Graphic design

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Post-SXSW

March 18, 2010 in Business, Events, Graphic design, Personal

Overwhelming. My first word for SXSW. After five days of the interactive conference, I have a long list of sites, apps, and ideas to be checking out for awhile to come.

Originally in the mindset of handing out some business cards, I found that far better than networking to simply toss cards around in hopes of scoring jobs, it was an opportunity to exchange ideas and expand by everyone sharing their work. There are some new contacts with intriguing businesses that I need to check out. Incidentally, I’m happy the QR codes on my cards seemed to be a point where I was up with tech trends (surprising, I know). It was a rare chance for me to share how something worked to a few people. I also appreciated the codes SXSW attached to everyone’s badges as a means to follow them online. Another bit of knowledge I have to credit Brad McCall with relating to me, and another subject of brought up in sessions—”finders”—those people that are early adopters, that find all the cool new items going on and spread that knowledge. Brad is a finder.

I got into a few sessions on the design side such as making websites more beautiful, sketching out concepts pictorially with clients rather than noting keywords (quote: sharpies smell like ideas), dashboard and app design. The balance was jumping into more technology-heavy sessions (which gave me some homework). I particularly enjoyed the panel about the pros and cons of HTML5 Canvas and Adobe Flash. Augmented reality, technology ideas from sci-fi, crowdsourcing science, and a couple hours of infographics and maps (I am a geek after all) added some apps to play with. (Foursquare anyone? Gowalla, Dopplr?). There were a couple particularly good discussions on self-promotion. Excellent thoughts from Peter Shankman that are simply good general rules for life, but are always helpful to remember and apply to professional situations.

There’s so much said about social media, very much the center of nearly every discussion. One intriguing axiom reiterated was that there isn’t a distinction between your personal and your professional “brand”. Also funny to see the focus of social media manifest with an audience with their heads down on mobile devices and laptops while listening. I’m an oddball in that I don’t have a twitter account. So far, I haven’t felt a compelling need to have another vein of social media to maintain (while I ought to be working or developing my direct professional skills)…for the moment, anyway. I get tempted to apply myself to it for awhile, or rather I think I’d spend more time following and pulling design and technology information out of it.

There’s not a chance I could relate all that got my mind going, in a single blog anyway. Though I hope to expound on those new lines of thought in future posts as I start to follow up on what I jotted down. For now, I’d better hush up and get back to some design work.

Omniture-Adobe Summit ’10

March 11, 2010 in Events, Freelance, Graphic design

For the third year, I was fortunate to be involved with designing for the Omniture Summit, which wrapped up a week ago. Odd to replace the familiar green Omniture branding with the grey and red Adobe preferences.

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.

Printed Business Cards

March 3, 2010 in Business, Graphic design

Ah, the smell of a printing press, something I haven’t experienced in awhile…or enough. Already noticing things I’d like to improve on and ideas to try out for next time, but pleased with the finished product.

Business Cards

February 21, 2010 in Business, Graphic design, Personal, Portfolio | 4 comments

Another project that’s been in the works for too long is now at the press. With the production of the snowboard and the approaching SXSW conference, I made a push to finish some business cards. Basically, I adapted elements from my snowboard to maintain that self-promo theme. Funny thing is, I now have both the snowboard and business cards using a kind of logo that I don’t intend on maintaining as a permanent logo. It’s really more of a branding element reflecting the kind of characters I draw, more of a style association than a specific mark. It is an abstraction of my initials, which makes me think more along the lines of creating similar characters or redesigns of my initials without any of them being a standard.

Through the design process, I considered many different print possibilities with the cards—letterpress, die-cut, specialty papers, foils and metallics, emboss, etc. I didn’t want to overdesign, though; the card doesn’t have to implement everything. I did go for rounded corners and a slimmer vertical format. Also, a qr code appealed to me with the interactive festival approaching and I’m hoping it’s not going to be something too trendy. Finally, the press run necessitating a higher quantity than I’m likely to hand out anytime soon, it seemed like a good idea to create some variety from the theme, resulting in the three different designs.

Completed Snowboard

January 21, 2010 in Graphic design, Personal, Portfolio | 4 comments

Posting the photos of my finished snowboard before I have the bindings attached and head up to the mountain. Really excited about how this turned out and my mind is already going on more designs I’d like to try out (with so many other projects on the list). Further reading about the design in the previous blog.

