A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Delaware, where I’d lived for a few years before coming back west to California. (While visiting Delaware might sound weird to you, it was part of an East Coast Nostalgia Tour that included Philadelphia and New York, so hey, it wasn’t that weird.)

It had been almost six years since my husband and I had gone out East, and ever since we thought of making this trip, I had one mission in mind: To find tangible evidence of the very first graphic design project I did seven years ago, a project where I was actually paid to create something!

Backstory: In 2004, I was in a different career. I was a journalist back then. Graphic design was the thing I did on the side because I enjoyed it and liked bending my brain in different ways.

I worked in sports journalism, and through my job, I became friends with Pete DiVito, a sports information assistant at the University of Delaware. Pete eventually moved on to Goldey-Beacom College, a small school in Delaware that at the time, was transitioning from the NAIA to NCAA Division II.

To coincide with the transition, Goldey-Beacom wanted a new athletic logo (pictured here). They had been using the school crest and wanted something simpler and something that screamed Lightning (their nickname). So, that’s what we came up with. I barely knew how to use Illustrator at the time. But it got done, the college liked it, and it was promptly put on t-shirts and a banner that was hung in their gym. Pete gave me a t-shirt with the logo (which I still have and have never worn). I was a wide-eyed kid in awe. That’s my stuff up there! This is freaking cool!

The piece de resistance was going to be the basketball floor. You see, Goldey-Beacom did not have a traditional wood floor at the time. They were going to install one with the new logo on it. I never got to see it. I moved off to California by then. For years, I’d search through photos on their athletic website, hoping to see the floor. No dice.

Fast forward seven years later and the trip to Delaware. I was going to find this damn logo, come hell or high water.

School was out, so the joint was practically empty. I neared the gym. Holy smokes! Banners with my logo! My logo on the floor! However, there were some dudes playing basketball. Luckily, they were playing half-court, so they weren’t all over the middle of the floor, but I admittedly felt a little skeezy going in there and snapping photos while there were people in there.

(So, forgive the quality of the photos. I shot fast and from far away because I didn’t want to look creepy!)

Here’s the logo in lights:

And on a banner near the athletic offices:

And finally, the floor:

Oh, the floor. Such a mild tragedy. As I mentioned before, I knew next to nothing about using Illustrator when I did this project, so I didn’t know about outlining fonts and whatnot. Hence, the floor doesn’t look like everything else. Oh well. I’ve learned a lot since then.

It was neat to jump into the way-back machine and see this stuff. I know I’ve come a long way since then and I’ve grown as a designer in those years. I was just a happy kid back in the day, happy that someone wanted to pay me to make something and then splash it all over their school. And it was nice to see that they were still using it after seven years.

Thanks for the smiles, Goldey-Beacom!

This was the final project to close out Spring 2010 at Sacramento City College. It was the most involved one, and probably the most fun. And I managed to kill two classes with one stone when it came to this final project.

One of the classes was a studio class. We were put into teams, and our task was to produce an ad campaign for the Rotary Club of Sacramento. It consisted of a print ad and a 30-second commercial. The commercial was going to be aired on local television and everything (ad space had been bought). Two different groups worked on two different ads. Ours was the one with lower production costs, meaning we had to shoot everything in one location and probably in a studio (we have a photography studio on campus).

I worked mainly on the 30-second commercial. There were three photographers, the incredibly talented Ron Nabity, Andrew Nixon and Kevin Fiscus. I project-managed. We were also assisted by Ann Edwards, who helped out with a lot of production, and Marika Andrews, another photographer who mainly helped with scouting models.

Our group had to do everything from scratch. We came up with the concept for our ad (it’s about showcasing a more diverse, younger face for Rotary). I wrote the script (and got lots of help editing and re-arranging it). We storyboarded the whole thing, figured out how we wanted the ad to look, found models, the whole nine yards. The faculty had hookups with a local recording studio, and both groups got to sit in and listen as voiceovers for both ads were created.

It was an incredible process. I’d been involved in some aspects of production before — I’m a former theater stagehand, and I do know my way around a recording studio — but I’d never worked on a commercial from start to finish. Our photo shoot was an 8-hour marathon involving four different models (though only three got used in the final commercial). It was the fastest eight hours ever. It was neat to work with a team of photographers and learn about their lighting and setups and watch them work with models. It was fun helping direct a shoot and fix stray hairs and straighten out collars.

