Shameless Self Promotion, Part 2

I've just completed a redesign of The Easy Way Out website. The Easy Way out is a locally owned and operated personal chef service that caters to families and busy professionals. The previous site was not getting updated and did not have the structure necessary to accommodate new offerings such as the classes she teaches. Since the chef’s specialty is Latin American cuisine, I kept the color palette warm and drew the pattern by hand in illustrator to give a more authentic Latin American feel to the site.

I kept the design simple and clean to showcase large photos of the chef’s beautiful recipes. Although I disagree with the decision to choose the same red as the top and bottom friezes as well as the decision to remove the black border that would have distinguished the background from the active site area, I think the resulting site turned out very well. The chef is very pleased with the redesign; she felt that we successfully achieved the objectives outlined in the creative brief.

Below is a screengrab of my preferred version, visit www.theeasywayout.net to see the live site.

Sugar Coated Evil Comes to Zazzle

I've used the saying "Sugar Coated Evil" for quite some time now just in jest to describe myself. And I was thinking it might make a good t-shirt...so after a bit of work I've developed a Sugar Coated Evil line of products on Zazzle. I've got just a few items to start and I have plans to add another line or two of items down the line. So for now, you can just enjoy being evil.

Unfortanate Packaging

Or at least price label placement. I was recently out purchasing Mario Kart for the Nintendo Wii and noticed this other game...



...either the employee at the game store was being very clever or the package designer needs to take a minute to think about how the final package will appear on store shelves. Either way, I was amused!

Making A Zine: The story behind the covers for HZ-12: Nightmares and Dreamscapes

This is my fourth entry for the handmade HOWiezine (or 'zine) as it is affectionately known, made by members of the HOW Design Forum. After building up my confidence and style on my three previous zines, I decided it was time to go for the gold and ask for the covers. This theme is very near and dear to me, as I have always been fascinated by dreams.

While I was looking for inspiration for the covers, I noticed a great painting while waiting for my haircut. It was pretty abstract, but I could make out some figures and within those figures, I discovered more figures. I had found my inspiration: a sort of hybrid Dali/Escher style where there were images within images. Silly me…art doesn't work that way…as I began my preliminary sketches, I soon discovered that this simply wasn't going to work with my style or patience. So I began concepting some more.


During the course of my research and sketching, I remembered my very cool Egyptian Book of the Dead. So I began playing around with the wedjat eye, the emblem for the falcon sky god, Horus. While the of of Horus doesn't really a direction relation to dreams (the right eye is active/solar and the left eye is passive/lunar), I decided to develop my own two eyes that would be tied more closely to dreams for the covers. I also decided that if you were to put both the front and back cover together, the two eyes would be a complete illustration. I initially thought about doing the inside pages on vellum that were glued to the front cover and the the pupils on each eye would be cut out so you could see the image on the vellum backwards (like how our eyes capture images), however I soon realized that printing to vellum was not a good solution, it was going to be expensive, the ink didn't seem to stick so well and the paper curled horribly, so to keep production sane (as I knew I'd be finishing up at the last minute), I stuck with my tried and true double sided paper for now. (I know, I know, I need to be more paper adventurous!)



The front cover eye is the nightmare eye and is wide open and bloodshot due to the lack of sleep from the nightmares. I used the color red here to convey, anger, madness, energy and unease. The swirl pattern reflects the wedjat eye, looking into the pupil into the nightmares that haunt this person. The burned in stars show the scars that the nightmares have left (see the inside front cover for more about this).



Then I realized I was only halfway done! My standard two zine pages have been side one: illustration, side two: poem tied to illustration. How in the world was I going to cram a poem and an illo together on the inside covers? I experimented with several placement options and decided to "book end" the poems: inside front cover would be on the left, inside back cover would be on the right. I decided to connect the inside cover pages too, so that they could be put next to each other as a diptych.

So I began work on the poems in between thumbnails for the front covers. The poems both seemed to come pretty easily while I was listening to my creative mix on iTunes,which was good, I could spend more time on the illustrations. The dreamscape illo was pretty easy: an image of a serene sleeper underneath the moonlit sky. I added in a few little dream elements: an Egyptian style boat, a couple in love, and a forest of trees that are ghosted into the image to hint at the fertile imagination of dreams.


