The British Museum

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Jonathan Hull

During my visits to the British Museum this last week, there were a couple times that I was struck with how much history we have exemplified by rooms filled with categorized items which, of course, only make a small sampling of all physical evidence we now have of the course of history. I was also thinking how much of our historical knowledge is derived from artistic expression— paintings, sculptures, literature, clothing, architecture, music, etc. Obvious thoughts, perhaps, that have occurred to me before, but one of those ideas that has more depth to it when standing in a room with shelves upon shelves of books, artwork, sculptures, and cataloged history.

I also went and checked out the Shah ‘Abbas exhibit. I always enjoy Islamic calligraphy and was glad that BYU had such a great exhibit a few years ago. I’m drawn to the attention to detail and the beauty of letterforms intertwining and used not only for their verbal meaning, but for the design of the shapes. I had to be amazed at the detail achieved in the small format of the paintings also.

Good thing to be able to visit repeatedly. Last trip out this way, the one visit I had to museum was marked by being so tired from jet lag that somehow I managed to view the Egyptian collection and miss the Rosetta Stone.

Posted in Events, Personal | 3 Comments

Off to London

Posted on May 25, 2009 by Jonathan Hull

Tomorrow morning I’m headed off to London for a month. After my first trip out there I thought that not only would it be good to return, but that I’d prefer to stay there awhile and have days that are spent just living abroad rather than sight-seeing (that’s not to say that I’m not going to be finding myself in the museums much of the time). Though I’m realizing that a month is perhaps not quite long enough for this, I’m considering this trip a trial run, as there are so many other places I’d like to check out (some, perhaps, less expensive). Hopefully I can strike a good balance between time in the flat doing freelance and time around town expanding my visual vocabulary.

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A little UXD

Posted on May 12, 2009 by Jonathan Hull

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.

 

discover_icons

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“Smash your brand”

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Jonathan Hull

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.

Posted in Business, Events, Freelance, Graphic design, Website | 3 Comments

Peace Meals

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Jonathan Hull

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.

Posted in Freelance, Graphic design | 4 Comments

iPhone Redirect

Posted on January 25, 2009 by Jonathan Hull

With so many other things going on that I ought to blog about or add, I just spent a couple of the small hours adding a page especially for iPhone users. As the iPhone mysteriously has no capability to view flash content in websites as yet, Brad pointed out to me the obvious importance of coding the detect and redirect in my site. Ta-daa. The stripped-down and much less flashy version (sleep-deprived pun deemed apt), of my website.

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Does working at night make me a vampire?

Posted on October 28, 2008 by Jonathan Hull

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.

Posted in Business, Graphic design, Illustration, Portfolio, Website | 2 Comments

QL Labs Logo

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Jonathan Hull

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.

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Random thoughts at the start of Autumn.

Posted on September 23, 2008 by Jonathan Hull

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.

Posted in Business, Graphic design, Illustration, Personal, Portfolio | 1 Comment

Website update

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Jonathan Hull

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.

Posted in Portfolio, Website | 2 Comments

Communication Arts Illustration Annual

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Jonathan Hull

I’ve been checking out the Communication Arts Illustration Annual and discussing it friends and associates. As I was relating to a friend this evening, I’m particularly noticing techniques involving stylized realism. My buddy Brad was pointing out Jim Salvati as a point between impressionism and photorealism that he likes, and I agreed by noting the work of Greg Manchess. Although I have always enjoyed Tim O’Brien whose work I’d say is fairly photorealistic. In contrast to those, there’s more distorted styles in the narrative vein such as Jack Unruh and Jody Hewgill that I’ll notice in so many issues. There’s always so much to take in and I’ll likely notice new things for different reasons on another read.

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.

Posted in Illustration, Personal | 1 Comment

Atlas Capital Management Logo

Posted on June 9, 2008 by Jonathan Hull

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.

Posted in Business, Freelance, Graphic design | 2 Comments