Brad Frost Web

Thursday #4

This is the 4th installment of my “weekly” design project. Carrying along the same tradition as the previous design, I’m having fun arranging concentric circles in semi-irregular patterns.

Wednesday #3

This is the third installment of my “weekly” design series. I guess I should have been more realistic in regards to how consistent I would be with this project, but thankfully only a week slipped by.

Blue, orange and concentric circles are in full effect here. These are a few of my favorite things.

Tuesday #2

Just got back yesterday from snowboarding in Stowe, VT. Its been amazing progressing with my wife and it was a ton of fun hanging out with a big house full of people.

Because of that the design day got pushed back, so here is the updated version.

Now that I (already) broke the pattern, I’m wondering if I should start a new pattern with this. In other words, make next week’s design arrive on Wednesday, then the following Thursday, etc. We’ll see how it goes.

Monday #1

This is the beginning of (hopefully) a weekly occurrence. In an effort to set aside some quality time for creativity, I’m going to attempt to update the same PSD every week on Monday. I will add, edit, subtract, whatever to the same document and post the results. The idea is over time it will grow into something completely different than what it is today. It should be fun to watch the evolution as it grows, like one of those dinosaurs you soke in water and they get huge as they soak up the water (genius).

This is getting ambitious, but hopefully I can force myself to do this enough to want to do more pieces like this in a series and eventually have at least a couple in strong rotation.

Check back next Monday or subscribe to my RSS feed for the first revision to the above document. Comments and criticism welcome.

Its been a while since I’ve posted anything because (in the words of my boss) I’m busier than God, so I figure I will post up the 2008 showreel of Anika Flade, an amazingly talented motion designer I have the extreme good fortune to work with.

SHOWREEL 2008 from crashdummy.net on Vimeo.

View more of Anika’s work at crashdummy.net and especially check out her brilliant short film, Love Me. It is currently making the film festival rounds and has gotten a wonderful response.

Brad Frost Logo Thingy

If there’s anything I shouldn’t be doing right now, its messing around in Photoshop.  I’m so busy its insane.

In an effort to try to keep creative amidst all my current activity, I’ve started doodling a bit in Photoshop at lunchtime. Hopefully this can be a semi-regular thing and I’ll post them as I make them.

All's Fair in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Lines

I heard the word “gaffe” at most one other time before this election.

This is true statement. I can’t escape this word, no matter where I go to receive my news. People say it in casual conversation. Its amazing what power the media has to subliminally and NOT so subliminally introduce new words, phrases, ideas and ideals into our minds.

Think about it, how often did we toss this word around before this election season?

God bless America and Pump Demi Bold.

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.

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.