Blog 5: Laughing Lion Design

Laughing Lion Design has some very nice graphic design and illustration works. It doesn't have all the fancy tutorials and freebies like the others. But it's nice to look at this guys work. He has logos and posters and all kinds of things. I like his work.

Blog 4: Inspiredology

Inspiredology is a 'Design Inspiration Lab' as they call it on the website. I believe it is also with how much stuff they have on it that can inspire some graphic designers. Like the other blog they have tutorials and freebies and stuff like that but this site has videos, photography and even news. One of the best sites I've seen so far for inspiring graphic designers.

Blog 3: Design M.ag

Design M.ag is a very helpful site for anyone looking to design a web page. It has many different web pages that you can get ideas from and many different ways to create the same thing using different programs. The also have interviews with web designers as well as tutorials and freebies to download. Overall good site.

Blog 2: Logo Design Love

Logo Design Love is a site that can help you with ideas on creating your own logo. It it very useful. It has many ways of creating simple yet effective personal logos. It also talks about famous logos and the history behind them. I like this site, it is very useful and can really help with designing a logo.

Blog 1: David Airey

David Airey has a nice blog for aspiring graphic designers. The content he has in his blog is very nice and could inspire some new graphic designers. At the same time some of the advertisements he has in there could reveal the truth about advertising and what its doing to the public. So it's kind of inspiring in different ways, but I don't really see any of his own work unless I'm looking at it wrong. Good blog, but I think he needs to put more of his own work in it if he is a graphic designer.

Week 9.2: The Pool Table

I did this project in my Multimedia 2 class at South University. Using the Maya program I created the pool table using basic polygons. A rounded edged cube is the base for the table then i took the middle of the top of the table and sunk it into itself. I then took the edges of the felt and pushed them into the sides and turned the felt green. I then created the pool sticks using basic cylinders with a ball at the end (that you can't see). Then I put the pockets in the table by cutting out holes in the 4 corners (when I did this I forgot about the center pockets, I will be fixing this). Then I put the 3 lights on the table to make it look more like its in a bar and to brighten up the balls a bit. The balls were last though. I created them using the rounded edge cube again and put flat cylinders on them for the lower numbered balls such as 1-9. Once I got to 10 it became too crowded to read how many there were just by looking at it. So to make it easier and to distinguish the low balls from the high balls I put the actual number on the high balls. Once I was done creating the dice I put them in clear basic spheres and put them in order on the table.

Week 9.1: Personal Logo

I put a lot of thought into my personal logo. I wanted one that would kind of describe me in a way. I came up with many ideas and put a lot of descriptive words on paper of things I liked. Then, I went a completely different direction with it by using horoscopes. My Chinese horoscope animal is the Dragon and my American horoscope animal is the Leo. So I came up with a few logos for each of them and ended up going with this one. It came out kinda tribal when I drew the lions head so I intentionally made it look even more tribal but still recognizable as a lion. I started with the mouth and then the chin hair and I went on it just started to look like kind of tribal so I purposely made the rest of it look that way. The type is actually Tribal; I found that online.

Week 8.2: The Pineapple Fountain

This is a photo I took in Charleston, SC of the pineapple fountain down near The Battery. I did this project in my digital photography class at Trident Tech. The teacher said to take a photo and play with the eraser tool and paint brush tool. I ended up erasing everything except the fountain and putting a bit of color in it using the paint brush tool. The green and kind of redish colors that are in the corners, along with all the others, all come from the photo itself using the eyedropper tool. Then, found a brush that had a straight edge on one side and something to border with on the other. I called it The Pineapple Fountain and this is what I came up with.

Week 8.1: Parody Crate Label

This is a project I did in my Package Design class. The project was to research old crate labels such as apple crates and stuff like that. So I looked up a few and most of them looked like clip art pasted on a piece of paper and stuck on a crate. I wanted it to look somewhat like that when i did it. The project also was to do a parody of one. The teacher gave us choices on what to do and Assorted Beach Trash was the one I picked out. So I found a clip art of a crushed and dented soda can and changed the colors on it. I then made up a name and a tag line for it. Assorted beach trash had to have a picture of a beach behind it too. So I found a low resolution picture online and put a filter on it so it kind of blurred and made a nice texture at the same time. Most of the crate labels I found also had a thick border around them so I put one on here and this is what I came up with.

