design - Bitter Grounds Magazine

Steampunk Cat Airmail! – with a touch of PRIDE

by catpaw | 13 Jun, 2023 | Catpaw's Picks, design, Stamps

Time to do a bit of promotion! I’ve been working away at my little store over at RedBubble, but realised I don’t pay enough attention to it. I think I have far too much fun researching and writing, so I tend to forget everything else.

I’ve been poking the store with a stick lately and realised I needed a new avatar. I’ve used my venerable old cat postage stamp for nearly 20 years now and as much as I love him, it was time for a change. What better way to refresh than with airmail, steampunk & cats!

To celebrate my shiny new image, I’ve put it on some merch. You can have this PRIDE wearing cat aviator on t-shirts, stickers, totes and a handful of other items.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve been playing around with some new AI driven art. It’s a bit tricky getting the phrasing right to generate what I’m looking for and I’m still trying to figure everything out, but I’m pretty happy with the results. Stay tuned for more philately fun – I have about 5 more designs on the drawing board. I’ll let you know when they are ready. These are far more fun to create than I ever imagined.

Check out them out at Steampunk Cat Airmail! – with a touch of PRIDE by BitterGrounds | Redbubble. While you’re there, don’t forget to take a look at the other products I’ve created.

Designing a logo for Bitter Grounds

by catpaw | 17 Apr, 2020 | design, photos | art | design

After over a decade of blogging, I’ve decided to start designing a logo for the magazine. Better late than never, n’est pas? And, let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you think.

Designing a logo step one: creating a mood

I’ve gone through dozens of design ideas, best left unseen. I sat down and rethought what image I wanted to convey at first glance. That took a lot of reflection. For years I’ve avoided using a coffee motif, because I thought it was too cliched, but after looking through the site and slogan ‘espresso fueled ramblings’ I realised I was wrong. A carefully picked espresso graphic would enhance a logo.

Colours, colours, colours

Oh boy, this one is a difficult one. I’ve been struggling with a colour palette for the site for a long time. I’ve gone through dozens and still can’t seem to settle on one that tweaks my visual cortex. I gravitate to earth tones and tend to be over reliant on them. I’m still experimenting so expect the logo colours and basic colour layout on this site to change over time.

I discarded my first try at using espresso colours. They ended up being bland looking and muted. So I’ve settled, temporarily, on a basic black background/white font design. This tends to pop a bit more on the screen.

Fonts and layout

This was a tough one. Far more difficult than the rest. Choosing the right font makes or breaks a design. I’m not a professional graphic artist. At best, I can be described as an enthusiastic amateur. This process has increased my admiration for people who design as a living. You can’t slap any old font down and say “Oh done!”.

I tried about 20 different ones – serif and sans. I prefer San serif fonts because I like the overall simplicity many display. I fired up Adobe Spark because it helps novice designers with basic ideas and played around with ideas. One font and layout caught my eye – Bebas Neue by Ryoichi Tsunekawa. I really like his fonts. They have a linear, geometric feel.

Now that I had a typeface, what was I supposed to do with it? Once again Spark came to my rescue. They had a basic layout idea that worked well, but only if I used a lot of ‘white space’. The liberal use of bold and regular drew in my eye, along with the satisfying spacing between letters.

Putting the logo together

So I had the graphic, the font, and the basic layout. It was time to potter around with it. Before I show the finished version, here’s one of the earlier incarnations I made:

I really like the drip down effect, but overall? It just didn’t work. The logo isn’t readable if it’s shrunk down and it just isn’t right. I’m going to go back at it later to see if I can correct the readability issues, but for now, it’s on the back shelf.

And here is what I opted for:

Ticks all the boxes: simplicity, spacing, balanced and clean. It shrinks and expands beautifully. Best of all, it works with banners like this:

Hmm, yes, I do gravitate towards the darker images, don’t I.

And this:

This last one is an idea I’m working on for the vlog. The straight black and white logo plays well with colours, so it has potential. Though, I think the espresso graphic in the previous image works better so that’s the one I’ll keep using.

And there we have it. My first logo for Bitter Grounds. Like all things, it will change as I become more confident in designing, but for now, I’m quite happy with it.

To see more of Ryoichi Tsunekawa’s work check out Dharma Type at https://dharmatype.com/about.

