Good morning friends, happy Monday February 20th. Today is Family Day here in Ontario, and I am away for some much needed Rest and Relaxation. But I wanted to share with you a project that I worked on a little while ago.

Project Objectives:

The purpose of this project was to complete the communication material for an Integrated Marketing Campaign (IMC). This project was done in teams of two. I was partnered up with my good friend Holly Walker to complete this assignment. The Client we were working with was HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre.

Backgroung Information:

HopeSpring understands that there is much more to cancer than the physical diagnosis and treatment. They offer coaching services for those with cancer because they are often faced with a great deal of change, stress, and complex medical information. HopeSpring was created to help people to move beyond the fear, confusion, and frustrations surrounding a cancer diagnosis. They offer a variety of programs and services, all designed to create a greater sense of confidence and control. Also, they offer personal and group support, a free wig boutique, and an excellent resource centre. Many people in the KW region have found inspiration, information, and empowerment at the HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre. All of their programs and services are confidential and free of charge. Friends and family of a cancer patient are always welcome, and no medical referral is needed.

There are no direct competitors in the region, but they do compete with any place that offers yoga, reflexology, therapeutic massages, wig fittings, counseling, or group therapy.

Positioning Statement

HopeSpring is the only holistic cancer support centre in the region focused on education about and relieving stresses associated with cancer, as well as coaching their clients towards overall wellness.

Target Audience:

HopeSpring’s target audience varies in both demographics and psychographics. They one thing the target audience has in common is they are either living with cancer, or are friends and family of a cancer patient. There are an estimated 2, 377 new cancer cases for 2011 in the KW region. HopeSpring would like to start to target a younger segment, as well as try to entice more men to start using their services.

Creative Strategy:

HopeSpring would like to update their logo, send out a direct mail piece, update their e-newsletter, and create a new brochure. The logo needs to reposition the brand to boost awareness and increase the number of clients, especially the younger demographic. The direct mail piece and the brochure need to inform and educate the target market about HopeSpring, what they offer, and how they can help. The e-newsletter needs to educate clients of HopeSpring on what is going on inside the organization and provide testimonials.

All messaging must be in line with HopeSpring’s positioning statement. The tone should be informative and persuasive, but stay upbeat and uplifting. The appeal needs to be empowering, making it clear that HopeSpring will offer the client the utmost in coaching and support.

Implementation:

The following are the communication pieces that our team came up with:

Please click on them for a larger view.

HopeSpring Logo

HopeSpring Direct Mail

HopeSpring E-Newsletter

HopeSpring Brochure

Thank-you for taking the time to look over this project. Like always please feel free to post any comments or questions you have.

Hope you have a happy and productive week.

Good morning friends. Happy Monday February 13th. This morning I would like to share with you a neat little project that I stumbled upon. The project is called Random Project 2012.

The Random Project 2012 showcases a growing collection of postcards which are created by everybody. These celebrate the spirit of the London 2012 Olympic games and enable exhibit to visually document the shared cultural experience as the year unfolds – we will all therefore become the artists-in-residence for a historic year.

To be a part of this great experience all you have to do is pick a number between 1 – 100 and email this number to word@random-project.co.uk. They will they send you a word. All you have to do then is create a postcard relating your word to either 2012; London, England; or the Olympic games.

There is some fine print and stuff which I encourage you all to look up on their website here.

Now to my postcard. I was given the word ‘fun’. I won’t tell you what number I picked to get this word, that might spoil some of the fun of this project.

While I was bored in class, late one Friday afternoon, I started to doodle out some pictures. After a little while I started to notice that I had a little pattern going. Every image I had drawn could be related to a birthday party.

This got me thinking of different games that are played during a child’s birthday party. I wanted to pick a game because part of this project is to relate to either the year 2012; the city of London, UK; or the Olympic games. After listing a few different children’s games I settled on “duck, duck goose.” I decided that I would make the children’s head which ever animal they had been called and have the ‘goose’ chasing the child around the circle and back to the spot.

Front of Postcard

Back of Postcard

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Hopefully, this post will inspire you to get your own random word and create a postcard for yourself.

Until next time, have a great week.

