While I was at The Next Generation (TNG), I worked with fellow TNG staff on several projects for the California Wilderness Coalition (CalWild), most notably their 40th Anniversary campaign.

The element of that project I enjoyed the most was designing, editing, and producing a retro-styled issue of their print newsletter, the Wilderness Record.

The concept I was presented with was to evoke the organization’s history by making the newsletter completely faithful to its original look and feel. I was given newsletters from throughout the organization’s history for reference; I scanned in graphics that were originally used in their newsletters of the 1970s and included stories from throughout CalWild’s history.

Event attendees loved the newsletter. People involved in the founding of the organization commented that they hadn’t seen a newsletter like that in many years and that it vividly brought them back to those days.

In order to produce this newsletter in a way that would truly create that reaction, I knew we had to go all the way and find a vendor who would print it on a web press on newsprint in the timeframe we needed. Gary Reid at Dakota Press, who I have worked with for years, has been a print broker in the past; since he didn’t have a web press at the time, he pointed me to Delta Web Printing in West Sacramento, who delivered the perfect newsletter extremely quickly for a terrific price.

I began the process by designing a 40th Anniversary version of their logo, staying as true to the existing logo as possible while adding the “40” element in a typeface that evokes the time during which the organization was founded.

I had to refine the gradients and illustration elements somewhat in both versions as I worked on these logos; they had originally been live traced from decades-old hand drawings. I adjusted the placement of the organic shapes within the “40” mark for better visual flow.