Behold, the terrifying creature Castor canadensis: A very brief look at the Canadian beaver in design.

by catpaw | 14 Jul, 2017 | Catpaw's Picks, country Stamps, design, photos | art | design, Stamps

While flipping through a catalogue for a show at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (UofT) and I spotted what has to be the single most amusing depiction of a beaver ever created:

Fearsome, isn’t it? Baron Louis Armand e Lom d’Arce Lahontan’s beaver looks like it crawled out of a myth – head of a man, body of a dog, legs of a rodent and a pinecone tail. Mean looking too. His works were printed in the early 1700s under the title New voyages to North-America. The second engraving from the Lahontan book doesn’t fair much better. The poor beaver/monster hybrid simply looks exhausted in this engraving:

Impressive snarl on that beast, not to mention the awe-inspiring eyebrows. I can’t decide whether the beaver/monster is wearing earrings or if the artist couldn’t decide what type of ears such a creature would have. The lack of webbing on the hind feet convinces me a friend was correct, the artist never saw a real beaver. Or he was playing to a naïve European audience who would lap up the dangers of hunting the exotic and dangerous animals of North America.

However, those engravings have nothing on an 1685 illustration that reminds me of a game we used to play where you had to draw what someone was describing:

The eyes are a bit haunting and suggests something out of a bestiary of magical creatures.

One of my favourite designs comes courtesy of Sir Sanford Fleming. Canada’s Postmaster General asked Sir Sanford to design Canada’s first stamp, and instead of the default Queen Victoria portrait, he created what is arguably one of Canada’s iconic stamps:

Compared to the mighty beaver in the Lahontan engravings, Fleming’s 1851 depiction is downright benign, but it does look like a beaver. The optics of the little water fall at the beaver’s feet make the creature look the size of a bear when you look at the tiny stamp. Regardless, this is my favourite stamp. I own 7 copies of the later issues and look at them often. It’s easily the most identifiable stamp in the Canadian catalogue. (read more about the stamp design –https://bittergrounds.com/canadian-philately-5c-beaver-stamp-some-not-so-tortured-canadian-history/

And speaking of mythology, a wonderfully quirky book, called Castorologia or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver by Horace T. Martin (1892) offers a glimpse into many early engravings and the use of beavers in Canadian imagery, including this flight of fantasy:

Believe it or not, that beast, bottom right, is a beaver – Canada, home of unicorns and snarling, vicious, pinecone tailed beaver.

Living in Canada, it’s all but impossible to avoid seeing images of beavers. It’s deeply ingrained in our historical psyche and found scattered everywhere in Canadian art, architecture, teacups, stamps, plates, signage and pretty much anything you can imagine:

For the record, I have no idea why there were beaver silhouettes posted down at Nathan Phillips Square (downtown Toronto). But this dashing fellow, found on the Centre Block Parliament Hill makes far more sense. Think of him as a Canadian gargoyle.

Hands down, the single best use of a beaver is in this early proposal for a Dominion of Canada seal sometime in the 1880s:

I adore this engraving. So much so, I’m thinking of putting it on a t-shirt. You can find it in the Castorologia book, pg 201. The “rampant” beavers look like they are picking a fight with their “you looking at me” scowl. How awe inspiring is that image! Beavers with attitude.

And speaking of rampant beavers, here’s another example of beavers in Canadian iconography – the Coat of Arms for the city of Toronto:

This little offering is relatively new, created in 1998 when Toronto amalgamated. When I first saw it, I thought it was an early incarnation of Toronto’s CofA. I’ve never seen it anywhere, except on a few random web pages. I remember the old Coat of Arms rather well but didn’t realise it had been changed until recently. The beaver is larger and far more intimidating than the poor bear on the right. I think in a cage fight, the beaver would win. The overall image is a bit lacklustre and static, lacking the flair and attitude of the beavers in the previous shield.

Not sure if I can take a “rampant beaver” seriously ever again after seeing this make the rounds on social media:

The artist, Jessica Bortuski captured modern Canada’s wry humour about it’s international image perfectly. Far less serious and earnest than the fierce beavers of earlier days. (Find more of her work here http://jessicaborutski.blogspot.ca/)

I’ll close out with one last (and less tongue in cheek) look at beavers as Canadian icons:

George Kruger Gray (25 December 1880 – 2 May 1943) 1937 engraving of a beaver on a rock. Nudge a Canadian and chances are you’ll find a few jingling around in their pockets.

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You can download a pdf of Castorologia or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver by Horace T. Martin at Archive.org https://archive.org/details/castorologiaorhi00mart