Archive for the 'design' Category
Mar 28th 2008Lightbulb Doodle and Midnight Spaghetti
Cleaning my room tonight I found the original scrap of paper that inspired me to make a painting out of the doodle. It was a simple drawing that was done in a meeting at work, and as I looked at it more, I saw the possibility of a cool painting. So a 3′ x 4′ canvas is in my room right now with this swirling lightbulb glaring at me and begging me to finish it.
I’ve been so incredibly busy lately…I feel like I’m living 8 lives at once. So finding this little doodle tonight really put things into perspective, that big things can be created from a mindless sketch, that great things can come accomplished with a simple optomistic mentality.
In other news, I will be on tour with Midnight Spaghetti next weekend in Burlington, VT (I’ve never been there) and Albany, NY (never been there either)! I’m quite excited to get back up on stage and lay down some funk, especially with such a great band that’s known for their energetic performances. I’ll fit right in.
Comment? »Mar 27th 2008Ledonne Creative
I recently had the opportunity to construct a website and blog for Ledonne Creative, a web marketing firm in Pittsburgh, PA. Ledonne Creative specializes in search engine optimization, online marketing strategies, and design. Thus the design was nicely set up for me, all I needed to do was bust out the ole’ Photoshop knives and carve it up.
The main site is all Flash, leaving the blog section to do the heavy lifting from an SEO standpoint. For the Flash end of things, I mostly used Flash’s built in tween class, and simply added some little animations for rollover states. Subtle, but effective. I also executed a PHP contact form for the site from within Flash, which was a first for me.
In regards to the blog, I simply modified the existing site design and placed it within Wordpress’ architecture. The same arrows in the Flash site were regurgitated as list bullets and title headers, and Century Gothic (not your traditional web font) was used for the titles and some of the site nav.
Since this blog will be used for SEO, I installed some of the most popular SEO plugins for Wordpress, including Headspace 2 and Google XML Sitemap Generator. Since the client knows all about optimization, these simple tools and tweaks will provide the necessary framework for the company to boost its rankings and provide some killer content.
All in all I’m quite happy results for it being a quick and dirty job. I look forward to seeing what sort of helpful SEO and design tips Ledonne Creative writes about in the near future.
Comment? »filed under:design
Feb 19th 2008I was Chuck Norris’ Siamese Twin
This was a school project I did when I was first learning Photoshop. I recently stumbled onto it hiding in my folders and thought that I’d share it. *Important Note* This project was done almost 3 years ago, before the Chuck Norris revival movement hit full swing.
Comment? »Feb 8th 2008new profile pic
So I designed this to be my new profile picture for my ever-expanding collection of social networking websites. I hand drew a picture from a photo and messed around in Photoshop. I’m not the best at Photoshop, so I’d really like some honest constructive criticism. Hit me up with a comment with what you think of it. Thanks
2 Comments »filed under:design
Jan 17th 2008Monopoly Template for Photoshop
Christmas time was fast approaching and the idea popped into my head to create a custom Monopoly game for my family. I remember seeing something for a “Make Your Own Opoly” game, but when i checked it out, I found out it’s whack. It only has 9 spaces per side instead of the official Monopoly’s 10, you have to print it out on your home computer, and just lacks the overall look and feel of the original game.
So began my quest to find a Monopoly template for Photoshop , something that I could just open up on in Photoshop, swap out the default titles with my own, and if I wanted to, redesign any element of the board. I can’t say I searched the 4 corners of the globe for a proper template, so the best I came up with was something that someone threw together quickly in a forum somewhere.
It was a good start, but the creator was rushing to do it quickly and overlooked a few things. So I took it into Photoshop, simplified a lot of the structure, and designed the board to mirror the original Monopoly design. I set the file at CMYK/300dpi and set the dimensions at 20in x 20in, the actual Monopoly board dimensions. However, Christmas time was fast approaching, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to labor over every detail.
That being said, there are a few shortcomings with my template, but all of them can be fixed quickly. Here’s a quick list of them.
- No Mr. Moneybags. He wasn’t relevant to my project so he was left out.
- Didn’t have time to illustrate Luxury Tax, Guy in Jail, amongst other things.
- A lot of the dimensions are eyed-up and not necessarily exact measurements
- All the icons (electric company, trains, go, free parking, etc…) were drawn quite poorly in Photoshop. If I had more time, I would have properly illustrated them in a fancy program called Illustrator.
- The typefaces aren’t exactly proper, especially on the property cards. The main typeface is Kabel, which you have to pay for, so I used knockoff fonts that are similar, but not the original.
- The colors aren’t exactly correct, so you’d have to twiddle with them
All these shortcomings aside, the Monopoly template is pretty strong. Hopefully somebody else can take it to the next level! Leave a comment if you have any questions.
6 Comments »filed under:design
