Mowey and Dibby

So a good friend recently commissioned me to design the mascot for her boyfriend's burgeoning lawncare business. He wanted something simple but eyecatching to put on his flyers. She sent some clip-art of a lawnmower with very specific instructions regarding how to design the character's face.



The liked the first one and suggested only minor changes; erasing one of the more technical pieces of the mower, filling in the wheels and raising the bar a bit.

Easy peasy, and so now I present MOWEY in all his finalized glory!



I finished an illustration for myself yesterday of my own interpretation of Dib from Invader Zim. My friend sent me the song "Master of the Universe" by the Sick Puppies, saying that it was suited for him! I agree, and that inspired this drawing.



I cleaned up the sketch and decided to color it without even bothering to ink. I like the effect, I think it makes it look a bit more grungy.



I put some choice lyrics on the image, and that was originally my plan; but once I got them in place I wasn't too wild about how it looked. I love playing with type but I guess it doesn't do as well with my illustrations. My hubby and I agreed that it would probably be best to remove the type and crop the image.



Ta-daaa!

DaMenSion and Batman

Man, it's been a month since I updated! Sorry (as if anyone reads this lol!)! Real life grabbed me by the lapels and wouldn't let go.

I have one more assignment to share before I'm done with this semester. Dave wanted us to see what we could do to improve the reputation of DaFont. For those that don't know, it's a site where one can download free fonts for just about any use, submitted by various creators. It doesn't seem that there is much quality control there, and it has a bad reputation among graphic designers.

He showed us some booklets from sites like Veer, that offer resources from fonts to stock illustrations. I felt that DaFont could easily steer in that direction, but keep the industriousness and community vibe that it already possesses. I thought it would be a neat idea for each creator to be able to have their own sort of "storefront" on the site to attract people toward their work... And also include more of a "networking" aspect that having a larger variety of work would provide.

So I decided the best way to showcase that would be to have a "theme" for every page, alternating between stock photos and illustration. We'd also need a new name to communicate how EDGY AND DYNAMIC the site is now. So I came up with "DaMenSion" because, you know, 3rd dimension and all.



A lot of us went along with that basic idea. It probably wasn't the most innovative thing I could've come up with, but I was more concerned with finishing an 8 page booklet in a timely manner. (It actually wasn't as difficult to accomplish as I thought it would be!)

All of the fonts are taken from DaFont. I must say that only one of the fonts was, in my opinion, badly constructed. I won't tell you which one, however! Hopefully you won't be able to tell. I played around with all of them to get them to my liking.

The illustrations are all taken from Veer... And I believe the photos are mostly from the Stock Exchange. Seeing as how this is effectively just a mock-up, I hope that nobody is offended that I used their work. I took care to ensure that most everything was royalty-free, save for the illos. I used the lower-quality versions that Veer provides for my project.

I love the front cover the most, because this is the most experimentation I've done with type so far.


I had to put some thought into how the pages would be arranged so they would print out correctly. I put pages 2 and 6 together originally, and my mind didn't even linger on the fact that two even-numbered pages would NOT face eachother.

The superhero drawing is mine! DMS man! I originally had the text laid out differently to compliment each image, but Dave and the class thought I should have more consistency between each page. So now the cute girl's eyes are covered. She is anonymous!







And the photo of the final booklet! (Taken with my phone tee hee)



Also: A fun little birthday gift I made for my friend! She loves Batman and is into silly things like me XD So I came up with this idea.

(Wait for it... it's animated!)

Evansville Museum Ad Campaign

This assignment involved picking a local business from a list and coming up with a nice ad campaign for it. Surprisingly, most of the class picked the Evansville Museum along with me. They're a privately run museum that's currently trying to raise the money needed for an expansion. They have a lot of neat exhibits but not a lot to capture the public interest. Therefore, I first sat down and considered what the museum already HAD that could bring in the public.

My favorite part of the museum in my youth was the replicas of Lincoln's home and other period shops and homes, so I focused a lot on Lincoln and log cabins in my initial sketches. They also have the EMTRAC museum that has an actual train you can check out, and a planetarium. I also tried to think of more cost-effective means of advertising, because they obviously don't have a huge ad budget.



