Blue Microphones Yeti 2018 User Manual

are well known: the Gama-Go Yeti is particularly well designed 
and appears on everything from shirts to vinyl toys. I compiled 
as many Yeti images as possible in order to not (ahem) ape 
other existing Yeti.

It was now time to sketch.

Amazing as it may seem in this digital age, I began with a 
pencil and a piece of paper, something no mouse or electronic 
tablet has been able to improve upon. I started with what I call 
the “Basic” Yeti, a somewhat bemused, friendly fellow that you 
could bring home to mom. It took quite a few sketches to hone 
him into what I saw in my mind to begin with, but he eventually 
took shape and I scanned a rough sketch into the computer. 
While I was sketching him out, other, more specialized Yeti be-
gan to form in my mind; these too would be sketched out and 
digitized one by one.

With the Yeti now safely caged on my desktop, I simplified the 
shape of the Yeti with a series of basic shapes, mostly com-
prised of circles, ovals and simple lineforms. All of this was done 
in outline (wireframe) view. Much time was spent refining and 
combining shapes until I had what I wanted, and along the way I 
stumbled upon other shapes and patterns that would eventually 
work their way into the other Yeti family members. It’s a mostly 
intuitive process that I wish I could explain in words, which I’d do 
if I could only spell, so it’ll have to remain a mystery.

At this point, with a few of the Yeti drawn in outline form, it was time to turn attention to the actual package. Blue’s 
wonderful idiosyncratic approach to things is to develop a unique look for its products, from the actual design of the 
mics all the way down to their packaging. Thus, no two Blue packages have the same look; aside from the Blue logo 
and a blue-colored band running around the packages, there is no uniform series design look. This approach does 
have its occasional drawbacks, but remains true to one of Blue’s founding principals, that every person has their own 
unique individual style and sound.

Part of that critical identity to this or any other Blue product was to devise a 
strong typographic quality to enhance the brand. Choosing the right fonts is 
crucial to any project, and the process of spending hours reviewing different 
typefaces is, well, dare I say it, fun (perhaps that’s why many designers are 
single). Fonts are the visual equivalent of a box of assorted chocolates: sweet, 
immediate, and a bit of a treasure hunt. It’s simply a matter of weeding through 
all the bad ones and finding the gems. There are a lot of typefaces out there 
and 90% of them are badly designed or won’t withstand the winds of time and 
vagaries of style. And no two designers will agree on the 
remaining 10%, prompting heated discussions at parties 
— ultimately another reason why most designers are still 
single.

The font chosen for the Yeti was the Pennsylvania font 
family, designed by the Font Bureau in Boston. I was 
drawn to it by the variety of weights within the family and 
the way some of the lower case letters evoked a figure 
walking upright, which was too nice a visual metaphor to 
pass up. I went with a lower case spelling of Yeti on the 
front of the box, as it was a visually friendlier way of introducing the product. 
Capitalizing it was far too formal for a first date with the consumer.

Next up: color. Yeti follows in the tradition of other recent Blue consumer product names with an arctic-like theme: 
Snowball, Snowflake, Icicle (we like to think of it as our way of combating global warming). Anyhow, these products 
pretty much cornered the market in the blue color spectrum, so I gravitated towards a cousin color, teal. Aqua, if you 

yes

Virginia

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