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.

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.

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.

It’s always good to have freelance. Recently I had a couple of small jobs come in from my friend Michael Hancock at GoFish Creative, including some illustration work for a logo for Devereaux Mansion in Salt Lake. I enjoy these collaborative jobs and am glad to see what Michael does with the type treatment and arrangement of the logo as a whole. It reminds me of the days at Indigo Creative.

At the same time, I received an unexpected freelance referral from my website. I didn’t design a website to be the first tier of self-promotion as it’s a rare thing for anyone to be browsing the internet and happen to come across a portfolio site and request work that way. Yet, I had the fortunate surprise of just that occurence. Alicia Quillin from Dangles Hangers contacted me and asked for a logo and accompanying illustration and layout.

As I’ve left Indigo, I’ve applied to other studios while freelancing, one of which was Rare Method (formerly B/O/W/G). I didn’t get the job, it isn’t always the right match, but Rare Method did refer an associate of theirs, Curtis Packer at Venafi, to me to make some modifications on a series of icons.

I can’t leave my site alone. I get in a discussion with my buddy Brad about how to randomly rotate his background on his Therty Brand site. I go and figure it out (probably nothing new to most people), then try to figure out how to make my flash movie transparent so I could do backgrounds… just for GP, of course. Instead, I end up adding a random image generator in the flash movie to show some random glimpses of my sketchbook. Some are honestly pretty old. The example here is from my internship days at Shannon Associates Ah well, it’s just to add… I was going to say texture, but maybe clutter is a better word, I don’t know yet. Maybe just a warning about what you might be getting into if you’re looking further into my site.