Archive for November, 2009
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 »
Quarter Circle Forward
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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)
Tags: quarter circle forward, radio, wdet
Posted in Music | No Comments »