Lastly, it was neat to see the concept that we thought of come alive in this commercial. It was shot entirely in a studio, all still photography.

The only thing we didn’t do was cut the final commercial. That was left to one of the teachers and his son, who are Final Cut gurus. However, I cut a version of the commercial for my After Effects final. (I told you I killed two classes with one stone.)

Working on this commercial was one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve had so far as a designer, and I truly appreciate all the work that goes on behind the scenes. And I feel fortunate that I got to work with such a fun and talented bunch of people.

Here is the commercial cut in After Effects. It’s not the real commercial that will be seen in the Sacramento region, but do enjoy anyway.

One of my great wants in life has always been to take a photography class. I love photography, love taking snapshots. But I wanted to up my game and finally learn how to shoot you know, manually. Learn about shutter speed and aperture and everything. So I finally got off my behind and took an intermediate photography class.

Boy, did I learn a lot. And it was fun.

The final portfolio for this class consisted of 12 different shots, each fulfilling a specific assignment. Enjoy.

(Click on a photo to see it larger.)

Front / Side / Back lighting (same subject)

Selective Focus

Human Interest

Painting With Light (this is a single exposure, three different light sources in this case)

Motion (intentional, not accidental)

Close Up (as close as you could get if you didn’t own a macro lens!)

Cityscape

Environmental Portrait

Night Shot (this is my personal favorite in this portfolio)

Flash Three Ways (top: Fill Flash, middle: Freezing Motion With Flash, bottom: Isolating Subject With Flash)

Student Choice #1 (yes, that’s a real leaf, I swear)

Student Choice #2

A few days back, I mentioned the marathon that was school and the raft of final projects that were due. Here’s the first in the series of projects. I was really pleased with how everything turned out.

This first project was for a studio class. (It’s basically a student-run creative agency that does real-world work for clients here in Sacramento.) Each graphic design student was paired with a photography student and given the task of choosing an existing ad campaign and designing an ad that would have fit logically into said campaign. If it was a print ad, the newly created ad had to look on-brand and advance the theme presented in the previously existing ads. (For instance, one pair of students did their version of the Diesel “Be Stupid” ads.)

I took a slightly different tack and chose the Bud Light “Too Light, Too Heavy” ad campaign, which is entirely a TV ad campaign. There were no print ads for reference, so the challenge was to come up with a situation that could be interpreted quickly in one or two shots. This was the result (call it “The Haircut”):

Now that was a fun shoot. How often do you get to tote around garden shears and act like you’re going to cut a chunk of hair out?

Everyone asked me if we actually cut the guy’s hair. We didn’t. That’s all hairstyling, baby. (Many thanks to my friend Lisa Williams for serving as not only the hairstylist, but the model holding both the scissors and the shears. And another friend of mine, Corey Hill, graciously let us ‘fro his very fluffy real-life hair.)

Several ideas were batted around for the ad, including a version at a doctor’s office where the Too Heavy would have been a doctor swinging a mallet to check a guy’s reflexes. But in the end, the haircut idea was the easiest to execute. My photographer, Janelle Robinson, and I thought about shooting this at an actual salon, but as it turned out, we didn’t really need to because both photos were so close up.

This project definitely helped me flex some art direction muscle, not to mention the post-production Photoshop skills I haven’t used in a while. It was also just neat to see this start from the concept in my mind to the actual print product.

As a side note, this piece won a silver award at the Sacramento City College Graphic Communications Student Showcase. Woot!

Today wrapped up a very hectic, sometimes mind-numbing, sometimes sleepless, sometimes frustrating five months in which I decided to take three different classes at Sacramento City College. I hadn’t taken that many classes in a while, but there were so many things I wanted to do and learn that I almost couldn’t help myself when the Spring 2010 schedule came out.

Finally, school is over and I have some of my time back. But it was a terrific time. I’ll be posting some of the final projects from various classes.

Learning new things is so essential and vital to our profession. It’s also nice to look at things from a different perspective. You sometimes feel creatively energized that way. For instance, I took a photography class and worked with photographers on a commercial shoot for a different class. Being behind the camera was not only a great experience, but it also taught me how to interact with photographers, learn more of their lingo and learn how to direct a shoot. Being an actual photographer taught me more about aesthetics and composition and having an eye for things. It’s all stuff that’s applicable to what we do as designers.

Besides, it was all just plain fun. Who knew school could be so much fun?