Good morning friends and happy Monday February 6th. Today I would like to explain to you how social media works. Well…  not actually. I am actually just go to post a poster that explains the way very basic way different social medias are used. A friend of mine actually posted a rough version of this on his Facebook. I thought it was a very clever approach  and I wanted to clean it up a bit and add a little interest.

Here is what the original version looked like.

The first thing I did was changed all the social media names to their icons. Most of the icons are well-known enough that the name wasn’t necessary. The next thing I did was lined up all the text so that it started in the same margin. To add a bit of interest I turned the dot at the bottom of the exclamation mark into a donut. This follows the theme throughout the explanations. The last little thing I did was place the text on a scroll. This was to help ‘authenticate’ the document by making it look like the 10 commandments, but with only 9 ‘rules’.

Here is what my finished version looks like.

I urge everyone to retweet this post with the has tag #SME, or like this post in Facebook. You could take my image and create a vintage version and post it on Instagram, or post on Foursquare where you are when you are reading it. Even if you don’t do any of the previous suggestions, I hope that this might brighten your day.

Have a good week.

Good morning friends and happy Monday January 30th. Today I want to share with you something that has inspired me. I stumbled across Phidais Gold’s paper toy show.

The show took place from May 27th to June 15th at the LAP Gallery in Waltham, MA. I wasn’t able to attend the show to see the paper toys, but their Phidais Gold’s site has a link to view all the paper toys that were featured.

These are a couple of my favourites.

After browsing through the various artists creations, I decided to create my own. I took the template that Phidais Gold provided and decided to create a Kermit the Frog like creation. When I finalize my paper toy I will post it for you all to see.  Until then, I have provided a copy of the paper toy template here, but feel free to visit Phidais Gold’s site to view all the toys they created. They have various other inspiring things on their blog. Go check it out.

Thanks for stopping by, have a great week.

Good morning friends. Can you believe it’s already January 23rd? This month is just cruising by. Speaking of cruising, some of you may have been aware that my wife and I were lucky enough to spend this past New Years on a cruise in the Caribbean.

Today I would like to share with you some of the pictures that I took while we were on vacation.

Click on each image to see a larger version.

That’s all for today guys, I hope you enjoyed looking at some of the shots from my little New Year’s vacation.

Have a great week.

Good morning friends, happy Monday January 16th. Today, I would like to share with you another project that I have worked on.

Project Objectives:

The purpose of this project was to create a marketing campaign that would help create awareness of an environmental or social issue. For this project I partnered up with a good friend of mine, Ryan Stockie. We chose the topic of the declining bee population as our environmental issue. Currently this is just a fictitious campaign and all the dates and materials are conceptual.

Background Information:

Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, and are known for their role in the pollination of plants. Bees play an important role in pollinating flowering plants, and are the major type of pollinator in ecosystems that contain flowering plants. It is estimated that one-third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination, most of which is accomplished by bees. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates most fruit and vegetables, nuts, sunflowers, alfalfa, which is used for cattle feed, and cotton.

There was a dramatic reduction in the number of honey bees in the US between 1972 and 2006. The honey bee is now almost absent. At the same time there was a significant decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers. This decline was a result of urbanization, pesticide use, mites, and commercial beekeepers’ retiring.

The first thing that can be done to help protect these pollinators are don’t use unnecessary pesticides. Bees are sensitive to chemicals. Pesticides that are sprayed on blooming plants can be toxic to a visiting bee. The next thing that can be done is to provide food sources for bees. The flowers in your garden are a great source of pollen and nectar for busy bees. Planting a variety of flowers that will bloom from spring to fall will help. Although you may not like the carpenter bees that use your porch as a nesting site, they are out there pollinating your garden. Hopefully you won’t spray these bees with insecticides to get rid of them. Instead try to make another nesting site more attractive to them. Honey bees nest in hollow trees and other cavities, so if you could leave that space for them. You can provide other nesting sites by drilling holes in untreated lumber and putting that lumber in a warm, sunny area. You could also leave brushy areas undisturbed so bees can keep their nests from year to year.

Creative Material:

These posters are designed to attract the viewers attention and get them to go and visit Plan Bee’s website, www.savethebee.org. There are 2 different poster designs created. One for the repercussions of losing the bee, and one for the benefits of increasing the bee population.

