Well, it's official. My little brother is all growed up.

I recently had an adventure in logo design.
The lovely ladies of GetBabied here in Austin asked me to make the logo for this year's upcoming Birth Awards. The design I made was nice, but, let's be honest, the typography I chose was rather boring.


That night, I made some half-assed mediocre attempts at type design. Not to say that they were bad. They just don't represent the Birth Awards or the birthing community in any way (which, thinking about it now, fits the very definition of a 'bad logo').

So the next day arrives, and I got a couple logo design books from Book People. Flipping through them gave me one of those Moments that artists love. Settling into a chair in the cafe, looking through my new books-- logo after logo-- I felt the Creative Energies swirling around in my brain.

 

It was a good reminder in "Oh yea, good art is geared toward its audience!" 

I was experimenting with making the B in Birth look like a mama-belly. We ultimately didn't use that design element because the GetBabied logo has a mama-belly for their B. 

And behold the final product:

More Paintings from my class

Harvey

Morning Coffee

On the F Train

I'm also on Etsy now! I'll be putting all these paintings on my store for sale :-)

Summer Paintings

Over the summer I took an oil painting class at the local community college. Here are a few of the pieces I did.

In the Coffee Shop

Here's the latest video for Degs, starring Mike and Gabrielle (aka Nels and I).

I decided to go all La Jetee on it and use only still images. The challenge was to make it dynamic while only using the still pictures.

Programs used were Premier, Final Cut, and Illustrator. And Nels used Protools for the audio.

Freelancing with Vector Art

I've been super busy lately freelancing. Mostly playing around with Illustrator and After Effects, woo!

I'm working with Degs Beldham, who has this nifty website Call My Other Number dot com where you can buy alternative phone numbers for your phone. I made a video for him for the Take One Small Step competition.

Check it out here

I hired my brother Nels to do the audio. We had a lot of fun working on it. Unfortunately we didn't win the competition, but we got into the top ten, woo! It took a little less than two weeks to make this. It was hectic at first, trying to find a time when Degs, Nels, and I would all be free to do the recording (an added difficulty that he lives in London and we in Texas).

This was a rare animation where I didn't use a storyboard. I wrote a script for the interview and voice over, and I made notes for what visuals I wanted, but I didn't draw anything out on paper before I started. It's a different approach that what I normally take, and it was fun and (dare I say) freeing to make it up as I went along.

Programs used were Illustrator, After Effects, and Protools (for Nels' audio work). Lots of help from the Video Copilot people. I always watch at leased 2 or 3 of their videos for any project I do. I'm pretty sure they know everything.

Right now, I'm working on my second animation for Degs. Meet Gabrielle:

More logo design

This one is for the website Reviews of Things and Stuff
reviewsofthingsandstuff.wordpress.com

It was the negative space that excited me in this one. I like the partially visible reflection. I'll have to play with that more in future projects.

My friend Yankee emailed me today. He's starting his own business and wants to hire me as the in-house graphic designer. I don't know any details yet (the company is still in the paperwork stage), but I'm very excited.