Yesterday I had a contact from a client from several years ago needing some support and their file was no longer on the hard drive, and so I was forced to visit the dusty archives.

At this point you are perhaps visualising a dusty old corridor, me with torch in hand, and bats swooping at my head. Nothing so dramatic – the archives are a spin of a chair behind me at the bottom of my filing cabinet ha ha…

Whilst I like to describe them as archives, lets say they are more like disorganised discs with random dates and years on them, with absolutely no information about what is inside for half of them.

I’m sure many business owners will relate to the early days of their business when it didn’t quite occur to them that the archives would grow substantially and thus some sort of ‘system’ would be required from the outset for data to be easily found.

So I was routing through the jumble and thought I’d treat you to some of my earliest ‘work’. I have not looked at these designs for at least three years and all have been long gone of the hard drive and languising in the bottom draw for some time. It is a journey of discovery for me as it is for you.

Here we go, opening the disk…..

DESIGN SAMPLE 1
………………..now the first design project recorded in my accounts was in November 2002, so this design below from December 2002 really is one of my earliest works, one of the very first designs I ever created.

Now I have to say this is utterly vile and a badly badly drawn female character! For a start she seems rather sulky and unhappy with her bag to say the least about the concept.

Thankfully the client settled on my better concept shown below which even today doesn’t look too bad. The only thing I find offensive about it is the font…because this font has been used to death over the years; when I used the font it wasn’t profilated over the entire web, but it is now….and seems to be heavily used in the US I’ve noticed – US businesses seem to find favour with this type of cute retro font.

If you are looking for cute retro fonts the best place I’ve found on the web is www.fontdiner.com - there is a fantastic selection there and their website is very cool.

DESIGN SAMPLE 2
I found this ‘Truly Ace Vintage’ logo design, just after the Bag Habits design, and the horrible memories came flooding back. What was I thinking!? Goodness! I still have this font in my font library however

If I dig hard enough I probably could find the hideous website design acompanying it, but I don’t have time for that. I think after this design the simple plain text only ‘Truly Ace logo’ was evolved…I think I felt, and still feel that because I become so easily bored with designs, that I didn’t want to become trapped without something that would date and I would grow to hate.

I actually recently changed the font for the Truly Ace logo because the old font had become dated, but with it being text only and the colours retained, it didn’t involve a sweeping change to the whole look of our brand, and I like that versatility to keep the design looking fresh without changing the basic image.

DESIGN SAMPLE 3
I will leave you with my secret shame – the very worst design I think I ever created in very beginning and one that has never been aired in public, this is an exclusive so to speak

Ok, I can see where I was going with this….see the text is falling…. how clever of me (dripping sarcasm)……..what I neglected to realise is what on earth has the flowing of the ‘water text’ got to do with software and systems consultancy, and how does the design help viewers relate to the business as offering this service?

Well it doesn’t does it? ….one can almost forgive designs that show no meaning if they are a strong brand design, but not when they are as ugy as this monster.

What I should have done is questioned the client as to how the words falling water relates to their service, and used that information to create something with meaning.

So the ‘archives’ are back in their drawer, and it was an ‘interesting’ (scary??) trip down memory lane. Hopefully I won’t have to revisit them anytime soon. My back up is far more organised nowadays with in-house backup of all client designs, and remote back up on top of this, so fingers crossed I won’t be loosing any files soon.

Amanda