Filed under: Illustration | Tags: Apocalypse, Brooklyn Bridge, Chrysler Building, Design, Empire State, Flatiron, Flight of the Conchords, New York, Robots
I finished my DCG final early on, so I fiddled around with another concept. I chose to do an alternate cover for the ‘Flight of the Conchords’ soundtrack. I intentionally made it very cartoony to give it a sketched feel. Also, I’m a big fan of tracing. Once finished, I refitted it into a desktop. I learned a great deal about masking and organizing layers while doing this; and I have to say: I’m really digging the Smart Objects feature in CS3.
Done in Photoshop CS3 and Illustrator CS3
Filed under: Branding | Tags: CD Cover, Chemical Brothers, Maya, Southern Lights
This is my final for Designing Computer Graphics. A friend suggested that it looked like the Northern Lights and seeing as I’m trying to be super original, I named the faux Chemical Brothers album, Southern Lights (which occur at the south pole.) I had to play around with the fonts and layout a bit to get it just right. Needless to say, our midway critiques helped out plenty, and that’s saying a lot since I usually don’t take very well to criticism. I also made a logo for a side project. Another friend said that it was “rainbows and bubbles” but I liked it too damned much to not use it, so I took out the colorful gradient, stuck with a nice teal green, and slapped on ‘poduski’, which also adorns -in poor quality- my current banner.
So the Olympics are returning to London -for the third time- meanwhile, Chicago has never hosted. For our Designing Computer Graphics class, we were to redesign the logos for either the 2012 Olympics, the Detroit Zoo, or Orlando International Airport, all of which have hideous logos. Then we made 5 icons for said logo that were similar in style. I went through a quite a few designs and lost a lot of sleep, but in the end, I was thinking too big. They worked well as art (I still might use them down the line) but not so much as logos. Finally, just scribbling on my Wacom (I practice my handwriting whenever I’m bored), trying to think of something, I came up with this swirly font and incorporated a simplified version of Big Ben. It’s funny that just a few lines, a circle, square, and triangle are enough to convey a representation of something so grand and ornate as Big Ben. Same thing with icons, I doodled and tried to think simple. I noticed that I could use the shapes from my logo in my icons. Arguably, all the shapes in the iconset can be found in London 2012, but I mostly used to the ‘L’s, ‘2’s and ‘0’s.
I’ve also included my alternate project for the Detroit Zoo. I worked on both at the same time and the London one came out slightly ahead. But I’m including them here just because I think they’re too good to go to waste. These were sketched on a trip to the Orlando Zoo and then traced over in Illustrator.
Done in Illustrator CS3
Filed under: Potpourri
As with the previous two, this work was also on a brand new medium. This time, film. My class was tasked with making a three minute commercial for a product of our choosing. I chose to do a trailer for a fictitious Hitman game. I didn’t get all the shots I wanted, but I think it turned out rather well, all things considered. Incidentally, I hope to get into the movie business in one form or another once I graduate. The music was shamelessly lifted from the Hitman: Blood Money soundtrack and is composed by the brilliant Jesper Kyd. It’s a big file, so you might want to hunker down. I suggest you watch it in high quality to get the full breadth of the cheesiness and amateurism. Shot on DV and edited in Final Cut Pro.
Filed under: Potpourri
These two were my first foray into Photoshop. Both were assigned in my Art History class. The first is a Fight Club poster made to look like Medieval stained glass. It was done solely by tracing and painting. (I’ve managed to turn the most sophisticated photo-editing software and turn it into MS Paint.) Despite that, I got very positive feedback from my peers.
The second is made to look like pop art inspired by pop culture, in this case: the infamous LOLcats. I had no idea what to do and a friend suggested to copy the style of Roy Lichtenstein. This worked out quite well as it was fairly simple to execute, yet still allowed me to retain that oh-so-coveted glory.
