You can't miss this: A Poster a Day

I found a great story on Imprint today, which is an interview with a graduate student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco who decided to great a poster each day from a BBC headline to use for his thesis project called BBCx365. The student is Johnny Selman.

Basically, every day he would take the top headline and create an illustrated poster to express it, even if he was on vacation or sick. I think that is dedication and a great challenge, especially on slow news days or slow thinking days. I think as designers we should all found ways to challenge our outlook on the world and how we express it on paper on a regular basis.

Here are a couple of examples from headlines we will all recognize:

One of my favorite quotes from Steven Heller's story is the basic rules the artist had for himself.

"... Use as few elements as possible. Reduce the story to its simplest visual form. Don’t over think it. Don’t overwork it. Use as few colors as possible. Use flat color. Use color as a representative element. Don’t use gradients. Use typography as the central visual element whenever possible. Use Gotham Bold or your hand. When needed use Tungsten Bold as a condensed face. Other typefaces can be used sparingly for parody. Use bitmap and vector graphics. Rip the levels out of photographs. Keep it interesting. Use humor. Use parody. Use satire. Use visual puns. Stay neutral. Be bold. Don’t be afraid.”

While I am not sure if all of those are ideas that every designer should live by, especially outside this project, I think they create a good outline particularly for designers who are still very much in the learning process. As I have learned, doing illustrations can be very overwhelming when your skill-base is still limited, but I think remembering to take the story do its simplest visual form, while still being interesting, can help eliminate some of that pressure I often feel when I sit down to create a design.

You can't miss this: Fun with colors

Hello everyone, this is tangerine, and it is one of my favorite colors. So, I am dedicating my font to it today because I am going to be writing about color and the fun that colors bring to our life.

After working on the M-word project for the past couple of weeks, I have been really thinking about color and realizing that I don't really know that much about colors and putting them together.

I grew up in a very white world, and I'm not talking about the color of people (although it was). The house I lived in growing up was brown on the outside and the inside walls were all this gray/white color. I asked my parents when I was little if I could paint my room pink - every little girl's dream. But I was shot down. It wasn't until I was in high school (we moved into the house when I was in second grade) that my parents added color to our walls (half-of them, in only two rooms). Then I went to college where I lived in a white cinderblock cell and then I have been apartment hopping for 3 years since graduating and living in you-better-not-paint-it-or-we-will-charge-you-out-the-wazzoo complexes. So, the color in my apartment (yes, tangerine in my kitchen and bedroom) is mostly spot color and stands alone.

So, I was very excited when I came across the website Colourlovers.

It has all kinds of color palettes inspired by pretty much everything from fashion to home decor.

I really liked that they took the cover of "House Beautiful" magazine and broke it down into a color palette of five different colors. I imagine that was something that the designers of the magazine did as well.

Not only does the website create those color palettes if you click on one of the colors then it will bring up other palettes that have been created by users of the websites that incorporates that color as well whether you are looking for a color scheme for a room or a wedding.

I think this is a great site for keeping up with different color trends because most of the information seems to be posted by the site's registered users, so I suggest you all take a look at it sometime and maybe you will find some inspiration for your work, clothes or, like me, your apartment.

I am hoping to find a nice coordinating color for the tangerine in my bedroom right now, so this is one of the color palettes I am finding most inspiring because I already have some blue-ish-green pillows:

Thoughts?

Also, note how great that little shrimp looks in the color palette. If only I wasn't allergic to shellfish.

Response: Better Cook's awesome designers

One of my favorite parts of being in school is getting to see all of the creative ideas that my classmates come up with for the same publication with the same mission (I say this because many magazines do stories and designs for the same topics but each has a unique mission), and I loved what my fellow designers did with their Better Cook prototypes.

Blair's design from the get-go was classic M-word. It was sophisticated and clean. While she worried that it may seem too familiar, I think that is what I liked about it so much and what I think many readers and new cooks would like about it as well. It looked like an old-friend with a modern update. If it was an Oldsmobile commercial, its tagline could be "Not your grandmother's cooking magazine."

I particularly liked the typography Blair used for the masthead, which is funny because Lee Ann, our other teammate, used a very similar one in her initial design. I was glad, however, that Lee Ann mixed up her typography for her second round and introduced Glypha to our magazines. I wasn't really familiar with this typeface but I just loved the way she used the different weights throughout her pages. It really gave them a sense of continuity and keep the design similar without being boring. It also feels like a very fresh font particularly with the brighter colors our publishers have asked us to use.

