Jolly Fats Wehawkin

I love The Middleman. I love the comics, I loved the TV show, and I really wish either of them had caught on with the general public, because, like Usagi Yojimbo,  the Middleman kicks serious ass. If you were one of the 12 people who watched the show, you will no doubt remember that the Middleman's headquarters was disguised as a temp agency, the Jolly Fats Wehawkin Employment Agency. Here's my take on the logo.

The original logo was set in a fake typewriter font with a big drop-shadow. It was only seen on the wall in the front office and on a t -shirt that Wendy Watson wore once in a while. I thought it was perfunctory at best (which was no doubt the intent of the designer), so I decided to take a stab at it.

The typefaces are Bodoni Poster and Copperplate, both reliable old standbys. My thinking here was the logo probably hadn't changed much since about 1978, and it was probably whatever the kid at the sign shop came up with. I went for a gold look, something a little cheesy, but a step up (I think, anyway) from the rather flat original design.

Bialystock & Bloom

This was actually one of the first fictional logos I did, way back in 2001, the year the musical version of The Producers opened on Broadway.

I've always loved the original movie (I literally have scars from laughing so hard at it; I watched it in the hospital four days after abdominal surgery and tore three stitches despite the pillow I held to my stomach the whole time.)When I heard about the musical, I decided I wanted a shirt, but not one that commemorated the stage play or film; what I wanted was the kind of shirt that members of the stage crew of Springtime for Hitler might wear. That's kind of what I go for with all these things; little scraps of reality from the fictional world.

For this design, I decided on a stark black & white design both because a tightwad like Max Bialystock would only spring for a one-color print, and also because the limitations of the time of the movie would have made a single color design optimal for everything from letterhead to rubber stampers.

The fonts are intended to evoke bygone eras, though only one of them is actually vintage. "Bialystock" is set in Rundfunk and "Bloom" is in Dolmen, two pseudo Art Deco fonts that Letraset came out with in the '70s. "Theatrical Producers" is in Bodega Sans Black Oldstyle, a retro-flavored typeface from 1990.  The "&" is Cooper Black, an authentic Jazz-era font from the 1920s.

Re-creations

Here are a couple of straight recreations of existing designs.

First is a design that's only seen for a short time on a billboard in the background in one scene of a movie, but I have no doubt that a lot of people will recognize it....

Got it?

Yup, it's Brad & Janet's home town, Denton, Ohio, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Here's another one, from about 30 years earlier.

If you don't recognize this one, I don't want to know you. If you do, well, here's looking at you, kid. We'll always have Paris.

Either one looks fantastic on a black background, like say a t-shirt....

A few non-Springfield items...

Aside from the Simpsons-related stuff, I've taken a stab at a few other ideas over the last year, and I thought I'd go ahead and toss them up on here since I haven't posted in a very long while. So here goes....

Oceanic Airlines
I felt like I had to do this one; it's the airline from TV's LOST, and the logo they used on the show was frankly horrible. Okay, the design of the O was okay (and I've kept mine very similar to theirs, with some minor tweaks) but the font used for the name was perfunctory at best. Helvetica, really? Or maybe it was Arial. Whatever, it was a boring vanilla sans serif that looked like somebody forgot to load the font before printing out the design. Dullsville. So I changed it to a fat face with a little bit of style to it; I used Frutiger Ultra Black, with the "Airlines" part set in Frutiger Bold. (Frutiger is my standard sans serif. Whenever possible I use it instead of Helvetica and its spawn.) I tweaked the colors a little bit and called it done.

Just to be a smartass, I added a clip-art airplane upside-down and the tagline at the bottom, set in House Signpainter script.

Pencey Prep Fencing Team
This was actually done as a gift for my bride. It's a reference to Catcher in the Rye; Holden Caulfield gets kicked off the Pencey Prep fencing team just before the book begins.

The design is deliberately simple, intended to look like every high school athletic shirt you ever saw. The main type is Princeton, and the lettering on the crest is Duc du Barry. The little banner reads "sis scio verum" which is Latin for "if you want to know the truth." It's a phrase that Holden adds to every third sentence, so it seemed to be an appropriate motto for the school.

Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Shows & Combined Circuses
From Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, this was my attempt at creating a period piece, the kind of poster that would have been slapped all over town when the circus rolled in way back in the long-ago days when there were traveling circuses. Lots of different fonts here, including a few bits from Adobe Woodcuts. A bit of distorted type, which I generally loathe, but in this case it was appropriate. I'm pretty happy with the colors, too.

Spade and Archer
This was inspired by watching The Maltese Falcon again; I noticed the lettering on the window, the kind of lettering that was common on the windows of second-floor offices in most cities in the 1930s. In the movie, the lettering was a straight-sided block face, but I decided to use something a little more stylish. Copperplate seemed to be appropriate, so here it is. I tried to pick a color that would evoke the semi-metallic bronze paint that might have been used. Gold seemed too gaudy for Sam Spade's sensibilities.

Noiseland Arcade

One of the interesting difficulties of the Simpsons is that after 20 years on the air, some of the cultural landmarks change. For example, the arcade where Bart used to fritter away a lot of his time; arcades are thin on the ground these days, now that everybody has a Playstation or XBox or whatever.

But anyway, I like the name, so here it is, the Noiseland Arcade...


My idea for this is that Noiseland is a place that opened up in the early days of videogames, shortly after the advent of the ubiquitous Pac-Man. They have never replaced or updated their signage, so Noiseland's logo is a good 30+ years out of date.

For the name "Noiseland", I hand-built my own lettering, based heavily on fonts from the Bauhaus School, particularly Blippo and Pump, with a tri-line design. The "Arcade" part is set in Braggadocio, which is a knock-of of Futura Black, another one of the Bauhaus designs.

The colors are pure '70s cheese, intended to contrast with the completely unauthorized Pac-Man logo that helps to further date the design as a relic.

It's a little sad to think that when The Simpsons premiered, this design would have only been about 10 years out of date; now it might as well be from Renaissance. Sigh. I'm old.

Kodos for President

I happened to catch a rerun of the Halloween Treehouse of Terror episode from 1996 yesterday, and was struck by the profound political commentary, and a bit disheartened that Groening & Co. were clearly shouting into the wind a dozen years ago.

When the Presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are revealed to be the monstrous aliens Kang & Kodos (yeah, yeah, "spoilers." It's from 13 years ago. There has to be a statute of limitations on this stuff....), they explain that it doesn't make any difference; "it's a two-party system... you have to vote for one of us." When a spectator suggests voting for a third-party candidate, the aliens taunt, "go ahead, throw your vote away! MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!"

After Inauguration Day, when Kang has won the election and the aliens have enslaved the population and put them to work building massive installations, Homer explains "don't blame me; I voted for Kodos!" as if the result would have been at all different.

So I sat down and whipped out a bumper sticker....


The squid symbol is based on the elephant and donkey icons that get trotted out every four years. I reversed the colors to make it feel alien; usually the red is on the bottom part. This alien nature is further emphasized by putting the star off-center.

The text is set in Simian, a font family from House Industries. I've used it before on other designs because it's a nice and interesting sans serif gothic that comes in three weights: Orangutan (Light), Chimpanzee (Medium), and Gorilla (Bold). I added a 12° skew since the font doesn't come in an oblique.

My First Tattoo

This one goes past pretty quickly on the show, but I liked the sound of it.

In the episode "My Sister, My Sitter" (season 8), Marge and Homer go to the grand re-opening of the Springfield Squidport and leave Lisa in charge of Bart and Maggie, with dire consequences.

Meanwhile, at the Squidport, which is one of those formerly-skeevy industrial areas that's been gentrified into a yuppie retail/entertainment complex, Mr. & Mrs. Simpson survey the new shops and restaurants, one of which is a tattoo parlor where a bunch of the Springfield children are admiring one kid's new ink.

As usual, the signage in the episode is fairly perfunctory, plain block lettering with a passing effort at a graphic. In this case, the word "First" is emblazoned on a ribbon traversing a heart, in a classic tattoo motif. I decided to go in a different direction, playing up the idea that it's a parlor specializing in young customers (which is certainly illegal just about everywhere in the US).