The nightmare illo was a bit tougher. I had trouble finding the position of the dreamer for this one. And since I decided to mention Morpheus (Greek god of dreams) by name, how was I going to depict him/her? I drew a dude in a dark cloak, kinda a tribute to Neil Gaiman's Sandman and felt that I could work with it once I got it into Illustrator and Photoshop.



Now that my sketches were done and I scanned them and placed them into Illustrator, where I went over them with the paintbrush tool. I used the paintbrush tool and my Wacom tablet to create a variable line width that mimics drawing by hand for the outlines. I then go back in and "fill in" flat color (as a separate layer under the outlines) using the pen tool. I tend to build my files with a lot of layers to the Photoshop end of things go a bit smoother. So I built the eyes (outside covers) first and they came together nicely.

I then worked on the dreamscape illustration and it came together quicker than I planned. Which means only one thing, the nightmare illustration gave me, well nightmares…

I created the dreamer first and then I worked on Morpheus. Morpheus looked horrible! I tried several variations and each one got progressively worse. And with each day ticking away, I knew that I didn't have much time left to figure out how to render him. I decided to let the piece sit and I'd think about it for awhile. That did the trick, I realized that Morpheus did not have to appear as a person. Since I used the crescent (light) moon as the "protector" of dreams, why not use the "new (dark) moon" as the "tormentor"? And instead of a more traditional cloak, why not use those cool twisted stars from the front cover to make up the cloak? This idea worked out extremely well. The stars have nice jagged edges and when I put them into the shape of the cloak, they had the appearance of either being painful and/or bugs crawling across the dreamer's skin.



Now for the type. I originally wanted to have a cool ambigram for the front cover done by my talented friend Nikita. Alas, due to time constraints, it just was not possible. So I went with plan B: I winged it. I had already chosen two different typefaces for each poem. I tried a few different fonts for the title and eventually settled on my old friend Zapfino, which I blurred a tinted a bit, like a dream coming into focus. I then looked at the type for the poems and decided that it would be best to use the same typeface for both poems and use color to distinguish the nightmare from the dreamscape. I then brushed in white behind the type to resemble "clouds" or comic book style "dream bubbles" on each poem to maximize the illustration as well as tie in the type.



That's basically it, thanks for taking the time to read through this, and if you have any questions, just ask!

That's Unfortunate...

We had several severe storms roll through our area this past week. My favorite local news channel was bumped off the air at one point, so I switched to another station. I think the folks in the graphics department need to talk with the people who post the severe weather notices because as you can see, there was a little unfornatune placement of a severe weather notice…

Mac Attack!

So after the HOW Conference and talking to some of my designer friends, I finally caved and decided to upgrade my 6-year old G4 to a brand spankin' new 24-inch iMac. I got a refurb machine of the new previous generation aluminum iMacs. The day before it arrived, I thought to myself..."hmm...is it possible that the 24-inch iMac will be too big for my needs?" Then it arrived, holey Macintosh! This sucker is huge, especially compared to my tiny my old 17-inch monitor. I hooked it up and wow! The screen is super bright and enormous. I think I got a headache the first few hours of looking at it. But then I opened a few programs. Oh the extra space! And watching LOST online fullscreen will never be the same again...I'm getting used to my new HUGE screen, and I'm lovin' it more and more with each passing day.

So kudos to you, Apple: the new thin keyboard is wicked cool, the iMac itself is a brilliant design and engineering piece, and migration from my old Mac was very painless.

HOW Design Conferernce 2008 Review

I was fortunate enough to attend my fourth HOW Design Conference May 18-21 in Boston and here are my thoughts about this year's offerings.

As always, it was fantastic to see my old friends from the HOW Magazine Forum as well as meet new friends in the sea of 4,000 designers that descended upon Boston for 4 days of design knowledge!

Opening keynote session was good, there was some great info there, but you had to work to find it. I think if the presentation of the info was just a bit dry/lacking.

