LEGOed: The Legend Continues...

So I have a few more. First some additions to the Mortal Kombat edition.


Shang Tsung


Johnny Cage

Now some personal ones:


I'm really proud of this one because it is freaking perfect.
My Brother, Gordon Eckler


Seth Akkerman


SCAD Professor, Scott Boylston


and I'm am pretty proud of this one as well.
SCAD Professor, Rhonda Arntsen

The Empire Strikes Barack

I'm not one to usually for showing political views, mainly because a lot of the time it isn't worth arguing with someone about. This morning I was going through my almost endless list of emails from The Daily Heller when one on political satire had this video.



This is great!

LEGOed: Mortal Kombat Edition

About a month ago I was able to pick up Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. In this game you can play any character ever in the series to date (note that they are coming out with a Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe that just looks stunning, not to mention you can be The Joker!). So I decided one day to make a few characters LEGOed, this is what I came up with:


Liu Kang


Kung Lao


Reptile


Sektor


Raiden
This one was the beginning of this adventure and I am especially proud of him.


ROUND ONE. FIGHT.
This would be my officially first LEGO vignette. :D

Screw the Bahamas

Since last year's presentation by Joe Duffy and his son here at SCAD I've heard nothing but praise for Duffy & Partner's Bahamas logo



Well screw the Bahamas logo I think the logo that they did for Gander Mountain Tall Tales Restaurant is awesome.



a beautiful use of positive and negative space, something a lot of designers tend to forget about when creating a mark.

LEGOed

So in my little down time when I am looking to turn off my mind but up my creativity I have started with what I am calling LEGOed. I dig through my (currently) 180 LEGO minifigs and see if any pieces remind me of people I know. Here is what I have so far.


ME!


My Mom!
(and I swear to you this one comes like this, it is Umbridge from Harry Potter but it looks EXACTLY like my mom)


PING!


Scooter!


Bob Newman
(one of my professors here at SCAD.)

and who knows you might be next...that is if I find a piece that reminds me of you :D

Christvertising

Okay so I find this hilarious, some people won't but this guy has a genuine sense of humor and some guts, that I like to see. It is hard to distinguish if it is a joke or not until you start browsing around the site which you can do so at Christvertising.com

Teaching Graphic Design

So for the past month I have been hired by the Boys & Girls Club of Savannah to teach a workshop in Graphic Design. The summer camp for the kids ends this friday so I only had four weeks in which to teach kids ranging from grades 5th to 9th, graphic design. It has been fun to work with these kids on this but I did need to do a bit of reworking of the course once or twice to compensate for kids missing and needing to catch up and for computer problems. All in all the kids I feel got something out of it and understand graphic design to be more than the computer, which is good because I wanted them to realize that ideation is the most important point and that a computer is a tool not an answer. In this way if they cannot afford a computer they don't feel as if they cannot become graphic designers later. I had a friend in undergrad, Graham, that never owned a computer the entire time.

I taught the kids Brainstorming, Sketching, How to Make Type Feel, Drawing Symbols and from this we worked on Logos. I made them a deal, they can make the logo for whatever they want, a video game, a sports team, a restaurant, anything goes but I am giving them the word they must use for the name. Everybody got the word Vortex. A word I borrowed from Bob Newman's Logotype undergrad class here at SCAD. The results were interesting since most the kids didn't know what the word meant they didn't get hung up on making tornados and such. At about the second day into the project I decided to do the entire thing in 24 hours just to show the kids an example of exploration and sketching from my own work.

My favorite quote from this class came from one girl who said "And I thought school work was hard!"

Here are some samples:


An Online Community "Sims" Game by N'yeema Noble (5th grade)


A Cafe by Alexis Merritt (6th grade)


A Florist by Kristine Walker (7th grade), and honestly the best and most appropriate use of Curlz I have ever seen.


