My Monthly Avatars

Good morning friends, happy January 9th, 2012. Today I am going to share with you my goal of creating a monthly avatar. This idea started after I had been shown the Mad Men avatar creator, which can be found here.

I went through the process of creating my own mad men avatar but wanted to make some changes to it. I took the version I created on their website and brought it into Illustrator. Here I recreated it and made the minor adjustments I wanted. Here is what my recreated Mad Men Avatar looks like.

Mad Men Yourself Avatar

The enjoyment created by making this image has caused me to want to continue to create a new avatar for the holidays. Again I modified the Mad Men avatar very slightly to create a happy holidays version. It was at this point that I decided to create an avatar for each month of the year. I have decided to update and showcase each monthly avatar at the top of the side bar on the blog. I will be updating this each month. I also intend to use this avatar for all on my social media sites. If any of you would like to see my avatar doing something or wearing something to celebrate a certain month please feel free to pass that on to me. I would love to hear what people think.

Hope everyone has a great week.

DIY Old Fashioned Caramels

Good morning friends. Today I would like to share with you a neat little DIY caramel treat package.

It started as a gift that I created to give to my wife and a few friends for Valentines Day, but since then I have modified it to be something to give for any holiday and not just as a gift, but as a package to create multiple gifts. The contents of the package are: 5 custom designed paper bags, and a recipe card to match the labels.

Both the paper bag and the font help sell this as on old-fashioned treat. The graphics are printed directly onto the paper bag to enhance the authenticity of the product.

I placed nutrition facts on the back of the paper bag to create the appearance of a store bought product instead of being something hand crafted.

This is a nice little package to buy and have your kids make the gifts to hand out.

Idea Development Gone Bad

Good morning friends. Today, I want to chat with you about a fundraising event poster I created late last year. I was approached by a couple who were organizing a charity event to help raise funds for the Cambridge Shelter. I figured this would be a great way for me to gain some exposure, while also helping out a great local charity.

My approach to the poster went horribly wrong. Instead of following the process I have used all year long to create different pieces for school, I decided that I could just go back to using the computer without any of the idea development I have learned. Of course this turned into a disaster very quickly.

My first draft of the poster was a horrendous orange and yellow nightmare. I don’t know what I was thinking when I started this. The typography, even though it was uniform, didn’t match the style the event needed to be and after printing off the first rough draft, seen below, I knew I needed to make some drastic changes.

I went back to the drawing board and started to really think about the message behind this event. Slowly, it started to turn around. I changed the background to a pink to white gradient and used the font Zapfino for the main title of the event. The only thing I did keep from the original draft were the swirls in each of the corners. I also replaced the dot on the ‘i’ with a single heart. These hearts were also used to separate each of the sections of the poster. Despite being much happier with this draft, it was still missing something.

Finally it hit me; I needed to show more love and caring in the poster. To accomplish this I chose a silhouette of a man with his arm around a smaller child. This added a main focal point to the poster to help grab the viewer’s attention.

I’ve learned a lot in creating this poster. The first thing I learned was that creating a poster on the computer is just as hard, if not harder, than it is by hand. The second thing I’ve learned was to NEVER start a project without the proper idea development; It will just end up taking longer.

Beans, Beans and more Beans!

Good morning friends. Today’s post is going to be about beans, and many of them. I was asked to think of at least 100 different ways of drawing beans.

At first, this task seemed like it was going to be impossible. There are only a limited number of different types of beans. To help me over come this enormous task, I started with a simple mind map. I started by writing out all the different types of beans. While I was doing this, the bean song got stuck in my head. This was very helpful because it got me started thinking outside of the box. Once I had a full mind map, it was time to start drawing out some of these ideas.
I took a humorous approach to most of my bean ideas. I wanted to use as many different puns as I could. This was to help me stay interested in the project. The next step was to start thinking about style and colour.

This took me to the iSpot. Here, I flipped through numerous different illustrators to help me find different ways of rendering my bean collection. After selecting a bunch of unique styles to use, I started to pick and choose from my beans to try these new styles.

After I had tried a bunch of different styles on a bunch of different drawings, I narrowed my selection down to 40 beans. These were then laid out on one illustration board. The song “beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot,” was spread throughout the board, to keep the viewer moving from drawing to drawing. I also included many different bean characters who are interacting with each other. This was done to keep the viewer entertained and always finding new ways to look at the same drawings.

With the completion of this project, I now have gained an understanding of how my creative process works and what I can accomplish with it.

Creating My Logo

Good morning friends. For today’s post I have decided to explain some of the decisions the went into the creation of my logo. Before I could create my logo I had to figure out who I am, and what I want to say as a brand. The three things I wanted the logo to communicate were that I am a calm, critical, and centered person. After ‘doodling’ my initials about a hundred times, I decided I liked the look of the following set and how they emphasized my core values.

After cleaning up the sketch there was a BIG problem. The graphic looked way too close to a swastika. This needed to be fixed. To accomplish this, I decided to change the colour of the letter ‘t’. I wanted to keep the logo in grey scale so I used 70% grey for the colour change. This brought another little challenge; the graphic was very top heavy. To correct the balance of the logo, I decided that each initial would have one stroke as a solid colour and the other two strokes would have half one colour and half the other colour.

The next step in the creation of this logo was to place my name somewhere along the graphic. The first place tried was at the bottom of the graphic, in a solid line of text. This just didn’t fit the style I was going for. That is when I came across some Russian Constructivism work by El Lissitzky. The graphic already had the Russian Constructivism feel to it, so I decided to repeat the style by separating my names and placing them on angels with their corresponding initials.

This process was a great activity to help me in discovering who I am and what I what I want to say as a brand.