The past couple weeks have been pretty hectic and busy to say the least, I recently finished 2 projects and now am juggling three more.  In between all the madness I managed to get some free time to work on a personal illustration which I haven’t had a chance to do in some time.  I originally came up with the idea for this piece based off the elements: land, earth, wind and water, and from there it sort of took it’s own direction.  I hope to make some more in the upcoming weeks perhaps a series of something, also check back soon I should have some new work updated as well as soon as I get the ‘ok’ from the clients.

Dating back to the time I was still in school and throughout my career, like many, I constantly found myself reading up on the current news in my industry to try stay on top of things and to remain relevant.  One of my main sources was reading through design related magazines such as Print, Computer Arts, Computer Projects, Communication Arts, How Magazine, and the list goes on.  I understand the hard economic times everyone is going through these days and that people have to do what is necessary to keep moving forward but one thing I have noticed that is making me think twice about making a purchase is the rise in price of design magazines.  Some of the main publications have increased their prices in 2009 quite significantly compared to last year while the content and amount of material for each magazine seems to remain the same if not even trimmed down a bit.  I purchased one of my favorite magazines, “Communication Arts” back in 2008 and paid $16 for the Interactive Annual and today I noticed this yearly issue was on sale again but for the price of $24.  “Print” is another well known magazine that has increased the price from about $12 an issue now up to $19.  While these prices are still affordable for some, for others I think paying almost $20 for a magazine that has not increased it’s content is starting to get a little costly.  Some magazines such as New York Times and Computer Arts have tried ways to save money for the consumer by slicing the overall width and height a couple inches thus saving a little bit on print production and keeping the prices relatively the same.  I know it’s not easy for all publications to do this and for some it’s much harder than others but I personally think an $8 increase per issue without some added content or additional value is making it a very hard purchase to make. 

Cargo Collective is an easy to use, almost completely customizable publishing platform for designers to showcase their work. They have been around for a while now giving out beta accounts to selected applicants.  I recently had the chance to mess around with my account and I must say it is relatively simple to use as long as you know a little bit of CSS.  The end result is very slick, clean looking site to say the least.  Although they are still in beta at the moment, many designers have already started using this setup as their main site since Cargo allows users to point their own domain to this platform.  Once I started exploring around and updating my work to Cargo, I really wanted to make the switch as well. They already have everything broken out into templates so all you have to do is just upload your work and your basically done. It’s a lot more organized and faster to update work on their platform than it is for me to do on my current site, plus I’m not the best programmer so somethings on my site are rigged pretty badly just to function.  The only thing that made me think twice about making the switch was pointing my domain to another site where I do not have complete control over my files on my own server. Also, while they are adding a meta tag function for the next release, not being able to edit the whole HTML page is kind of a risk to me as well.  But we’ll see how the next version is.....

Allan Jardine a web-developer and designer has developed some really helpful tools that are available for free on his site Spray Media.  I haven’t had a chance to explore all of the applications yet but I did go through the main design ones which include the Grid, Ruler, Cross-Hair and Unit.  As a designer these tools are helpful in many ways and are quick to access.  Simple drag the application name into your bookmark folder and each time you visit a site and are curious about the layout or just need to measure the size of something go to your bookmarks tab and the application will open up on that site. 

For anyone who works in the advertising industry, this video titled “The Vendor Client Relationship” is a must see.  I know it’s been out for a while now but for those of you who have not seen it yet, it’s suburb, hilarious and very much true.  I can relate to pretty much all these situations as I’m sure many of you can as well.

A good friend of mine from Orlando recently just got engaged and was looking for some wedding announcements.  He wanted it to be a two sided post card style with a sort of organic theme, I gladly accepted to help design the announcements for him and his gf.  I’m excited for them as they are both really awesome people, congrats you two..