A Fast Food Chain by Monica Mayle (6th grade). Whenever a kid said their logo was done and showed it to me I told them to draw it again. Monica drew her logo over-and-over to cover 8 pages of her sketchbook, what she didn't know was I was counting on her getting tired of doing it so she began simplifying the mark to get done quicker, the more she did it the better it got.


A Shoe Company by Juwon Johnson (5th grade), this little one impressed me constantly, his mind is just in the right place when it comes to design and art. He was another that I had do his sketch over-and-over because he thought he had it down pat the first time but he needed to simplify it more. This kid could be amazing one day, but I swear he has a bigger ego than me!


A Skateboard Wheel Company by me.

Quote Poster 1

This past Sunday I decided to isolate myself and create a poster for my girlfriend. I have a great enthusiasm for rock posters, custom lettering and quotes. My sketchbooks tend to be filled with more text than drawings since I tend to think in words, a trait slightly uncommon for a visual artist (at least that is what I have found). So drawing inspiration from the exquisite work over at The Small Stakes I set out to create a poster for her of my favorite quote about love.


"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real" - Iris Murdoch.
If you would like a copy of the poster you can download a PDF of it here

I plan on making a series of posters much like this one and perhaps putting on a show of them sometime in the next year.

Photoshop Droplets

A little history. I used to work prepress at a printshop and in that environment you take any job whether it is Quark, InDesign, Pagemaker, etc. and print out a post script file that goes to a hot folder and off to a workflow production program such as Trueflow. The post script runs through a series of necessary commands and Trueflow gives you the perfect PDF for digital plate making.

So one day I wondered if I could create a folder on a Mac (like a Windows hot folder) that would run certain applescript commands (in this case in Photoshop) and have it perform actions that would render what I needed. In this case because I worked with hundreds of photographer photos that were 72 dpi, RGB, jpegs and wanted them made into 300 dpi, CMYK, tiffs. I studied applescript and eventually stumbled across something built into Photoshop called Droplets. No these do not make things look like they have water droplets on them. They are desktop based links to Photoshop Actions that you can drop a file onto and even if Photoshop is closed it will open Photoshop and run the Action commands linked to the Droplet.

This is an amazing feature and has been in Photoshop for years but almost no one knows about it. So I give you a PDF Trick-of-the-Trade for Photoshop Droplets (aka Lo And Behold I Am A God Amongst Men) ehm, the joke being that now you can get the computer to do a lot of this mindless repetitive work for you as you go for a "paid" break.

Enjoy!

How to create Photoshop Droplets PDF

Come back and visit from time-to-time as I post more Tricks-of-the-Trade!

A Touch of Color

So a friend of mine is opening a jewelry store and asks if I can design a logo for him. I give him my rates and send him a questionnaire/creative brief so I can get a better idea of what he is looking for. The name is A Touch of Color. Now many times as a designer we will often face having to work with something that seems a bit off. A Touch of Color may not (for some) feel like a jewelry store name so my job is to make you think jewelry store when you see it. The overall concept with both directions was the intertwining of elements in jewelry, this goes beyond just links on a chain but also the use of different elements such as materials, metal, precious stones and so on. Both directions do this but in different ways. Both logos are hand drawn and then inked (when his business loans come through) he'll have me finalize the one he likes, making it a digital version and I will begin to create color versions for usage. I start all logos in just black and white because if you get the mark to be strong in just one color than the addition of color can bring more life to it without the color being the sole strength of the mark.


This mark was inspired by some of the work by the brothers at Invisible Creature. Dealing with long and sometime ornate names of bands helps them create dynamic marks that speak volumes of what the audience is in for.


With this direction I was looking towards something more traditional, using a combination of John Downer's Brothers and Zuzana Licko's Mrs Eaves both from Emigre. I redrew them by hand in order to create the interlocking letterforms but have the intention of making Mrs Eaves the workhorse typeface for A Touch of Color's business system. It is a beautiful typeface that I think helps bring about the feeling of the handmade and antiquity of the jewelry. And the entire package is only $95!