I would like to say congratulations to Lee Ann for capturing the title of creative director for our magazine.

I really liked your hand concept on the front. I had initially thought of something similar, but the way you executed it was excellent. Despite hating fish, I really liked her fish feature designs. It was disgusting yet intriguing all at the same time. Kudos on that.

I am not sure if I am allowed to posts my classmates images on here, so I would like to direct you to Blair and Lee Ann's blogs to see what I am talking about in this post.

Overall, I don't blame our publishers for having a hard time choosing a creative director because I think we are a really strong team, so I am looking forward to showing you all (my wonderful readers) what we come up with over the next few weeks!

Critique: The M-word

For the past two weeks, I have been working on my design for a prototype cooking magazine - Better Cook. Unlike many cooking magazines and blogs today, this magazine will focus less on the recipes, although there will be some, and more on the techniques of learning how to cook, which I think is great because when I started cooking in October 2009, I had no idea what I was doing. Recipes seemed so overwhelming (and complicated) when you didn't even know which knife was the chef knife or every chili looked exactly the same. Luckily, my friend, Lee Ann Flemming, was a mother and practically a professional cook (she was the food stylist for "The Help" and has a degree in home economics), and she was only a phone call away. I used that life-line on many evenings when smoke would be puffing out of my oven.

However, not everyone is as lucky as I was to have a chef friend nearby, so when I was designing Better Cook, I tried to keep in mind the idea of clear and effect designs that involved enticing but not overly intimidating images.

I have to say that I really liked what I ended up with, especially my table of contents.

Cover:

I decided to make two different covers to show to the team of publishers I will be working with on this project. The first, left, is more of a traditional cover for a food magazine. It shows a pretty meal in a home-type environment. I chose this image because it didn't seem like a particularly complicated meal - fish, rice and beans, however, it still looks beautiful. After reading a 1954 issues of McCall's magazine that is at least what women of the 1950s cared about, so I figured women of today would want something similar (gasp, we haven't come as far as we think we have!).

I also liked the image because it was very colorful and the balance with the extra table space provided a good canvas for the sell lines, which are very important for a newsstand magazine. For the sell lines, I wanted to use two basic fonts (Thonburi and Times) and create interest through varying the size, color and even direction. I think it was effective because I was able to create a hierarchy between the three different sell lines and then within each sell line there is an obvious hierarchy with the most important and eye-catching information in color and larger than the other portions.

My second cover, right, I designed because I was worried maybe a plate full of food would be overwhelming to a new cook and because this isn't a recipe-centric magazine. So, I wanted to add a bit of whimsy to the Better Cook image with the playful yet unintimidating shrimp that is almost posed like a model. The white background was equally as effective for placing the sell lines. I thought this one was very fun and would catch the eyes of grocery-store shoppers as they were checking out.

TOC:

I am definitely most proud of my TOC. I just love it! I knew I wanted to do something with a college-like image, which is something Esquire did at one point, but I wanted to do it in a way that felt more like a good magazine than a yearbook memory page. When I came across this images, it was like the heavens opened up, light shined down and the angels began singing. No joke. This image in the stock image library had everything in it that our prototype magazine was scheduled to have stories about - even a fish.

My next thought was how would I play the image large enough and create a TOC with all the information that it needed. So, as you can see, I decided to play the image large and create lines coming out from different elements that would give the reader the name of the article that had to do with that item and a page number. I decided to also create more of a "traditional" TOC below with the Departments and other stories that would act as the navigation system for the rest of the magazine.

Feature:

This issue will have two stories in the feature well - one about fish and the other about creating an easy vegetable garden for transforming your summer table. I don't like fish and am allergic to shellfish, so I decided to work on the garden story for my initial design. I just did the opening spread and unfortunately, when I went to the site where we are getting our photos, my Internet was too slow to get the library open. So I went to Google However, what I came up with I really like. I think the dichotomy between the two images is really effective, so I will be going for a similar design if I end up working on this feature story.

Coming up:

I am working on designing the March 8 feature for Vox. It was just upped from a 4-page spread to a 6-page, so I have quite a bit of work to do on it. I will post my initial design this week, and I plan to have a final-ish draft by Thursday, so be on the look out for my very first Vox feature design AND my first sports-themed design - ever!

