moving on...

Since March of 2010 I have been an employee of USU's Purchasing Services office. It's been a great gig. The people here are awesome, the job has been easy for the most part and they have been really accommodating to my crazy design class schedule. Heck, they even hired me on in spite of the fact that only a couple months after starting I would be leaving for about five weeks for my study abroad in Switzerland. Good people.

While it's been great and came at a time when I desperately needed to find work, I am moving on. I have interviewed for, been offered and accepted a job at USU's Information Technology department as a graphic designer. I'm sad to leave what is familiar, but excited for the new opportunities that await me and the experience I will gain by having a job in my field of study!

I wanted to find an image for this post, but wasn't sure what it would be, so here's my identity mark. I don't think I've ever posted it here before and so I guess now is as good of a time as any, I mean it is who I am, right?

Poster Design

When my first daughter was born my wife and I wanted to have a poster made for her. We had seen "birth," posters online that were parodies of concert posters and thought they were super awesome. At the time, I was working as a booking agent and had zero know-how in the ways of graphic design or how to begin using Adobe CS. I had a good friend and designer create the poster and from the second we laid eyes on the finished product, we decided it would become a family tradition for each new youngin' to have their own poster.

I created this poster for our second daughter, IZZY "BUG." I obviously needed to include all the info (date, time, weight, height, etc) but still wanted it to be simple and clean and not too cluttered. I feel like I achieved that with the type/image relationship of the lady bug and it's flight path. Be sure to click on the image to see what I mean a bit more legibly. Some of the letters seem to get a little lost viewing it digitally, but the poster is 17x24 and perfectly legible!

THREADLESS.COM HAS MY SHIRT UP FOR SCORING!

Threadless.com chose my t-shirt design to be voted on! Be rad, take two seconds to sign up for an account (I know, a pain, but it's easy, free and you can score other shirts too) and vote on my design! If it gets picked, I get $2,500 plus other cash and awesome stuff!


Here is a link to vote: click HERE!

After you click on "HERE!" it will take you to the voting page. From there click on the score you'd like to give the design. It should then ask you to log in. If you don't have a Threadless.com account, down below you can click to join (is free and takes a few seconds). Once you have joined, you will be able to score the submission (and others). After you vote, it will jump to the next submission...fyi.


If you have any questions, please let me know!

ALL THINGS BFA!

The show was last night and it was a HUGE success! Thanks so much to all who came out to support! We had around 400-500 people who packed the house. It was insane!


The Herald Journal wrote a great feature for the show! Click on the link and check it out HERE!

And here's a few photos from the set up and the event:

USU GRAPHIC DESIGN HITTING THE STREETS...HARD!

Check the downtown banners and gallery walk display images!

Gallery Walk teaser shots (individual shots of each collage)

Awe-inspiring

One of my favorite bands is Thursday. Today they released a new record, which of course is already in my possession, and I am in love with the cover art and inserts. I love finding artists that make me want to create my own art and design! Do yourself a favor and check out Mia Pearlman HERE.

USU GRAPHIC DESIGN BFA PART II

Alright, here is the website! Check it out!

http://www.usudesign.com/

USU GRAPHIC DESIGN BFA 2011

The USU Graphic Design BFA exhibition is coming up in just over a month. I can't believe it! This semester has flown by at an alarming rate and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

For the show, we have partnered with the Caine College of the Arts and the Logan Downtown Alliance. It is going to be huge! At the beginning of the semester we split into groups to come up with ideas for an identity for the show, a location, etc. Our group's identity (I AM) was chosen as the identity for the exhibition. Even though we are all showing our portfolios together, we really wanted to have it focused on the individual first and the graduating class of 2011, as a whole, second. All the advertising posters, banners, mailers, etc. have a portrait of each student, designed by them in order to separate them and frame them as an individual.

A website is in the works and nearly complete. When it's done, I'll post the URL for it. For now though, we have created a Facebook fan page. If you're on FB, take a stroll over that way, "like" the page and spread the word!

Side-By-Side

Here we are. Here's the side-by-side comparison of my first and second attempts of this type of typographic portrait. Though promptly after finishing the second one, I already see areas where I should have done something different, I am still happier with it than the first. Plus, in the second one, on the right, I don't look like I'm about to punch someone's face off.

