The "Face" of Ranger Mike Friday

This past Wednesday, around 4pm, I came across a buried treasure that only graphic designers would get truly excited about. As I explored its contents, I found myself staying in the office much later than I needed to be and when I finally went home, I couldn’t wait for work the next day to continue playing with my new treasures (isn’t that a great thing, to be excited to wake up and go to work?).

Q. What could possibly generate such enthusiasm and creative inspiration?
A. The official NPS map pictograms, as vector images, courtesy of the Harpers Ferry Center.


A brief lesson in digital images: Vector refers to a file type that relies on mathematical formulas to create shapes and therefore can be scaled to any size without distortion or awkward pixels. For designers who constantly have to scale the same images for different projects—for web, print publication, or billboards even—vector-based images make the job so much easier. And for me, the resulting smooth graphics works well with my personal style that is founded in balance, white-space, efficiency and clean-cut-ness (okay, I know that’s not a word). If anyone’s watched me work with Adobe Illustrator, he has witnessed a weird intuitive dance between my fingers on the keyboard, my wireless mouse, and the computer screen.

So finding all of these vector-based symbols, already created, is like suddenly finding myself able to speak another language. Or doubling one’s vocabulary. These are just more words for me to use in my visual language and I spent most of Thursday testing out how they feel.



(PS. I've printed these off as paper bookmarks, to send to our network staff as a reminder to "bookmark" this blog on their web-browser. I know, that's a pretty bad design pun)

Now Ranger Mike Friday has a logo, a symbol to represent who he is. It’s somewhat ambiguous and could represent anyone, and that’s the point. Ranger Mike Friday = National Park Service.

Just to show Ranger Mike doing a variety of activities, I added the hat to many common pictograms. I think my favorite are the random—but real—ones like “Showers Available” and “Golf Course.” Because the activities that I found are not specifically about scientific monitoring, I may be developing our own set of pictograms for the network (bird watching, snorkeling for fish assemblages, using a helicopter to monitor elk, etc).

Simplifying complex information into readable, usable graphics is becoming a common theme in my work and I enjoy this design challenge.