Week 7.2: TTC Internet Radio Poster Vol. 2

Again this is the same project as the previous one so I wont go into as much detail about it. The process was the same for the background and the logo at the bottom (which again I take no credit for). This time I decided to use drums as the focus of the poster. This was a bit more difficult to cut out of the photo it was in because of the all little pieces that had to be cut out. To make it easier though I used the Quick Mask tool in Photoshop along with the paintbrush tool. Once I cut it out I put it in the place of the guitar, took out the radio signals, and moved the lightning bolts to the symbols. I didn't use the radio signals because I could really find anything on the drums that could symbolize a radio tower. So I cut them out of the poster completely and came up with this.

Week 7.1: TTC Internet Radio Poster Vol. 1

I did this project as a school project and a poster contest. Trident Technical College was opening their own radio station on the internet at the time and needed a way to promote it. So my class was asked to make posters to turn in so they could ask the judges which one was best. I wasn't exactly sure what they were going to play on the radio station, but I had been back to the radio station part of the school where they teach students how to work the keyboard and everything else that goes on behind the scenes at a radio station and I noticed a Boston record. So I figured they might play a little classic rock now and then. So I thought of the best classic rock bands and singers I could think of and tried to make a homage to them at the same time that was making a promotional poster. Mostly just make a promotional poster and have a little bit of classic rock in it. I went with the Jimi Hendrix guitar because it is recognizable if you know a little bit about him but at the same time it's a guitar and can symbolize all kinds of music. I did have a flat background at first but it made everything look flat. So I used some filters in Photoshop and put a lot of grain texture into the background and blurred it just a tad. Once that was done the guitar on top  really popped out. Then to add a little flare to it, and to make ya do a double take if ya only see it out the corner of your eye, I put in the really lightning bolts on the strings. I also used the logo they were going for as a type of broadcasting signal as if the guitar was sending out radio waves to the entire world. The logo at the bottom was not created by me so I take no credit for it.

Week 6.2: Preservation of Persistent Pollinators

This poster is help save the bees! At the time I created this there was a bee crisis and the project was to make a poster for disaster relief of some sort and I choose to do an animal relief and remembered hearing something about bees disappearing or dying off. (All of this is completely fake by the way. Every bit of this is fictional: the company, the logo and everything.) So I made up an non-profit organization to help notify people of the problem. I went through many names and most of them were as silly as the one I chose to be the final name. Preservation of Persistent Pollinators. Since it was about bees the logo choice was obvious. Doing a honeycomb for the logo. Then I got creative and thought about how I can make this really dramatic. I thought to myself, "how about flying dead bees?!" So I came up with many concepts and decided on the one you see here. With bones as the wings and the skull of a bee as the head. Then I had to come up with a phrase to put on this particular poster. Something dramatic but not too dramatic that people will just overlook it. So I went with something cliche and I think it made it kinda funny at the same time. I also needed something else because part of the project called for 2 elements that were related. So I created a flower since they are bees and that is what they go after to create the honey. I chose the color scheme purple and yellow because they are opposites and I didn't choose the colors till I created the flower with the yellow center.

Week 6.1: Manson CD Cover

This is a project I did in one of my Photoshop classes at Trident Tech. We were supposed to be remaking a CD cover for any artist of our choice and I wanted to The Best of Marilyn Manson CD. I recreated his logo as best I could and put his name around it. The name of the CD is below that. Then I played around the brush tool a bit because I haven't used that in any of my projects. Then I went online and found a picture of these lips that reminded me a lot of Manson and The Rocky Horror Picture Show but that's not the point. I cleaned up the lips as much as possible and put a stroke around them after I simplified them. I placed in the opposite corner of the title and put the brushes I played with in random spots in the background. I also tried not to cover up as much of the type as possible because I tried that and you couldn't read it.

Week 5.2: Clooney for President

This is project I did in my Advanced Photoshop class at Trident Tech. We were spost to pick a famous celebrity and make a campaign for them. So I chose George Clooney for President.
I started with the background by finding a stock image of the American Flag. I stretched it a bit and blurred it just a tad so it looked like a background and didnt take away from the foreground. Then I found a high res photo of Clooney and photoshoped him a little bit. Fixed a few blemishes in his face and neck and cut him out of the photo he was in. Then I had to find another suit for him because the one he was wearing was kind of casual. So I already this photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger wearing a suit. So I cut the suit out and pasted it on Clooney. Of course I had to do a few touch ups to make it fit just right. Then I went online to find some of his most famous quotes and choose one that he might say on a campaign poster. Couldn't really find one that fit perfectly, but I liked the quote "The only failure is not to try." So I put that in where it looked appropriate then made up a website for his campaign and stuck it in the corner. Then using the same font as the rest of it I put in the top George Clooney for President. I've seen a few campaign posters and most of em don't really emphasize the first name, just the last name. So I made his last name the biggest word and put his first name on top in a smaller font size. Then I put the year he was running for and it was 2008 at the time and the elections were going on so I put 08 as his year.

