Carat*

I had a great opportunity to meet with some of the creative minds behind the luxury jewelry brand, Carat*, the other day.

I've followed the success of the brand for quite a few years as I knew it was new, and I thought it had a great start right out of the blocks in retail, and I watched the brand keep a great consistency to it's branding and marketing efforts year after year. When I worked at TSL Jewelry, I kept files of tear sheets on all of the jewelery brands to keep track of thier marketing efforts, and I would constantly evaluate new campaigns with the old to watch the building or breaking of a brand. Carat* kept standing out to me as sleek and sophisticated and lots of open avenues of opportunity to grow with creative marketing campaigns.

Here's to hoping that I get a collaborate on some future projects with them!

Pixel Wasteland: Reloaded

What to do when I run in to a creative block? I just push pixels from random old vector files and PS brushes from my library. I'm currently working on a character design for a cigarette package... but I after creating 10 characters, I got all mentally blocked up. So color and randomness rule at this juncture.

The bright side of these, is that a client was visiting the studio, and now wants these as wrapping paper... Sweeeeet!

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

Update on Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 10:15AM by josh sellers

I'm adding a couple follow-up designs for the CD case art.

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.