Basic Visual Concepts and Principles - Book Style Reveiw

Basic Visual Concepts and Principles, by Charles Wallschlaeger and Cynthia Busic-Snyder, I'm sure, has some very interesting material. But I'm not writing about that.
I took some inspiration from the layout and style of this Swiss styled book for our timeline assignment and found it quite helpful in regards to paragraph styles, spacing, colour, font, image placement etc. It has a timeline that I got inspiration from and also how they display their images as i would be doing the same. I really like the Swiss use of font sizing, large contrasting headings and small body text. There is lots of white breathing space and interesting indents, alignments, master page differences, page numbering & grid work.
It's available from Joh (or in the staff room, I believe).

What looks a million bucks, costs a million bucks

My Dad got some new medication the other day and I spied the packaging. The packaging looks like it costs a million bucks, raised lettering & shinny UV ink (1st Below), matching CD, brochures, booklets etc. (Images below)

The thing I really liked was the consistency, from the logo to products. I wish all clients appreciated consistency... sigh

My First Fake ID

As apart of this semesters assignments we all have to come up with our own personal ID that will be shown in the first pages of our portfolio. Since I already have one, I am making a fake 'branch' of my already established personal ID (the current is just general Graphic Design) that will include the kind of stuff we are doing for the Art Bazaar at the end of the year; hand made/screen printed items. So I want my logo to be similar but more hand made / ruff looking, different but obviously connected.

Above is my current general logo. I wanted to stick with the dot theme for obvious reasons (so I went with buttons for the circles for a hand made element), but more textured and earthy (so I Live Traced my image of my buttons instead of making really neat ones in illustrator). The colours would also have to reflect the hand made element so I wanted to go with some earthy warm colours (analogues - yellow, yellow orange colours) and less of them. I also wanted to stick with the same font but less perfect, so I got my text and took a screen shot and live traced it in illustrator so it was a bit more ruff around the edges.
Below is the result...