Last week AIGA Los Angeles hosted The Group Typeface Experiment at TypeCon2010: Babel here in LA. During an unscripted hour of collaborative design, attendees were given the opportunity to create a typeface on the spot using nothing but square and triangle stickers.

I had the pleasure of concepting the event, and the honor of helping produce it, along with numerous other intrepid AIGA LA members including the incredi-awesome Heather Parlato, whose design blog is regular reading here at Hexanine.

We were pretty pleased with the results, revealed here in the video above, filmed and produced on-the-spot by our friends at i am 8-bit (we’re looking at you Taylor Ragsdale). Watch away!

As the recent Tropicana packaging redesign fiasco shows, our perceptions of the products we choose are often made up of much more than the items themselves. But where do these brand perceptions come from, and how are they made? If designers are brand anthropologists, as Erin recently touched on, then consumers should be considered explorers, traversing shelf and window in search of that perfect bottle of tea or pair of shoes. And as in person-to-person interaction, in the branding world, first impressions are everything.

Marketers long ago realized the power of Saturday morning cartoons and used that time-slot to introduce countless children to a myriad of toys and snacks. Wide-eyed Children of the ’80s first learned about Fruit Wrinkles through claymation and the simple line: “Hi, my name is Roland, and these are Fruit Wrinkles.” It was fun, it was simple and it worked, and millions of globs of fruit flavored snacks graced the lunchboxes of a generation. Great brand strategists realize that at any given moment, someone, somewhere is experiencing their product for the first time, whether it’s in front of the TV, browsing the internet, or rolling their cart down the supermarket aisle. We call that process it Brand Discovery.

Brand discovery is sometimes used as an business-to-business term to describe an internal creative audit, but we think it has a much more powerful (and useful) meaning. Brand Discovery is strolling into the gas station to buy a Monster Energy Drink and noticing a can of Rockstar for the first time. It’s seeing a commercial for E-harmony while staring at your empty Match.com inbox. Or it’s glimpsing a Tom’s Shoes billboard around town and Googling the website when you get home. These and infinite more first contact experiences place the individual in the role of consumer-explorer, and being handed something on a platter is never as fulfilling as coming across it yourself.

Being handed something on a platter is never as fulfilling as coming across it yourself.

Sometimes entire marketing campaigns are based around the concept of Brand Discovery. Millions of drivers recently stuck in traffic spotted giant billboards with the words “WHO IS SALT”, only later to realize that they were seeing advertising for the latest Angelina Jolie thriller. Using mystery to reward consumer-explorers and create a buzz isn’t a new tactic (especially here in Hollywood), but it’s frequently turned to precisely because it works. At some level, all of us feel a sense of accomplishment when reach a summit and solve that mystery.

Established brands have also found a way to get involved. Generic products, once ridiculed, have been transforming en masse to more polished “Private Label” brands. Private Label sales hit a record high in 2009, and accounted for 90 percent of all gains in supermarkets. Target’s Archer Farm line of products are continuously being discovered by a regular clientele, and even Pharmacy giant Rite Aid is now getting in on the action. Eschewing Private Label offerings, some brands seek consumer-explorers through the use of variety. Remember when there were only two kinds of Cheerios? We don’t either.

With the constant barrage of new products hitting the marketplace each year, it’s becoming more and more difficult to connect with individual consumers. The tools we use to get the job done as brand strategists may change, but the experience stays the same. Exploring is exciting. Discovering is even better.

Photo illustration created using a photo by Anthony Albright, used under Creative Commons license.

Last month we spread the word regarding Font Aid IV: Coming Together, a typeface consisting solely of ampersands. This week, SOTA officially released the font, and we’re proud to be able to say that we’re included.

More than 400 designers from 37 countries contributed to Coming Together, and we’re excited to be involved. We submitted two ampersands, both of which are included in the typeface, (one features the Haitian flag, another, just a plain flag).

Coming Together is an OpenType font and is being sold for $20 US. It’s available through Ascender Fonts, Veer, FontShop, and MyFonts. All proceeds from the sale of the typeface will go to Doctors Without Borders, to help with their relief efforts in Haiti.