Typographic Portrait

Last week I decided I wanted to create a typographic portrait of myself. I began researching references and watching tutorials on different methods. After doing some research and running through some different tutorials, I found a method that I liked and decided to go with it. There's still room for improvement for sure, but as a first attempt, I'm ok with it. In the near future I'm going to be re-working it , and when I do, I'll do a side-by-side comparison. Until then, I give you, ME!

Relief Printmaking

This last semester I took relief printmaking. For those who aren't familiar with printmaking terminology, "relief," printmaking is simply making prints by carving into something, in our case, we carved wood. So basically, what is carved out is what the ink will not touch and the rest is what the ink rolls over and onto and when it is run through the press creates the print. I can never say enough about how much I appreciate the art of printmaking, especially woodcuts. There's something that seems more hands-on about relief than other types of print to me and I love it, in spite of the blisters, the slivers and the cuts.

Here are three of the four woodcuts I did this semester:

Urbanscape. I call this one, "ElectriCity."
17x23

We did a "Book of Hours," as a class. We did either a "sinner," or "saint."
I did Billy Idol as a sinner.

My final. This was a four panel piece.
37x60

Flash Site

Our final assignment for my graphic interface design class was to use Flash to create a website. I decided to do mine on Coheed and Cambria.

Click HERE to check it out!

Catching Up!

I feel like I've been totally and completely buried lately (mostly because I have). One of the things I've let slid while feeling bogged down is this blog. Here are some assignments that have come and gone:

This one was our "Boo at the Zoo," assignment for Branding. We were to create marks based on a positioning statement for the boo at the zoo event.

This assignment was to create an abstract mark for a conglomerate company that funds smaller companies and is based in technology-or something like that. Obviously, I haven't looked back on this since finishing ;-)

There's a couple. I'll leave it at that for now and someday (probably at the end of the semester–which is soon approaching) soon I'll take photos of and post my printmaking assignments for the semester.

Finished Flash Project

Here is a link to my first ever attempt at working with Flash. All in all, I really like Flash and this project was great until I had a problem with my original file and had to pull an all-nighter the night before it was due in order to finish. With that being said, I feel like this "finished," clip is still pretty unfinished. But alas, it's done and been handed in.

Army of Darkness quote animation

Final Type Poster

Typo Poster

Typographic poster, that is.

Our next assignment in Interface is to design a poster using only typography from an audio clip of our choosing and later we will animate the quote using Flash. Naturally, I went with a really solidly epic quote. It hails from Army of Darkness.

Today we have digital comps due for critique. Here are a couple of my favorite. I'm really liking this assignment so far. I love my quote (obviously) and working with the type, but it has been a challenge since my quote is so long.

Hi, my name is Jeremy and...

...I have completed my HTML site for Graphic Interface I and amazingly enough have lived to tell about it. Dramatic? Maybe. But this project sucked the life right out of me. I slept less in four nights that I usually sleep in one night. I barely saw my family. I had my mind blown to bits again and again and again. And after all that, I have conquered. Is my site perfect? No. But it I am pretty freaking proud of it since it was my first ever effort at using HTML and CSS coding. Now that I am done, I know there is much I could have done differently and so many things I should have done or maybe not done at all, but nonetheless, I am proud to say I finished, *patting myself on my back* and I am proud of all those who camped out with me in the UR Lab day after day and night after night: Good Job.

I present to you: Design Thinking for Innovation – the website!

*A side note: I built the site according to Safari and Firefox browser standards. It may look funky in other browsers like Internet Explorer or on a PC computer, but hopefully not! 

Yeah, I know...

...every year students make a website for Graphic Interface I about their trip to Switzerland, but I did it anyway, so there.

Here's the home page. It (as well as the rest) is a work-in-progress.

More to come later.

Figure/Groud Mark

A recent branding assignment was to create a mark with our first and last initials based on a figure/ground relationship. I'll admit it, I struggled, but I came a long way from draft to completion.
Rough draft:

drawn and scanned

I call her Nellie.

This is from the first assignment in my Brand Identity class. We had to create a "mark of identity," from a zoo animal. Part of the assignment was to focus on using the "Pen," tool in Illustrator, creating the mark so it would be closed gestalt, as well as using as little detail as possible and still having the mark identifiable. I really liked the assignment.

Here is an early version:

Always interesting to see where the process will take you. That's what I LOVE about design!