I really liked my idea to create postcards that could be folded into interesting things. I had a log cabin, a "planetarium" that you could pop on top of a flashlight, a train, and other silly things.

When Dave looked at my sketches he wondered what my obsession with Lincoln was and when I replied that I was trying to focus on the stuff that they had to attract customers, he encouraged me to perhaps think of some stuff that the museum NEEDED that could also attract guests.

Upon researching other museums, I decided that our museum needed DINOSAURS and a cafe. They're located right on the river, providing what would be a really nice view for visitors that would like to drink some coffee and sit a spell.

My ideas were distilled down to some final concepts.



First, I created my billboard. It would set the standard for everything afterward. The image is from the Stock Exchange as so many of my images are! The font used for "celestial" is from Blambot, I think, as so many of my fonts are.



Some of my classmates weren't wild about the font, so I changed it out for my final draft. Font from Blambot yet again, I believe!



Next, I created the buswrap. It is difficult to find a usable dinosaur skeleton just lying around, you know? I eventually settled on this one, just for the purposes of the assignment. The bus is from the Stock Exchange, yet again~ I really wanted to find a usable image of the buses our own METS uses but could not. I took photos of our buses but they didn't work well once I plopped them in Photoshop. The billboard and building itself were my only usable photos, actually.



Third is the magazine ad! This is my favorite one. Why do I have such love for a dying medium?? The picture of the river is by myself, and the coffee is from the Stock Exchange. When it was all said and done, someone remarked that it reminded them of another ad campaign from someplace... Like Jimmy John's or something? I guess by the way the words are stacked. But... I LIKE stacking words... ;)



Lastly is my "installation." The EMTRAC was NEVER open when I had a chance to come down and take photos, and as I said, most of what I took didn't work well anyway. I had the idea to make a sort of installation along the building using train tracks and a replica train, but that just didn't pan out. Instead I created a huge banner! With a train I took from the Stock Exchange. It really wasn't detailed enough to make a good banner image, though. Curse you, trains!

MSI Site Design and STFU Tak Illustration

Today I have a Web Design project for you and a new illustration!

This project involved choosing a band with at least four releases and redesigning their logo, then creating a discography and merchandise page for them. I chose Mindless Self Indulgence because they are my favorite band and their site is okay but rather disjointed design-wise.

MSI uses a lot of Nintendo chipset music in their work, as well as having lots of bright, neon techno elements in their design aesthetic. I wanted to stick to that, while making it a little more slick since they've been sort of entering mainstream music.



I tried playing with Impact and layering colors to see how they'd interact. (The "MSI" logo is intentionally vulgar, haha! MSI is a bit of a vulgar band. Don't hate!) I also had my prerequisite hand-drawn font. I downloaded a nice font from Blambot and played a lot with its serifs. We all ended up liking that logo the best.

Once the logo was straightened out, I went about designing the pages. I stuck with my techno vibe in my sketches.



I really liked the circuit board and microchip ideas I'd come up with, but trying to integrate them practically didn't really work. I did end up using the sort of "electrical current" vibe in my final design, though.



For my first draft, Dave didn't quite dig the way I had laid out my navigation links. My classmates also pointed out that the gradient was a little ugly looking. It's supposed to fade from green to pink, but I intended for the page to extend beyond this "preview" window, so I didn't adjust the length of the gradient.

So I fixed those things! Made the nav links smaller and separated them with the fonts neato "asterisk." The way the page is supposed to work is that when you scroll over each thumbnail, it increases in size. If you click on it, additional info and order links will appear. MSI doesn't quite have their own storefront for a lot of their music; you are taken to other sites to order.



Then came the merchandise page! This one operated on the same basic premise, except I also added a shopping cart and size menus and the like.



I'm pretty pleased with this but I ended up getting a "B." Horrors! Dave said that the lack of a grid might be confusing... Which confused me, because I am sort of operating on a grid. *sobs!*

Next is an illustration I did for a good friend of mine. She gave me a hand with something when I was in a bind! This features her character Bianca and my versions of two characters from the old TV show Invader Zim. Bianca and the alien don't get along very well, and the poor hairy guy is caught in the middle. Love triangle!

