Banned by the Bay

This summer I had the great pleasure to work on a project for Banned by the Bay, a local project organized by a good friend of mine. It’s a series of events that help raise awareness — in a fun, celebratory way — of banned books. There are all sorts of great happenings throughout the week: authors and censorship experts speaking, comedians, and even a book swap.

I’ve hosted the project myself, here. You can also see it in the wild at bannedbythebay.org.

It started back in February with a bunch of ideas and sketches that helped us get to the heart of what Banned by the Bay would be, and what, visually speaking, it should look like. She wanted an illustrative, bright, and crafty style to it. Since I was still in Germany, we worked over email.

I set out on the logo. Always inherent in this process is knowing how to communicate when a client is trying to fit too much in. It’s imperative as a designer to keep the logo straightforward and clear, even when their tendency is to throw everything in.

Eventually we were able to whittle down to more refined ideas, and cut back some of the content.

And the final product, a hand-drawn black and white graphic.

Then on to making a website. It needed to have a very “San Francisco” feel to it (pretty perfect for me as I was fresh off the plane from Germany). I created a skyline with some pens, and construction paper for the footer.

And then I drew some small graphics to illustrate each of the four events.

Then I did a lot of work with textures to find the right look and feel. It needed to be light and crafty.

This is the landing page. Since the festival is primarily a series of events, it seemed fitting to put all of that information here, in the most accessible place. All of the details are in-window callout boxes made with JQuery. With more time I’d have loved to find a more eloquent solution, however this was quite simple and to the point.

All in all, it was a great project. I’m excited to be able to put some hand-drawn graphics on the web, and excited about the cause.