My fiancé's brother had a baby the other month and we occasionally get photos of him. We got one today that just screamed album cover so I threw this together.
I was playing around with a design in Illustrator and decided to finish it out in Photoshop with a photo I shot last week in Venice Beach.
Usually when I'm working on stuff I try to work in such a way that'll make my life easier as I come back to do revisions.
Not gonna lie, I didn't do that this time and I regret it. For some reason I decided not to pen tool the skater and it made everything 5x more difficult than it needed to be. I ended up masking by hand with the paint brush which succckkkkkked. Especially since I didn't use my Wacom, just the track pad on my laptop.
You live and learn though, won't be making that mistake again.
I've been freelancing with Havas for about 6 months this year on their launch campaign for Wells Fargo's new credit card line. The campaign that was sold in was "Real Life Ready," so we were tasked with coming up with spots that showed real life but with a celebrity. Obviously a challenge.
After several rounds of scripts and finally settling on a celebrity, my copywriter (Britton Rice) and I sold some stuff through. Unfortunately because of Covid we didn't get to go on production, but the final results were good enough to make Editor's Pick on AdWeek.
Big thanks to the Havas NY team including CD's Alexis Garber and Alec Kleinfeld, ECD Peter Gosselin and CCO Dan Lucey. Additional thanks to the entire account, strategy and production teams who usually go unheralded.
You can watch the extended cut below.
I decided to have my bachelor party in Atlanta so that my friends wouldn't have to make two cross country trips for me. We rented a party bus and it took us around to a few breweries all located on Atlanta's west side. I found out from one of my friends who lives in the area that it is sometimes called Malt Disney because of the number of breweries that have found a home there.
I loved this so I decided to make a shirt for the area. If I can get enough commitments, I'll have them produced.
A lot of the time I'll see different techniques on Instagram or Pinterest and think they look fairly simple, but I like what they accomplish. Sometimes I'll try my own hand to see if I can replicate them.
The problem is that I don't really have my own style, at least visually speaking. I think my style is more a tonal style. I have a particular sense of humor that I try to inject into my work. Usually a sense of irony with maybe a darker twist when the audience will allow it.
I was able to recreate the visual style for this, but when it came time to make it mine I realized there was only one good solution. There was a stunning lack of people in the original versions of this style I saw, and I began to wonder why that may be.
That's when I decided to add in the shark attack to explain why everyone else had run away.
Enjoy!
I've always been bad at freehand drawing, I think I mentioned that before. I remember in high school in my art classes when we were painting I'd sit there banging my head against a wall while everyone else did it with ease.
At the time I at least took solace in the fact that I could wipe the floor with them when it came time for photography stuff. Anyway, In an attempt to develop a freehand style I'm trying to hand illustrate more stuff and see where it takes me.
This is mostly flat styled but I tried to add a bit of depth using some textures to lightly shade.
I posted Clothes & Clothes Sans on r/Graphic_Design on Reddit and it ended up becoming the top post. Right now it's sitting at just above 1,000 upvotes (93% upvoted).
Over the past month I've been developing a pair of complementary fonts titled "Clothes" and "Clothes Sans." I wanted to do something that was completely hand drawn because It's an area that I know I need to practice more. I use vector as a crutch with illustrations and wanted to get out of my comfort zone.
The other day I started messing around with a photo I had shot. This ended up being the result.
It started with an abstract design I noticed in the background of a tv show my fiance was watching. I thought it might look interesting with a photo layered over it, but then I started warping things and adding some text for texture and messing with the colors.
Eventually I landed here. Decided to add in a paper texture for good measure so it didn't feel so vectory.
Let me know what you think.
The other week I had this vision of a robot cowboy. Last night I finally had time to turn the vision into a reality (as much as an illustration is reality).
This year has been exceptionally busy in regards to freelance. I've been booked virtually back-to-back since last August and one of my more recent gigs was at DDB SF. My friend Britton Rice and I have started doing some freelance together and DDB was our first tour of duty.
We worked on a really fun project for Energy Upgrade California, specifically their Flex Alert program. Basically, California's energy grid gets stretched thin during the summer so Flex Alerts warn people before they have to start shutting down parts of it to prevent a total collapse. Either turn down your power, or lose it completely.
Britton and I talked about how when blackouts happen, it can affect all the things you love about California. The original idea we pitched was, "Save Power, Save California." That eventually evolved into "Flex our Power, Save our Power." The full campaign is in the process of launching now, but while I was on Instagram the other day I saw the first ad unit for it and figured I should post.
I usually try to do a few new side projects every year, but because life happens - this year might be not as outwardly productive as I'm used to. To that ends, I decided that my wedding would be one of my tent pole side projects for the year.
To that end, I spent some time designing out the wedding website. Settled on a design language for it and tried to use photos I've shot over the years as much as possible (I even went and did a photoshoot to get a shot of the venue). Anyway, it's mostly up now and you can see it at www.iguessimalreadythere.com.
The nice thing about having this design language in place is that it made designing the Save the Dates (and eventually Invitation) super easy.
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