By clicking on the thumb you can see my pencils, inks and the final version. :)

Conbook

Of the projects I did this semester, this one is probably my favorite. It combines two of my most favoritest things: Illustration and Magazine layout. (Both things that are going out of vogue in today's high-tech times, eh? I've always been on the cutting edge of trends that way)

So anyway, we were tasked with creating a four-page magazine layout focusing on a subject from a list we were given. One of the subjects was "Social Networking and Privacy," with a link to this news article. I took the assignment pretty literally and assumed we were supposed to actually sort of lay out the ARTICLE.

First, of course, were sketches.



My first idea was for a sad man to be tethered by the neck to a computer monitor. Then I thought about having a pair of hands coming from behind bars, typing on a keyboard... Next I thought of going for a more "Facebook-esque" layout... And then came the "mouse turning to handcuffs" idea. Everyone seemed to like the mousecuffs, so I went ahead with that one.

Funny (or perhaps sad) story: I actually went and looked at photos of mice on Google when I drew the mouse. And yet I still managed to draw it monumentally WRONG. The buttons were on the bottom with the scroll wheel floating somewhere up in space.



The drawings I did made it through, like, two critiques and several instances of my instructor looking at the image while giving me feedback... As well as, of course, my own eyes staring at the thing... And nobody noticed my mistake until the final critique. And I'll probably never live it down, either!

But that's ok, I fixed it.



I think everything turned out pretty nicely. I wonder if I should have justified the text, though. Yet again I misunderstood some conversation about the whole thing and thought it should all be left-aligned.





Now this is mounted and hanging up in the Visual Communications hallway. Hooray!

Dash Dash Dash...

Dot Dot Dot Dot Dash Dash Dash. Or is it the other way around? I don't know morse code.

So anyway! Gonna get caught up on my projects, here! This is the first site design Dave had us do for Web Design I. The project entailed taking a box from home and turning every side of it into a site! A much taller order than I suspected it would be, probably because I picked a box with a lot of redundant information on it.

But I picked the box I did because it had cute graphics on it.



(S.O.S is a marvelous product, by the way. I just recently started living by myself and cooking, and this makes cleaning up so crazy easy...)

Of course, the first thing we had to do was sketch out our plans...



I pretty much knew what I wanted as far as layout goes. I thought it would be neat to use the tab as a navigation button of sorts. I pretty much knew what graphics I wanted for the main page as well. I think perhaps Dave suggested some lavender in the background to make it more interesting.

Originally I tried a photo of some lavender fields, vector traced to better match the illustrations. Nobody really liked it, and looking at it myself I thought it kinda looked like somebody's head... Braided into purple corn rows. SO instead I headed on over to the Old Stock Exchange and found me a nice photograph of some lavender flowers. Everything started to come together after that!



I redid the logo and left out the bevels and the lens flare. I think most people would agree it's an improvement... And then I redrew the lavender in Illustrator, which was fun.

Next was the "Uses" page, which took up the back of the box. That had the neato graphics that I liked so much. I tried reproducing them in Illustrator but they just didn't look right... Instead I cleaned up the box scans I did in Photoshop and just plopped them in. The effect I wanted on the page was for the user to be able to scroll over an image and cause it to roll to the side, revealing the uses for that area.



Last came the "Green" page... The only other page I could really glean out of the content on the box. It's a pretty minimalistic design, haha! Nothing much to say about this one.



And there you have it! My first website design (for a grade)!

Survey of Web Design Employment Opportunities in my Area

I searched Indeed, Courier and Press, Monster, Authenticjobs and Ivy Tech's own Jobzone... And the answer is "not much is available in my area." Even freelance opportunities in other areas seemed to be scarce. That doesn't surprise me considering the fact that our economy is probably doing better than in many other states. The only job that would even remotely interest me is for a Web Content Specialist position at Courier and Press itself. Everything else was the typical "WORK FROM HOME AND MAKE $$$" listings you tend to find in every classified section.

