Catalog design for Laura Morgan designs. These books were designed 8.5″ by 8.5″ square and printed by the client. The pages are held together by a binder ring — designed such that the pages can be easily removed or added. A select few of the rings contain some kind of jeweled bobble, some small piece of Laura’s jewelry stock. Most — for cost reasons — do not.

After designing several pieces of her branding and identity — including logo cleanup, her business cards and jewelry tags — it was clear that Laura Morgan designs needed a clean and elegant look as so much of her work is inspired by nature, architecture and oil paintings. As such, the font used on most of Laura’s collateral is Avant Garde Gothic.

Dear Santa:

As no doubt you have been monitoring my being naughty or being nice this year — which brings up a whole other thing about online and offline privacy, we can discuss that later though — I’d like to pose a question, does your standard for being good come strictly from the song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town?” I ask because I want to be clear.

If this is the case, the concept of good seems to linked to the phrase “for goodness sake.” So, being good is good because it’s the right thing to do. Yes? The right thing to do?

In that vein, let me take this opportunity to talk to you a minute about your branding. Because why? Because it’s the right thing to do. continue reading …

A personal Thanksgiving invite designed as a two-sided postcard. Copy 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.

Here’s an alternate cover concept.

With both of these, I wanted it to be playful and appropriate for the season. The fonts used are zebrawood and futura.

pda is 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 a bright piece that would stand out in a dark nightclub. I wanted the turntable/mixing graphic to look like what mixing sounded like, using the grooves of the record to splice into one another and then the dj’s arms to resemble turntable arms, almost robotic. But simple yet warm.

The type used for the logo and body text are Chunk Five (Adobe) and Skia.

Event info:
doors at 9:30, free before 10
Sept 25, 2009
Elysium, 705 Red River
$3 cover, 21+

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.

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Promo posters for the gritty indie film Cherry Bomb — not the one with Ron Weasley — about an exotic dancer who exacts revenge on a man who rapes her. It’s due out in 2010.

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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.

Creation of Orenda’s first round of print advertisements. The top one is more brand based, bottom one is 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.” I 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 I wanted to show something different — like the clarity of a glass of water, the pool from below was blue, natural and calming, demonstrating everything I 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 I used it in the copywriting of my first comp.

For font, I used Futura for this piece because it’s so straightforward and efficient.

The title for the 2009 play festival — choices ranged from Flashback Dance to Ya Mama Don’t Dance — clearly informed the poster/postcard design. With limited time, Time Steps — also a type of dance step — became the title and I really liked the idea of demonstrating time running backwards in a kind of reverse hourglass series. I also tried a clock face with backwards text but it didn’t quite establish a backwards time line as clearly.

Every year, the plays written and chosen have to follow three rules — this year, they were:

• The play must go backward, from beginning to end
• Include a sudden dance break that causes a shift in the action
• Include three things your mother told you not to do

I’m not sure what kind of dance can made from the steps I drew in the poster, but it looks like a lot of fun, eh?
As the copy font, I used Gotham. For the title, I used Sketch Rockwell.

Collateral design for Shrewd Productions’ annual burlesque Christmas show in 2008. The font used was Gotham, the title was created in Illustrator. The photograph was shot by Cory Ryan.