Critique: Vox iPad edition

Last week, it was my turn (along with my classmate Nick) to create the Vox edition for the iPad platform. Overall, I thought it went really well, and I am pleased that I will be able to boast to future employers about this new skill I have acquired while back in school. Look for the Feb. 16 edition on the Apple Store!

For this weekly project that I think each of us will do twice during the semester, the iPad designers go and take specific sections from the print edition and translate them into a digital format. The trick creating a successful iPad page is not putting too much information into such a small space like you do in print and making sure to keep it visual with more pictures and pull quotes.

The most challenging part of the designing, however, is making sure the pages have the same information in both portrait and landscape modes. The means, you can not have a picture on a page in one direction that you don't have in the other. Since this was my first try at designing for the iPad, I wasn't aware of that. So my first draft of one section had to have some minor editing after I go a little overzealous with images in one direction - landscape - but not portrait. It also felt a little strange to design the landscape direction, especially coming from a newspaper where everything is so vertical. Once I got over that, it was fairly to create the pages and the product looked great.

I feel like I got the easy part this time around because I was responsible for doing most of the department pages instead of the feature. However, I think this was for the best since my partner for the project also did the design for the print edition, so he was very familiar with how it should be laid out in on the digital platform. Yay, Nick!

So, without further ado, I give you my iPad pages in a combination of portrait and landscape:

Don't miss this: Glamour has no feet to stand on

Glamour has done what all magazines want to do and all readers beg them not to - it underwent a redesign. Or in the case of Glamour. It got a taste of its own medicine and got a full-on makeover.

Have you seen it yet?

Here is this month's cover:

I realize you all (gentleman) may not be as familiar with Glamour as some others, so this is one of the 2011 issues just for a quick comparison.

(Oh, hey, JLO!)

Looks a little bit different, wouldn't you say?

While there have been changes throughout the magazine, including reorganizing the order of the magazine to include an expanded version of its popular "Dos and Don'ts" section and place it closer to the front, relocating the features to the front and the fashion section will be more celebrified (I know ... really?), I am going to focus on the cover for this post.

The first thing I noticed when I saw Glamour's makeover was the lack of sell lines. I think this is because one of my professors was recently talking about them and their importance for getting potential readers to buy the magazine off the newsstand. Like most magazines, Glamour was known for cramming as much as they could about the magazine's itself contents on the cover.

In the redesign, the words have a lot more breathing space. Dare I say the cover almost looks naked, although the model is modestly dress for most women's magazines.

Even without the jam-packed sell lines, the most important words are there: Sex, Shopping, Guys and Beauty. The only thing I am surprised to see is that none of those have numbers. Magazines love giving reader 5,280 ways to do anything. There was also nothing about fitness or health, which I also found surprising.

Something I did find intriguing was that there really are only two sell lines because the bold and pink words act almost as one line of text and then there is just one more line about cover model Amanda Seyfried.

(Note: I had no idea she was the one who broke up Reese and Ryan's marriage! Also, doesn't see look like a Bratz's doll on this cover? Moving on.)

I think the next big change on the cover is that the masthead is not its typical lip-stick shade of pink or red that is classic "women's" magazine. The yellow is totally attention grabbing because it doesn't look like Cosmo or Glamour, for that matter. They also added this drop shadow.

I have scoured the web for reactions to this new cover, and I bring you these:

"Our first thought when we glimpsed the new cover was: Did a group of 14-year-old girls hijackGlamour?"

-Huff Post

"The old covers — celebs standing in front of a blank background — were just so typical. This is fun! And fresh! I love that she’s in a BATHROOM. That has WALLPAPER. I mean, her outfit is pretty much the worse. WTF that scary appliqued top + bad whiskered jeans. But the earrings rule."

-Julia, Styleite.com

""Sex", "Shopping", "Beauty", "Guys", "Gossip". Right- but what of it? I mean, it's not like I'm expecting to open up Glamour and find articles on fishing or the newest video games. They still need to entice their readers with interesting subject matters. We already know what the focus of the magazine is."

-Andiwaslike, comment on New York Magazine's article about the redesign

I found Julia's comment interesting because the fact that Amanda wasn't just in front of a white background didn't even cross my mind until I read that. I think it is because a girl in the bathroom "getting ready" is just so natural, although this image is pretty much anything but natural.

