Thanksgiving card
A personal Thanksgiving invite designed as a two-sided postcard. The first version reads: “This year will be nothing like last year …” Font used is Optima, a nice san-serif with the appearance of a serif font. Best of both worlds in a way. The second version has zebrawood and futura as fonts. Both versions are intended to be playful and appropriate for the season.
Loves, Mariessa tshirt comp
Designing a unisex t-shirt for Loves, Mariessa posed an interesting challenge — after all, her name has the word love in it and hearts in her logo. Since the brand is a boutique fashion line, it needed it to be edgy (my favorite descriptive word), bright and cool. I had my work cut out for me.
Turns out Mariessa didn’t like any of these — she’s going with something more distressed and more about clothing construction, a dress form and sewing machine parts — but I liked the execution of integrating hearts with a larger concept about either 1) a tough act or 2) big talk to make it more likely that a boy would wear it.
poster for the Long Now
Poster for the theater show the Long Now by the Shrewd Productions, opening May 21st at the Blue Theatre. Written and directed by Beth Burns, this story considers the turbulent nature of time, and the impossible hope of capturing a perfect present.
The challenge in this poster design was creating a piece that was at once technical (Time is one of the characters in show), organic with a bit of danger that looms just on the edges. We went through several iterations — one was too whimsical, one was too serious — before settling on this one. I think that the paper texture that I used for the background works well in the scope of the show, the puppet that plays Time has that same kind of rough hew to it, projecting on a canvas sheet.
The font for the text is Gotham. The background is a found schematic and I drew the birdcage, tracing and referencing several photos online. The girl and the bird are stock.
You can find out more information here.
logo identities, new age
Three logo identities designed for several new age-y companies. New age-ish? New age-like? I think you know what I mean.
Fonts include Futura, Gotham and Helvetica.
poster for Cherry Bomb, the movie
Promo posters for the gritty indie film Cherry Bomb — not the one with Ron Weasley — about an exotic dancer who exacts revenge on a group of men who were involved in her rape. It’s due out in 2011.
You can find out more information here. You can also become a fan on Facebook.
WeHateYourSite sticker
This is a preview sticker for We Hate Your Site for SXSW. In thinking about this job, I thought about what kinds of things indicate a written kind of critique — which is what We Hate Your Site is all about — I thought about grading or scribbling comments but that didn’t seem strong enough. I needed something pretty esoteric, so much so that it bordered on being difficult to read.
I used Andale Mono and Helvetica as my font set for this piece.
Orenda Technologies
Creation of Orenda’s first round of print advertisements. Number one is more brand based while the second and third ones are more product based.
As an eco-friendly solution for algae, stain and scale prevention, it was important to demonstrate their core proposition of “prevention science in harmony with nature, without compromise.” We chose the underwater shot as a way of showing the results of using products like Orenda rather than telling. One of the biggest ways that a lot of people relate to pools and chemicals is in an unnatural way; the smell, feel and taste of chlorine, and we wanted to show something different — like the clarity of a glass of water, the pool from below was blue, natural and calming, demonstrating everything we wanted to communicate about the Orenda product line.
One other thing about Orenda’s products — unlike other green products — is that it’s actually less expensive over time. And that message was very important to my client, and so it we used it in the copywriting of our first comp.
For font, we used Futura for these pieces because they need to be straight, clean and to the point.
pda, summer 2009 collateral
pda, a night of dj’ed electro, indie, retro music and the kitchen sink at Elysium that happens semi-regularly. Its title is based on the song by Interpol.
For this design, I wanted to have a display of vinyl record sleeve spines like you’d see a shelf of books, to demonstrate the variety of music. I setup two photo shoots, one at my friend John Gross’ house and then one at Backspin Records but I had a problem with the readability and clarity of the spines — some were just old and battered and some were still in plastic — and then not having all the records I’d need to have. So, I did what anyone’d do in my situation, I created it from scratch.
Some are based on actual spines, some are based on the cd spines, some are just completely made up. Some of the logos were found (Röyksopp, Bjork, the Sisters of Mercy overbombing graphic), some were traced (Depeche Mode, elastica, TV on the Radio), some were created from thin air.
The type used for the logo and info are the Maple Origins (created by Last Soundtrack) and two flavors of Condensed Futura.
Event info:
doors at 9:30, free before 10
May 29, 2009
Elysium, 705 Red River
$3 cover, 21+
illustration: cheese!
A leftover concept from Mariessa’s tshirt preliminary designs.
Since her brand — Loves, Mariessa — is very much based in the cool and a stylistic pursuit of the fashionable, I loved the idea of the paparazzi camera, one version with cheese and one with love. In this day and age of hyper documentation, we’re taking pictures of everything, Twittering our every thought and treating gossip like the news. The pop of the flashbulb reinforces self worth and promotes envy, it seems.
My favorite part? Has to be the half smile that could be a sly grin or a cool wink, maybe both.
about
elsewhere
RSS- Design is a Job
- Cruising the Hudson on a Boat Made of Trash
- Nine Tax Deductions of the Superhero Set
- Tupac Coachella Hologram Source Explains How Rapper was Resurrected
- How Sony Fell Behind
- U.S. Government, Carriers Plan a National Database of Stolen Cellphones
- John Cleese on the Five Factors to Make Your Life More Creative
- James and Karla Murray’s book The Disappearing Face of New York
- The Crisis in American Walking
- Texts from Hillary