Week 5.1: Amalgamated Industries Inc.© The Widget the World Awaits™

I created this logo using the program Adobe Illustrator. Using nothing but type and a couple circles. Very simple design, but it looks very industrial. The A is the only actual type in the logo other than the Amalgmated at the bottom. All I did was take the A and put 2 dots for the 2 I's on the outer slant of the A. It didn't look right at first because the lower dot came down farther than the rest of the A. So I extended the A down a bit so it was level with the bottom of the dot. I also skewed the dots a little so that they looked like they were slanting with the rest of the I.
I used the colors red and black because the older logo the company had was black type with a single red dot over the I. I didn't do it that way because with all the rest black it looked a bit heavy. So I took the biggest part of the logo and made that red and it made it look a lot less heavy. Finally, I put the company name below the logo using the Bauhaus 93 font.

Week 4.2: Caslon Brush Portrait

This is poster I did of William Caslon I. Did the research and wrote all of it myself. The portrait I did of him is made of out of nothing but the letter V in Adobe Caslon. I found the best picture of him I could of him online and basically traced him using lines of Vs. I used that to start and then started to shade it in so that it actually looked like him. Took me a few days to do it because I was still trying to get used to the brush tool.

Week 4.1: Cooper River Bridge Run

This is the poster I did for the Cooper River Bridge Run in 2009. When I did the poster, obviously I had to have the bridge in it. So I modified it just a bit by rounding some of the edges and getting rid of the strings. I mostly got rid of the strings because you couldn't see them with everything in front of them. When I finished modifying the bridge it was still too big to put the entire bridge in the poster so I cut about half of it off and just put one of the towers in the poster. Then, since it is South Carolina I figured I would put a palm tree in it. So I found a good picture of a palm tree and traced it in illustrator. Then cut out parts I didn't need and simplified it as much as I could, but still tried to keep it looking like a palm tree. Then, I chose my colors for the poster. I picked red, orange and blue. I made the background a gradient of orange and light orange that almost looks yellow so that it looks like a sun in the sky. I made the tree orange and the bridge red. Then, I had to figure out a way to put the type in it some how. For the contest it was required to put the words "32nd Annual Cooper River Bridge Run 10K April 4th 2009 Charleston, SC." So I decided to put a box on top of the background and made it transparent enough to still see the background but still enough to put type on top of it and be able to read it. Took me a while to get it just where i wanted it. Next I had to figure out where I wanted to place the type. By this time I had already decided to make the type the focus of the poster. Meaning the type is what i wanted you to see first then get closer to read it and notice the bridge in the back. I finally just started putting things on the screen after i picked the typeface. I put everything in order and made the words that were more important bigger such as the date. The poster still looked a bit flat though so I thought about it for a while and figured it out. The type needs to pop and then the rest will pop with it. So I double the type to make it look the words had a slight red outline with brought em off the poster just a bit. I didn't want to put a drop shadow on them because then it would pop too much. But, I wanted to make the poster look a bit fun and I think I accomplished that much.

Week 3.2: Through the Fire and Flames

This was a project a did Typography class called Abstract Song Interpretations. I did the song Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce. I listened to the song mutiple times to try and understand the feelings behind the song. I ended up taking all the lyrics for the chorus and using those as the big words and the outline for the guitar. I created this as I listened to it and every time they got loud or screamed I made the corresponding word have that feeling in it. For the background I took the full lyrics and made them into a very small typeface and layered it as a background to just put a little bit of texture in it. It looked a bit flat without it so it needed something.