Because of this, we’d like to spread the word regarding The Society of Typographic Aficionados Font Aid IV: Coming Together, a Collaborative Typeface — a font consisting entirely of ampersands. Coming Together will be made available for sale through several type distributors, with all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. SOTA, a US-based non-profit, is acting as a non-partisan organizing body to help coordinate the effort and ensure all funds are distributed appropriately.

To participate: Submit a black and white “ampersand” as a vector image file, not a bitmap. Send it in EPS format to fontaid@typesociety.org by 01/29/10.

There’s still 3 days left, so fire up Illustrator and get to work.

When I was a kid, my mom would chuck my sister and me into the car and take us to our local library. While she disappeared upstairs to seek out the new Dean Koontz thriller, we’d explore the children’s section — a giant labyrinth of shelves and racks stretching on into infinity. It took me years to learn the layout of that place, but by the time I had it down, my favorite spots were permanently committed to memory. Walk in, straight back, right, then left. End of the aisle, three shelves up from the bottom: The drawing books. Specifically, the Ed Emberley ones.

For the uninitiated, Ed Emberley is the author of a number of drawing books for children, and the man who turned doodling into a science. In 1972 he released Make a World, a step-by-step manual with instructions on how to draw more than 400 boats, buildings, helicopters, cars, trucks, trains, ships, people and animals. The premise was simple. If you could draw squares, triangles, circles, and lines, you could draw anything in the book — from a bicycle to a battleship.

These weren’t complex or detailed drawings (the people were stick figures with hats), but that was precisely the point. Technique couldn’t be more boring to a 10-year-old, and besides, all the instructions were right here, laid out in Ed’s clear, numbered directions. Each step in the sequence showed exactly what you needed to add, whether it was a squiggle, a half-circle, or a crisscross pattern. All you really needed was a handful of crayons or markers and a sheet of paper. Flip to a page at random and you were off and running.

The book’s cover was a world of its own, containing oodles of Emberley’s signature simplified drawings, all of them lined up in neat little rows. Clouds at the top, ocean at the bottom. It was hardcover, and published in an horizontal format which made it seem all the more unique and important. I can remember plopping down on the library’s berber carpet and paging through it, rapt, and lost in its minutiae, picking out which items I’d draw first. I must have checked that book out a dozen times, sketching out my absurd fantasies on sheet after sheet of my mom’s typing paper.

As I grew up, I learned hundreds of other techniques and rules designed to increase my talents as an artist and designer. As my skillsets increased, so did my inspirations, and I gradually forgot about Ed Emberley’s world, losing myself in more adult styles of art and design. But recently I discovered an in-progress documentary (Make a World: The Film), highlighting the book and the artist behind it. Seeing the art again for the first time in years, I was a kid again, perched at the kitchen table drawing dragons and dump trucks with no care for the results. Creating to create — for the pure joy of it.

Ed’s passion for doodling is obvious and bleeds through all of his books, and it’s absolutely contagious. In the land of Make A World, there are no briefs, clients, Photoshop filters, or Flash animations. Art and passion like Emberley’s are what drove me to create, to dive headlong into a world of design and illustration, and I’m confident many of you probably have similar stories of passion. But unfortunately, “real life” tends to creep in and douse this excitement at precisely the moments when we need it the most. It’s refreshing to think about how effortless Ed Emberley made the act of creation — just sit down, pencil and paper in hand, and make a world.

Creator Bernie Su asked Hexanine to design the identity for his dark, atmospheric, web-based serial thriller, Compulsions, and we leapt at the chance to join the production team.

As the story unfolds, the dark, irresistible habits of three seemingly-normal individuals are revealed. Our logo design captures the pent-up drama of the series, with cracking and erosion of the type signifying the twisted pathology of the main characters.

The first two episodes of the series are available for viewing now, with subsequent episodes released daily through the end of this week. See the trailer below, and then visit dailymotion.com to check them out. (Warning: scenes are somewhat intense and possibly not safe for work.)