Designed Life was not what I was thinking it was going to be about. My expectation from the description was how we as designers should be designing for the custom product/packaging that customers are beginning to get used to and expect in today's world. However, I did think that Joe Duffy did have some good info, I think the visual brief is a fantastic idea!

Decoding Design was very dry, however, I think that her book sounds interesting and I will pick it up and maybe it will give a bit more info to some of her concepts and that might tie the session together a bit better for me.

Arriving at Creativity was a dud. I think these guys were trying to be funny like the 3 Dogz presentation, but they just couldn't pull it off. I had no regrets skipping out on this one.

Visuals and Verbals was fantastic! Great info and presented in an engaging way. Way to go Andy Epstein!




Design Entrepreneur was okay. Sure it is wonderful to see and be inspired by the work of Charles S. Anderson, but I thought this session would explain more of the nitty gritty of how to become a design entrepreneur. I think this session would have been better if Charles had taken his ten points and elaborated on them. Instead of "find a manufacterer (duh!), tell me HOW to find one and HOW to negotiate a good deal for my licensing, etc.

Developing Leadership and Stratetic Awareness, Jeni Herberger gave a wonderful presentation with lots of great information! Excellent speaker, as always.

Lovin' Your Design Job was pretty good. Good information and the speakers were fun and entertaining. I wish that we would've spent more time on the worksheet working out HOW to achieve some of the goals that we started to explore. This session felt incomplete. Perhaps this should have been a two-part session for maximum effectiveness?

Planning, Packaging, and Promoting Yourself as the Product. What can I say? Accomplished logo designer Jeff Fisher gives a great presentation, funny and articulate while passing along good info. Although I still don't know how he keeps up on all those websites he's a part of...and despite being heckled by some rude people in about the 10th row on the right hand side, he remained calm and kept his good humor throughout.

Illustrative Design by Von was great. It was great to see his process and he presented the info in a fun and entertaining way (way to go Billy Mays!). From what I could see, people were coming to his session from other sessions.

Closing Keynote. The best session EVER. Bill Strickland is amazing. He was confident without being arrogant. He was engaging, I hung on his every word. The work he does is so valuable and he recognizes that we as designers can help change the world and he's asking for help. I don't know about anyone else, but I want to go to work for this man.



Suggestions & Closing Thoughts
Overall, I think this year's HOW was on par with Atlanta, some dud sessions, but more good ones than bad. Some general thoughts about the HOW conference:
I think that in addition to the tracks (creativity, business, etc), that each session should be labeled for where you are in your career: entry, mid-level, senior. That might help some people better chose which sessions to attend.

Please bring back the printing of the schedule on the back of the name badge! Yes, I know I am free to attend any session once there, but it'd be nice to at least be reminded of what I registered for.

Please make the badges slightly larger next year. They don't have to go back to their former size, but I like putting all the bcards of my new contacts in their and they simply all don't fit in that small of a badge holder.

I peronsally believe they can get rid of the handout binder and replace it with a notepad. Still have Corporate Image develop it so that F+W and CI remain friends. The current binder is expensive to produce and we're wasting a ton of paper on the copied handouts. Not to mention the 5 extra pounds the attendees have to carry around in addition to all their schwag. What I'd like to see is a small flash drive with a PDF or HTML version of EVERY session's slideshow on it. Put that, a cool HOW branded pen and a nice sketchbook quality pad of notepaper in a trendy HOW branded notebook holder that is portable (like the size of the VEER sketchbooks). And make the notepad/sketchbook a standard size so I can replace the paper and keep the outside binder part for reuse for many years. Bryn/Sarah, et al if you want to learn more about my concept on this, please feel free to contact me, you know where to find me!

I love the HOW Conference, it is the best in my opinion and I truly appreciate all the hard work that the entire HOW gang puts into making this event a success each and every year. Congrats to you all, I hope to see ya in Austin (assuming I can get work to send me again next year. let the crossing of fingers begin!)