I decided to use a childish handwriting font (Lemonade Bold) for "My First", with bright pastel coloring, and a spiky medieval font (Ironwood) for "Tattoo". The red-to-black gradient fill and multiple outlines add a little edge of menace in keeping with the usual tattoo aesthetic.

IBOJDPCNT Local No 643

Homer's union, the International Brotherhood of Jazz Dancers, Pastry Chefs and Nuclear Technicians, Local No. 643, is the latest Springfield entity to go under my mouse for an identity.

Nothing says "Union" like a gear, so that's where I started. I dropped in simple iconic graphics representing the three different fields the union represents, and finished off with some workmanlike typography.

The font in the gear is Garamond Bold Condensed. The typefaces in the title area are Franklin Gothic Condensed, Futura Light Condensed, and Franklin Gothic Heavy. Dull as dishwater, but all union logos are.

Malibu Stacy

I had some down-time today while waiting for files to transfer, so I went ahead and did another Springfield logo treatment. This time it's Lisa's favorite fashion doll, Malibu Stacy.

As always, I started by looking at the real-world inspiration, in this case the marketing monster known as Barbie. Of course I had a vague idea of what the logo ought to look like, but I was surprised to see how often the good folks at Mattel refresh their brand identity. There are a lot of variations on the basic pink script logo. Sometimes it's been swirly and girly, other times it looks like hand-drawn lettering, and still other times it's a rounded-serif italic. The only thing that remains consistent is the garish trademark pink color.

With that in mind, I decided that "Malibu" should contrast with "Stacy" in every possible way; it's geometric and angular, all caps, widely-spaced, smaller, and bright blue. (The blue is intended to remind one of the ocean, as in Malibu Beach.) The font is ITC Serif Gothic, a popular font from the '70s that remains interesting and not too dated.

For "Stacy" I started with one of the marvelous sign-making fonts from A&S, in this case A&S Signwriter, which I then converted to outlines, threw a stroke on and tortured within an inch of its life, fattening the letters, fattening them even more at the bottom, extending the crossbar on the t and elongating the tail on the y. Then I tipped the whole thing (except the crossbar on the t) to a slight angle and laid "Malibu" over it with a white stroke placed behind it. I chose a lavender color for the logo since pink is claimed by the competition.

Try 'N' Save

Try 'N' Save is the Springfield version of what used to be Pic 'N' Save, a chain of cheapo discount retailers that is today called Big Lots. Pic 'N' Save was the west coast version; in other areas, it was called "MacFrugal's" (how come nobody ever complains about the insulting ethnic stereotyping of the Scots? I bet if it were called "Frugalberg's" somebody would make a little noise...). Eventually, MacFrugal's/Pic 'N' Save merged with Odd Lots/Big Lots and now there's only one major bargain/close-out store chain. (By the way, the parent company also owns Kay-Bee Toys, so if you wait long enough, everything that goes through the toy store eventually ends up at the bargain shop. Just an FYI.)

Anyway, back to the design...

The last Pic 'N' Save logo was one of those vaguely western-looking ones, sort of like the font I used for Moe's, tall and thin with big fat slab serifs. For Try 'N' Save I went with something a little more informal and looser feeling. The Las Vegas font collection from House Industries is based on signage from classic Vegas casinos; I used Nugget, which is based on the Golden Nugget. It's a very narrow font, so I once again stretched it horizontally 250% (I really hate doing that, but sometimes it's necessary). The color is Pantone 199, a bright red that leans a little toward magenta, with a thin black keyline added to give it a little solidity.

As with Moe's, the goal is to create a slightly outdated logo, something that looks like it was done by a low-budget design outfit about 20 years ago and hasn't been freshened up in a while.

Things Unnecessary

"Things Unnecessary" is the store where Homer bought himself a $500 astrolabe in the Season 15 Christmas episode. The store is intended to be a satire of outfits like Sharper Image and Brookstone, but the name is a play on a chain store called "Things Remembered." These are stores that specialize in items for people with more dollars than sense; personalized tchotchkes, the sort of thing you might receive as a gift if you were a bridesmaid. The merchandise is all the sort of thing I call "look, I got you a gift" gifts; somewhat impersonal (in that it doesn't reflect anything at all of the recipient's tastes or preferences), almost entirely useless, but too expensive-looking to dump at the Goodwill, and since it usually has the recipient's name or initials engraved on it, it's almost impossible to re-gift. Exactly the sort of place that would stock $500 astrolabes.

