First, I jotted down some startling statements that might communicate the seriousness of the pressures teens face everyday. Next, I went across the street to Dollar General and purchased a 5-pack of spiral notebooks. I began thinking of things I would write on my notebooks in high school and started to draw.

After scanning the notebook covers, I started playing with color. There are times when a solid, flat color is just fun to start with. I found this dirty blue and decided on the bright orange color for the type.

The brochure was the jumping off point. Various forms of the post card followed over the next month or so.

This was a really fun project. I hope to continue this campaign in the future.

Next, I needed to set a mood. For some reason, this didn’t take long to decide. I grabbed the nearest Moleskine-like journal and scanned a blank page to get that subtle texture for the background. By incorporating Sketchetica for headlines and a cut-out style banner here and there, I just began placing information in a hierarchy. This became my approach to all pieces. I began with designing the postcard which was to be handed out to students on college campuses. This same mood and feel translated over nicely to the landing and download pages for the web site.

Designing the look of the web site was a lot of fun. Because I’m not a code guy, I usually get overwhelmed by trying to figure out how to put great ideas into HTML, CSS, PHP, and the like. Not so on this project. The Great Steven Peercy was commissioned to program the back end of this simple site which gave me free reign to exercise my creativity. O the delight to see my designs come alive with rollovers, working forms, and smooth functionality!

Although this was a small and quick project, I was given a lot of room for creativity which makes my job a lot of fun. Special thanks to Brock Starnes for excellent management and business acumen. Visit www.speakuptour.com to see the real thing up and running.

Landing Page for the Speak Up Tour

Downloads Page of Speak Up Tour's Web Site

I’ve already posted about the evolution of the bug-a-roo logo project. Over the last week, that identity grew a little stronger. With a sales event pending, we needed some fresh marketing materials. We’ve always been on a tight budget so instead of spending a lot of money on die-cutting business cards, we’ve just cut a couple of corners off and punched some holes to give the impression of a sales tag. Well, that gets old fast so this was my opportunity to simplify. The solution ended up being implying that tag with shape. However, instead of the drawing the shape of a tag, I just drew the impression of a background. Using a darker shade of the main green pantone color, I added a sliver beneath to imply a shadow. I liked this so much that I carried it over to the brochure.

The brochure was a redesign of something I threw together in about an hour for the last event. Since that was done around midnight, it looked uninteresting. I carried the green color and tag impression over to the brochure to see if I could still use it. It was starting to take shape so I stuck with it.

The previous design had a photograph of my wife holding our son in a baby sling. We didn’t have any more photos on hand so I decided to illustrate the old photo. If you are familiar with Adobe Illustrator, you know that you can click a button and, presto! you have an illustrated image of your photograph. That’s no fun, though. Besides, you get some funky-ness that doesn’t look quite right. If you do it by hand, not only do you get to brag about it, but any funky-ness is your own fault! This took HOURS. I had a blast, though. I worked with a skintone color palette, and created dimensional shapes and patterns to imply depth. It felt like the good ole days of paper and pencil. 

This illustration technique had been on my mind quite a bit. I had wanted to do something similar for bug-a-roo for a long time but didn’t have the opportunity until now. We’ll see if it shows up again. Again, that is the beauty of taking your time to develop a visual identity.

Illustration example

Well, I have to sign off because I have to be Mr. Mom so my wife can go sell these products. We’ll see how it goes. Check her blog out and order stuff from her: slings-and-things.blogspot.com.

Invitation for the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum

The invitations were fun because it forced me to research some of the design practices of the late 1800s and early 1900s. There is a lot of floral scroll work and whimsical ornamentation. It is rare to find display type that hasn’t been warped or shaped in some exotic way. Next was the informational type. Modern design frowns on the use of many typefaces in a single design. Turn-of-the-century design is just the opposite. It was hard to let myself do it but the result was a nice nostalgic effect. This was a single color design, 5.5×8.8 (about), on a cream color card stock.

Program for the Ribbon Cutting Ceremony of the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum

For the program, it was decided to print in black and white, in-house. Referencing an old mortgage bond for the Greenville & Columbia Railroad Company, I fashioned the little lines surrounding the “Ribbon Cutting” banner. The rest of the typesetting has a more formal feel due to the formal nature of the ceremony. 

Casey Jones Historical Fund Form

Finally, the Casey Jones Historical Fund form was created to distribute to folks interested in contributing a donation. Although forms aren’t too exciting, it was another opportunity to play with the ornamentation around the logo. 

