Archive for the ‘Portfolio’ Category
Wu-Tang vs. the Beatles: Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Tom Caruana made this killer mixtape of Wu-Tang vocals and Beatles-related instrumentals and has just released it for free online here. I made the official album cover as seen above. Even if I wasn't involved I feel like I'd be recommending this to friends, it's just that good. The samples especially really run the gamut from expected to totally-far-out-"what was that?"-style-awesome. Reception has been pretty good so far, Raekwon put the link out on twitter and it really started blowing up! Looking forward to doing more stuff like this.
Tags: album covers, beatles, wu-tang
Posted in Music, Portfolio | 3 Comments »
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 »
Function13 Album Cover
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
Cover design for Function 13's "Prostitution" remix album. More information and a link to the free download are available on the official site.
More work coming soon, things are getting kind of busy right now but I'm going to at least try and finish up the Wu-Note Project before the end of summer.
Tags: album covers
Posted in Music, Portfolio | No Comments »
MunkyButler.com
Friday, July 24th, 2009
Just a quick note to let everyone know that munkybutler.com, a new social networking site that Media Genesis developed, is now live. I got to work on this (specifically the name and logo, above) so it's exciting for me to see it finally released into "the wild."
Side note: apparently to help promote the launch there are guys in monkey suits performing zany stunts all over metro Detroit right now, so if you're heading downtown today don't bring any bananas or anything (and if you do, make sure you keep your eyes "peeled" for any suspicious activity).
Tags: logo, mediag, munkeybutler
Posted in Internets, Portfolio | No Comments »
Space Invaders Rd. 2
Monday, July 20th, 2009
The above is a detail from the new version of "The Many Faces of a Space Invader," created for an upcoming video game art zine. The new version features ten new characters, and I'm looking into my options for printing it.
Tags: poster, simpsons, space invaders
Posted in Portfolio, Video Games | No Comments »
Ugly Mug signage
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
The Ugly Mug Cafe in Ypsilanti is using my logo as their signage now — looks good. If you're in the area check them out, they make a great coffee.
Tags: coffee, logo, ugly mug, ypsilanti
Posted in Portfolio | No Comments »
Beer Labels
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
My boss Antoine has been brewing beer in his spare time, recently I made a couple labels for them and here's how they turned out:
You can see some more on the Media Genesis Facebook page.
Tags: beer, label, mediag
Posted in Portfolio | No Comments »
Wu-Tang Design Remix Project pt.2
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
So I want to take back something I said in Part 1 -- "almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible" is a bit too harsh I think. Some people have really run with that and gotten quite upset, and rightfully so. There are definitely some good ones in there. I've thought about it and I think it would be more accurate to say that my real problem with the original covers was how disjointed they all looked when put in the same playlist. The cleverest thing the Wu-Tang Clan ever did was negotiate separate contracts for everybody, but since these came out on so many different labels the cover art varies drastically. The "Wu-Note Project" is my attempt to amend this all the covers work as a set.
Let me know what you guys think of Part 2, either in the comments here or on Flickr, where I'm posting each as they're made. All in all I'm pretty happy with them, although I wish there was a Killa Bees Volume 2 fit into this series chronologically so I could do that Thelonius Monk yellow/red trick.
Tags: album covers, blue note, Design, remix, wu-tang
Posted in Design, Music, Portfolio | 17 Comments »
Wu-Tang Design Remix Project pt.1
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
A little while ago I put a bunch of Wu-Tang (both group and solo) albums on my computer. 21 of them, in fact. I inherited some mild OCD from my mom, and as anyone who has seen my iTunes can attest to, it manifests itself in weird ways. I need to have decent-quality album art for every album on my computer, which currently equals over 90 gigs. The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB's two albums being the only real exceptions) -- no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they're looking pretty dated these days. So, armed with inspiration from what Olly Moss and others are doing (as written about by me here, and later by Kottke here) and a book of Blue Note Records covers, I set out to remake all 21. The first seven are here (click for full-view):
I've changed the art for these in my iTunes and love the results:
So seven down, fourteen to go. From here on out I'm going to start uploading them to my Flickr Photostream as soon as each is done, so you guys can bug me if I'm not making them fast enough. I'll post the next set of seven here when they're done. In the meantime, enjoy, and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
Tags: album covers, blue note, Design, remix, wu-tang
Posted in Design, Music, Portfolio, Uncategorized | 104 Comments »
Space Invaders
Friday, March 20th, 2009
Made a Space Invaders sprite for the MG Newsletter last month and decided to make some variations today.
