This Fall, AIGA Nebraska will play host to the traveling exhibition of 365: AIGA YEAR IN DESIGN 25, a gallery show of the award-winning design work of last year. As is customary with most AIGA chapters, we will be sending a poster-invitation to announce this event. Normally the event-chairman (me) works with the co-chair (in this case, Be A Design Group co-founder Bennett Holzworth) to develop a concept and one of the two designers handles the artwork.

But we’re going to handle this in a slightly different, more amalgamous manner. Announcing the 2005 DesignOff!

After being blindsided Tuesday morning with the actual timeline and specifics of this project (not to mention the idea of posting it here), I think I will now embrace this challenge. See round one for the rules.

The finished design will be letterpressed on a 12X18 Chandler & Price. The light blue is representative of the color of the paper. The circular shapes in the background are growth rings in a tree stump or branch. That is where it gets tricky. I’m not sure if this is possible. I am tapping all of my resources to see if it is possible to get cross sections of different branches to be type high and get the growth rings to actually print on press. The growth rings represent a year (i.e. 365 days).

Please ignore all of the stretching and distorting of the type. I am trying to emulate the wood type that I have and so I tried to represent them with digital type. The size and proportion should be fairly accurate. So I guess that means you can’t resize the text, Nate.

I ran out of time to set the information below the AIGA logo. I think we should get a cut made for the smaller type and not try to set it by hand. Stayed tuned for Nate’s revisions that are due by Saturday Noon.

With Round Three we’re seeing some additions to the project, not the least of which was the jump up from sketch to rough-images (thanks, AIGA Design Achives!). Also, quite a bit more information has been added. The poster needs to communicate, not just look pretty (though with Alfred A. Knopf’s Caramba cover girl taking center stage, it certainly will).

I wasn’t ready to abandon Nate’s clock idea, but I wanted to try something else as well. So I did both. I only changed the date & time information from Round 3 on the clock idea (top right). I tried to make the time and date a little easier to understand. I also added the three in the clock so that there is a 365 in the clock itself. Am I forcing it? I think the clock design might be based too much on the actual time of the event.

On the new design (bottom left) I tried to accentuate the idea of one ring being equal to one year. If you would like to look at a larger version click here. I wanted this design to look like one in a science book. These diagrams point out the fire of ‘45 or the drought of ‘31 on the rings of old trees. Instead of pointing out different historical events, different points on the ring would represent different designs around the country. I would eventually like to talk to the original designers and find out when they actually designed the example shown and include this information on the poster.

I will let Nate pick which direction he would like to go next.

Time crunch! I must say that I loved Bennett’s new direction and incorporation of the tree-rings. So obvious I almost slapped myself for missing it. That boded well for me, as I found myself in an unavoidable time crunch for round five.

I am pulling the “Time Crunch” card as well. Just keep in mind that I am also frantically working to get my press fully operational by the time we need to print this. If I can’t get the motor up and running, we just might have to stick Nate on a treadmill to keep the press moving.

From DesignOff! 2005 Round One: “The design will begin when Nate sends Bennett the first draft at high noon on Tuesday, June 21 and end when Bennett sends the final design to Nate on Tuesday, July 5. Designers will have no more than 48 hours each round to turn in their drafts to the other designer”

Since there wasn’t a lot of noticeable changes to the design this time around, I thought I would show the beginning stages of setting the wood and metal type. What you see here is the only part of the poster that I will be hand setting. We will be sending off for magnesium plates for the rest of the type and design in the poster.

This past weekend, the DesignOff! came to a close - almost…