A couple of months ago, my younger brother took over marketing responsibilities for his local adult hockey league. He approached me (knowing that I wouldn’t turn down a chance to work on a sports logo) to help revamp their identity. The Tri-City Senior Hockey League (TCSHL for short) is located in Kearney, Nebraska. Kearney is also home to the Tri-City Storm, a USHL franchise that competes with teams like our own Omaha Lancers. The Storm wanted to get involved with the league to help increase the local excitement for hockey. When I suggested that the new TCSHL logo borrow an element from the Storm’s logo and share a similar color palette, the guys in charge thought it was a great idea.

With approval from the Storm, I paired a custom built logotype with a star, which is stylistically borrowed from the stars found in the Storm’s logo. The star serves as a visual link to the larger hockey community in Kearney. The new logo will be used on promotional pieces for the league, including jerseys, pucks, banners, and car decals.

My favorite character, whose movies appear on my list three (out of a possible four) times

Movies from my childhood

• A League of Their Own
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
• Beetle Juice
  
• Big
• Family Vacation
• Groundhog Day
• Heavyweights
• Little Monsters
• The Goonies
• The Mighty Ducks
• The Princess Bride
• The Sandlot

Movies that can be enjoyed by all ages

• Back to the Future I
• Back to the Future II
• Monsters, Inc.
• The Incredibles
• Toy Story 1
• Toy Story 2
• Toy Story 3
• Up

Movies that tell the story of an event or individual’s life

• 500 Days of Summer
• Catch Me If You Can
• Forest Gump
• La Bamba
• Ray
• Slumdog Millionaire
• Superbad
• The Girl Next Door
• The Social Network
• The Wrestler
• Walk the Line

Good guys vs. bad guys movies

• American History X
• Fargo
• Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Indiana Jones – Temple of Doom
• Indiana Jones – The Last Crusade
• Inglorious Bastards
• Kill Bill Volume I
• North by Northwest
• Shaun of the Dead
• The Dark Knight
• Zombieland

I think that doing something creative (outside of design) is really healthy for designers. It’s been a long time since I’ve painted, molded something out of clay, even sketched just to sketch. I know I have a long way to go before I’m taking Great photos, but in the meantime, I’m going to take every opportunity I can to learn and grow as a photographer. I love being a designer and while taking photos is really fun and rewarding, it’s still always going to be a hobby. I’ll leave professional photography to those who dedicate their careers to it.

This is my list of Great™ TV shows. It’s also (not coincidentally) a list of shows with writers who are awesome problem-solvers. The golden era of Great™ TV is closing (at least from my point of view), and although I’m not giving it up entirely, I’m not watching as much as I used to. So, consider this a farewell love letter to TV.

Seinfeld

Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are master problem-solvers. Their medium is different than ours, but they think just like we do. Every episode is a fully-realized conceptual exploration, pushed to the limit of its potential. The stories are woven so tightly — and with a ridiculous payoff that’s so surprising and do damn seamless — I’m convinced that they actually wrote all of them backwards.

See also: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Scrubs

House

This show is remarkable for the number of limitations it places on itself. And limitations (as every designer knows) are a problem-solver’s playground. Every episode follows the same basic structure, where the patient-of-the-week’s story is used as a device to push the stories of the main characters. Each of those characters conforms to a very specific type, which is used nearly-philosophically to examine how we all relate to one another. Every line of dialog means something, and every storyline is going somewhere meaningful. It really can’t be said enough: House is written tighter than anything else on TV right now. Maybe ever.

See also: Mad Men

Veronica Mars

It’s said that House is a modern day Sherlock Holmes, but in terms of building a short-form mystery that resolves itself cogently and unpredictably, Veronica Mars has him beat. Each of the goofy mini-mysteries is tied directly to a larger, more nefarious season-long story arc. Somehow, the writers are able to balance the absurdity of a high school amateur PI with very real, legitimately affecting character studies. It’s deftly-handled, and it really has to be seen to be believed.

How I Met Your Mother

This is a TV show that knows it’s being watched. Every episode explores some kind of specific concept, but where Seinfeld weaved that concept together and presented it at the end, HIMYM tells you (actually, Bob Saget tells you) right away that something interesting is about to happen. The magic is in actually watching them pull it off.

