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.

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.

Ah yes, it’s Halloween season and a couple weeks ago during another moonlit working session, I altered the backgrounds and colors of my website on a whim for the season. Traditionally, I think of oranges for Halloween, or fearful greens, but for the site, they didn’t evoke the desired effect (and together they remind me more of a carrot). Thus, I arrived at the blood red and stark whites against the grey, which fit also with the mailer idea I was working on.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete the mailer this year in time to produce and send it. I suppose that considering I was delayed in my efforts with paying work, the immediate need for a mailer doesn’t seem to be present. I still think, though, that when business is good, it’s still time for self-promo, both to advance as well as to keep business flowing.

Some time ago, a concept of a moontanning vampire stuck in my head and I adapted that to a card idea playing off a traditional holiday or vacation card which relate sunny days, beaches, and such. In the Halloween vacation card, the moon replaces the sun, and a pale vampire enjoys a sanguine drink on the beach, his reflection absent from the water, of course. I’ve had the correlation pointed out to me, as lately (the past couple decades), I have a natural inclination to be most active at night, though I don’t think that’s terribly uncommon with designers and illustrators.

Yes, it’s been two months since my last blog. Although there has been plenty of work going on, there’s much that’s still in process and accordingly I’m not able to blog about those project, fun as they are. I did get to do some quick illustrations (one afternoon) for a tag associated with some t-shirts Omniture distributed at a BYU game. The plan was, of course, to get everyone to put them on with the reward of prizes, so for the tags the thought was aiming for the kind of drawings typically seen in airplane safety instructions. Originally I went with the parted plastic hair I usually associate with schematics from a few decades ago, but apparently that was a bit too nerdy.

At the beginning of the month, I was in the Victoria and visited the Royal British Columbia Musuem and particularly enjoyed the First Nations Gallery. Strong graphic quality to a lot of the masks, carvings, and drawings that I’d like to look into more. I like the sparing use of color and the play of organic shapes. Some items struck me as reminiscent of Mayan designs. There were also a couple interesting galleries in Seattle with current artists’ designs that I’m glad I saw. Last May when visiting the Met, I was glad to have made a point of spending more time in the African, American, and Pacific art sections.

Today I received a few emails notifying me of the approaching release of Adobe Creative Suite 4. Seems like all to recently I upgraded to 3. I have to wonder if new releases come around too often forcing everyone to upgrade to maintain compatibility with each other just for a version with a slightly new UI and minor buttons. There’s even been a couple times when some functions are more complicated in newer versions. Not that I’m making any particular total conclusion here, new stuff is always nice, but I have to ask if a minor upgrade every two years is more waste and hassle than progress.

Finally, I took a little time to do some updating to my website. There were some functionality issues I realized i needed to fix, such as adding previews and darkening the buttons once pressed. Also, I felt grouping of similar pieces would be helpful. It was also suggested that I add ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons, which honestly took a bit of figuring out for me with my limited abilities to think through actionscript. I also stumped myself with the frame details momentarily when I had code that worked when I thought it shouldn’t. Occasionally it takes me a minute to rumble the math.

Designwise, the site isn’t as different as I first set out to make it– same basic colors, icons, and menu. I wanted to add color and texture to the background. I had also set out to reposition the menu at top, add framing elements in the menu, and create individually different icons, but found that the original functioned much better. When I was first building the original site, I started with the clean adobe illustrator-style edges, but went for the sketched components that my sketchbook is replete with. After a brief consideration to adapt the cleaner mode, I’m feeling that there’s more unique as is for now.

Any information I could find about Flash 8 and preloaders indicate that it will only run the preloader once the entire movie is loaded, therefore skipping directly to the main movie and defeating the whole purpose. Rather than waste a lot of time trying to contrive a way to make it work, I cut it as an unimportant element. Eventually, I hope to get a grasp on actionscript 3 for a future revamp.

This last month, my friend Justin Kunz was kind enough to refer me to Elias Akinaka, of Hui No Ke Ola Pono in Maui. Elias was really good to design for and had an interesting project for the native Hawaiian health organization that he works for. He asked me to design some traditional Hawaiian patterns for bandages as well as a simple illustration to promote healthy lifestyles. It was educational to work out the specific native details.

Being the Christmas holidays, my brother was in town, which makes for many opportunities for talking shop. My father Richard, brother Thomas, brother-in-law John Jensen, best friend Brad McCall, and I all have a background in design. Tom just received an invite to judge the Communication Arts photography annual.

I also nearly missed an invitation to join a creative site called Jamuse. It aims to be a forum for sharing work in progress with clients and colleagues by the use of a .jam file, which is meant to curtail copying. It’s not publicly accessable as yet, but I’m interested to investigate the site and check out its creative community.

Again I stray from strict design and illustration development to spend more time trying out actionscript, and again I return to one of my favorite subjects– astronomy. Similar to the simple interactive distance map I made several months ago, these are virtual 3d maps of the bright stars within 1000 and 25 light years. I’m hoping to add more to the design later, but I’ve posted the early drafts of the 1000ly and 25ly maps for perusal.

Recently a contact of mine from Razor Data asked that I design some logo concepts for a business he was starting up: Epic Experiences, an outdoor adventure tour company. His original thoughts were that of a circular shape including a mountain, another mountain with a rockclimber, a river, and a forest. I indicated that that many elements would likely be difficult to incorporate into a legible logo.

I attempted one logo involving the different elements, focusing on the rockclimbing figure, and simplifying the two mountain concepts into one central one. I also variated many other simpler designs, again focusing on the figure and the mountain. Sketching out ideas triggered ideas of aboriginal-type designs and mirrored E’s to form the mountain. Having further feedback from a graphic designer family and friends, I added texture and focused more on the facing E’s, being among the favorites.

Another skill I have yet to perfect is getting adequate information from clients concerning their needs on a specific project, and learning to work with the ‘We’ll know what we like when we see it’ kind of situation that often arises when clients honestly don’t know what they want, or can’t articulate specific parameters to the designer. I knew the logo needed to be a monogram, something streamlined and simple, and reflecting the park environment, and that there wasn’t much time allotted for the project.

Nevertheless, the first drafts monograms (a sample of which are pictured below) were rejected, with the further note that the committee had decided to put the logo on hold for the time being.