Archive for the ‘Process’ Category
Process: Media Genesis Newsletter illustrations
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
One of my favorite things to work on at Media Genesis in the last year or so has been the newsletter. We have a number of Project Managers with writing backgrounds, so every month or so we put together a newsletter of roughly four to five articles on the latest internet news, specifically geared towards clients of ours. As a founding member of the newsletter team, it's my job to create all the editorial illustrations.
Sometimes these come to me rather quickly, and the idea is easy enough to execute that just a basic sketch is all that's required before moving into Photoshop:
Other times things don't go quite as smoothly. For this illustration entitled "The Key to Corporate Blogging," I first drew a locked chest and a locked door down a long hallway:
After some work in Photoshop, it became clear that neither of these paths had much merit. The simplest path, just drawing a key, was the best:
Sometimes even the simplest sketch, just a gesture really, is enough of an idea to go on:
Despite what I thought as a child, today I'm not sure I'd really want to be an illustrator full-time. But editorial illustration is a great diversion from having your nose buried in website design all day, and I'm pretty proud of the newsletter we've put together. You can check out all past entries here, and while you're there feel free to subscribe.
Below are a few more of my favorite illustrations that I couldn't find my sketches for:
Tags: illustration, mediag, newsletter
Posted in Portfolio, Process | 1 Comment »
Process: The Redner Group
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
A little while ago I was contacted about creating a logo for a brand new PR agency known as The Redner Group. Their areas of expertise are "video games, consumer electronics, and men's fashion," so I was pretty much on board right away. Visualizing PR without resorting to gimmicks is kind of a tricky thing, plus there was the added weight of creating something for a brand new company (as opposed to redesigns, which at least for me tends to be a bit more common). The one thing we established early on was that the color scheme would be primarily red-based (REDner, right?). With that in mind, I got to sketching in my handy-dandy Field Notes book:
Sketching wasn't going as well as I am maybe used to. Things were a little murky, although if there was one thing I did hit on at this stage it was the notion that the acronym TRG was potentially more visually interesting than writing out the whole name — I don't know why exactly, but it seemed to have interesting ligature possibilities. I decided to dive head-first into Illustrator, with less of a life-preserver than usual.
A few themes came out of this stage that would set the course for the rest of the process, namely acronyms and circles. The top left was a fairly successful (I thought, at least) full-name version, set into a rather abstract capital R. The other versions on top also intrigued me — I had primarily been using bold condensed sans-serifs like Bureau and Knockout (especially nice as cap acronyms, I think), but in this case I used a typeface my co-worker Ryan introduced me to called Calvert, which worked pretty well. The lower-right logo is a little too obviously Draplin-y, and yeah, it's kind of goofy.
So those were shown, some edits were made, new logos were shown, and we quickly hit upon these three "families:"
I should take this opportunity to mention how great a client Redner was. With every new batch, I felt like real progress was being made towards a solution we would both be happy with, which was really reassuring considering how this process tends to go sometimes. Anyway, I was pretty excited with the right option especially, but then this was pointed out to me:
Oops. Yeah, it's not the same typeface, but it was close enough to be an issue. It was right around this point that I think we both started gravitating towards the "acronym in a circle" option. Not because it had a whole lot of special meaning, but because both aesthetically and functionally it held the most promise. Next I made a whole slew of typeface/color variations:
Yeah, so some of those are a little wacky, but I felt like we were 90% of the way there and it was important to me to make sure no stone was left unturned. We narrowed that down to two options:
And then one:
Helvetica wins again. All in all I'm really happy with this solution, I think it lays a really solid groundwork for future visualizations of the brand. Like I said earlier, tt's somewhat rare for me to a create logo for a brand new company, and not a re-design of an existing logo, so the idea of "laying a good groundwork" was an important goal for me. Nothing too flashy or bogged down, just a no-nonsense mark ready to get to work.
Coming soon, another process-y kind of post on a year's worth of editorial illustration for the MG Newsletter.
