Toronto Summer Music – An international classical music festival and academy brings world-renowned performing artists to Toronto for an unparalleled combination of performances and summer music education - with a fresh new site for its fifth season.


Visit the site at:http://www.torontosummermusic.com/


Wild on Media – If you are interested in getting noticed, than Wild on Media’s unique Out-Of-Home mediums are for you. Their non-conventional approach to advertising using cutting edge outdoor mediums, grabs attention by providing the “WOW” factor.


Visit the site at: http://wildonmedia.com/


Vast Exteriors Incorporated needed a fresh showcase for their award winning landscape design and build services. Whether you are looking to create a backyard oasis that sees your swimming pool surrounded by lush vegetation and waterfalls or creating a sleek contemporary outdoor living area utilizing foreign materials and textures, Vast Exteriors will bring style and creativity to any outdoor environment.


Visit the site at: http://www.vastexteriors.com/


Is it time to freshen up your online presence?

Paul Bies

President,
Mystique Creative

The transition from a college to a studio environment is a huge jump for new design graduates. The fictitious character of the client for class briefs becomes a very real factor in the design process, and initially for most, it can be quite a hamper on one's creativity.

They say that you learn more in the first six months of being in the industry than your entire four year tenure in university ... well it's absolutely true.

Factors such as application, budget, revisions and production (to name a few) can catch a new graduates off guard, enough to throw one off track. This is the crucial aspect of the transition, realizing the major differences between student projects and client projects. Scary, yes? But not to worry, after a few jobs, it's safe to say you'll have properly adjusted, which is why I'm going to address what I feel is the underlying hurdle: simply understanding yourself.

There's nothing better than learning by being thrown into the fire but it's the personal details and habits that one needs to pay closer attention to. Understanding oneself is of utmost importance, so with every brief try to take note of your work habits, processes, and time management. Soon you'll be able to figure out quotes / timelines for jobs and this understanding will bring more focus into your creative thinking. Remember constraints are your friend—because we all know how much of a headache a open-ended project can be. You'll be able to allocate time for research, ideation and concept generation, production in a way that best suits your processes.

It may sound a bit strict and contrary in a creative field but the goal is to develop a system, a design process that brings out the best in you. Working on freelance jobs on the side while in school is a good way to pick your own brain and nature as a designer. If not, get together with friends, organize briefs, with realistic budgets, timelines and goals and be each other's clients (just be respectful of the process and treat it as a real job, otherwise you won't take very much from the experience).

Try different approaches, because one really has to feel it out to figure out what works best for them. It's also important to note that it's not a one and done deal. It's about constant refinement, I myself am still figuring out and fine tuning my own design process. As a designer, don't ever stop being a student of the world and your life.



Rene Tan
Graphic Designer
Mystique Creative

Today I met a prestigious businessman while I was out at lunch. His overall appearance seemed to demand respect and authority. We ended up sitting together, and began talking. He told me about how he owns a significant amount of buildings, businesses, real estate here, travels there, loads of money, blah blah blah, etc. This man really seemed to be put together. Then he passes me his business card. I have to look at his logo four times before discovering that the blue goat sitting on top of the "L" was just the designers' way of uniquely dotting the "i". The kerning was poor, which made one word look like two. If that wasn't bad enough, the entire image was surrounded by a dreadful, dark drop shadow. Everything that this man represented was supposed to be displayed on this card, and all I could see was this badly designed piece of paper.

It is very important to start your business off on the right foot with a SIMPLE, UNIQUE, and RECOGNIZABLE logo. Many people do their own marketing materials or get inexperienced friends or relatives to do it for them. The unfortunate outcome is that even though your business may be the best in town and you truly have something unique about it, people will never know it. Many people these days take one look at a logo, business card, or website and make an assumption of what the company is like. A badly designed logo can make your company look cheap, unpolished, and inexperienced.

A logo is a part of something bigger. It is part of a brand and represents what your company stands for. It is an extremely important first step in promoting your business that many people overlook. It is best to choose a design firm or an individual experienced in logo design to create one for you, but only after viewing their portfolio to get an idea of the kind of work that you are paying for. Always remember that a good logo creates a long lasting impression in your customers and may be the difference between success and failure for your business.

Renee Richards,
Graphic Designer
Mystique Creative

As most of us know, ‘Pop Art’ is short for Popular Art and that in a sense, says it all. It is a celebration of the popular, the famous, the mass produced, the iconic image. It all began way back in the late 50’s and 60s when a few ‘Pop Art’ shock troopers decided it was high time they brought art back into the daily life of people. Wrest it away from the abstract sophistication and elitism that was prevailing at the time.

The main shock trooper of this movement was of course the cult popster himself, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and his chief weapon was serigraphy (silk screening). This is a photo-realistic, mass-production technique of printmaking. His iconic Marilyn Monroe was a serigraph as well as his famous ‘Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can’ which in retrospect was his defining foray into mass media and marketing imagery. He suddenly drew attention to a product so ordinary in one sense but so extraordinary in it’s pervasive familiarity. A product that had established a cozy place in the consumer psyche of the mid 20th century through magazine/radio/television advertising and POP displays in grocery stores etc.

Okay, in the case of the ‘Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can’ it all became a kind of a celebration of the mundane, I get that but what else was going on? First of all, I believe art has always been connected to it’s time, although it often tries to transcend it. When it comes to the visually super-charged 60’s, the connection between art and it’s time had never been greater. In the case of Pop Art, there was a further connection going on which was a disposable, consumer connection that we all share. We share it when we watch TV commercials, look at billboards, watch movies and buy groceries etc. The ‘Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can’ image itself is frozen in the 60’s but the experience and the message it has continues to resonate with us as we click our way through internet banner ads and receive numerous email ads for hundreds of products.

Shawn Richards
Senior Graphic Designer
Mystique Creative

To me anyway, Helvetica is a kind of paradox - it is both old and modern. When you stop to consider that this font has roots that go all the way back to the Bauhaus movement of mid 1920s (Germany), in terms of years anyway, it is very old. When you consider the Bauhaus style or international style with it’s stripped down (un)ornamentation, it is also very modern. The Bauhaus movement was by the way, the most important design movement of the twentieth century.

It is amazing to me that the Bauhaus style and as a result, Helvetica developed at all. Bauhaus ideas began to emerge during Germany’s most turbulent prewar period. Enormous political and economic upheavals and then a few years later, the disdain of the Nazis, created conditions that only left one option for it’s best people - leave to the New World, while the going was good. This was an important development because while Europe was still stuck with their old medieval guild and old job protection systems, the New World (U.S mainly) was more fluid, responsive and quick to exploit business advantages. In other words, more modern. The New World also wasn’t clinging to the style of the 19th century days of colonies and empires. It didn’t have that kind of baggage.

What really made Bauhaus and the fonts, furniture, graphic design and the architecture styles they created truly modern was the philosophy directly behind it. As it relates to fonts they insisted that typography should be used as an instrument of communication only. No extra eligible swirls or decoration for them. Just clean organization of ideas. That is the spirit of Bauhaus and that is what makes it modern. They applied that simple functionality to their furniture, architecture and graphic design as well, becoming a blueprint for the modern world. A completely new world born out of the new emerging, thrusting energy of the 1920s. A world of growing mass communication in radio and print. A world that was really speeding up, kind of like now.

Like to get a better visual of the Bauhaus style, take a trip to your local Ikea.

Shawn Richards
Senior Graphic Designer
Mystique Creative