Fortunately, they were happy with the minor touchups I made while they sat and watched over my shoulder. I should have never agreed to this, but I wanted to help in the 10 minutes or so I was allotted. Unfortunately, they liked it enough that it took off the pressure for re-doing a more thought out logo, despite the fact that my creative side had been mulling it over at first mention. I suppose there is a lesson in there somewhere, because I basically helped them out of urgently needing to re-design their identity, which I really wanted to do.

I had no way to shut off my creative brain from wanting to “solve” this for them, however, so I decided to create a logo anyway, since I liked the direction it was going, and here it is.

My enthusiasm for this mark continued, so I created a basic ID system for it, along with a spec sheet. One of the goals of designing a logo, besides simplicity, elegance, and versatility, is giving it more than one “read.” What I mean by this when you can see more than one meaning in the logo.

Case in point, the old Bank of America logo with the flying bird that could be made out in the joining of the letterforms. I’m not comparing the level of my Aerofoam logo design to the elegance of this Bank of America mark, but mind does have multiple reads, which is one of the goals of most logo designers.

The identity system utilizes screened back airplane blueprints for texture, and a larger watermark of the logotype on all three elements.

I made this image of the business card out-of-scale to the other elements so it would be easier to see for the purposes of this page.

The spec sheet is a bit more fanciful, and in real life a client probably wouldn’t want to “waste” all the space at the top with a repeating logo, despite the pleasing effect.

Oftentimes clients feel an overwhelming urge to fill every last bit of space with text, since they are paying for the printing, after all.

I suppose if I wanted to get really ambitious I’d create an annual report, but it’s time to get back to my paying projects now.

For one thing, his current logo showed type that had numerous outlines on it, which didn’t work well when reduced in size on a business card. It also didn’t read well on a T-Shirt. I kept the same type of “collegiate” font, and it seemed a natural to give him a dog with a university cap, since he had photos of dogs in university caps on his website and he said that was what people wanted to see the most. It also didn’t hurt that this image perfectly illustrated his company name.

We started her project by looking at lots of imagery, which I posted on the online interactive whiteboard  service Stixy.com. She told me she liked blues and greens, and gave me exmples of a few other sites she liked that had both a retro/cute factor and a certain sex appeal. This gave me enough direction to get started and what emerged was the desire for a nostaligic feel with a modern twist.

The above image caught her eye for a number of reasons, mainly because of color, but also for the imaginary fuzzy memories it seems to evoke. The ones that followed were from photos of found graffiti along with pinups and airplane bomber girls.

She definitely wanted to have a woman as part of her logo, so my job was to find a perfect pose and create the logo from it. From this point on it became a game of cutting and pasting pinup girls, turning them into digital “paper” dolls, with me manipulating their limbs this way and that until I got the perfect pose.

From here, however, I would need to get a model to put in this pose as plagarism is not my strong suit. I didn’t want to rip off anyone else’s work, so I set to finding a model.

Since I don’t have a lot of female friends who are pin-up models, the simplest thing to do was get on Flickr and contact a girl that might be interested in posing.

Turns out the perfect girl lived in Sweden, but she will willing to do the job remotely for a fair price, so I hired her to do the pose. Incredibly, she took her own photos and posed from her living room, and was able to make the necessary changes to get the perfect angles.

Once I had the reference photo, I set to work on adjusting contrast and some slight figure adjustments, and had my girl.

I put her in illustrator and once I got her looking the way I wanted, added some type. I used a font called “B-Movie” as the basis for the logotype, and made changes to the letterforms here and there to give them a more rounded feel. I left them alone for the “Served Hot” bit.

Now a theme was emerging and I discussed the idea of creating an identity that harkened back to old diner menus, which was well-received. This would also translate well for a webpage. I wanted to create a sense of playfulness on the page, and came up with some restaurant terms for the navigation, such as “Daily Specials,” “Our Entrées” and “Hot Plates.” Spinning off of this was a “Motto,” which was sometimes put on family diner menus, and “Hot off the Grill,” for press releases.

I built the site on the ExpressionEngine CMS platform, which to non-web people means that she can edit the website herself with the help of a fairly sophisticated framework that allows for password protected photo galleries, automatic press-release formatting, and fancy magazine flipbooks. Visit High Profile Media online.

They had an outdated logo that was a very detailed drawing of a building crane and wanted something much simpler. They had lots of high quality photographs of men on the job, and the sheer size of the pipes they installed dwarfed the men inside them. If a pipe were to burst under the freeway, this is the company the city calls to fix it.

So I’m thinking: Big. Pipes. Underground. Drilling. Water. Construction.

They tell me the only caveat is that orange should be in the color palette as they already had this color on much of their equipment. The logo should be readable really small and also really big. On the side of the freeway big. I rolled up my sleeves and started drawing.

Here is a selection of some of the designs I presented.

This first design really spells out that this company drills holes in the ground, and makes use of the type itself. The next design is more abstract, and could give the feeling of being either below the surface, in a trench, or in a dugout area.

This design drew heavily on a pattern that I saw on the front of one of the drills I photographed. Though abstract, it conveys a sense of strength and toughness.

