After two years of the previous design, returned to the Adobe chalkboard for another non-computer project. For a first project of the year, it made for a lovely full-day start to finish just illuminating a basic design in black and white and listening to some good music.

Last August kicked work into high gear, fortunately, and has been stacked since. So, though my site hasn’t changed much, apart from some fidgeting around with blog themes, I’m starting to get some of the finished projects at least mentioned.

As social media moves faster than just about anything else, last week I saw a Facebook link to a project I’d worked on for the LDS Church at the end of summer before I heard about it’s completion from the client— link here on YouTube or on the LDS Church’s site.

It’s the first time in awhile that I’ve done that much illustration for a client and my hand felt it. Note the backgrounds in the clips, those are mine. This is another highly collaborative work, so I wasn’t involved with the live video, or the figures, and actually not the coloring or animation either. Still plenty of work sketching out the backgrounds and good to see how my stylization was used in the animation.

Excited to be starting into another Summit for Omniture—now the Adobe Omniture Summit. This time around brings a new aspect in working with some different groups of people for the event. As part of the new structure, Adobe opted to send me down to Adobe MAX in Los Angeles. Flattering to have a client fly me down to take in all the printed signage and décor of the conference and evening events. The meetings were interesting to discuss the various concerns about the concept and execution of the actual Summit event and I’m really hoping it goes fantastically this year. Of course, right now, I’m just seeing all the aesthetics with the great contrast of sky blue, dark green, and Adobe’s red in all the textures and thinking on fun ideas, if not for Summit, then for filing away for the well of ideas for other projects.

The actual MAX sessions that I was able to get to intrigued me as when I think of Adobe software, my focus is Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and on rare occasion Flash—basically the design suite. However, I never heard those mentioned in the general sessions where to push is for programming and interactive media—Flex, AIR, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst. Damn, always so much to learn and keep up with, if not for actual use, at least for proper understanding of what’s possible.

It’s one of those projects heavy on the production side with a lengthy list of similar pieces, though I enjoyed working with Steve Gustavson and Ben Child from the marketing team mocking up the creative imagery around the new year.

I’m thinking sometimes there ought to be a good balance between projects that are thoroughly creative and energy-intensive on idea, and ones where I can just sit down and push through the production of the design.

With the event finished, I’m hoping to be able to post some photos taken of the actual pieces from the event.

Unfortunately, that design didn’t stay up for long, and the time came again to disturb the clean black slate with a new design reflecting the Adobe ownership. The concept is to relate the right brain/left brain differentiations with the creative suites of Adobe and the analytic software of Omniture.

A bit of process to near-finished product—

—and after a bit of restoration, the good addition of ears, and some spray fixative that I’m sure made the day more enjoyable for everyone in the building—

This past evening was the “Green to the Extreme” Omniture celebration party remembering the past thirteen years and marking Omniture’s transition to an Adobe company. As a contractor, it’s fantastic to be invited and mingle with the sea of green. I have acknowledge and congratulate my friend Brad McCall, of course, for his creation of the Omniture brand.

For the event, I was able to work on a large banner commemorating Omniture’s history to date and really pleased with how the seventy-foot banner turned out. Steve Gustavson and Ben Child of the marketing department had a great concept for having a shape underscore the flow of time (using the signature green, naturally). As the banner is being sliced into year-sections, framed, and auctioned off, I wonder somewhat how much a design I worked on is being sold for all told. And yes, I used Adobe products to create it.

I’ve had the opportunity to work on some product icons with the Omniture UXD team lately. Posted is a small sampling of icons I worked on and a portion of a screenshot for the product with a couple of them implemented.

Honestly, I enjoyed these icon projects, though there are some in the various sets that have a trick of telling the story in the succinctness of the icon, particularly if the function is uncommon to the user vernacular. To me, there are some icons that are simply not going to be able to fully communicate a complicated or specialized new action without mouse-over text, but should make sense within the set after that blank has been filled in.

The closing session for the day featured Martin Lindstrom who related many great things to work into professional practice. One in particular is the idea of “smashing your brand”– that is to say, having recognition of your company and product without the logo at all and more so by the smallest elements used in building your brand (i.e. a familiar color, sound, or the way photography is used, etc.). I was sitting with the UXD team who had to credit my friend Brad McCall for his handling of the Omniture brand in it’s initial conception such that many elements are recognizable as signature Omniture to people who have worked with them. For a session at a conference for a technology company, I was thinking how much of it was directly applicable to design, which gets me fired up to design and examine some new ideas.

I’d like to think that I’m building my identity fairly well so far. Of course, I don’t have a logo as yet, but feel that the use of sketched elements that I create almost subconsciously sometimes that I used for the buttons, borders, and menu items on my site make it unique as something identifiably me.

Last summer my brother’s design firm Rigsby Hull hired me to extrapolate some patterns from some beautiful old textiles to print as divider and end sheets in a cook book they were working on called Peace Meals. It was one of those projects which devoted a lot of time to enjoyable intricacy. I’m glad to have just recently seen the printed product. Aside from the very small design portion I was involved in, there’s some great photography which involved some processes I found intriguing and makes even me a bit hungry.

The Atlas Capital Management logo is another collaboration with Michael Hancock of GoFish Creative similar to a previous piece for the Orion Management Group. I often see images of Atlas in profile, but for this one, my instincts leaned toward face-on symmetry for a stronger and more stable appearance… something that seems more inline with Atlas. Again, my mythological geek side comes out to make the point that Atlas supports the sky, not the earth as is sometimes depicted. I designed a simplified armillary sphere, not wanting to make more of the sphere than the figure. Pictured above is the final figure that I created at left and Michael Hancock’s implementation at right.

Incidentally, last week I was in Manhattan and was disappointed that Lee Lawrie’s sculpture of Atlas in Rockefeller Center is covered. On the other hand, it’s great that it’s being cleaned and taken care of.

Following up on previous blogs, I’m posting a couple images from the Business Case Guide that I was working on for Venafi. The Systems Management for Encryption guide was designed to complement Venafi’s other collateral, which was facilitated by the fact that the company has a well-established color pallette, font preference, and parameters on details such as the corner radius of the curved boxes. I’m interested to see how the graduated tabs and subsequent increasing page width worked in the printed piece.

It’s been a busy month. Work at Omniture has been centered on Summit, a fairly intense time for them. Frequently, people have been out of the office for Summit. It was an odd feeling going in to Omniture and being the one of the few people in the section of the building during the Salt Lake Summit. My contract there just finished this week and I’m looking forward to working with them again next quarter. The last major piece I worked on was a collaboration with Steve Gustavson for the annual report cover. The Omniture style makes an interesting challenge to design with two colors, one font family, and no photography.

Between work with Omniture, I’ve had some other small freelance jobs and have also been working again with Venafi on a couple of larger projects. I feel the increasing shift toward the corporate and technologies.

I was hoping again to balance out all the corporate design work and have pieces ready for the Communication Arts Illustration Annual, but despite their annual practice of moving the deadline back a couple times, the month was full enough with freelance projects to be able to do a satisfactory piece. I suppose that if work is that busy that I shouldn’t be needing to advertise for more just yet. Still, it’s always good to have as many options as possible.