Just a quick word to let everyone know I'm still alive and that I've largely abandoned this platform for two solutions that I find immensely more satisfying.

1) Cargo Collective — This is where my portfolio lives now. The tools they provide to users are incredible and I feel like this is a much better place to maintain an updated work presence: http://cargocollective.com/loganmills

2) Flavors.me — Flavors is probably even more technically impressive than CC, but rather than show work stuff it aggregates a lot of my other internet data (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, etc). I heartily recommend you try it for yourself, but in the meantime here's mine: http://flavors.me/loganmills

This might be the last post here for awhile, please visit these two new sites and let me know what you think. I'm also currently accepting freelance design and illustration work, if you're interested please email me: loganmills@gmail.com

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.

The official 2009 Taito Christmas card. Pretty sweet (p.s. I didn't make this).

Happy Holidays everybody!

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:

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.

This is just a quick post to announce/promote/remind everyone that I now have a weekly radio show on WDET HD2. The show is called Quarter Circle Forward and it airs every Wednesday at 9EST and goes to Midnight. This Wednesday will be the third show so far, and it's shaping up pretty nicely. A link to stream the station online and copies of previous setlists can be found at the official show page. For a sampling of what gets played on the show, here's a sneak peak at the first few songs from this week's show:

Necessaries - Detroit Tonight
the Mantles - Bad Design
Best Coast - Sun Was High (So Was I)
Summer Camp - I Only Have Eyes For You
the Flaming Lips - Worm Mountain
Kim Sun - The Man Who Must Leave
Kanye West - RoboCop
Islands - Heartbeat
Islands - Vapours
Fuck Buttons - Space Mountain
Neon Indian - 6669 (I Don't Know if You Know)

I've wanted to do another "mixtape" for so long but just haven't the time — my old method was convoluted and messy and just generally not that fun to do. Today I discovered a new method that's the complete opposite, so these may start coming out at a more feverish pace. Mix 3 is much shorter than the others — under 20 minutes, so there's definitely no time for filler. It's made up of:

the xx / Washed Out / Au Revoir Simone x Neon Indian / the Pains of Being Pure at Heart / James Husband / Yoni Wolf

Pretty killer right?? Download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?moclgtzyzdn

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.

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).