Soy Inks

You wanted to know things about inks made from soy? Here's a poster that explains that. You can click on it to enlarge the image and read it better, if that's your thing.

I'm not sure why I made this.

Cannibal Animals

The American Royal is a livestock show, barbecue competition, and rodeo that takes place annually in Kansas City, Missouri.

I took their branding and rubbed cannibalism all over it. Because their barbecue is too good to resist is the idea.

Belly Bites

I made a dog treat box for school and it's adorable. Look at it's lickity little tongue and woobly little legs.

The paper it's sitting on is a class critique. I've been working on this project for a week or so, and this is the second iteration of this box. As you can infer from the sheer quantity of notes on the template, there will certainly be a third.

So crack open its skull and feed your pets with the innards of this adorable little doggy box! It's technically not cannibalism!

An Absurd Memory

New assignment! This is one of the first projects we as students have done for an outside client. The goal was to capture the essence of seven short plays by renowned playwright Samuel Beckett for an upcoming performance at Johnson County Community College. The plays include:

Act Without Words II: In which two people of disparate personalities are stored in sacks.

Ohio Impromptu: In which an old man reads from a cryptic tome to an old mute man.

What Where: In which there are only five left of a group of four men.

Play: In which three burial urns take turns spinning yarns.

Come and Go: In which three women sit on a bench.

Breath: In which there is breath.

Footfalls: In which a sick child either exists or does not.

Death and confusion play major roles in each performance, which is why my main graphic consists of a sightless skull. The icons overlaid on top represent imagery from the individual acts. They are loosely joined by broken, ashy lines, implying the thematic ties that necessarily join each, but only in a superficial - or broken - nature.

Bring your kids!

Type Tattoo Week! Day 7: Apply (to) Yourself

Type Tattoo Week! Day 6: Look & See

Much rougher, much less type, but I've discovered recently that I'm pretty fond of creepy tattoos.

The idea with these is that one would be applied one to each palm.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 5: Shall Pass

Did I mention that the project is to design a henna tattoo? Because that detail is important to note for this pun.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 4: Above

More tattoo motifs! The typographic focus in this one is mainly the letter spacing and thin slab serif style.

The words mean nothing but are vague enough concepts to mean quite a few things. So that's nice.

Text Tattoo Week! Day 3: Ampersand

When designing the most generic typographic tattoo, it helps to use some of the most generic tattoo motifs. Hence this half-filled ampersand.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 2: Still

I chose this word for the second tattoo mainly because of the anatomy of the type. The lower finials of each of these letters forms a neat little hook motif that I think works well with the idea of stillness - keeping things in place and all.

Type Tattoo Week! Day 1: LOL

I'm back in school! And the first assignment for my new Advanced Typography class has been to design typographical tattoos. So I'm going to post a week's worth of those to get us back in the swing of things.

This might look familiar. It's sort of an extension/reimagining of the ROWA concept from an earlier typography project. I chose the LOL mark because I've always been fond of it's semi-symmetry and the cute little happy face incorporated into the center. However, in the process of drawing it larger I've somehow made it much, much creepier. So that's a life choice I have to live with now.

The Roaring Five-Years-From-Now

This was past of an art history project, the assignment was to create an educational product that could be sold in a museum gift shop to teach people about a particular movement. Hence this art deco desk calendar. It's chock full of all kinds of lovely prints and fantastic information about the era, the art, and the legacy of art deco.

Poster in this image is © Art.com and Steve Forney. Used non-commercially in an academic setting.

Road Trip!

Here are a few travel magazine covers and titles I designed!

Like Grains of Sand

I've been working on a 2D platformer-type game for a bit now. It's a school project, but it's also a concept I've had in the back of my head for a while. This is a thing I drew today for that thing I mentioned a few sentences ago. Please view it with your eyes.

Five shades of gray and some little color accents that I may or may not keep. I've always had a fascination for clock towers, and I'm happy to report that nothing has changed.

World Domination Made Easy

The Uchukira Corporation is proud to announce that How to Assemble Your New Doomsday Device has won first prize in the animation category at the Take 5 Film Festival!

Here are some production notes if you're into that kind of thing.

I'll Make You a Pizza You Can't Refuse

There's a pizza place nearby with a mafia theme. Their current menu doesn't really suit their restaurant - it's built around buffet and delivery orders, but finding a way to order the pizza you want is a bit of a mess. It lists all kinds of things you don't need to know while in the store and things that don't do you any good outside the store, like the contents of the salad bar and the drinks available at the drink fountain. Here's the original for comparison.

