Saturday, August 04, 2007

Playing with text effects



These are a couple of things I came up with while playing around with text effects in Photoshop. The fire was a standard that we were shown in class. After seeing that I found an ice tutorial and took some shortcuts to make it simpler. The fireworks was inspired by a radioactive effect I found.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

After Nightfall...

One of my pet (pun intended) names for my wife is 'Katie Kat'. This one was inspired by that...

Dark Wood

I've been wondering what to work on next outside of school. Out of a number of projects I started, I was sidetracked by a photo of our front lawn. After some playing around with it I settles on this rendition. Influences from the likes of Stephen King, Creepshow, and H.R. Giger were running through my mind I suppose.
I have a thing for stuff that is creepy and haven't worked with it much lately. My next projects may or may not be along these lines...

Thursday, July 26, 2007

What's for dinner?

Here is one I did while practicing layers in Photoshop. The original pictures looked nothing like this of course!

Thursday, July 05, 2007

New blog

My wife just started a new blog. This is the first one she has done and she seems to be enjoying it.
The link is katiedance.blogspot.com
This blog is actually my second, since I accidentally erased the first one! (DUH!) It has been a cool way to share my experiences and thoughts about things. It has also been interesting to see all the people who check out the site and where they are from. I have had hits from all over the world, some who actually looked at my website first or did a direct search for this blog. Some of the hits have been from family, some from fellow posters in forums and some from random search hits, where they were looking for something else but found this!
After all these hits I have actually only had 3 or 4 comments. Thats karma for you (I never comment on other peoples blogs!). Oh well ;)
Anyways, check out her blog, she is a fun girl and I love her!
~~~

Website

I went ahead with the website I was working on for my friend. The name we wanted was taken and the people who bought it wanted $14,000 for it! I had to laugh and told them to take a flying leap! We settled on www.dkconstructionpro.com
It was done as a layout in photoshop originally, so putting it to html was a bit different than I am used to. It took about 5 hours to get the basic layout and to set up the email accounts and server settings.
Not too bad...

Monday, June 18, 2007

Website

After showing my "customer" the magazine ad, he stated that he thought it would look good as a main page for a website. When given the assignment to design the layout for a site, I used the magazine ad as a (very) rough draft for the layout. This was the resulting front page:

Promo T-Shirt Container

I designed a t-shirt container about the size of a container of tennis balls for a promotional give-away item at trade shows. This was done in Illustrator and then finally rendered in Bryce as a 3-D object.
The actual assignment was rendered in Illustrator with an example label (below).

Magazine Ad

Magazine ads are much more fun to work with for me. They are in color! Although the newspaper ads were in b&w, they were quite challenging due to the nature of the format restrictions and type restrictions. All of the ads were created with InDesign and Photoshop with prep work in Illustrator.

Newspaper Ads


These are the three newspaper ads I came up with for my class. They are laid out in accordance with newspaper column standards. They are in order: 1, 2 and 3 column ads.

I'm back!

Ok I have been AWOL for over a month now (as if anyone noticed!). I have been working on projects for my Electronic Design course. Mostly logo work, newspaper ads, magazine ads, and web layout.
I have included a sample of the logos I designed for a local company int his post and will be adding more posts containing other types of examples shortly.This company is belongs to a friend of mine. I figured since I the projects would be of this type that I might as well make them useful! So far he has liked everything I showed him from the class. Most of the class was intensive use of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Clear 3D Project


This was done for my typography class. It was a pain in the @$$ as you might imagine. I discovered that the best glue for putting together clear plastic is Testors Clear Parts & Window Maker cement. Takes awhile to dry but dries like glass, no residue or fogginess! Had to learn that the hard way after trashing the first project due to cloudy residue in the globes.

Silly wallpaper...


House music wallpaper I made in about 5 minutes

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Orange Version


Version in orange... seems to have a bit more of a sense of urgency.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Decriminalize

This was a project for my typography class. My first use of Adobe InDesign ( a wonderful program by the way).
The subject matter does reflect my personal views. Check out this former Seattle Police Chief's article.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

For all of us Dell lovers


This one is for all of us who have a dell with that "lovely" factory wallpaper.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Ra's Bar & Grill



Another drawing for the Paizo art challenge...
This one was to include a mummy, ice, and a potion. What better place for these than the local undead tavern!

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Terrible Heights




This is a project I created for an RPG posting forum on paizo's website.
Talk about fun! I got totally wrapped up in this.


Saturday, March 24, 2007

Autoduel Quarterly

This was my final project for Visual Indication. This is a custom cover for a magazine created by Steve Jackson Games as a supplement for their Car Wars board game. The magazine, entitled "Autoduel Quarterly" ran for about 10 years. It is now out of print but is available in HTML and PDF format. The original 'zine was a very small and simple publication, printed first in two colors then later in up to four colors. My version follows the later issues' style, in terms of layout, but includes a fuller color range. I really enjoyed this venture and am planning on trying my hand at further similar projects.
Here it is:

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Dragon

This week we were required to create a full page layout including text. Since I am a long time fan of Dungeons and Dragons, I decided to take a blast from the past and create a fictional "Dragon Magazine" cover.