Thirty-three years ago I opened Adobe Illustrator for the first time at University of Georgia’s graphic design department’s Macintosh computer lab. We were tasked with designing our logo in Professor Ronald Arnholm’s Typography course. I designed my Vinson logo — seen above in my website’s masthead — in ten minutes. I saw it in my mind and then began typing in v-i-n on top and s-o-n” on the bottom. What I loved was the immediate nod to the yin and yang with the dot over the lowercase letter i and the inner dot of the letter o. I was immediately drawn to the Futura font family for its sans-serif, geometric qualities. It was the first font choice I made. Call it fate, I guess, or just a cool synchronicity. Futura was designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It was released by Bauersche Gießerei foundry in Germany, founded in 1837.
“Professor Arnholm stopped by to check in on my logo’s progress. Quite calmly he leaned in and observed my work. He paused and then said, “that mark will last a long time.” Longevity is one of the primary goals of graphic design communication. It’s also the toughest one to accomplish.
I love that Futura was released in 1927. As most of my colleagues know is that twenty-seven is my lucky number. It’s also the Detective Comics issue number that introduced us to ‘The Bat-Man’ in 1939. You could say that DC is in my blood. Heck, my boss at TWC’s last name was Booth…get it? Phone booth…Superman?
My teammates at The Weather Channel gifted me a special Superman poster scribbled in silver with best wishes when I left to join Artifact Design. My daughter calls me Batman. Edgar Allan Poe and I are birthday twins, and his creation of the Detective genre directly influenced Batman.”
Keep in mind, this was the time back in the early to mid-90s when Photoshop didn’t even have layers yet. They weren’t introduced until version 3. How ironic though that I still used Illustrator in the same fashion three decades later. I only used about 2% of it’s capabilites primarily to design logotypes. Pathfinder was always my friend during cleanup. Something odd happened when Adobe introduced version 9. In order to export linework to import into 3D application we had to save it as version 8. That remained for decades. It may have had something to do with the PDF format. Who knows? I wasn’t ever on the Illustrator Prerelease team. However, I did spend many years on the After Effects beta program even making it into the top ten user contributors…