In the quest to always learn new things, one of the classes I’m taking at the local junior college is a motion graphics class. We’re learning how to use After Effects.

(I have to say, After Effects is awesome. I learned Flash a little while ago, and not having to deal with any programming is beautiful. I like keyframes and timelines. Simple stuff.)

One of our first projects was to take a previously existing bank ad our teacher had done and recreate it. We didn’t have to recreate it exactly, but it was 30 seconds and you had to animate things according to the voiceover. Here is the result:

(Excuse the resolution … I wanted to compress the hell out of it so I could get it onto the internets without waiting forever.)

Things I learned:

• You could easily spend three hours animating the first five seconds of your clip. (Our teacher warned us about this, and lo and behold, I got sucked in.)
• Storyboards help. A lot. Or at least writing down the key points of the script and noting what second the key points fall on.
• Animating to a voiceover is really, really, really, really, really hard.
• Uh, this is really a lot of fun.

I’ve gained a whole new respect for what the motion graphics folks do. It’s amazing. Our teacher also told us that we would never watch commercials the same way again after taking this class because we would learn to look at things in pieces. He’s right: I’m breaking down commercials in my head now. It’s insane. But it’s also cool to watch a commercial and have an inkling of how it was put together and how the animation works.

I don’t think I’d ever get into motion graphics full-time, but it is fun to dabble!

Last time, I talked a bit about one of the final projects in my typography class. Continuing on that topic, this week I wanted to focus on the other major final in that class – a semester long journal. The parameters for this project were wide-open. Beyond needing a weekly entry and being something that could be handed in, we were basically free to create anything that we liked.

Early in the semester, while reading about the early days of typography, I took an interest in the process of hand-casting letters. The first pieces of movable type were hand-carved from wood, with each different size and style requiring a new carving. Each letter was a movable module that would be hand-placed and aligned as a press plate.  Besides taking a really long time, it also meant that an experienced printer knew what just about every letter of a font looked like.

Having grown up in a digital world, I found this fascinating. While there are of course many, many advantages to digital typography, I saw a certain charm to the old-fashioned method, much like how some photographers still prefer to work with film.

I’d had a couple of dumb early ideas for my journal – one involved boots – that I’d rather not talk about.  After reading about the block printing process, though, I got a bright idea. I wanted to create type by hand – one letter a week, one for each journal entry.  Modern printers use metal lettering, but without access to a smelting furnace I figured that was a little out of reach. Wood carving was a possibility, but given that I needed 16 different letters, each fairly large, it seemed like a daunting task. Luckily, I remembered seeing my sister work with a medium that would work just fine – linoleum.

Linocuttin'

The process is pretty simple. Print a letter, trace it, flip the paper over and place it onto your linoleum, then trace it again. This transfers the pencil lead from the first tracing onto the linoleum and creates your template. From there, you painstakingly carve away the linoleum that’s outside of the letter shape and voila – instant letter block.

After some sage advice from my sister, I bought a carving tool and a couple small squares to do some experimentation. I started with one of my favorites – Garamond A. While the results didn’t turn out as clean as I hoped, I actually liked the effect. The rough edges and ink blotches were a nice change from digital perfection. I really felt that by distancing myself from the digital world, where fonts magically appear and disappear at your whim, I was gaining a better understanding and appreciation for letters.

My first journal entries were pretty dumb and pointless. Mostly I wrote about whatever I was thinking at the moment. Seeing the rough letterforms I had created, though, I had a better idea – rather than accepting the easy perfection allowed by computers, I would embrace imperfection. Each entry would deal with something that I felt was one of my own imperfections, coupled with a hand printed letter.

Pretentious? Maybe. But it sure beats boots.

COMING NEXT WEEK: THE BIG REVEAL! Ok, actually, this post is already long enough. The next part should be up in a couple of days.

So it’s been nearly a year since my last post – whoa.

Unlike my post count, though, my design skills haven’t been stagnating. Through classes at SCC and specifically the GCOM club, I’ve been involved with a couple different projects that have really helped me expand my skills (and kept me really busy). I’ve cut back on my design classes this semester to get some GE done, and it’s actually left me with a bit of downtime which I plan to use on some personal projects – including this blog. For the next couple weeks I’m planning to go into detail on a couple of the projects I’ve worked on in the last 11 months.

