We've now received that final piece of artwork and it's been added to our header. It's a mosaic of many, many Revit add-in icons (plus the Revit icons from versions 2011 through 2017, the years that our site's been active). Here's the mosaic (click for full resolution):
The mosaic and logo are both by Juan Osborne.
We first became aware of Juan when he released a handful of free add-ins on the Autodesk App Store. We like good design, and the first thing that we noticed was the high-quality artwork of his add-in icons:
The care in creating those icons is evident, and above and beyond what we often see from other parties, as with the following:
Or, better yet, check out this artwork with the copyright holder's watermark, the kind that's intended to prevent unauthorized use, still apparent:
(When you've rendered Rusty speechless, you've really done something.)
Now, we don't poke fun here just to poke fun; we want to let add-in developers that need help along these lines know that there is help available. More on that later.
Also, there are other add-in developers that have keen design senses (or at least ties to good marketing firms). RTV Tools, Kiwi Codes, and Emanuel Favreau are just a few that spring to mind.
After noticing Juan's add-ins on the App Store, we checked them out, and awarded two of them, TransferSingle and WorksetCreator, Editor's Choice Awards. And they and FilterMore were also featured in our popular Essential Revit Add-ons roundup this year. In fact, Juan had the most add-ins on our essentials list!
We also checked out Juan's website and learned that he's quite an accomplished graphic designer, having been commissioned to create many pieces. For example:
And of course, Juan's also created some BIM-centric art (click for full-resolution images):
While many of us probably style ourselves as technical with a healthy dose of good design sense, it's truly rare to find someone with their left and right brains as engaged as Juan's seem to be. So we contacted him and asked if he had any ideas on how to improve our site.
"I don't know how to help with your currently nice site," he replied. "Maybe I can create one of my mosaics or something for your site top."
A few months later, out of the blue, Juan sent us a new logo for our site that paid homage to and was a fusion of sorts between our original logo and the Revit 2017 logo.
To be honest, we weren't sold initially. But then we thought to combine it with a change in our site to a dark theme that we'd had in mind for some time. The darker theme really made the new logo pop, and we fell in love with it.
Now, our editor Tim Grimm likes to think he has pretty good design sense, but there's no way he would have come up with the concept of the new logo, let alone the final design. It took a true graphic designer to do that. And to have done so quite nearly fully formed on the first attempt was very special indeed.
We still wanted Juan's mosaic though and it took awhile for us all to agree on the one we liked most.
In his career, in addition to working as a freelance graphic designer and as a BIM consultant, Juan has worked as an architect, project manager, BIM manager, BIM specialist, and developer with companies like ibinser, Imaginespacios Architects SLP, BOD Architecture and Engineering, and AVATAR BIM. He's currently working at Broadway Malyan in Madrid, Spain as a BIM expert on large retail projects.
Being a professional graphic designer with extensive BIM technology experience, Juan is uniquely qualified to help Revit and BIM associated companies and developers create branding that is unique, compelling, memorable and attractive.
If you'd like to work with Juan, please, send him an email.
For our part, we feel very fortunate to have crossed paths with Juan and to have had the opportunity to work with him. We couldn't be happier with our current branding and owe much of it to him.
We hope you like our current look too. And, as always, we're happy to receive your feedback.
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