“Beautiful Soul” Surface Design Pattern.
I love creating patterns. Every night over the last week or so I’ve been trying to design a new pattern to add to my library. Eventually i’d like to find a surface design rep and license my designs for material and other usages. But I want to flesh out my archive first.
Here’s several pattern designs I’ve created recently that were a lot of fun to create.
“Textured” Coke Classic Design.
Over the last few years I’ve done more and more exploratory work for clients. This involves brand exploration and ideation on new potential product lines and identities. This past year my client Tervis hired me to design some Coke Classic wraps for their tumblers to be used in a licensing presentation.
I was provided with a style guide of Coke Classic brand assets and asked to create some brand centric designs that utilized these assets and kept true to the vintage aesthetics of the Coca Cola brand. Each design also had to have a QR code included with it.
View larger Mad Men image here.
Looking forward to season 6 of Mad Men. It’s one of my favorite TV shows. Yes I enjoy the creative context which is advertising, but the other aspect I enjoy is that the era is the 1960′s and I’m always spotting the same decor and objects my parents owned and I remember seeing when I was a kid.
I think in the second season I spotted wooden ducks with metal wings hanging on a wall during one scene and just laughed because my parents had the exact same set in our living room growing up. Kudos to prop master Scott Buckwald for a very authentic touch to an already compelling narrative.
My favorite character on the show is Roger Sterling. He plays a narcissistic womanizer with a quick wit and a penchant for liquor and cigarettes. He’s a good example of everything you shouldn’t be, and he pulls the roll off in a very entertaining way.
So I decided to illustrate him tonight using one continuous line.
Editorial Illustration.
I don’t do a lot of editorial illustration. But one publication I’ve been doing editorial illustrations for well over a decade now is a magazine called “Oil and Gas Investor.” I get sent the article, I read it, re-read it and try to glean some bit of information I can elaborate into an interesting visual narrative that will represent and work well with the article.
The premise of this article was on research being done by universities regarding shale-gas exploration. Initially research papers were coming out and the reports were positive in general, than the debate would begin to flame the research via ad hominem personal attacks on the researchers behind the reports.
So this dynamic of academia playing their research card and having the cards turned on them leading to the report than becoming a negative reflection on them was the idea I played off of. My client liked an old illustration I had done years ago so I used the same segmented style and format on this editorial illustration.
Keywords: Illustration, Commentary, Editorial
Sasquatch cardboard doodle.
I’ve been on this cardboard doodle kick for about a month now. It’s been a fun creative habit.
Today I decided to draw a Sasquatch and posted my initial one via my instagram account. Someone asked if they could buy it so I agreed and it’ll be shipped out in the next day or so to a new home.
I was kind of bummed though, I like these funky pieces of art so I decided to draw another one for myself which you can see in the image above.
Sinfully ugly logo.
The most intriguing projects for me are those that challenge me to think differently, or cause me to approach something in a new way. Rarely are projects so smooth as to avoid any bumps in the creative road, some times that happens, but most often the creative process between client and designer can get a bit messy along the way. So knowing how to steer the proverbial ship through the waters of client expectations and personal preferences is paramount in pursuit of resolving a design problem.
In this post I’ll reveal some interesting aspects that transpired during the course of a recent project.
Life is Too Short for Bad Art!
Last year I coordinated a poster event for Neenah Paper at the HOW Design Conference. It was a lot of fun and a huge success. I’m thankful that Neenah Paper asked me to coordinate another poster event for this years HOW Design Conference in San Francisco.
I invited four talented artists (several of them are SF based) to create a unique poster design for this years event. Each day a different artist will be signing their posters at the Neenah booth. (Get to the booth early the posters go fast!) The artists who are part of this years event are:
- Josh Chen
- Earl Gee
- James Victore
- Ron Chan
- Von Glitschka
Now take a few minutes and go behind the scenes for a sneak peek at my poster design and how I created it.
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