As I was browsing through Ad Age the other day I came across an interesting post about the designer who rebranded the new Tropicana look, Peter Arnell. Some of you may already know that ever since the newly designed carton came out Tropicana’s profit has plunged 20%. Ad age has the video of Peter explaining his new design and the concept behind it. First off, to the average person who doesn’t know much about design I think his explanation is way too deep and over thought.  The new bottle cap which resembles an orange is designed so when the consumer twists the cap to open the carton they are squeezing fresh orange juice into the carton, if it wasn’t for the video who the heck would have ever thought of that? I can picture some random soccer mom pouring a glass for her kids thinking wow this cap really makes the OJ seem pure and natural.  With all due respect the re-design of Tropicana has failed, Pepsi the manufacture of this brand is already switching back to the old cartons but keeping the new cap.  Pepsi basically spent tons of money re-brandng Tropicana which lasted just a couple months.  With the failure of Tropicana I kind of wonder if the brands sales has really dropped because of the re-design or perhaps it’s a coincidence that the economy has been struggling even more this time around. Some people have been saying the carton looks like a store brand which I can understand, but my only argument with that is despite the fact that it may look like a store brand OJ you still see the words Tropicana, so are you not going to purchase it because you don’t like the new design? 

I was fortunate enough to recently be interviewed on Design Taxi for their Travel Album feature Design City: New York City. The feature focuses on uprising stars in different cities and for this edition it was NY.  Check out the feature here.

I was contacted a couple weeks ago by the curator of the Digital Art Gallery for MacWorld and he told me that Steve Wozniak saw my design at the show and wanted a signed copy for himself to display in his home.  For those who don’t know Steve he is pretty much the Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison of our time, Wozniak created the 1st ever Apple computer in the mid 70’s and is a co-founder of Apple along with Steve Jobs, he was also recently on Dancing With The Stars haha.  When I first heard the news my instant reaction was “Wow, damn what a huge honor, I can’t believe it!”, to have someone with such a status as him wanting one of my design’s is just shocking.  I received the printed poster earlier this week and signed it then dropped it off at the post office where it will now ship back to California to get framed before getting delivered to the legend himself, Steve Wozniak. 

I was browsing around some older work from last year and forgot that I made some marquees for mtvmusic.com, these weren’t used but I still like the concept of them. First one is based off David Bowie’s Space Oddity, followed by Daft Punk and lastly the classic Snoop Dogg album Doggystyle.

I submitted an illustration a couple months ago for the OFFF 2009 Catalogue and I just received word the other day that my design was selected and will appear in the book. Thanks OFFF!

One thing that I really like about watching movies besides the previews is the title sequences in the beginning of the film.  Every movie has it’s own creative way of displaying the credits and it’s really inspiring to see what they come up with and from which studio. I recently came across The Art Of The Title which has a nice amount of archived movie titles layed out in a storyboard frame as well as a link to the actual clip.  This site is definitely worth checking out even if your not into movies, just looking over all the art of the storyboards is quite a site to see. 

As I mentioned the other day I was working on some playlisting stuff for mtvmusic.com, well the official launch of the new feature is now up.  This definitely makes it a lot easier to listen and watch music videos all day especially at work, just add your favorite songs and let them play continuously. You can also view other popular playlists as well as share your own.  Mtvmusic.com is also working on getting additional licenses for their music videos so that all the good people over in the UK will soon be able to watch their favorite artists. 

For those who have visited mtvmusic.com and always wondered if there would ever be any type of play list feature available, it has now arrived.  I worked and help design this feature late last year and after some testing it is now live.  The feature is simply and easy to use and allows users to add songs to their quicklist, reorder the list, remove songs, etc.. all this without having to login. I am currently working on a couple of marquee images for the main carousel of the site and I will post those on the blog when they are completed.

Apologies for the lack of updates lately, I have been pretty busy working on a couple of different pitches that I can’t name right now but as soon as anything is confirmed I will updated the news.  Anyways, I recently had the chance to work with Media Tronica on a project for the soft drink companyFanta.  We created an online game that’s sort of reminiscing to Dance Dance Revolution where you and someone else battle (Dance) head to head for 30 seconds to pulsing beats, thumping speakers and a shimmering discoball. The objective of the game is to earn points by performing various dance moves on beat with the music.  You can also embed this game to share and try to out dance your opponents.