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

My friends Matt and Casey got married earlier this year. My wife hosted Casey’s wedding shower and asked me to “design something real quick.” She had planned a shower where all guests would bring a recipe to help the bride jump start her domestic arsenal. Of course, this brought to mind the idealistic housewife from the 1950′s. Also appropriate to that genre was the orange and aqua color combination employed in the design. To top it all off, I tried “baking-in” the imperfections of screen printing into the design. If you look closely, you can see how some of the lettering is a little offset from the background. The final printed product was a 3×5 card to mimic an index card (ya know, for recipes). You may even be able to see the light blue and red rules in the background.

Casey Brewer Wedding Shower Invitation

Casey Brewer Invitation Detail

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.

After sketching out what seemed like a full sketchbook of ideas, I kept coming back to the initials, I.O.I. The organization is referred to by these initials more than anything else so I felt strongly that the logo needed to communicate this. The result is the flaggy treatment of the initials. By creating the solid ‘I’s, we were able to insinuate the ‘O’ between them by only placing the negative space. What we are left with is a memorable logo mark that isn’t completely dependent on the text to its left. 

The organization’s main location of operations is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Surrounded by a lush and muddy countryside, Addis is full of greens, dark oranges, and various shades of neutral colors. It seemed natural to establish these colors as I.O.I.’s palette. 

I am happy to report that after years of hailing Papyrus as a worthy font choice, I.O.I. has reconsidered its typefaces. Hallelujah. You can visit them on the web at www.ioiusa.org.

One of the curses of being a graphic designer is that EVERYTHING must have a logo. The good thing about that is that you can develop your wife’s side business into a brand. We began with a quick, rough logo. My wife refuses to capitalize anything so naturally, the logo would be all lower case. I thought the brand should reflect her care-free, cheerful personality so rather than searching for the right font, I sketched the type with Illustrator’s pencil tool (when’s the last time you used that one?). I fashioned a quick outline of a bug in the background and called it a day. It worked for a little while but I started cringing every time she asked me to print her some more business cards. 

I began sketching ideas for a revision. I came up with some great concepts but was having trouble translating it into crisp, clean vector lines. As a designer who prefers those wonderful vector lines to their jaggy raster counterparts, I had to resist the temptation to scan the sketches and start tracing. That’s cheating isn’t it? Well, after several frustrating attempts, I fired up my Epson and started tracing.

This process has really opened a lot of possibilities for me. I realized that no matter how complicated the idiosyncratic anomalies of hand drawn images are, they have to break down into simple lines at some level. This could only strengthen my design skills. One of the complaints about the vector preference is that things tend to be too neat. It would be great to master the ability to force vectors to behave and look more like rasters (without the scanning, of course). All of this comes from a distain for the size and color limitations you have with a raster image. 

Anyhoo, the results were quite nice. I ended up with a lovely logo for my wife that reflects her personality and business. You can see the process below. For gift ideas for moms and moms-to-be, visit bug-a-roo.

Original Bug-a-roo logo

A Sketch

Another Sketch

THE Sketch

Bug-a-roo Logo

In the case of this project for Union University, there was a definite theme for their spring, 2009 semester chapel program. All speakers were to relate the ancient use of the psalter to modern Christian worship. As a designer, there are some obvious visual roads to travel down on a project like this. The ancient/modern tension is a fertile ground for any designer. However, the most common approach, especially in terms of design for religious organizations, is to incorporate images of old paper, books, or anything recalling an old monastery in Europe. There is nothing wrong with that approach (I’ve used it many times). For this project, though, I wanted to go another route. It is sometimes good to consider the most obvious stereotypes at the beginning so you know what not to do (I’d love to design a coffee shop logo that did not incorporate a steaming cup of coffee into the design). Instead, I asked the question, “how can I design something in a contemporary style without trying to make the old look cool?” This presents a number of problems such as imagery, font selection, color selection, etc. For example, if I’m going with an ancient feel, I’m not likely to use a bright color such as orange; I’d choose a couple of drab colors. 

I found myself thinking about old 1970s office buildings with baked coffee in a percolator, scratchy office chairs, and a musty secretary smoking a Camel cigarette and wearing chic horn-rimmed glasses. As I looked through textures for a background, I imagined the upholstered cubical walls in this office. I found the perfect background image. I wanted to update my 70s vibe a little so I used Officina Sans (an appropriate name, I think) for the font. Being a two-color project, I searched for an ugly brown to be my base color. After experimenting with a number of brighter colors for my accent color, I settled on that bright orange. This scheme makes me think a little about the mystery candies you’d get at halloween after trick-or-treating (what were those things). I knew, though, that I’d have to find a central image to pull everything together. Back to my “obvious stereotype” brainstorming.

Go to any Christian bookstore/web site that sells CDs and you’ll find the “Praise and Worship” section. I’d bet you’d find a large percentage of package designs will incorporate some cool college student with spikey hair lifting one or both hands into the sky. This, of course, is the obvious stereotype. I used this stereotype. I found my spikey haired kid with a nice ugly flannel shirt I thought would look good on my brown textured background. Shameless!

Sometimes design begins with ideals but it is amazing how quickly that can change before a project is completed. This is one thing I love about design. Again, it is the disposable aspect that makes the creative part so free and fun. Sure, we’re free to have ideals, but we’re also free to fall back on reliable solutions. Hopefully, the result is a good looking promotional item that lasts 3-6 months in the back of some college student-with-spikey-hair’s notebook. It communicates something to generate interest pertinent to the day, provides practical information, and retires to Florida somehow.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with how this project turned out. My favorite part is the type setting and organization of the calendar. I know I’m a nerd but that stuff just makes my day. Everything is nice and neat. I love it.

Union University - Spring 09 Chapel Guide

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.