Last Instinct

I helped Magnus of Helsingkrona Gille with design for some business cards about a month ago. They will act as combined business cards and flyers to hand out to people that might be interested in the alumni association. He kindly posted some samples which arrived in the mail today.

The design follows the previous graphic style I used for a folder earlier this year. If you want some you can get your hands on them at the office of Helsingkrona Nation.

I found this amazing remake of a very classic label, the Chiquita banana. The design is made by DJ Neff and it’s just so inspiring. Simple and beautiful. You can read all about it in an interview on design:related or in the article at Cap&Design (swedish) or make your own sticker and share it using facebook connect on the cool campaign site. The interface of the sticker designer also features the same techniques as used in the award-winning campaign I did for LdB in late 2008.

I’m part of the alumni for Helsingkrona Nation, called Helsingkrona Gille. I was asked to put up a decent website for them and start up some activity on the web. Since I was very active in Helsingkrona when I studied in Lund I naturally took this challenge. The first step was to just change the old Facebook group for a Helsingkrona Gille Fanpage to get something to work with while developing.

Secondly I started to work on a new logotype, to get a central point in the graphic identity to work around. This was stressed by an upcoming folder, which will go out to about 900 persons about now. As you might guess I was asked to do the layout for this folder also. I really wanted to get the new logo into this work, so I spent a few nights working on it.

A friend of mine had an idea to base it on a small pin that members of Helsingkrona wear while representing the nation in different activities. I thought it was a great idea, since I also have a redesign of the Helsingkrona Nation logo in progress. I thought that I then could make them match very well.

The original colors of Helsingkrona are red and blue, which are very hard to match unless you use some tricks. You should avoid putting red and blue in direct contact with each other, since it looks bad. However, if you put black or white between them, they look really good together. This is because it enhances the contrast between the two using a neutral color with maximum contrast to both of the other colors. This technique is used in many well known designs, including Pepsi, NBA and The Union Jack.

The second trick to make it look good is to have different brightness of the two colors. This is not necessary, but it enhances the contrast between the two colors even further. Both of these tricks enhances the contrast, making the colors work together. As with any colors, they have to match, which you can achieve using color picking techniques or just a good eye.

I wanted the logo to have an academic look to enhance the connection to Helsingkrona and Lund University, also giving it a serious look and maintain the distinguished heritage. At the same time I wanted the logo to have a modern look to not send signals of old and boring. As with most logos, it’s supposed to work with any media in any scale.

This is what I came up with and I’m really proud of my result. It works well in different scales and now it will have to prove itself in different medias. I will put up more about the folder and the website as soon as they are published.

Me and some manly friends have an order called Lagom, which when translated from Swedish is short for The Academic Spruce Order of Lund for Men. Lagom is actually a popular special Swedish word roughly meaning not too much and not too little. We have get-togethers every now and then where we often have some activity, like go-cart, followed by sauna and then dinner, some singing and clubbing – we call it Herrmiddag meaning gentlemens dinner.

A couple of years ago in 2007, I decided to make a nice academic-style logo for Lagom. I got totally inspired by the logotype of the Lund University, since we at the time all lived at Helsingkrona Nation, and studied at the Lund University. I’ll guess you’ll see a certain inheritance from the Lund University logotype. Anyway, I think I got a nice result and it certainly gave me some good practice. The logo was made, like the Ex-Libris I made for my grandfather, using Adobe Illustrator.

In mid 2008, I was asked by my grandfather Erik Sperber to make him an Ex-Libris for his collection of books. I was very honored, especially since he is turning a hundred years old in April 2010. The purpose of an Ex-Libris is to put it in every book in a library collection, so that anyone can see which collection the book came from.

My grandfather Erik is a Ph.D in both Biochemistry and Archeology, so this has formed most of his life. He got his Ph.D in Biochemistry back in 1946 and his second Ph.D in Archeology 1996, when his was almost 86 years old. This got him into the Guinness World Records for a Ph.D at the highest age. You can read about it in an article from TT written in Swedish. The second dissertation was about Weight systems in ancient Sweden and the viking on the cover was actually drawn by my sister, Anna Lundberg. I contributed by making him a visual basic program for weight analysis using an algorithm for Holm’s Index. I might do a remake of it or post the original version if I get it to work. I have actually found the algorithm useful for beat detection a couple of years ago. Well, back to the subject!

He wanted the Ex-Libris to have symbols of Biochemistry and Archeology in it, so he handed me a couple of pictures from his dissertations. I took the challenge and this is what I came up with and also the images it was based on. He was very pleased and today it’s in the first page of every book in his collection! =)