See also: 30 Rock

Friday Night Lights

Like many shows on this list, the thing that unites all of the characters (in this case, high school football), is really just a device. The actual topic of FNL is regular people in a small Texas town living their lives. But the trick is that the writers are able to turn very regular situations into compelling TV. And damn is it compelling.

See also: The Wire

Smallville

I know what you’re thinking. But consider this: Smallville’s writers have taken a ridiculous story about an alien and his mad-scientist nemesis and managed to kind of make it make sense. It’s more about Kansas than Krypton. They’ve reengineered a story that everyone is familiar with — one that’s been told 10,000 times over since 1932 — and still found enough new material to run for 10 years on network TV. Of all the problems solved on this page, this is easily the most impressive.

Miles’ Birthday banner

Illustrating the banner reminded us of early design school exercises. It also gave us an chance to bust out our beloved Prismacolor markers. Each letter became a blank canvas in which we had to creatively fill the space. This is not unlike our starting process for client work. We sit down with a blank sheet of paper and sketch until we find solutions that work.

Happy first birthday to Miles!

Bach wedding logo

Before beginning the logo, the bride and groom told me that they wanted it to represent their new life together. Normally, this would mean that they were looking for something as generic as two hearts locked together (no offense if this beautiful symbol graced the cover of your wedding announcement). However, they are not your typical couple.

Since my friend was from Nebraska and his finance was from Germany, they decided to make their home in a completely new place that could be their own. They city they choose was Seattle, which is home to some of the most breathtaking nature you’ll find in the world. The couple’s new home (which was also the wedding’s location) became my key focus. I knew they planned on having a variety of local beers for their guests and custom pint glasses made up as favors, so giving it the feel of a beer logo made sense.

Evolution of the wedding logo symbol.

I love TV. There’s been a lot of movie talk around here lately, but if I had to choose between TV and movies, I’d pick TV — hands down.

It’s been said that TV is a writer’s medium, and that’s apparent if you look behind the scenes of most any TV show, where the writers are the most consistent and important presence. Because the core creative decisions of any show are established at the beginning of the series, TV directors don’t have the same kind of control that they do in movies. (In fact, most shows have a rotating set of directors.) Instead, the creative weight of a show is carried by its writers.

Almost all TV shows are written by a group of people. They get together at the beginning of the season and build story arcs (commonly 13 or 22 episodes each), which are then divided into episodes (usually 21 or 43 minutes long). Their goal is to build a complete season-long story, but each episode has the potential of telling its own, self-contained story. That’s a difficult task — but in the right hands, it’s a magic that only TV can provide.

TV writer’s rooms are full of really creative people, using the limitations of the medium (time, format and budget) to their advantage. They work tirelessly at figuring out how to get from point-A to point-B in the most interesting and meaningful way possible. And, of course, they’re story-tellers, guiding their audience on a specific path.

Hopefully, you’ve discovered why any of this is relevant: fundamentally, designers and TV writers are doing the same job every day. The best shows are full of intelligent and charged story-telling, borne out of problems well-solved.

On the surface, the parallels run pretty deep between our professions. But it gets even more interesting when we look at the unique complexities of individual shows. In part 2, I’ll run through my favorites and try to articulate what makes each of them Great™.

Once you’ve identified all the Great™ things, patterns emerge. These patterns are — without a doubt — the biases that define your perspective on the world. Essentially, this list enables you look at yourself from a completely objective point of view.

Since the system was born out of movies, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at my Great™ movies list and find some patterns.

Movies where one guy (or Batman) takes on the world

• Batman Begins
• Batman Returns
• Catch Me If You Can
• The Dark Knight
• JFK
• The King of Kong
• Minority Report
• Mission: Impossible
• Moon
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Zodiac

Movies that take place in one day

• Collateral
• Groundhog Day
• Inside Man
• Panic Room

Movies that remind me of being a kid…
or, movies that remind me that I’ll always be one

• Back the Future I, II & III
• A Christmas Story
• Dumb and Dumber
• Home Alone
• The Incredibles
• Iron Giant
• The Muppet Movie
• Toy Story 2 & 3
• Uncle Buck
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Movies about relationships from a guy’s perspective…
or, movies that prove I’m kind of a sap…
also, movies about music or with great soundtracks