The name and type of business demands a logo that has a veneer of elegance, an upscale look, with a sleek but ornamental typeface, so I started with University Roman, a somewhat swashy font with big loopy letters, a strong vertical shape, long spiky serifs, and what I would describe as a "Disney" flavor. Elegant but superficial, with something of a soulless quality.

A veneer of reflective gloss with a slightly cold metallic color, and a completely extraneous ligature of the too-precious double-s and the g, and we have an upscale logo with a vaguely tacky feeling about it.

Awfully quiet out there

Is anybody out there? I see I have a few followers, and a couple other people have told me they look at these, but a little feedback wouldn't hurt. Somebody comment already. Are there any Springfield institutions you'd like to see me take a whack at?

Hello? Bueller?

Moe's Tavern

Moe's is another of the long-time Springfield landmarks that never really had any kind of a logo; the establishing shot of the exterior shows a purple building with green-and-orange diamond-cut stained glass windows, and (again) plain red block letters spelling out the name, "MOE'S" over the door. The words "Moe's Tavern" appear in black lettering on the side wall.

I decided that Moe's sign should probably look like it hadn't been updated in a few decades; in the mid-1970s there was an 1890s revival (along with a '20s revival and a '50s one, almost simultaneously, as nostalgia is prone to do), with a lot of businesses adopting the late-Victorian-to-Edwardian letterforms and decorative devices. In my old neighborhood there was an entire mall decorated in that style, and some people may remember Farrell's, a chain of "gay '90s" ice cream parlors. In Southern California at least, the turn of the century design also included an Old West flavor (same time period, different culture), with "western" fonts popping up here and there.

I've opted to use one of those western fonts, in this case Ponderosa, but I've tortured it. Ponderosa is an astonishingly narrow font with gigantic serifs, so I scaled it horizontally to 300% of its original proportion for enhanced legibility. Then I rotated it 10° counterclockwise (or as I prefer to think of it, widdershins) and stacked layers of keylines on it and dropped it in front of a circular element.

Colors are derived from the interior of the bar; brown from the wood, green and orange from the windows, and yellow from the customers' skin tone.

Globex Corporation

Hank Scorpio's world-dominating corporation was an ideal candidate for a refresh; the original was, once again, plain gothic type, with a globe replacing the O.

Given that world-dominating corporations usually try to present themselves as benign and friendly, I decided to go with environmentally-conscious blues and greens, which also helps to integrate the globe with the letters.

Fonts are Gill Sans, Extra Bold and Light. I decided to play up the arrow formed by the intersection of the E and X by filling it with the green from the globe.

I think it's as warm and fuzzy as any malevolent corporation bent on tyranny and evil.

KBBL-TV

KBBL is another blank slate; the only thing that's consistently been used for Kent Brockman's station is "a red 6 inside a yellow circle" and "red block letters," according to the Simpsons entry at Wikipedia. (yeah, yeah, I know.)

So we start with a red six and red block letters. In this case, I chose to warm up the red a little, pushing it a bit toward orange, and muted the yellow down a bit. A white keyline to brighten it up a little, and a blue holding shape to tie it all together.

The six is that same Chimes font I used for the Canyonero, but slightly edited to make it square proportions. The KBBL lettering is set in Simian Gorilla, a font from House Industries based on the lettering from the original 1968 version of "Planet of the Apes." I kerned it super-tight so the letters would overlap.

Luigi's Italian Restaurant

The character Luigi is a deliberate stereotype, derived from that piece of clip-art that appears on practically every pizza box ever delivered. As such, his restaurant is a stereotypical Italian restaurant/pizzeria, so that's where we begin.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Italian restaurants (apart from Lady and the Tramp eating spaghetti) is the red & white checked tablecloth. I muted it down a bit by using thin striped squares instead of solid red blocks.

Naturally, the colors should be taken from the Italian flag, but again, I muted the colors down, choosing a light pastel green.

Fonts are : A&S Graceland for Luigi's, Stempel Schneidler Black for "Italian Restaurant"' and New Berolina for the slogan.