This logo takes a bird’s eye view of a pipe, and the outer shape was taken directly from a pipe I saw in one of their photographs. The configuration with the logo in the center of the type gives it a more formal appearance.

This version takes a more illustrative approach, giving a three-quarter view of a pipe. I’ve also utilized gradients, which is a less traditional, but very contemporary approach.

This next logo is my personal favorite, as it is involves simple shapes, but gives a sense of perspective and also of equipment/construction. The client liked it, but wanted something simpler still.

I took it one step further toward simplicity, and gave the orange more priority.

In the end, the client opted for the utmost in simplicity, a drilling down of sorts in their quest for visual representation of their field, and asked for a plain circle. They liked their previous typeface, Bauhaus, but wanted an update, so I chose Utopy, which is very similar to Bauhaus, but has breaks in the letterforms. The lowercase “b” feels somewhat pipelike, and they were very happy with the finished mark.

This is a logo I designed for an iPhone application that would enable the user to reap the same rewards as are offered for paper versions of loyalty cards. The client wanted it to read equally well on its own, and as a small iPhone app icon. We went through several color studies before settling on yellow and blue. This project involved creating a full-color version with a gradient, a flat 4-color version, and a b/w version with and without a gradient. I also provided a PDF styleguide.

The logo has been put on posters, t-shirts, basketballs, etc. and has been printed in 2-color and one-color. The folks at the Scoring Factory decided they wanted a more streamlined version with more emphasis on the word “Scoring,” so I created the variation below, which has been well-received.

Here is a version on black. Notice I added a subtle radial background in dark gray so that the black shadow sides of the buildings didn’t get lost.

Here is the revised logo applied on a black T-shirt.

When it came time to create a promotional poster, I was given this image of a basketball player taken with a point-and-shoot camera. The background was shadowed and busy, so that made cutting out the image rather tedius.

Luckily, there are two tools available to designers that allow them to get around such obstacles: creativity+Photoshop. When I have a low resolution or grainy image to start with, there are a few ways to go.

I chose to reduce the image to black and white, and then colorize it. From there, I wanted to give it a feeling of crazy motion. I added some diagonals for dimension, and brightened the color for impact.

As it happens, they wanted something more conservative, and opted for a version with a plain gray background. I still prefer where this one was going….

Here’s a logo I did for a new basketball team in Pittsburgh, PA. They wanted something with an old train and a basketball in it that could be embroidered onto shorts and jerseys and provided me with the color palette.

Krafton Publishing was a start-up company that published wall calendars. I love it when the product and the company name lend themselves so well to each other. I also designed a number of their calendars, but because of their low budget, had to work really hard to get the photography they had to look good. Also, each 18-month calendar had a number of events in it…the calendars were printed in Hong Kong and we had to proof and mark them up and then send back to Hong Kong. It was quite a production. In the end, I liked the logo the best.

The logotype was loosely inspired a bit by the Allman Bros. script, and they wanted something that would also work as a monogram. After some experimenting, I decided to keep it fairly simple, and dropped the swash from the final “E”.

While looking over old album covers from the 70s, I came across some script from an old Crosby Still & Nash album that servied as the inspiration for the photo styling. Coincidentally, the lead guitarist had a giant Malamute dog, but since we weren’t doing a parody of the cover, it wasn’t a consideration.

They didn’t have the budget to fly to Austria for the photo shoot, so I worked remotely art directing the photographer. This group of musicians was extremely low-key, and no elaborate styling was going to work.

Above is the original photograph I received from the photographer. You will notice that in addition to the color toning, I added a burlap texture, and did some touch-up on each member, including adding the monogram I created on a t-shirt.

On the inside of the package, I wanted to continue the wood texture, which ended up on the CD itself, and for the booklet I added more color and imagery inspired from the song lyrics.

For the style of the illustration I wanted the simplicity of a woodcut but wanted it to be modern looking and scale down well and still be recognizable at a small size. One of the reason I chose the mountain “range” as part of the image as it is often used in designs related to the San Gabriel Valley, where the City of Monrovia is located.
I chose the Syracuse font because of it’s Arts and Crafts feeling. Here is a formal description of the font: “Syracuse is a font inspired by the typefaces of the “Arts & Crafts” designers of the early 20th Century. As such, it has a distinct “hand” look. In “Syracuse” you will find hints of Dard Hunter’s work at the Roycrofters in East Aurora, New York, a little of the Art Nouveau style of 1900 Vienna, even a touch of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s design ideas in Glasgow, Scotland. The font was named for the city in New York where Gustav Stickley produced his Craftsman furniture.”

The logo also had to be able to accommodate the names of three stations, and so I created an area below the image that could change according to which station they needed it for. I also did color variations for each station, but they decided to keep the colors of all of them identical.

Following the approval of the logo, I was commissioned to design a business card and letterhead, and then a website. The station wanted the website to convey both television and coordinate with the newly established branding. They also wanted to maintain the site themselves, and have it be easy for people to scroll through the most recent videos.

I created the new website on the WordPress platform, and kept with a look consistent with the new logo and color palette. Visit the KGEM-TV website.