I’d like to thank the folks at Casey Jones Village and encourage you to visit them if you are ever coming through Jackson, Tennessee on I-40. It’s right off of the highway and it’s a lot of family fun. Thanks, also, to Heather Hornbeak at Cedarway photography for the photo of someone (probably her) holding the program. Check Cedarway’s stuff out as well.

The first day targeted street traffic generously provided by the Memphis in May Music Festival. For this audience, a low-cost, small format (2.5″ x 2.5″) card was handed to passersby to raise awareness and generate a buzz. The next evening, a VIP artist reception was held featuring jewelry designer, Wendy Mignot. For this, a gate-folded, two-color invitation was designed, printed, placed in a metallic silver envelope, hand addressed, and sent to a list of art enthusiasts throughout the city. This element was appropriately the most elaborate and expensive part of the campaign. Finally, the last event was an invitation-only champagne brunch with a come-and-go vibe. Obviously informal, we chose to send out a color postcard to a broader audience. This final event proved to be a happy medium between the previous two events both in scale and promotion (not to mention production costs). 

The campaign was topped off by a couple of email blasts sent out by the gallery owner. I designed two images to promote two of the three events. You can check them out below. I had a great time working on this project and look forward to doing more in the future. If you are ever in Memphis and would like to check out a great gallery, go to Art Under a Hot Tin Roof at 117 S. Main (Downtown). Also, their original location is in downtown Jackson, TN. Drop in and say “hi.”

Art Under a Hot Tin Roof: Email Blast for VIP Reception

Art Under a Hot Tin Roof Email Blast for Champagne Brunch

I love to organize information. For this reason, web design has always been fascinating to me. Bully Bloc provided me with a logo, a few pictures, and a lot of text. Normally, I’d go to town in Illustrator or InDesign, but since HTML is somewhat new to me, I had to hold my horses. I utilized a generic email template I found. It was a single column and a simple starting point for me. From there, I created the header, the banner, and the section headings in Photoshop. It is remarkable how much of a conscious effort I had to make when working for web as opposed to print. First of all, I am used to working in CMYK color mode. I’ve learned how to think in terms of four colors of ink and how they relate to each other. In the print world, there isn’t just a single black but there is also a rich black. The simplest of colors must be formulated by mixing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. In RGB, there are only three colors to worry about (Red, Green, and Blue). It is color manipulated by light, not ink. Now my color sliders need to be all the way to the right for lighter colors. You get the idea. On top of all of this, web-safe colors are even more limited than CMYK values. Then you have the issue of Raster versus Vector. I’m so used to working with those nice crisp vector lines. I’ve really come to fear pixels as a result. In Photoshop, you have to think in pixels. There are no more inches and half inches, just absolute pixels. In print, everything has to be at 300 dpi; in web, everything is 72 dpi. That’s the difference between playing an XBox and the Atari 2600 (in terms of resolution).

Once that was done, I had to think in HTML and CSS. This is like trying to thread a needle with mittens on. I’m used to grabbing an object and dragging it to it’s perfect location. In HTML, there is a scientific way to tell a browser where that perfect place is. It would be like trying to define exactly why you find a particular person attractive. When your not used to defining things so precisely, it can be a pretty arduous task. Anyway, I choked my way through it and here is the final result. Not bad for a print designer, ehh?

Sending an email campaign is another story but thanks to some help from a friend, I was able to handle that side relatively easily. The newsletter went out last week and I’m already looking forward to doing next month’s. This whole process was a bit addicting. I’m thinking of all of my clients who could benefit from it. I predict I’ll be doing a lot more.

Once I began freelancing, things changed significantly. Suddenly I found myself in situations where I didn’t only have the freedom to give my expert opinions, I was actually hired for them. Tennessee Industrial Printing had acquired a new digital press in early 2008. I was hired to develop a small advertising campaign to run in various local publications. I was amazed at how natural the whole process was. I sat down with the folks at TIPs and just listened to their needs. I was also very interested in hearing the message they needed to get out. It was quite simple: they had a new digital press that allowed them to turn around large print jobs quickly. They now had more direct mail capabilities as well as variable data abilities. Simply put: fast, mailable, high-volume, quality. 

After the dust clears from such a meeting, the most important details rise to memory. I sat down and began typing the copy for what we planned to be a three-ad campaign. I chose the three most important attributes, applied quality to each, and developed three distinct concepts. After scouring hundreds of photos that visually communicated these three concepts, I developed the headlines and eventually came up with the illustrative designs (target, clock, and ruler). Putting it all together was the fun part. 

Developing the TIPs campaign was a blast. After keeping my mouth shut for so long, I began to see experience and observation paying off. TIPs is a great home-owned group of folks to work with. If you’re ever in need of some great high-quality, fast turn-around, high-volume printing or variable data, direct mail services, check them out.