Poster to Increase Bee Population

Poster Warning About Decreased Bee Population

The visuals on both types of posters are simple pictographs which are placed in a mathematical formula to express the outcomes of either a life with the bee or a life without. Each poster also displays a particular stat that will help get the viewers attention and make them think about getting more information from the website. The bottom right corner of each poster contains the Plan Bee logo and website information. The posters are designed to be shown on either white paper with black text or on black paper with white text. Both styles of poster are interchangeable depending on their location and target audience. The font chosen for these posters is Ariel Black. This is to help emphasize the posters simple yet bold statements.

Implementation:

On April 18, 2011 we will unveil our “Save the Bee” campaign created by the Plan Bee organization to the public. May 1, 2011 we will release our campaign posters to the general public. These posters will be distributed and posted up on school walls, city buses, bus stops, billboards, and businesses. June 1, 2011 we will release our “Save the Bee” merchandise to the general public. We will be selling bee habitats, plant seeds, and articles of clothing. These items will be sold at at local Shoppers Drug Marts stores, Walmart, Zellers, and all grocery stores. All proceeds will go to the “Save the Bee” fund. July 1, 2011 we will start our “Save the Bee” fundraiser which will be held at the Kitchener Auditorium at 7:00pm-11pm, tickets will be $10.00 a person and kids are free. There will be a guest speaker that will be talking about the declining bee population and how we can help solve the problem. There will also be a live music performance from the popular music group the Black Eyed Peas who are major supporters of the event. All tickets and proceeds will go the “Save the Bee” fund.

Thank-you for taking the time to look over this project. Like always please feel free to post any comments or questions you have.
Hope you have a happy and productive week.

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.

Good morning friends. Hope you all had a wonderful week, and a chance to spend some quality time with your family and friends over the holidays.  I am on vacation this week and I know what you might be thinking. “His first week back and he is already taking a break”. In fact I am, but that isn’t going stop me from following my new year’s resolution of posting weekly. I have saved this post for a little while, and figure now is a great time to share it. This post will be about my first contracted photography shoot.

Back in May of 2011, I was asked if I could produce a panoramic shot of the Kitchener train station that would be blown up and hung on a wall for a wedding rehearsal dinner. I immediately jumped at the opportunity. But, as soon as I had agreed to the job and hung up the phone the panic set in.

I had never had a picture go off to an actual print shop for production before. I now started to worry about things I never really thought of before. How many pixels does this image need to be? How many shots do I need to take to make the panoramic shot work? Do I need to acquire a permit to take pictures of the train station. All of these questions and more started running through my head. Thankfully I had some resources to help me out with these concerns.

I found out that I did not need to acquire a permit or a model release to take the picture because the image was only being used for personal use. I also figured out that to produce the image at the desired width of 10 feet I would need to stitch together 5 images. These are the images that I took.

I took these 5 pictures into Photoshop and stitched them together. After some cloning and touching up of the images I took them back into Lightroom and added some effects to give the image a little more of an old-fashioned effect. Here is what the final image looked like.

Kitchener Train Station

This was a great first commission for me to do, after I got over the initial stress of the project and figured out exactly what I needed to send to the printer. I would like to thank the Denstedt’s for allowing me to help them with their special occasion.

Here is a picture of the happy couple with the print.

Have a good week.

Good morning friends. I hope all of you are enjoying the holidays and able to spend some time with your family.

It has been a LONG time since my last post. I’m not sure where the time went or why I wasn’t able to post more, but I will be now. I would like to remind everyone what this blog is all about. The intent of this blog is to feature both my finished work and the entire process I go through when I create new pieces. From time to time, I will also be discussing different design tips and different inspirational ideas that I come across.

Again, I am going to set up a schedule of when I will be releasing new posts. I am going to learn from my previous attempt at blogging and drop my contributions down to once a week. With the new year right around the corner, it is time for new resolutions. My resolution will be to continue updating the site to release a new post every Monday.

Again, I would like to welcome you back to the blog, and thank you for taking the time to pop in and spend some time looking around. I hope you find something inspirational to get your own creative juices flowing.

See you next Monday.

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.