If you are anything like me and you have your personal logo for use on your website or whatever, you probably just have one version saved in an AI document. You open it whenever needed and adapt it on the fly to whatever you might be using it for. I did the same thing for years.

However, with the new Signalnoise project I’m working on I realized that wasn’t going to cut it. I will be needing to send my logo to other people for use across a few different mediums, on different colors, using a different colors, etc and I would be spending a lot of time asking these questions and creating the logo per task. That eats up a lot of time, so I spent a little while thinking about my identity and creating different versions for use in these situations, in the form of a basic identity AI document.

Some of you might have learned about Brand Standards Manuals in school, where you create a book of rules and regulations on how the logo will be used. You might not need to do it to that extent for your personal identity, but it’s good general practice to think about these alternate variations of your identity and create them in one document. Not only will it point out problems (like color variations), but it will create a nice accessible library you can grab quickly or send to those who might need it. Think about things like: will you be printing on black or white? Will your logo be 1-color or full color? Will there be a wordmark or just an icon? It’s interesting stuff, and will certainly strengthen your personal identity.

Need a hand? Download the Signalnoise Basic Identity (AI, CS4) and have a look.

I don’t yet have photos of the actual magazine but the ‘Elle’ tutorial I wrote for Digital Arts Magazine has been published on their website. The poster was originally designed for the crew at Thinkstock, who were kind enough to donate the photograph of the lady to this tutorial. The process is stripped down and broken into 16 steps, but the fundamentals of how I created this poster are there.

The tutorial is published in the July 2010 issue of Digital Arts Magazine, currently on newsstands in Europe. Enjoy!

These make me pretty happy. I was surfing around Ffffound last night and came across these scans of vintage Volkswagen buses from the 60s. I’ve always been a fan of the Volkswagen bus design, where everything is round and adorable plus would have made for the perfect mobile advertising unit. The round body makes for a wonderful blank canvas, and the architecture is split up in a way that makes multiple color schemes quite striking.

Oh, to live back then and see these wonderful things all over the place. Maybe I should cut my losses and invest in a Signalnoise Volkswagen bus to travel across Canada in.

Yeah, might have to do that. :)

Really digging the clean and stylized work by Minneapolis-based illustrator Katie Kirk. I stumbled upon her Flickr stream quite by accident last week and spent a great deal of time flipping through her portfolio. What’s really interesting is seeing the progression of her work, from her earliest to recent. She has an obvious eye for style, and instead of adding more things to her illustrations, it’s as if she spent time taking things away which results in a more pure form.

In a time when it seems “more is more”, it’s refreshing to find calming work like Katie’s out there in the wilderness. Check out her official site, her Flickr stream and drop by her Etsy shop.

Alex Varanese is a beast. I might have said that before, but he just doesn’t quit. Check out these re-imaginings of modern gear as if they existed back in 1977, the year I was born. Beautifully rendered compositions with some awesome tongue-and-cheek humor worked into these pieces. It’s insane how much I want that wood-paneled Microcade 3000.

Hey Atari, can you please hire Alex to help reboot your 1970′s product nostalgia?

In case you missed it, Alex was featured on Signalnoise a while back in a post called The Process of Alex Varanese, the title is self-explanatory. You can check out more of Alex’s work on his website, and check out this project on his Behance.