‘South by’ can be an overwhelming experience. Our intent with our party this year was to provide a relaxing yet fun escape from the madness and mayhem of the conference. We wanted our guests to party with old and new friends in a relaxed atmosphere while enjoying margaritas, beers, and breakfast tacos.
Once we had our theme, we looked to Austin’s au courant southwest/modern aesthetic to inform the visual language. With our party’s theme in place, we got to work on freshening up our beloved Wobblr.
Branding
The shape and scale of the Wobblr is reminiscent of an old-school arcade game, so we went hunting for a typeface that alluded to that—and found Miyagi. Completely unrelated to the martial art philosopher from Karate Kid, Myagi is a typeface digitized by UK-based designer Alex Haigh in 2008 and published by his foundry Thinkdust.
Myagi is not a retro font, but a near identical digitization of ‘70s typeface Yagi Link Double, designed by Robert Trogman for Facsimile Fonts. Yagi was languishing in old Letraset catalogues until Haight took it upon himself to re-create it. And we’re glad he did!
Myagi is of its time, but also timeless. Its connected curves and bold geometry are not only attractive, but also lend themselves really well to laser cutting. We got our friends at Make ATX to cut the new Wobblr logo out of 1/8-inch plywood. Then a bit of paint and glue and… voila!
Tech Updates
But the Wobblr is not just prettier now, it’s also had some tech upgrades. The two screens are now an iPad Air and an iPad 4, which provide more resolution and faster animations. We switched from Windows to Mac software to run the cameras and developed a new sharing interface that allows folks to email their Wobblr creations. Because consistency is king, we also updated the Wobblr.com UI to match the new branding.
