Category: Design

March 7, 2013

Dramatic Palm Conclusion

Yesterday, I talked about iconography, and how I would make trace after trace in order to get to a clean icon. As you can see, my sketches got uglier and uglier, but also simpler and simpler.

Eventually this:

Became this:

A printer friendly palm tree that can be used for any kind of merchandise at almost any size or resolution.

I also made these guys for fun:

They’re not too printer friendly, but they look pretty good to me.

So now we’re done with the palm tree saga. I hope you loved it as much as I did. Time seems to disappear when I’m working on graphic stuff, which can be a blessing and a curse. For example, I was just going to refine some edges and lay out text in photoshop after work, two hours later I’m still in the office like a clown. I have to get home to my boyfriend and my terrible dog, who I just learned took a dump on our carpet this evening.

Get dog training, they said, it’ll make her better, they said.

March 6, 2013

The Iconography of the Palm

The way I was taught icon design was that you start by making as detailed a trace of the original as possible, then a trace of that trace, and a trace of that trace, so and and so forth, making design decisions along the way, of course, emphasizing and downplaying features as needed. Eventually, all that’s left are the essential divisions of light and dark, at once simple and direct.

For example, this rooster magnet started it’s life as a trace of a photograph of a real rooster.

Yes, I know, someone stepped on it. It was me. Sorry rooster.

So, as part of my current project, I thought I’d work on palm tree iconography.

This is the first step, a detailed trace of an actual palm.

Then I doodled some more.

Scratch pages and random mid-project doodles can show options, test theories, and clear my head of tired, trite shit that’s taking up important space. As you can see, by the end of the second page I’d pretty much run out of gas, but I have some good direction for tomorrow, when I plan to start pulling everything together for presentation on Thursday. I know, I’m cutting it pretty close. I don’t usually operate like this, but that phone thief really took the wind out of my sales.

Tonight we were taking pictures of my outfit, and I just had to pull this one out and show it to you.

Pepper defies gravity.

I know it ruins the outfit surprise, but I don’t care. Isn’t my dog adorable? We’re doing training right now, and it’s making her better in some ways, but worse in others. For example, she will now sit on command about 75% of the time, but she pisses in the house at least twice a day and only 50% of those make it on the pee pad. The rest are usually within about a foot of the thing, which just makes me think she’s doing it on purpose. She’s also more terrified of the outside world than she’s ever been, but she appears to be happier and more relaxed with Ben and me. We asked the trainer about it, and her answer was basically that the change in routine is freaking her out and that as training becomes a part of her day, she’ll gain confidence and stop being so fucking lame. One can only hope.

March 5, 2013

Sketchbook: Palm Trees and Suns

When that jerkoff phone thief stole my phone, they also stole the only copy of some initial sketches for a project I’m working on. Tonight, I tried to remember what it was I had in those scratch pages.

This one is my favorite, but it also feels awfully familiar. Anybody else recognize it?

Obviously, these are just black and white sketches, but even with the scratch pages missing, they laid a good foundation for the next step, which is to refine these main concepts into some real options. The Aztec suns are way too angry and scary, but I think I have some solid ideas that I can expand on, and go into further detail for over the next few days.

Fuck you phone thief. Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

December 3, 2012

The Cutting Edge of Advertising

We got our advertising annual in at work this week, so like I do with all the design annuals, I sat down to sketch the major themes, and like I did with our last one, I used my Samsung Galaxy Note. Below are the major themes in advertising this year, as I see them.

Really, when is that not a theme?

I’m actually pretty fond of this one. But I can’t tell if it’s because of superior design, or because this is a picture of my awesome boyfriend.

No joke, there actually was a campaign highlighted in the annual where a clothing company disguised their pants as whiskey. To what end I do not know. Pants are basically the opposite of whiskey.

Of course it is. When will making fun of how stupid girl stuff is ever get old?