What I did notice throughout the magazine and why I called this post, "Glamour has no feet to stand on" is because almost all of the text one you move to the inside of the magazine is sans serif. I mean - it is SO sans serif and large, like a children's book. There are also these "torn page" elements that just has me asking, Glamour, what were you thinking.

OK. So they have made quite a lot of changes that I do like, including the yellow "Glamour," but unless you are like Esquire and you change your look practically every issue, I think there will always be a lot of huffing and puffing until everyone gets used to the "new" look.

Oh, well. Congratulations to the designers who got to flex some new muscles to create a new-ish look!

Why should designers use Pinterest?

Oh, Pinterest!

With your lovely pictures of shirt-less Ryan Gosling (or other attractive actor-of-choice), recipes and crafts, you could keep a society of women (and men) candle-making, knitting and baking like its the 1950s. Hello, Mrs. Cleaver wanna-bes.

But seriously. It's addictive - apparently.

I am sure you all have heard of this, but it is the latest social media network to take the Internet by storm. It is a closed beta site, which means you have to be invited to join, but it consists mostly of images people have pinned of food, wedding/engagement/baby announcements and other graphic element.

I became a member in December and besides pinning my holiday reading list and making a few recipes, I have pretty much left the website alone. However, I didn't realize the benefits it could have for me as a designer-to-be until I heard it described as a GRAPHIC social networking site. Maybe I just wasn't giving it as much thought as the homemaker/crafting types.

Then I ran across this article on Imprint, my blog-of-the-semester, and it discussed by designers should be taking a look and pinning on Pinterest.

"While many of the good moms using Pinterest aren’t clued in to the latest design looks, they are a madly appreciative crowd - if you offer up your gorgeous images, you will be met with copious applause. Anyone posting their portfolio to Behance or Core77 should double up with a little Pinterest test."

-Jude Stewart, Imprint

I don't know if I would post my portfolio on Pinterest, I think many wedding photographers would stand a good chance since society seems to be obsessed with weddings right now ("Say Yes to the Dress," "Four Weddings," need I say more). For designers, however, I think it could potentially be a good way to get feedback. Although I fear that pinners would be like when your grandmother gives you feedback, everything is great - just some things are more great than others. That is also the philosophy in community newspapers if you live in a town with a community theater.

The info for designers is brief, however, it has given me a new appreciation for the website besides the tasty slice of chocolate chip banana bread that I made from a Pinterest pin that I am enjoying while I write this post.

OK. Maybe I am a bigger fan than I let on.

Happy, pinning and perusing!

Response: Imprint/OMG this is so cool

I think I have commented on this in my blog before, but I am sort-of into weddings. For my Spring Preview cover design, my initial idea was to create a wedding "Save the Date." Well, this isn't a wedding invite, but it is a OMG(osh) SO COOL invitation from the Society of Design to Jessica Hische, who the organization wants to speak at an upcoming event.

Yes, those are Pennsylvania license plates. The design society spent three months and had 27 people agree to get (what seemed like) random letters on their license plates to spell out this message.

How cool?

Remember these:

License plate purses ... not as cool.

I also love the slight subliminal messaging that is going on as well since the bottom of each plate says, "visitpa. That is, essentially, the goal.

I hope Jessica says yes!

Read about the project here. Also, this is from the blog (imprint) I am reviewing throughout the semester, so look forward to more exciting posts like this one!

Response: Deadlines

In the world of journalism you have to be flexible. This is an area where I am trying to be better, however, I like schedules and sticking to them. However, sometimes that doesn't work out. This week was one of those sometimes.

Unfortunately a feature story has fallen

through, and it was the

one I was assigned to design. My initial designs were due today, despite not having any photos and a really rough draft of the story. So, I was dealt the difficult task of creating a layout with very little information and a brief description of possible pictures. In the past, I have imagined layouts in my mind before having a story or pictures. In those cases, I was writing the story and shooting the picture, so I knew - more or less - what I was going to come up with in the end.

Using the minimal information I was given, I set out to design with my imagination and some Google images.

This is what I came up with:

Not too shabby. I was basically trying to arrange the images to where I could break up the text nicely and use the images as supplement (versus having the images tell the story). I really just wanted this initial design to be clean and organized. Nothing too showy.

