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.

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.