Making Good

2018

After a successful pilot, BYUtv bought one season of Making Good. Cosmic Pictures came to me for a brand that could flex across the 12 episodes they would edit and deliver over the next year.

Me, Kyle

Design

Jack Mergist

Showrunning

Jeff Wiggins

Production Design

Creative Direction

Jack, Making Good's showrunner, wanted it to feel like Saul Bass, Brady Bunch, Monster's Inc. I looked to 50s Betty Crocker cookbooks, and Alain Grée.

Guidelines

The deliverables included a 28 page pdf guidelines for editors, vendors, and caption or title designers.

Logo Optical Sizes

Because the kit needed to span digital, print, and video applications, I created two optical sizes of the logo.

Typography

It was important that the in-house team at Cosmos didn't get stuck with a brand that needed a full time letterer or illustrator. So I created some opinionated, bespoke fonts.

I’m a brand designer in Oakland, CA. If I'm not baking or reading, you’ll find me at Savers. I run Very Cool Studio, work as a brand designer at GitHub, and run Song Club Records.

In my experience, design is what it does. Designers (me, Kyle) have the tendency to fall in love with the conveyor belt. And as we all fall in love with the clean doingness of AI, it has become more and more important to ask “okay but what does it do.” Design is the opinion-making process for answering that question. I sorta think this is what trust the process means. At the start of every project I’m a little dumb—at the end I’ll be a little smarter. If I’m doing my job right, the work will be a little more than me—kinder, smarter, more true to its purpose—leaving me in my state of stupor for the next project.

And maybe because I see myself as a little dumb, I think of most design problems as interpersonal problems. I still haven’t found a good enough idea, a plan so god-tier that it’s self-convincing. And the subjectivities that get in the way of those smart plans are only a problem because we say so.

If you made it this far, let's talk — that's the interpersonal part.

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