I redesigned and streamlined their menu, turning it into a tear-away notepad. The focus was on user experience, and I wanted a design that would be easy for the customers and cooks to interact with. This menu explains everything you need to know about building a pizza with little pieces of mafia theming sprinkled throughout. I also redesigned the logo while I was at it.

How to Assemble Your New Doomsday Device

Congratulations on your new Uchukira™ Doomsday Device! Here's a handy video on how to easily and quickly assemble the most reliable planet killer on the market today. Brought to you by the Uchukira Corporation.

Uchukira: World Domination Made Easy™

This is a project that I've been working on for the last few days. The student film festival from last year is coming up again, and I managed to find out about it a whole week in advance this time!

I decided to do the animation in PowerPoint again, because I'm still pretty familiar with the software and I don't animate enough to buy any actual animation software. Here's a slide from the original PowerPoint and another excellent case study of why PowerPoint is not made for animation.

The film festival is on April 4th, so I'll let you know how it turns out. Wish me luck!

Curves and Lines

You know those times when you want to convey a certain feeling in text and none of the fonts you look at convey that feeling so you make the font yourself?

I'm right in the middle of that.
 

Right now I'm building all the characters in Illustrator out of circles and lines and using pathfinder selections to selectively add and remove elements.
As you may have guessed, this is for a business card. For the time being I'm just building the words I need ad hoc, but someday when I have some more free time I might expand this out into a complete font. It's got a cool, clean geometric feel that I really like.

It's the Bombe

 Cryptography! Or as my great-grandpa used to call it, fubswrjudskb!

This has been an ongoing project for my layout design class, and it's finally getting to a point where I'm ready to call it presentable. The project is to construct a tritone newsletter for a non-profit organization. While my classmates are off raising awareness for worth-while organizations like the WWF or GlobalH2O, I decided that I like word puzzles and made a newsletter for non-profit hobby organization the American Cryptogram Association.

The neat thing about making a newsletter for a group dedicated to hiding messages in things is that you get to hide a bunch of messages in things. Take this logo, for example.

This logo is a rotational cipher for the word BOMBE, which is a reference to the machines used to crack the Nazi ENIGMA codes during World War II. If you take 360 degrees and divide it by 26 (letters of the alphabet), you can assign a different letter to each distinct point on a circle. I indicated this by the point on the circle that doesn't have a triangle on it. The outer ring is B, the next ring is O, and so on. The result is a neat little explosion with a neat little hidden message.

This is the cover! The main focus here is the tritone coloring - only the colors used in the entire document are the red, orange, and blue shades along the left edge. The dark brown is a combination of all of these colors, and the raindrop imagery is just lighter and lighter shades of blue. In theory, this entire newsletter could be printed with just three inks.

And here's the interior spread! It's very busy, very rigid, and very wordy, just like cryptography. Because this composition is for a hobby organization, I wanted to include articles and information that would be interesting to casual cryptographers. This is a bit of a departure from the philosophy of the ACA, but its accessibility is perfect for bringing in new members and keeping current members informed and entertained.

A Bit of AMBIT

I posted about this earlier, and now that the deadline has passed and everything is finished I think it's safe to go into more detail about exactly what it is I was working on.

The AMBIT Awards is a ceremony held by the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association to honor individuals and agencies that've achieved excellence in direct marketing. They asked me to design the Call for Entries direct marketing campaign for the event, which I'm choosing to interpret as an honor.

I was given total creative freedom and a set of files and assets from previous years. While it wasn't required, I decided to start from scratch, rebuilding the brand from the ground up. Here's a logo comparison:

The old logo (left) and my redesigned logo (right)

The project consisted of two parts, an email and a mailer. The Potato Awards were based off the art I did for the email, and I continued that theme into the mailer. Here's the email.

And here are some scans of the Call for Entries mailer.
 

A Thousand Miles Apart

Shannon and I have been in a long-term relationship for almost two years now - I live in Kansas, she lives in Utah. We meet every few months, but the distance is still hard to deal with. Video games have had a huge part in our relationship, allowing us to play together even when we can't be together. This is what I did for Valentine's Day this year.

The link goes to a download page for a game I spent the past few sleepless nights making. It features her in Utah and me in Kansas, trying to make it to Colorado (the state between us).

You can download it and give it a try here: http://goo.gl/SEu1Pd

I've included the game's closing cinematic after the jump break for anyone who wants to see the final message without playing the game. For everyone else, spoiler warning and Happy Valentine's Day!