From Graphic Design job listings I've seen in the past, I know that pretty much any creative job these days requires you to have some web design experience... Which is why I enrolled in this class. I can't help but wonder about the general conditions around this phenomenon, however. How many companies have completely dedicated web design professionals? I imagine many of them either contract out that kind of work or make some poor sap with another job description attend to it. With the Internet environment as it is today, so many companies still seem to put their sites in the hands of third parties or nonprofessionals.

What is SEO?

SEO is short for "Search Engine Optimization." At the very root, it would appear to be something invaluable to a business. Using SEO a website, theoretically, can manipulate its place in search engine rankings. Unfortunately, abuse of SEO by unscrupulous businesses over the years has caused it to go out of vogue.

In the past, a web designer could use meta tags in his code to show search bots exactly what his web site deals with. Abuse of these tags by inserting popular search terms (like "sex") to boost search engine ranking has led most search engines to ignore meta tagging. Instead, A List Apart suggests coming up with the keywords most relevant to your audience and being sure to insert them into your body copy. Insuring that your site usage and search results come organically is the best way to secure your space on search pages. Be subtle! If you're too aggressive, search engines will consider you a threat and bump you from their results pages.

These days, the most popular search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google, don't shed much light on their search algorithms to ensure that there is no abuse. Google itself makes it quite clear that there is no magic way to make your site appear as the number one search result. Overall, SEO is tied into accessibility. If you ensure that your website is clear, concise, and relevant, your users will both thank you and be able to find you easily. Their traffic will be what ensures your search engine standing.

Evansville Bowl for the Cure 2010

Two posts in one day, I know! But this one is shorter, ok?

One of the coordinators for Evansville's "Susan G. Komen - Bowl for the Cure" works in our school's fitness center. They're trying to get more college students to participate, I guess... So they're looking to have some colleges students design their new logo. Because she works at our school she allowed us to have a crack before any other area colleges :) I think, currently, our class's logos are being looked over by the folks down in Dallas. Maybe one of us will get picked, eh?

This one needed a quicker turnaround than any other project we've done so far, so I didn't go for any sort of amazing innovation. Our client mentioned that this was their 11th year for this event they possibly wanted to play off of that. Other than that we had free reign.



I just stuck with my typical hand-wrought style when it came to my final designs. (Yes, the font is made by moi) I figured that if they were aiming for a younger audience, it might work. Right?







I think I finished this assignment with maybe 15 minutes to spare. Whew!

The Ageless Aesthetic Institute

For this assignment we had to redesign the logo of an existing company, and then create a stationery package for it. I knew I wanted to do The Ageless Aesthetic Institute because it was girly and I can do girly, lol.

First, I did about a million sketches. I really had no idea what sort of logo I wanted to go for. Just a simple mark would've been best since I wanted to communicate a dignified and clean aesthetic... But what about a neat logomark?


Click to visit the sketch page

Eventually I settled on five logos that I felt somewhat successfully communicated what I wanted:



I was hung up on using these geometric shapes to represent the first letter of each word, and trying to organize them in an interesting way.



I really liked the little sundial logomark I came up with, so I introduced that. It's the only hand-drawn logo out of my solutions.



I really liked this little "hourglass" too. Another play on the "Ageless" thing. But one of my classmates thought the top of the glass looked like an asscrack. Or perhaps the crack in front XD So I definitely didn't feel like pursuing that one.



The "eyelash" mark was simple but effective, I thought. Here I present it with a more dignified font.



I ended up settling on this one, which has a bit more "modern" font. I used a system font and just made it super-thin by messing around with the strokes.

Now that I had my logo, it was time to design the stationery. I wanted to keep the teal and brown theme they had going on their site, I thought it was effective. I tried to go simpler than I tend to do on these things, so I basically just used the "eyelash" in different permutations. I liked the idea of making it sort of "go off" the paper and come back into it.

In the case of the envelope, you can see where my line of thinking was going. This template is off of Designer's Toolbox. A really neat site that a classmate pointed out to us. It looks super neat when it's printed out and nicely folded.



On the back of the business card, you can see the connection between the two "lashes," which I carried over into the brown blocks of color on the thank you cards. The dotted lines around the corners of the business card indicate that I wanted it to be a round die-cut. There is a design on the back of the letterhead, too.



Here's a photo of the real deal!