DJ Fraser

I simply love working with DJs on any project... it involves music and freedom of creativity. Though the parameters of a business card design for British DJ Fraser Douglas were that he wanted a "smiley face/ 80's retro/ street art/ punkish.

I chose a Rives bright white "Rives Design", 350 gsm recyccled paper for this.... it's with no gloss or UV overlays. Just raw with the texured paper.

So this is what we decided on in the end. I'm happy, he's happy.

FRONT

BACK

New Thirsty Horse Labels!

I photographed the new Thirsty Horse Wine bottles the other day.

The folks over at Thirsty Horse gave me this brief: The bottles need to tell a story of being somewhere tropical, but upscale and far away. One daytime shot and one evening shot/ 70s to 80s/ not too sharp. Exotic.

So, without the use of the usual large studio tricks in LA or the depths of Hong Kong's Chai Wan photo studio mecca, I managed to pull this off on the balcony of the studio.

It was a marvel of engineering how I managed to light the wine bottles with 2 mini-sunbounces, 2 Profoto 1200w compacts, and a couple black cards. It worked well and the client is happy.

PSHOP Tutorials rock!

I was playing around on Tutsplus.com this evening and did a fun little tutorial by Wojciech Magierski.

It's always great to take the time to do these as they always refresh my pshop memory as I'm going step by step. I've been using photoshop for about 15 years now. Everytime I think I know it all... I learn something new.

It's a great tool for design and always entertaining to re-piece together another designer's work.

Pixel Wasteland

Within my nine 1tb  hard drives, I have digital files from old projects, started projects for clients that cancelled and projet ideas that hit me at 4am mid-sleep, that I crank out and go back to sleep. Sometimes, I completely forget about these little gems and later find them in the folder "Pixel Wastland". Mostly they lie dormant and never see the light of screen again and some get pieced out for other projects.

Here is one from a 3am epighany I found that I'll re-explore and rebuild with a bit more detail//

Vectorific!

Currently I'm overloaded with freelance projects. I've been turing away clients lately, which is one of those things that any designer hates to do! But fortunately, the few projects I ave going on at the moment, being balanced form all corners of the world, have been absolutley fabulous! There has been a lot of freedom for creativity, and the projects have had me relying heavily on Adobe Illustrator. 

I always prefer to work in Illustrator for a few reasons:

1) It gets me back to my 2D graphic design roots; It allows me to draw out my ideas on paper, scan it, trace the drawing in Illustrator and then go to work with the pen tools.

2) When I'm not able to draw my idea, I can photograph it and manipulate the photo in Photoshop, then re-draw it in Illustrtor

3) These vector graphics can be scaled to any size without the raster-based distortion; Making it easier to transfer the graphics in to smart objects for web designs built in photoshop, Flash, etc.

4) It's ready to go for Cinema 4D!

Some screen grabs of current work in illustrator....