• Adventureland
• Almost Famous
• Beautiful Girls
• Definitely, Maybe
• High Fidelity
• Little Children
• Midnight in Paris
• Scent of a Woman
• The Social Network
• The Squid and the Whale
• When Harry Met Sally

But, also guy movies…
and, modern westerns

• 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
• American Psycho
• Glengarry Glen Ross
• Inglourious Basterds
• It Might Get Loud
• The Matrix
• Moneyball
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Tombstone
• The Wrestler

And finally, movies with some kind of conceptual schtick

• Chicago
• Drag Me to Hell
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• The Game
• The Illusionist
• The Prestige
• Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
• Quiz Show
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Singin’ in the Rain
• The Truman Show
• Zombieland

Of all the movies on this list, it’s this final grouping that is probably closest at capturing the biases that make me who I am. Whether it’s a movie, a tasty dessert, a comic book, a regular book, a zoo exhibit, a pop song, or a logo — I just love to see people making creative decisions to solve problems meaningfully.

Pirahna poster

Designing posters as pieces of art, without the stress of solving a real problem, can be a really fun escape from time to time. It was also fun to work on because I spent a good deal of time playing guitar with her father while I was in high school. The poster will be framed and given to him as a gift at Kami’s wedding this weekend.

These discussions can spiral out of control, but in the end, every movie ends up with some kind of critical consensus. And out of these conversations, we’ve slowly developed a colloquial rating system.

It’s called the Sparano Scale™, and it works like this:

1. Great™
2. Good™
3. Not Great™
4. Not Good™

We’ve found that the distribution breaks down so that most items rate at Not Great™ or Not Good™, with a smaller percentage of Goods™, and a very, very small percentage of Greats™.

That’s what the Sparano Scale™ is about. By making your opinions clearly known to the world, you are encouraing good experiences and preventing bad experiences. In other words, reviewing things is a service to mankind.

There are a lot of transparently important things going on here:

It’s conversational

You can slip your ratings into any conversation. But since the ratings are colloquial, no one will realize that you’ve surreptitiously reviewed something.

The magic is fewer choices

Four options makes choices easier. Usually, you can just pick the one that feels right. Ask yourself: was it good or bad? And then, how good or bad was it?

…and enough choices

Some might ask: why not stop at two options, like Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert? With the ability to choose Great™ or Good™ (the positive options), you’re able to isolate the things in your life that have made a real, lasting impression on you. This list of Greats™ is a meaningfully small percentage of all of things you’ve ever experienced.

Meh isn’t helpful

We’ve found that not having a middle option makes for easier (and more meaningful) ratings. Because there’s no 3/5 or 5/10, you must make a choice between either positive or negative.

It works for everything

The scale started with movies, but don’t stop there. This is a way for you to easily and clearly convey your experiences to other like-minded people.

Everyone already knows the scale

These same words are already used to evaluate things, but the scale provides consistency of scale. For clarification, it helps if you raise your eyebrows and shake your head with a Not Great™. And when delivering a Not Good™, let them  feel your disappointment. (Remember, your time or money has just been wasted.)

You can use it even when you have too many choices

On a 5-point scale: just skip the 4.
On a 10-point scale: use 1,4,7,10.

It’s personal

Your ratings are going to change over time, and you don’t have to defend your choices if you don’t want to — and that’s OK.

Everyone’s Greats™ are unique

This is probably the best part of the scale. When you’ve decided that something is Great™, you’ve connected with it on a fundamental level. Collected together, your Greats™ are like a conversational DNA strand.

…but it’s the overlaps that count

Compare your Greats™ with others. When you find someone with a similar list, you’ve found yourself a new friend — someone you can trust to recommend Great™ new things.

You’re probably wondering about the overlaps on Oxide’s Great™ movies list. Here’s a sampling:

Adam and Drew: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Up.

Joe and Drew: Ocean’s Eleven, The Matrix, High Fidelity.

Adam and Joe: Groundhog Day, Zombieland, The Dark Knight.

As proof that everyone’s Greats™ are unique: there’s just one overlapping movie for all three of us: The Incredibles. We all agree that Pixar’s 6th movie is a perfectly-paced, cleverly-written, and finely-sculpted masterpiece. Despite disagreeing on the weekend’s new releases — or anything else that we may butt heads on — our one Great™ movie will always be there to bring us back together.