Hidden Type

I was driving to see my parents the other day and I noticed that the old copy shop near their house went out of business. I also noticed that they had taken down the sign and clearly someone had painted around the sign. Where the sign used to be there was some type painted on the building itself.

While I didn't have my camera with me that day (bad Nick!), I made a mental note and went back a few days later and snapped some great pics of the hand painted type. Not sure what "Warrior" was there before the copy shop, but it was neat to find this gem of hidden design. Sadly, the building is scheduled to be torn down soon. I'm glad I was able to capture these images before they are gone forever.

I wonder what other kinds of great design lies underneath our current signs?

Princess Sun is Done!

I hate gift registries. I can never find a gift in my price range and I usually end up wasting so much time and energy trying to find something suitable for the happy couple that I am a pretty grumpy customer. So I decided early on that when my friends got married I wasn't going to have any of that gift registry crap. If I'm going to spend time and energy on a gift for my friends' wedding gifts, I'm going to give them something truly spectacular. So was born the tradition of creating a custom illustrated poem to give to my close friends upon their marriage.

One of my dearest friends (like a sister that I never had to me) is getting married soon and so it was time to create yet another of my illustrated poems. I knew about the wedding since October and had worked on some ideas briefly over the holidays, but due to other commitments wasn't able to get started until about February/March of this year.

The poem gave me a bit of a challenge early on, but it proved to be the easy part. Now that I had the poem complete I could begin work on the illustration! I first had to secretly acquire photos of the couple-to-be from her sister. No problemo. I got the pics and began sketching. I start out trying to capture a realistic version of the person first then simplify it down for my style.

My friend's husband-to-be was easy, I got his illo nailed on the second try. My friend, however, turned out to be more of a challenge. I tried sketching from several different photos and even just parts of photos to try to capture her likeness. No luck. Time was growing very short and projects were piling up was I was trying to sketch out my friend. As you can see in these images, I just wasn't "getting it".




So I did what any good illustrator would do: I put the project down and went on to another project. When I came back to this illustration (and it wasn't long after I put it down due to my timeline), I decided to try a different approach. I went straight into the simplified illo in my style. While I don't think it is perfect, I do believe it does capture the essence of my friend's personality (and that is the point, these illustrated poems are intended to be fairy tales, not exact duplicates of reality).



Now the huge hurdle: I had no idea what kind of layout/environment to put these two people into! My friend is a huge Art Deco and Edward Hopper fan, so I looked there for inspiration. I had a great poster on my wall that might do the trick, so I sketched it up for inspiration.



But it was missing something. Something important. Then it hit me, sunflowers! My friend loves sunflowers and since it is one of the symbols of the sun, a field of sunflowers could be her domain!



Now that I was getting somewhere, I determined that Celtic-style clothing would work best as my friend is of Irish descent. I did my research and came up with what I feel were suitable garments for the princess and her prince. I added a Celtic cross to the man to reflect his Catholic faith and I added a moon pendant to Princess Sun to represent her sister.



I didn't have the hands figured out, but I needed to get this illo done, so I just forged ahead and put it all into Illustrator as is. I got the file built, but the hands were still an issue. So I printed out what I had so far and began to sketch hands in different positions. I finally found the solution: Princess Sun's hand would be over the pendant (to reflect her close bond with her sister), and the Prince's hand would be on the Princesses' arm to reflect how all three are now connected. Bingo!

I finished my digital inking and laying out flat color in Illustrator and then I pulled everything into Photoshop where I added the textures and lighting to complete the illustration. Here's the final illo that I ended up getting done with a week to spare.... :)



The text of the poem reads:
Princess Sun
Princess Sun and her sister,
Princess Moon,
Shared the vast sky.

They shone their brilliant light
Upon the world.
Princess Sun loved her sister,
But she was still lonely.

Searching for the love
She saw blossoming
All around.
Her brilliance began to fade
As time and hope faded.

Until one day
A glimmer caught her eye
And she turned to see
Her true love
Revealed.
(©2008 Nicholas J. Nawroth, all rights reserved.)

To my dear friends, Reb and Matt, may your wedding day be beautiful and your marriage long and fruitful!