For the Fall 2009 semester, one of the classes I enrolled with was the brand new GCOM class, Typography. Like many novice designers, I had no concept of typography beyond the simplest basics. I figured it would be a good opportunity to get a grasp on this crucial design discipline, and I was definitely not disappointed.

One of the final projects of the class was to design a custom type specimen with 4-8 unique letters. This seemed like a daunting task at the start of the semester, but — well actually I guess it was pretty daunting at the end of the semester as well.

This was the first sketch I did. (As you can see, my word is my tag – Thearc). You might be able to tell that I didn’t have any real direction in mind when I started these beyond some very vague concepts. I tried to have a lot of contrast on the strokes, pairing heavy and light strokes asymetrically (very artificially in retrospect). I was also experimenting with indentations and sharp serifs, but quickly decided they made the letters look too BROOTAL. You can also see that the E was proving particularly difficult to nail down.

This sketch was basically a doodle in class, so this was all off the top of my head and without any font reference. Unfortunately, with finals rapidly approaching I decided these rough, sketchy and ugly concepts were good enough and started refining them.

These were my refined sketches. Of these six, the only letter than I feel really stands out as interesting and worth expanding on is the T. It’s the only letter where the contrast in strokes really adds anything, as opposed to looking ugly and forced. It’s also the only letter that really nails the look in serifs I was going for. The R and the C might have potential with some more refinement. The E, H and A should have all been scrapped and reworked completely, but alas, I’m a student, not a font foundry. With about a week left until finals, I pushed onto digitization.

This is the final result. Digitization, as it turns out, is a lot harder than you think it would be when you don’t account for it while sketching. The C was especially difficult to translate, but I think it actually turned out better than the sketch. The one thing that really makes me cringe is the unequal line weights on the H, E, A and R. I digitized these individually, and the problem didn’t become apparent until the letters were placed together in a composition.

My original hope when designing this font was to use it as part of a personal logo. In that regard, I failed horribly. I wouldn’t think of using this text for anything besides an illustration of the evils of poor planning. Like any failed endeavor, though, it taught me two things: one, that a single set of sketches is never enough, and two, that I should have just used Bodoni.

Giambattista Bodoni: making me look like a chump since 1798.

It’s still fall, not too cold yet (well at least for us on the West Coast).

Went to a friend’s pumpkin patch a little while ago and took my trusty Nikon D60. Sometimes it’s just fun to shoot random things. And pumpkins are very pretty shades of orange. Shot some stuff that I thought might make interesting textures or background images for fall-related things.

Feel free to use these. All I ask is if you do use them in a project, just drop me a line and show me a sample. I like seeing my stuff in action.

Enjoy!

Download all the full-sized textures here.

If you want to see the entire set on Flickr, go here. There are lots of pretty pumpkins like these:

In any design job, you face deadlines. Clients want things right this very minute! Or, they needed it yesterday! (My boss likes to throw that one out at me a lot.) But what if you had only 30 minutes to design something … and it was actually kind of fun?

A couple of weeks ago, I got the privilege to participate in the annual Sacramento City College Show-Off Competition in the faculty division. The competition is part of our annual end-of-year student show for the Graphic Communications department at the college. There’s a faculty version, a student version and a 3D rendering version. And yes, it was as much fun to participate as it was to watch.

The faculty version pitted myself; Don Button, department chair and Photoshop whiz; Chris Seddon, my boss at the graphic design lab and an Illustrator whiz; and Tom Cappelletti, teacher of many disciplines in our department.

Our task? We were given a topic on the spot, had 15 minutes to brainstorm and then 30 minutes to design an 11″ x 17″ poster on said topic. Our topic was “Tagging Yourself.” We had to choose five words that described ourselves and design a poster using mainly typography to convey the message.

Don won the competition (winners were determined by popular vote). I came in second by a tiny margin. I was quite honored, as Don was a teacher of mine and is highly respected here in Sacramento. Don also won last year’s competition so he’s an old hand at this.

This was my entry:

This was my brainstorming sketch (you can see that I thought of the concept pretty early … drawing the profile face was the biggest challenge):

This was Don’s winning entry. If you know Don, you’ll know this is very much him:

In all, the whole experience was a blast! There was also a ton of great student work at the show. If you want to read more about it (and see the winning student and 3D entries), visit the GCOM@SCC blog!

[Super thanks to Andrea Diaz-Vaughn, who headed the planning committee (and invited me to participate in the faculty show) and GC Club president Priscilla Garcia)!]