Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Whitney, KFC Ltd. & Photogenic Toronto

Weekly Update 2017-30: Lovely southern-inspired folk songs from Whitney, repping fried chicken with KFC's new apparel launch, and a new Toronto sign to grace the feeds of social media.

Music: Whitney
Hailing from Chicago but sounding like heaven, Whitney is a regrouping of the pieces of Smith Westerns' breakup in 2014. The band sounds like all the good parts of folk and soul and country, with some lovely interesting strings and an overall mellow mood. They'll be playing Toronto this Friday and at Osheaga where I'll be seeing them in a couple of weeks!

I especially like No Woman and Golden Days.


Accomplishment:
You may have noticed that my website has a whole new look! I've been hard at work adding new projects and updating the overall look. It's an ongoing process that I've left too long.

Specifically I've added two new projects (so exciting): one being a Check-in app for events, the other being FriendCanoe which you've seen on this blog before. FriendCanoe is still being developed, but the design will be displayed and updated as I work on it. Fun stuff!


I also did some preliminary logo sketching for my friends' band Slowfish and met up today to discuss the direction.




Goal:
This week I'll be continuing work on my site, as well as setting up my new computer! Yay, I finally made the jump to buy a brand new MacBook.

I'll also be compiling the Arduino work I've done so far into a finished project. It'll be ongoing, but I've already learned a lot from the projects I've completed so far, so it'll be good to recap everything.

Random Thought: KFC Ltd.
Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with Kentucky Fried Chicken. On the one hand, it's delicious (both hot and cold leftover). On the other hand, the processing it undergoes makes it barely even food, which is why I feel so shitty after eating it. I rarely step inside a KFC anymore, which is why I found their new ad campaign extremely surprising.


They have really nice merchandise to promote brand recognition and loyalty, just when you were thinking that you'd like to rep fried chicken, now you have the perfect opportunity.



This enamel pin is so huge, it needs four backings.


I kind of want all of these items. I wonder if all of this is some sort of effort to reconnect with millenials who may have forgotten about the old Colonel? I love me some enamel pins but I don't think any of this would get me into a restaurant any faster. If you want to rep some fried chicken, visit the shop on the KFC Ltd. website.

Inspiration: The New Toronto Sign
You may have seen this Toronto sign in your instagram feed one or two or a million times:


While I do love this sign for many reasons (helps people interact with the city, global brand visibility, visual appeal), there is something about it that feels kind of corporate and too clean to really represent the city and all of its facets.

Well that sign can move aside because we've got a showstopper that just entered the scene. Artists Thelia Sanders-Shelton and Julie Ryan used washed up driftwood to create a wooden Toronto sign on the rocks in Humber Bay Park. People have already been instagramming it like crazy:



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I love so many things about this sign. It has a more handmade feel (because it is handmade) so it reflects the people who created it, it's made from natural materials, and it even includes the city skyline in it (since it's a little far away from the city centre, but still accessible). I feel much more pride for this sign than the one in Nathan Phillips Square, but I think the city is big enough to have more than one sign. Don't you?

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