Signs of the Zodiac

December 23, 2009 in Graphic design, Icons

Balancing out the planetary symbols for the design of the snowboard, I devoted the better part of a day for creating complementary icons for the signs of the zodiac. It helped that seven of them are symmetrical, and that these are among the characters I’m often idly sketching (as evidenced by one of the random backgrounds at the beginning of my website).

Snowboard 2010

December 19, 2009 in Business, Graphic design, Icons, Personal, Portfolio | 2 comments

After a couple years remaining on the list of portfolio projects to accomplish, I’ve finally succeeded in finalizing a snowboard design and sent it to production. Between obligations to client work and a perfectionist block about making the prime design, the project crept along for some time. About a year ago I got involved playing with fermat spirals and checking out surfboard patterns (which I often find to be more interesting in their streamlined design than the cacophony that sometimes clutters snowboards). Unfortunately, by the time I got enjoying those patterns, it was well into January and paying projects took center stage well into spring. Obviously, I’m a bit late this year, but at least there’s still plenty of boardable weeks remaining in the season.

From fermat spiral and surfboard-like stripes, I added a seven-pointed star (again built on the spiral) referencing the pinwheel at the opening of my website. (There is, actually, no particular branding basis for the shape, other than there being many such shapes and characters littering my sketchbooks, e.g. the extremely stylized glyph for my initals jjh on the base of the board). The next leap came with the observation that I ought to employ the planetary symbols created in the fall (thanks Brad), balancing them out with some new zodiacal glyphs at the tail end.

After that it was mostly an overly drawn-out debate on color, there’s simply so many great colors. Partial to blue, that was almost always assumed, but good bright reds, oranges, and even some greens, glow off the snow so fantastically. Still planning to put those colors to work in other snowboard designs (so much fun to do it once, why not go for it again… even if I don’t get to build them all), I went for the blue to tie in with my site and the red because of the striking contrast. I think it works with the blue being on the cyan side and the red having a fair bit of yellow in it, those colors, of course, being complementaries in subtractive color (light rather than pigment).

I’ve been down to Revolution Snowboard Manufacturing where I’m having it built and checked out the finished results of their last design competition. Going to have to watch for the next one. Now I’m holding my breath hoping the finished board looks so good when finished, which I’ll have to thoroughly photograph and post.

Omniture and Adobe in chalk

December 17, 2009 in Freelance, Graphic design, Illustration

The common area at Omniture, known as the Living Room, has a wall-sized chalkboard, which needed some new embellishment last summer. It made for an exellently intense, full day of work away from the computer and a lot of dust (the fruits thereof seen below).

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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—

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—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—

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Green to the Extreme: Omniture to Adobe

October 23, 2009 in Events, Freelance, Graphic design | 2 comments

Omniture Timeline

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.

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Planetary swag

September 17, 2009 in Business, Free Stuff, Graphic design, Icons | 3 comments

Thought it time to give out a little design swag, and as I’m constantly sketching lettertypes, I implemented some stylizations for a character set, and big geek as I am, yes, they’re the planetary symbols. They include the Sun, Moon, the eight major planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), the five current dwarf planets (Eris, Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, and Ceres), and two less-used alternates (for Uranus and Pluto).

planetaries_sketchTrick with the dwarf planets (geek time here), is that the three newest—Eris, Haumea, and Makemake—don’t have any official symbol. Eris appears to have a de facto symbol relating to it’s namesake’s discordant nature. The other two weren’t so easy. There were a couple resources where individuals have endeavored to create a symbol based on the Hawaiian pictographs relating to Haumea or the Rapanui image of Makemake, and they seem to be repeated, so without better information or an IAU ruling, I’m adapting those also.

Right, geek time over. I’m posting two variations for non-commercial use. Please download, enjoy, and contact me to discuss any use for commercial projects. I’m retaining copyright on these as I like them very much.

Getting involved with Creative Commons, interested to see how well this works. Thanks Brad, Tom.

Now check it out:

planetaries_a

A little UXD

May 12, 2009 in Business, Freelance, Graphic design

Once again I’ve neglected my blog. I could, of course, outline some professional reasons for this— occupied with clients, travel, in progress with portfolio projects— but, in truth, I’ve just been lazy about it and haven’t taken the time to organize my thoughts and experiences into an interesting and germane post.

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.

 

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“Smash your brand”

February 19, 2009 in Business, Events, Freelance, Graphic design, Website | 3 comments

After a couple intense weeks of working on pieces for the Omniture Summit, I was able to attend some of the events yesterday. It’s an interesting sensation to walk into the event venue and be surrounded by all this signage I’ve been collaborating on. That’s a lot of green.

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.

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