shield used by the team last year.

It’s a mishmash of low-res clipart which screams “1996″. My first real issue with this logo came when I became part of the leadership team late last year and we wanted to have some team beer coozies made with the logo on it. This logo was incredibly unwieldy for screen printing, and in trying to clean it up, I got fed up and decided we needed something completely new. On top of that, none of the current team really knew what any of the origins of the various shield elements were. The history was completely lost on us. Our team nickname was the Rhinos, yet our shield had a boar on it, supposedly representing the strength of the forwards, and a pheasant, representing the speed of the backs. Not a real consistent theme here. It was clearly time for something new. So I did a little research on the series of tubes, and when I came across the logo for USA rugby, I had my inspiration.

It’s simple, it’s got an old-school shield feel to it but it’s much more modern. Even though the rugby ball looks more like a football, it’s pretty solid. So I did a little doodling and here’s what draft no. 1 looked like.

And then after some Photoshop magic, here are two versions of what I ended up with. The boar and pheasant are gone, the rhino is in, and the palm tree was preserved because that actually has some significance as a nod to our annual winter tours to the Bahamas.

Here’s the post on the KRFC website announcing the new logo: KRFC unveils a new shield.

But I’m not done yet. I decided that there’s probably some lingering attachment to the old logo, especially for recent grads that played with it on their jerseys week after week. So I’m working on a new “throwback” version of the shield. Here’s what it currently looks like. It’s real rough, but I think it’s got some potential. Now if I can only find the time to finish it.

[Kellogg Rugby Football Club]

Way back when, in the days of yore, I played on the club rugby team at Northwestern. Back in the 90s, the team used this standard NU logo on all its gear.

This is all well and good. It’s a solid logo. But rugby clubs throughout the world tend to have much more elaborate rugby-specific crests and shields full of meaningful elements that point to their club’s history and affiliations. The crests tend to have fanciful representations of lions, griffins, ligers, pegasuses (pegasi?) . . . much like this half-lion half-chicken figure replete with sharp talons.

I decided we needed something a little more specific for the rugby club that used some elements of these classic shields and went about painstakingly creating a new wildcat, using the same head from the NU logo.

Considering that back in 1997 when I was working on this, I think I was using MS Paint just as much as I was using Photoshop. And on a 1-10 scale, 10 being a Photoshop wizard, I would say that I probably ranked a -3. This thing took me waaaaay too long. My grades in physics and differential equations bore out the effects of this obsession.

The final product of my efforts is below. We began using this on all of our gear soon after and the current team a decade later still uses it on their website, jerseys, kitbags and more. I’m proud of its staying power, but I would definitely like another crack at it. There’s really not much to it aside from the wildcat. Other standard shield elements, like a rugby ball, or other items that refer to unique events in club history are unfortunately absent. I wouldn’t mind spending some time on a V2, but then again, I’m not part of that team any more, so I need to let it go.

[Northwestern Rugby]