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.

A couple months ago I was pleased to collaborate with Bjorn Pendleton, a former associate of mine from BYU. The project brief for QL Labs reminded me of NutraSanus– natural health supplements with an emphasis on the natural in the design. The instructions from Bjorn were to investigate the juxtaposition of natural and pharmaceutical lab elements as well as the integration of the ‘q’ and ‘l’ initials (incidentally, neither Bjorn nor I knew what the initials stood for, other than perhaps founders’ names).

As pictured above, I worked a lot with the leaves (simple, but a quick metaphor). In the far left draft, I meant to integrate the initial with the leaves, which, in a ring suggest sun rays, flowers, a cycle, and a complete whole. I also wanted to work an option with more than leaves, thinking of roots as sources in natural supplements along with their symbolism of growth and nourishment.

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 issue struck me as having more weight on narratives and broadly realistic approaches than I’ve seen in issues in recent years. I could be wrong, but there appeared to be a bit of a broader spectrum rather than a heavy focus on highly political editorials and plethora of naive styles that I often see in design periodicals. Sometimes it seems that there’s a bit too much focus on anger and politics, and while those themes need to be communicated, they aren’t the only things to convey.

I was also discussing with Brad some of the artists I was looking at in New York this last month. The J.C. Leyendecker show at the Society of Illustrators was definitely worth the time. There were a couple pieces there that called to mind some sketches of Dean Cornwell. Thinking of the way I sketch the figure, I’m probably drawn to the the deco-style adaptations. I like the way that Leyendecker streamlines organic shapes and how, even with paint, there’s a certain kind of cross-hatching.

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.

Three weeks into my current contract with Omniture, I’ve completed many projects for the Omniture Sales Kickoff. Their thematic concept relates to various historical achievements: Great Pyramid, Great Wall, Eiffel Tower, Combustion Engine, Microchip, all building up to Omniture itself. Above are two banner designs: one of my favorite drafts that wasn’t selected, and the final. Below are some smaller banners, the right pair are finals, and the left an unused concept.

Here’s a simple sketch I was working on a few days ago, just added some simple color in Photoshop. I’m finding that I often have a great deal of anxiety about starting an illustration project, even a sketch, but that once begun, it’s easy to be focused and just go with it. That seems like another good reason to be sketching more often, when I have the opportunity.