Since I have no idea what photos have been/will be taken for this feature since it is no longer running, this could have worked.

Response: Critique

I think it is lucky than I am not a particularly competitive person because another week has passed, and I was not a winner. Sad. However, I still count this week as a success because I learned how to adapt text in illustrator (although I am not sure to what success) and create the "Krista" - as I am calling it for now - which means you have a picture and one element is cut out and hangs over the text and the rest of the image is behind. However, I did enjoy this week's assignment.

So, here is my final:

I know what you're thinking. This looks like last week's. Well, for those of you reading who are not in my class, once you show your three initial designs, you are supposed to tweak the one the editors liked the best. So, I kept with the same image, and I made adjustments to the placement of the different pieces of text.

Starting with the main compliant from last week, which was that the editors didn't like the location of the sell lines, I used the boxes created by the image to put them in the blank area. Then I decided to play with the font. I liked the title, Inspired Sound, so I decided to make it, well, in the words of my classmate Nick, more raw. I think I began to achieve that until I went cheesy and made a music note for the "d" of sound. I like my design even if it is a "winner."

You can't miss this: Royal Wedding info graphic

I'm jumping on the bandwagon and showing off an infographic this week. It's from Behance.net, and I am not making this a "you can't miss this" because I think it is particularly well done (though it looks nice), it is just to show that you really can make an info graphic out of any kind of information these days. This one was created just before the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Duchess Catherine and includes Twitter Activity, Facebook shout outs and even Google searches by key words - Kate is the winner. I like this one because I watched the Royal Wedding, wrote a column about getting up for it, and informed my Facebook followers, so I just love that someone decided to compile this info.

I also loved this Tech Germs info graphic. It is both informative and disguisting. Who doesn't love a little grit with their graphics?

These were also part of an article on Nowsourcing.com with the best info graphics (in its opinion) of 2011. I encourage you all to check out all of them when you get a chance.

Critique: Cover up

Well, I was up this week for doing preliminary designs for the weekly cover competition for Vox. I was pretty pumped because I have not done a cover before for a magazine other than choosing the image, and it seemed fun.

I was right! I had a really good time. Although not all of the ideas were great. I definitely will be making changes before this Thursday.

For now, here are my initial three design in the order I like them best (left) to not-quite-right/have-we-returned-to-the-90s?

The story is about Lonnie Barker Jr., a gospel rapper, who grew up on the streets of Oklahoma, and overcame a life ridden with drugs and violence. Today he sings and speaks to kids like himself about channeling anger and persevering through staying positive and making good choices.

His story is one I know well. I lived in a town ridden with poverty. Teen pregnancy, bad educational system and food vouchers were a way of life for almost 70 percent of the town. It is heartbreaking.

The story, however, concentrates more on him and his music, so I wanted to express that in the cover. I really liked the photo of Lonnie singing in the studio - doing what he does best. However, since there was a religious undertone to the story, I liked that the window of the studio created a cross without being overtly Christian. I also liked that I would be able to frame the "Vox" information in one and the headline in the other.

I really tried to pay more attention to my typography this week since that is an area we have done some reading in my design class and because I have personally made a goal to improve in that area of my design. So I chose the hed, "Inspired Sound," because I thought it married the idea of two types of music (gospel and rap together). I also wanted to show that in my type choices, so I went with a classical serifed font for the word "inspired" and a more edgy italicized font for the work sound. I also tucked them together because I wanted to show that they were one, like in Lonnie's music.

For my second cover, I decided to do something more illustrated to mix it up. However, I still wanted to show Lonnie because the story is with him. When I read through the article, I noticed how he doesn't use curse words in his music. It got me thinking about all those funny stand-ins for curse words people use. Everything from "shut the front door" to "gosh darn it." This lead to more of a collective conscious session of my evening where that idea trickled into "Holy Cow," which lead to the idea of a cartoon character that ended with a pop art-inspired image using the photo of Lonnie looking up. That might have been thinking gone awry.

My third idea didn't turn out at all. I hate it. I really have no words for what I was trying to do other than that was not the original intent. I wanted something more hip-hop-y, but what I got was a "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" gone wrong cover. So, I am not going to even bother saying anything other than I'm sorry about that one.

I am going to continue working on the first cover and hopefully it will be the cover for the 2/16 issue of Vox!