Week 3.1: CD Box Set - Aerosmith

This is the CD Box Set I created for Exit Portfolio. I came up with the idea to do Aerosmith when I was started thinking who I wanted to do for the project. I remembered a few of their older albums and wanted to incorporate those albums in the background and see anyone caught them. The spots in the background are cow spots and then there's the circles on top of those. The cow spots are inspired by the Get A Grip album and the Circles are inspired by the Big Ones album. Aerosmith has multiple logos that are all pretty much the same just changed around a little bit. So for the Logo I just chose the best one i could find and did a little bit of changing myself. I thought about making it just plain white with a faint black shadow underneath, but it didn't look right. So I played with the filters in Photoshop a bit and kinda liked the film grain effect i had it on it. Then I changed the color to gold so this box set would be like a "Gold Edition" or something. The photo of the entire band on top is the best and very high quality photo I could find. I did have a different photo up there but again it didn't feel right and it had a lot of artifacting in it and it was blurry. So I absolutely had to find another photo that was at least print quality, and this photo had a lot of color in it and it was them playing a song and not just posing for the camera. Now the two photos in the top are the two most popular people in the band. Steven Tyler on the left singing a slow song and Joe Perry playing the guitar. I thought of the two photos as a competition between Tyler and Perry because I heard they don't really get along with each other, but they play together like the best of friends and they still sound awesome to this day. It was kinda hard to make the photos of the two look like they were ghosts. The Tyler photo was easy because it was black and white but when I turned Perry black and white and tried to do the same effect it didn't work. So it took me a few days to do that, but i finally got it by playing around with the features a bit.

Week 2.2: The Magnolia Bridge

This photograph was taken also when I lived back in Charleston and visited the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. This one is called The Magnolia Bridge. It is a beautiful bridge and i just had to take a photo of it. With the reflection coming off the water and the architecture of the bridge itself...it is too beautiful not to take a photo. Even though it's nice to have 2 of my family members in this photograph, I think it would have been better not to get them in the photo. (I don't know who the guy on the tree is, but the other guy in blue is my Uncle Harold and the lady is my Aunt Pat.) There are a couple things I could have done better with the photograph, but as an amateur photographer back then I think it came out nicely.

Week 2.1: The Giant Gladiola

Back when I used to live in Charleston, I visited the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens with some of my family that came down to see me. We all walked around the enormous plantation and gardens all day and i took lots of photographs. One photograph i got was of a flower called a Gladiola and it was no ordinary flower. This flower was huge! I took this photograph of it with the pond in the back so you can't really see how big the flower is, but it had to be at least 10 inches across. It was bigger than my head. So this is one of my favorite photographs I have taken.

Week 1.2: Twisted Nightmare Magazine Cover

This is the magazine I created for another project at Trident Technical College. The project was to create a 10 page magazine about anything the student wanted to do. I love Rock Music so I chose to do the Top 10 Metal Albums of 2008. Of course this is only the cover, but the inside of the magazine is just as great as this cover. The background is a few of the albums in the top 10 cut into the words Twisted Nightmare Magazine (which is what I named the magazine). The black and white see through stripes on top of the words in the background are the same stripes on the famous Van Halen guitar. The guitar i created in Adobe Illustrator along with the phoenix peace sign on the bottom it. The typeface was a bit hard to read so i doubled the type on top of each other and made them two different colors so they are able to be read easier.
I know you can't see the inside of the magazine, but I'll tell you about it very briefly. Everything in the magazine i created myself except for the photographs. I created my own advertisements, which were fake of course, but they completed the magazine. I even created concert advertisements and new album advertisements. I still have to make a few changes to some things inside of it, but for now I believe this is one of my best creations.

-Brian Howell

Week 1.1: Rock 'N' Roll Stamps

I was asked to create some stamps for one of my classes at Trident Technical College. I first created them to the specifications of the project. Once i was finished and the class was over I had the chance to create the stamps the way I wanted to create them. I chose to stay with the rock theme i had going but narrow down the images on the stamp and make it look as though the image on the stamp went with the stamp itself. The way i had it before it looked like I just put some random pictures on the stamp and called it finished. This time I played around with the colors and the effects in Adobe Photoshop. That was after i had created the drawings and background images in Adobe Illustrator.
I came up with the idea to create stamps with a sort of "dead" or "bone" theme along with the rock theme. So I did a little research about each of the kinds of rock 'n' roll I used and used some sort of iconic image for each. Such as the Mohawk on the skull which is very common in Punk Rock, and the electric guitars in the Heavy Metal, and the "devil horn" sign in the Hard Rock. So there you have it.
-Brian Howell