One thing I’ve noticed about the Note is that it can be more difficult to sketch on just because I’m worried about leaning my hand on it. If it were any bigger, it would be ungainly since I’d have to hover my hand and wrist over the drawing surface. As it is, it’s really only my hand that I have to keep away from the screen. It didn’t bother me when I first started drawing on the phone. Maybe I just wasn’t drawing as much back then, but you’ll see that some of these lines are a little shaky. That’s from me holding my hand over the phone and not having much leverage on the pen.

Oops. I published the blog without my winter holiday charity banner. What a terrible blogger I am. Donate to compensate for my shame.

October 9, 2012

The Cutting Edge of Design

I like to read my design books and make rough sketches of the things I see as being major themes and concepts in them. I thought I might as well capitalize on this opportunity to create content. So, I did the sketches on my Samsung Note instead of my sketchbook. Here’s what I see as being the major trends at the moment.

October 13, 2011

Twitter Design Challenge: KATG’s Hottest

At about 5:00 p.m. this evening, I put the word out on twitter that I was accepting Design Challenges. At 7:20 p.m., having no other challengers, Keith and The Girl‘s own programmer extraordinaire, Doug won with his request that I do something in honor of the Annual KATG Hottest Contest, in which male and female fans of the show compete to be named Hottest Fan.

So, I started with a little plotting and some sketching. Pretty quickly, I set on a theme that I liked.

And, a short 3 and a half hours after I accepted the challenge, 20 and a half hours ahead of my 24 hour turn-around promise, my design challenge is complete.

Click on the image to see it full size.

I feel like it’s missing some snappy copy there at the bottom, and I even left some space for it if I can think of anything. It should say something like “stand out” without actually saying something as over-used as “stand out.”

I decided not to use the Keith and the Girl logo for two reasons. One being that I didn’t want to use it without their permission, and the other that I felt like it would complicate the simple themes of the piece.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? Seen it before? Let me know in the comments.

September 29, 2011

Bienvenidos a Gringolandia

My friend and co-worker was sworn in as a U.S. citizen yesterday, and we all had a little party for her at the office. My contribution to the proceedings was this graphic, which we put on a poster board that everybody signed.

The phrase bienvenidos a gringolandia is superimposed over an image of Frida Kahlo sitting on a rooftop in New York. The gringolandia is written in the style if iconic 'greetings from... postcards' with images of America inside of the 3D letters.

May 28, 2011

Twitter Design Challenge Parrot and Glasses

By now every creative person on the internet has read or heard that quote from Ira Glass about wading your way through shit work in order to make something good. In the interest of getting more crappy work behind me, I put this out to twitter yesterday: “Experiment. The first person to give me a noun, an adjective and a color can be my first Twitter Design blog. This may end badly.”

Fairy_Princess_Holly replied first with her request of ” Parrot. Sparkling. Purple.”

And AldoMcGee won second place with his request for “Sunglasses, fierce, white.”

Holly’s was the most challenging one. Sparkling parrots are a difficult concept. Parrots in general are a difficult concept. I ended up doing a lot of little doodles to try and figure out my plan of attack;

a page full of line drawings of parrots

Eventually I settled on a sketch I liked, and I picked an image that I had been looking at for my sketches and used it for shapes. I kind of think this might be cheating, but the shapes felt so much more organic than if I would have tried to freehand them.

a picture of a parrot

Then I used the pen tool to assemble the parrot.

parrot

Yeah, the purple sparkle is a lazy second thought, but the parrot is really my favorite.

Aldo’s request was a breeze. In fact, I did it before Holly’s because it was so easy. I just thought of Lady Gaga and how she is pretty fierce, and she loves the lightening bolt right now.

sunglasses

I hope you guys liked my first design challenge. I feel a little strange calling it a design challenge. I don’t consider myself to be a designer, I don’t really consider this design, but there’s not really a better word.

I’d love to hear your feedback. What did you think about the designs, do you think that my use of the parrot image is cheating? What do you want to see next?

I think in the future, I’m only going to take one challenge at a time. Doing two caused too much of a lag.

May 19, 2010

I AM JESUS

I have invented the one thing we all needed but did not have:

THE VAGINA EMOTICON!

(i)

Alternate spelling: ((i)) for when your vagina is fat or your text is narrow.