Tags: meme-worthy?, space invaders
Posted in Portfolio, Video Games | 9 Comments »
A Night of Contemporary Art at the DIA
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
The Detroit Institute of Arts is curating a special selection of contemporary art for friends of Media Genesis and Boyle Burdett on January 22nd, and we got to create the promotional material for the event. The first image was sent out as an email, and the second is going to be printed as an 18 x 24 inch poster. We're really happy with how they turned out, it's especially fun to take a set of visual elements designed for one medium and remix them in another.
Bonus Factoid: Pentagram made the logos for both the DIA and DSO (Detroit Symphony Orchestra). And both are excellent.
Photo: 
Michelle Andonian, American (born 1958), Andy Warhol in Detroit, 1985 (printed 2008); ink jet print. Gift of Michelle Andonian in honor of Joy Hakansen Colby (2008.422), © Michelle Andonian.
Tags: dia, mediag, warhol
Posted in Portfolio, Uncategorized | No Comments »
MediaG Newsletter
Monday, January 19th, 2009
One of my favorite projects at work lately has been the redesign of our newsletter. Not only did we redesign the look, we completely revamped the content and restructured how each story is presented. We mostly cover topics related to website development, but if you use the internet(s) at all there's bound to be something of interest to you. We're working on our third "issue" right now and in my opinion they're just getting better and better -- but we can always use feedback. Click here to visit the newsletter site, leave some comments on individual stories, and sign up to get the monthly newsletter in your inbox.
Update: full page January newsletter can now be found here.
Tags: email, mediag, newsletter
Posted in Portfolio | No Comments »
It’s So Cold in the D
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
Made this for the Media Genesis Holiday email -- thanks to whichever co-worker suggested the "MediaG Meme" idea. Want to do one of those outlines-with-numbers guides to this but maybe three people would think that was funny and Super Puzzle Fighter isn't going to play itself.
Tags: email, holiday, mediag
Posted in Portfolio | 1 Comment »
Ugly Mug identity
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Just got word that this identity I did for the Ugly Mug, a really excellent coffee shop in Ypsilanti MI, is being used by the store. The system is such that I can do a lot more variations for different uses, I'll post those sometime in the near future. Also forthcoming: pictures of the logo in use.
This one was a lot of fun to do, I've been really interested in the "identity vs. static logo" idea for awhile and I was eager to get a chance to put it into practice. Its success will ultimately come down to how much worth we can get out of the different variations, something I'm really looking forward to. Plus it's always great to work with a client that's eager to try new things, trusts your judgement, and brews a hell of a cup of coffee.
Tags: identity, logo, ugly mug
Posted in Portfolio | No Comments »
Tees by the People
Friday, August 29th, 2008
My friend Ryan recently took a design position at Team Obama, and sent me the link to teesbythepeople.com a few days ago. It's basically an Obama-themed Threadless, where users can vote on which user-created t-shirts they would like to be officially produced. The above is mine, I'll post a link once it goes live to their site (this may take a few days, they seem to be getting a lot more traffic than they expected).
Did you guys see the speech last night? Totally awesome and inspiring -- the gloves are off. And McCain responds today by naming an inexperienced woman as VP. Brilliant.
Tags: obama, t-shirt
Posted in Portfolio | 2 Comments »
Lemon Party Gator Style
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Presented without much comment: The logo I made for my wiffle ball team, Lemon Party Gator Style (there might be t-shirts!). I also helped Tait with the theme song, which I can hopefully post later.
Tags: logo, mediag, wiffle ball
Posted in Lulz, Portfolio | No Comments »
Lunch
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
A drawing I did recently for a Media Genesis project. The client (who shall remain nameless) didn't pick it, but I stand by it. Thanks to Matt for showing me the knife tool in Illustrator.
Tags: food, illustration, typography
Posted in Portfolio | 2 Comments »
Atlantis
Friday, May 16th, 2008
So some time ago Media Genesis moved into a building with way too many conference rooms and the only way to keep them straight was to assign each the name of fictitious place. Some time after that it was decided that each room should have a poster for the door, and that each designer at Media G could do one. I drew Atlantis.
My friend and co-worker Matt got mine and his printed yesterday, and the prints look great. I'll try and post a photo of it "in action" next week maybe. I love projects where I get to write my own copy -- now no one can ever say the phrase "don't get bit" isn't printed somewhere inside our office.
Tags: atlantis, mediag
Posted in Portfolio | No Comments »
Bigfoot poster pt.2
Monday, May 5th, 2008
The Urban Forest posters are up! Matt took pictures over the weekend, when I get home I'll post them to my Flickr.
Tags: aiga, ann arbor, urban forest
Posted in Portfolio | 1 Comment »
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 »