Fan the Flame

My father-in-law has been working alongside a missionary named Juan Maurico for about 25+ years, meeting physical and spiritual needs for Mexican families from Piedras Negras to the Yucatan. Each year, a colorful trip shirt is given to the team members that join in on the fun and cross the border with Jim and Juan, helping to build roofs, paint walls, feed families and hug kids. Everyone on the team wears the shirt during some of the big group excursions on the trip (arriving in Mexico, touring San Antonio, sharing post-trip successes with churches back in the States) and the bright colors really help to identify the whole happy crew.

While discussing the next upcoming missions trip (2012) over a family dinner, Jim shared the new theme that he and Roland (another professor at FCC)  had come up with: “Fan the Flame”, “Compassion & Commitment” and “2 Timothy 1:6″. Jodie and I quickly worked up some possible ideas for the shirt on the paper napkins at the table and were able to get some great feedback from Jim on what type of flames and lettering he was interested in seeing on the shirt.

Based on our sketches and his feedback (and the requirement that we use a maroon base color, as it was already chosen as the new shirt color), I worked up a few variations on the idea. Jodie and I narrowed down several font choices and color palettes to pretty much what we presented to Jim and Roland a few days later. You can see a bit of the design and colors that we came up with here. Of note is the use of the maroon shirt color in some negative space locations … a great trick I learned a while ago that provides you with an additional “free” color when screen printing (where every additional color adds to the cost of printing).

six8

A local church that I have frequented but yet to have partnered with on a project recently approached me about working with them on establishing a brand for their upcoming college age ministry. During the initial client meeting, we were able to establish a little bit of the look and feel of things that they liked, but mainly, they hadn’t nailed down an exact theme (or name even!) and were giving me some real freedom to work with.

Since I prefer to base all of my logo and design work in general directly on content and core concepts, I did manage to get the client to provide me with at least a scripture that they were going to use to focus the mission and goals of the new ministry (Micah 6:8). From this, I was able to create a super generic and almost stream-of-conscience style list of words and terms to start the brainstorming process between us. Just for fun, I also shared the concept with my small group and after some discussion, one of the stronger ideas we came up with was the name “six8″; a simple mix of the numbers in that scripture. It was a simple idea, but it also represented some of offbeat and trendy feel that seems to be popular right now.

I presented about 30+ word ideas to the client and they immediately singled out the “six8″ name as the one to go with. From there, I made several various sketches, trying out unique lettering styles, as well as different feels to layout and blocking for the logotype. I ended up presenting quite a few sheets of options to the client, a snippet of which you can see here and here. The final logo hasn’t been put into use just yet, but should do well to help to promote the new mission.

Sandy’s Books

My mother in-law, who has been working with and teaching children since at least the time my wife and I met (13 years ago), is working to create a line of children’s books and asked me to create a simple website to promote her books. Currently, the site only has one book being featured, but as she has additional books published, I’ll be extending the focus and feature set of the website.

Since the goal of the project was a simple one page feature that could be thrown together quickly (we literally discussed this over lunch and I had it up and running the next day), the level of planning and sketching for this was very rough. The most important piece was the book graphic for the logotype and as such, I ended up tossing out my initial directly digital attempts (vectors in Illustrator) and instead drawing it up by hand. Sometimes a pen and paper are just the best tool … no matter how nice your Wacom tablet is.

The page itself didn’t have much in the way of requirements so my sketch was mainly to establish an overall approach to the layout. The actual design details were worked out on the fly, just trying things out until I liked them (in Fireworks). It isn’t the way I typically work, but again, this is kind of a different and fun project.

Because I managed to work out the design so quickly, and because I remembered to turn on my screen capture app, I actually made a time-lapse video of the site being designed and coded from scratch. Nothing fancy, but fun. You can view it here or below.

Illustrative.

For awhile now, I’ve been wanting to revamp and simplify the online presence I currently have for my client design and illustration work. Behind the moniker “Illustrative.”, I’ve created scores of logos, tee shirts and websites for ministries and while the current site does a thorough job of presenting samples of each, it is long past due for a visual overall.

There are still pieces I love about the current identity (the simple depth of the angled, shadowed version of the logo still fires a few neurons happy for me) and website design (those monsters peeking out of the top are just lovely), but it is definitely time for a change. The web (and visual design in general) has grown so much since I first threw together the branding campaign and site for “Illustrative.” and I really wanted a fresh approach to the redesign.

I always prefer to start my web design projects with a focus on the content and if I am working from scratch, I have an even stronger preference to start with the branding, as I believe it drives everything. My thoughts with the attempts you see here were to take the existing soft script typeface I had previously chosen for the logotype and create something smoother and more unique. There is (occasionally) something slightly painful about seeing a logotype that can be simply recreated by just finding the right font file and typing some letters. I wanted a logotype that was a bit more “one off”.

I started with the Google Web Font, “Vibur” (by Johan Kallas), because of the fluidity of the letters and how much it reminded me of a fat sharpie marker on paper (definitely my preferred method of drawing). I printed out a few different lines of the logotype letters and sketched alterations with pencil over the top of the printouts. From there, I took scans into Illustrator and used the bezier curve tool to shape what I wanted. I’ve only gotten to craft out the “ill.” mark the way I want (and might just stop there, because I love it so much), but this is still in progress.

proj • etch

 

Maybe it is too meta, but I thought it would be great to start out this weblog by featuring the sketch I created to come up with the name for this project itself. The criteria we were given for this class project were simply to create a WordPress-hosted blog that relates in some way to design and post at least once each week throughout the duration of the course (which is Digital Storytelling – Online, for anyone that is curious).

Initially, I had several thoughts about creating a blog to feature short screencasts that I would record, each demonstrating a unique feature or technique from within the sphere of the Adobe Creative Suite design products. I often have people ask for tips and tricks to improving their graphics in Photoshop or Illustrator and I thought this assignment would give me an opportunity to fulfill those requests. The biggest hang up I saw in the idea was the amount of time I would have to invest with each post and with the current work, course and life loads I am juggling, I didn’t see it being sufficient successful.

Coming upon this new idea of featuring preliminary project sketches and mock ups was actually something that I just found this afternoon and it actually came to me while drafting a new version of a personal design logo (more on that in a later post). Being an avid believer in actually thinking about a logo before even opening a digital design program, I frequently make quick pencil or ink sketches for client logo and design projects. Sadly, after I am done with the initial conceptualizing, all those sketches and slips of paper just get stacked up and put away. Thanks to this project through, now I will have a way to share all those ideas and scribbles with others. So here you go. Enjoy this first one and be sure to come back for more!

Let’s get it Started!

Say hello to this brand new weblog setup as part of a Full Sail University class project and as an opportunity to share many of the initial sketches and conceptual ideas that are always at the start of my design projects.

Enjoy, have fun and peruse to your heart’s content … and even a bit more, if you like.