Red Blazer Realty

The Red Blazer Realty company is a parody of Century 21, whose agents all wear (or wore; I don't know if they still do) mustard-gold blazers as part of their corporate image. I decided to ignore the Century 21 logo and go a different direction.

As with all of these, my goal is to come up with what the business logo would look like if it really existed. Generally, that means sticking to the same assumptions and traditions that real-world businesses follow. In the real estate game, that means conservative choices of font and bold use of color, usually staking out one particular color as a distinction. I haven't noticed a lot of really great graphic design in the real estate business, my perception being that it's more important to be noticed than tasteful, so I went with the bright red of the signature blazer and placed it against black and white.

The red blazer icon is a simple geometric design, intended to be noticed and recognized while the viewer is driving past the signage. The typefaces are pretty generic, "Red Blazer" in Rotis Sans Serif Bold, with a 105% vertical scale, and "Realty" in Optima Roman with a 246% horizontal scale. (I'm generally loath to stretch a font, but in this case I made an exception, since I see it all the time in real estate ads.) The red color is as generic as can be, 100M/100Y.

Ayn Rand School for Tots

This was one of my favorite gags from one of the best episodes ever.

The goal here is to create a logo as bleak and oppressive as Rand's diseased philosophy. (Sorry, but just about every Objectivist I've ever met could most charitably be described as a jerk.) I knew it would be a harsh and rigid design, and originally it was strictly black-and-white, in keeping with the Objectivist worldview, but when I saw it on the gray background I knew it was right.

I looked at a bunch of geometric, constructivist and Art Deco fonts (including Anna, Bodega Sans several of Nick's Fonts) and before settling on Bureau Agency Bold. Even the name is oppressive.

Blood Bath & Beyond

I looked on Google's image search for Homer's favorite gun shop, but couldn't find any indication of a logo for it, which means I'm again left to my own devices rather than reworking an existing one. So of course the place to start is with the store that's being parodied here, Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The BB&B logo is pretty distinctive, so I decided I'd try to emulate it a little but not too much. I kept the stacked light and bold sans serif type and that's about it. Their logo is set in all caps, using Futura Light and Extra Bold, and they do an interesting distortion on the word "Beyond", so that each letter is horizontally distorted a little more than the previous one, giving the idea that it's stretching off into the beyond. Clever, but I chose to leave it alone.

My version is in Gill Sans, another geometric font that's a bit evocative of the Bauhaus School, heavily kerned, and set in upper- and lower-case. Bed, Bath & Beyond's corporate color is a soft blue, but for a gun store we need to be a little bolder; naturally blood red is the obvious choice, but it needs some contrast to set it off, so the "Beyond" gets to be black.

The biggest challenge with this logo was deciding whether "Blood Bath" should be one word or two. I ended up cheating a bit, making it two words but trimming down the space between words to about 1/3 of what it wanted to be.

Lionel Hutz's "I Can't Believe It's a Law Firm!"

It's actually easier to design some of these things than you might think, because the Simpsons writers come up with stuff that's so iconic it practically designs itself. As soon as you hear the name of the law office where Lionel Hutz works, you pretty much know what it ought to look like. Or at least I do.

By combining the idea of a law firm with a reference to a brand of margarine, they tell us exactly what kind of lawyer Hutz is: he's what we used to call "a mall lawyer." The most immediately familiar of those outfits is of course Jacoby & Meyers, a chain of discount lawyer franchises that sprang up in the '70s and advertised heavily on local television. So that's where I started.

As I recall, the Jacoby & Meyers logo used to be a boring arrangement set in Souvenir, which is one of those fonts you don't see too often anymore, mostly because you saw it everywhere 30 years ago. It was one of the few fonts that came standard in all the pre-computer typesetting machines, so it got used a lot. It practically smells of the '70s. They've since changed the J&M logo to the generic-but-timeless Centennial.

I've used Souvenir Demi and Bold italics, and set it on an angle to vaguely emulate the typography on the margarine label. The green and gold colors are evocative of both food packaging and '70s logo design, but completely inappropriate for a respectable law office, and the double drop-shadow is there entirely for the cheese factor.