Tags: logo, Process, red, redner
Posted in Portfolio, Process | 2 Comments »
Process: My Bigfoot poster
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
A few weeks ago we got the word that the AIGA: Detroit (American Institute of Graphic Arts) was hosting the third fourth iteration of the Urban Forest Project, and that Media Genesis had been selected to produce two of the posters. For those that don't know, the Urban Forest Project (first held in New York City in the Fall of 2006) is an outdoor exhibition of posters dealing with issues of the environment, specifically trees and their importance in our ecosystem. Denver hosted the second Urban Forest Project shortly thereafter, and more recently Baltimore was the lucky host.
After researching some of the posters produced for both the New York and Denver projects, Matt and I began sketching out ideas for what we would produce. The brief mentioned using trees as a metaphor, but we both noticed that previous designers had taken this very literally and we began brainstorming ways around the "tree trap."
One night before falling asleep the phrase "Reason to Save the Trees #____" popped into my head. This seemed like a promising start; it was a blank canvas to come up with bizarre and off-the-beaten-path ways to subvert the "tree trap." I remember having a few impossibly ridiculous ideas at first, but the one that stuck was that of a homeless Bigfoot. This intrigued me. Bigfoot = funny, but Bigfoot with a bindle = comedy gold.
The next day at work I drew this:
I was excited about this direction, so I started to work in Illustrator. After a bit of drawing around I realized that if he was holding a sign instead of a bindle, there would be a great opportunity for a second joke inside the sign. Pretty soon I had this:
After messing around with some type treatments in Illustrator, and being generally unhappy with the results, I decided to move everything in to Photoshop. Generally Illustrator is the preferred app for print work, especially large posters, but in this case I wanted to try some things with layer grouping and blending effects that I felt more comfortable doing in Photoshop. After a couple missteps I decided to put the image in a frame, with the text outside it. Because this would be hanging on street lamps, I put all the text underneath the image. Bigfoot's sign was still blank, so I polled some people on what Homeless Bigfoot's sign should say. My girlfriend came up with "Will Verify Existence For Food," so I scribbled this on a piece of paper and scanned it.
Finally I had something that resembled a poster:
It was right around this time that we had our first internal critique involving me, Matt, and Antoine. It was a generally positive crit, although some very good valid points were brought up. One issue was the separation of text and image (I agreed that the layout seemed lifted from a Far Side cartoon). Another was the complexity, there were after all three "jokes" in something that most people would only glance at as they walked by. Not only that, but they were in a strange order:
Back in Photoshop I did my best to address these issues. Rachel suggested I replace the text in the sign with "Homeless and Hungry," which I really liked because it brought the text and image together and also simplified the layout (two jokes instead of three, basically). To accommodate this I had to move the text to the top, which I was skeptical of doing but if there's one thing I've learned about design it's that you have to be willing to experiment. Your gut feeling isn't always right, and your design isn't sacred, so you might as well experiment.
The obvious thing that felt unresolved to me at this point was the "Would Be" text. It was just sitting there, not doing anything for the design, but I was getting a little frustrated and couldn't see a better solution.
A few days passed and I came back to it. It felt off. It was awkward to read, and there was still too much going on. I decided then that my mantra from that point on would be "simplify, simplify." I took out everything that I thought was unnecessary, including previously-untouchable elements like the sign and the "Reason" text. I also decided to scale back on the number of colors used. Again, nothing is sacred and you have to be willing to get rid of things you think are good but just aren't working. After a bit of work I had it boiled down to this:
I felt close now, but the text at the top still bugged me. I reduced the number of colors more and went back to an old design stand-by of mine, the banner. For the first time, it felt finished.
But not for long. I left it alone again, came back to it, and this time it didn’t look as resolved as I remembered. If my mantra was “simplify,” why was there still that graphic noise in the background? I had tried to avoid gradients up until this point (for some reason, possibly involving my design education and preference for analog vs digital) but I tried it on the background and really liked the result. Antoine mentioned that the removing the “Reason #” text confused my initial message, that being that there are hundreds of reasons to preserve our environment, and after some consideration I agreed and brought it back. The banner moved to bottom, some colors were changed, and finally:
It was done.
I’ll post pictures once it’s printed and hanging up outside.
Tags: bigfoot, Design, poster
Posted in Portfolio, Process | No Comments »