Response: The September Issue

I didn't know that Meryl Streep/"The Devil Wears Prada" was based off of Anna Wintours/Vogue magazine.

I know. I KNOW. I feel incredibly dumb/uninformed. I thought that movie was just a general parody of fashion magazines.

However, now that I know the movie has more basis in reality than I thought and have seen some of "The September Issue," which is a documentary about Vogue's largest issue of the year and what it takes to put it together, I think aspiring magazine journalists should think seriously if that is the kind of world where they want to work. It seems like a volatile environment.

While I agree with one of my classmates who was surprised that Anna Wintours wasn't more, um, mean, the documentary still portrays her as kind of a bully to her staff. I was pretty sure one of the two women in a scene where Mrs. Wintour's is looking at ideas was going to burst into tears at any second.

What I always try to remember, even when I watch documentaries, is that there is still a sense of agenda. Just like a fiction movie producer, a documentary filmmaker still wants to provide a good story for it audience. As they say in show-business, a film has to have a direction.

A vision.

In some ways, journalism is a lot like documentary filmmaking. I believe there is a class within the MU journalism school that has to do with this subject. But, in a sense, each of us as we write/take photography/design for the Missourian are creating stories. A lot of times we plan these out because we want them to have a certain look or tell a particular story. This idea of agenda setting in journalism has been researched fairly extensively in academia but, honestly, is hard to avoid. Even in a non-academic world, agenda setting is noticed (complained about) by readers and sources. Particularly in regards to taking quotes of context. I am sure you have read letters-to-the-editor or heard follow-up interviews with people who say they didn't say something or it was taken the wrong way. Often this is done to create a story or project a certain viewpoint.

Outside of the media: Recently, the quote on the statue of Martin Luther King Jr., was amended after the civil rights leader was misquoted in stone.

It said, "I was a drum major for justice peace and righteousness."

However, the actual quote from King's speech was:

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness."

It was pointed out that the misquote made King sound arrogant.

So, what I am saying is, I guess, as I continue to watch this documentary and create an analysis of the magazine publishing business, I think it is important to remember that even documentaries are created to entertain and inform. However, I don't know if I want to work in that high-pressure world, whether this documentary depicts the work players in the environment in their true-light or not.

I did admire the passion and gumption of Grace Coddington. I could tell she really loved her job and that she is willing to stick up for her work.

Also, what was with Anna Wintour's haircut!

You can't miss: Long live logos?

Have we learned nothing from the Gap, people?

As I am sure some of you have probably heard, JCPenney's is undergoing some major changes for 2012. The biggest change concerning customers is that the department store is getting rid of their infamous couponing system - one of its staples being a $10 off $25 purchase - in favor of a new no-nonsense "best value" pricing system. Who do they think they are, Walmart? But for all of us designers and people who just appreciate studying brand designs, JCP is also unveiling new logo.

Again.

In case you missed it in 2011, JCP altered it's logo of a red box with the whole word "JCPenney's" to the sans serif image you can see below on the left.

For the new logo, they have dropped the Penney's part (maybe indicative of its new non-coupon system) and added this little blue box. Look familiar? Well, that's because the Gap did something similar in 2010.

Told ya.

I can also tell you it failed, which is why many of you probably don't remember the logo fiasco. I think the new logo lasted one week-ish. In an interview with VanityFair in Oct. 2010, Gap spokesperson Louise Callagy said the new logo was supposed to "signify Gap's transition from classic, American design to modern, sexy cool."

Excuse me, that is

not what Gap is known for. I would know because I have been buying the same classic long-sleeve shirt there since I was in 4th grade. Except for one cold-weather fashion season in the early 2000s when Gap tried a similar shift of classic to trendy with their clothing line. It is also OK if you don't remember this either. It failed as well.

Luckily, I don't think JCP has a strong enough image (or elitist customer base) to elicit quite as big of an uproar as the Gap.

Unlike the Gap that desired to be more modern, JCP hopes to evoke a sense of patriotism from its customers for both its brand and country through its Americana-inspired logo. Notice how it uses elements of the U.S. flag - as if the "American Living" brand and incessant Rascal Flats music wasn't enough.

I wonder if this new logo will inspire any mocking logos. I did enjoy this response to the Gap logo:

Thanks DesignAddict for this logo