As I was working on the Bleutuna Limited website and content, I started to think of how the site was laid out and how I was conveying information. And it was boring.
The way I’d set up the infrastructure, there was going to be tons of similar content and a ridiculous workload to get it all formatted. Even worse – no one was going to read it. There was nothing compelling to get users to actually engage with it. My eyes were glazing over and that’s always a bad sign.
That’s when my experience with working with salespeople came into play.
Salespeople love charts. They love diagrams. They love illustrations that show how things work together and the bulleted lists that go along with them. I began to think about what ProductionCliq was and how we fill in the gaps to a production, making sure all the necessary bits are there.
I started with puzzle pieces, but that wasn’t film centric enough. Then I played with a Bolex camera and its lenses, but there simply weren’t enough different elements to illustrate all the points and it didn’t represent what we do 100%. Bleutuna Limited doesn’t really shoot film. We shoot HD.
A hard drive was too tech heavy, so I looked around my room and found a big stack of HD-CAM tapes that hold all the original footage for my senior film, Sons of God, and then it all made sense.
The result is below and I’m pretty damn happy with it. First, because it’s not red. Second, because it’s a more flat, less gradiated vector drawing which I enjoy doing. Third, because I think it works extremely well in illustrating what Bleutuna Limited does, how we provide the necessary pieces to make a project a success and showcases that we work on many different types of projects in a concise manner.
The Wolfpack Film Group, along with tons of sponsors such as the Texas Motion Picture Alliance, is putting together a huge New Year’s Eve Party to celebrate the Texas Entertainment Industry. Oh, and portions of the proceeeds go to the WPOS Homeless Documentary.
The Karma Lounge in a swanky, downtown spot here in Austin, Texas, and so the goal was to create an equally swanky advertisement to appear in publications such as Insite Magazine.
I looked through a significant number of flyers, everything from raves to parties to things we won’t mention here. Most of them had scantily-clad attractive ladies as the crux of their marketing pitch. I chose to go a different direction.
The client wanted something bold, lush, and rich – which, honestly, keeps bringing me back to RED. I swear, if you didn’t know better, you’d think red was my favorite color. For some reason, maybe because I’ve done red really well in the past, clients seem to want me to keep working with it. This time round, though, I was able to add some pretty strong blue and orange elements that I think give this piece a different look than say the Lionheart or Red Luvs Ya brands.
gimme some
Mr. Bone’s makes some of the best BBQ in Austin, which you can then extrapolate to mean he makes some of the best BBQ in the world.
Working with the team at NuArtisan, the goal was to create something iconic and memorable.
As he starts up a new business, he wanted an old-school, ornate logo, featuring himself as one of the prominent elements. There were a few other design challenges to be dealt with as well:
- Needed to clearly be Texas, and preferably Austin
- Sunglasses needed to be shaded
- Eventually, he needed a hat and a mustache and a bigger smile
- Eventually, his hair would have to be salt & pepper
What made all of this difficult was not having any additional photos. No shots of him with a hat, with him smiling or with him sporting a mustache. So everything had to be done more freehand than I’m used to doing when presenting a likeness.
My first directive was to give Mr. Bone’s a Kangol style hat. I did a significant amount of research, looking for hats of that particular style, and seeing what they looked like from all different angles. Mr. Bone’s was in a very specific pose, so a straight-forward shot of such a hat wouldn’t fit nor would it be distinctive enough. Initial tests showed it looking more like the top of a mushroom than a hat.
Once I had the Kangol hat down, I played with different backdrops – the goal was to convey Texas, barbecue and Austin, in that order. I played with a simple circular backdrop, but that didn’t have enough spice. I turned that into the shape of Texas, but eventually realized the best bet was to combine the concepts of barbecue and Texas into one element: a grill shaped like Texas.
Mr. Bone’s wanted a different style of hat, something more like a typical fitted baseball cap, and wanted a version in color which showed off his salt & pepper hair, and a bit more of a smile than he initially had in the original photo.
The final color version is below, though I personally like the black & white version more myself. I think it has a classic feel too it that goes well with the idea of Texas BBQ:
Finished up creating the logo for Firewater Solutions, a project I was brought onto by the team at NuArtisan a home safety company that wanted to have a sharp, modern brand that was bright and vibrant. Something that would instill confidence but not come across as stodgy or old.
I had many ideas and many different ways to handle this logo. Believe it or not, the combination of Fire & Water in a logo is a pretty common thing, so much so that when I looked around at fire logos just to see what others were doing, most of the logos actually had water included in there as well.
Ultimately, there was a central shape and style I loved, but its actual interpretation could be played with. The basic concept was a bowl of water with fire on top, with the bowl of water beginning to show signs of boiling.
The other concepts I had in my head was playing on the Japanese Water panting concept (no.1), a simple drop of water on fire (no.6) and a splash of water surrounding a raging flame (no.7).
Continuing the Lionheart Health Branding Initiate 2009, the client requested 6×4, post card size flyers that could be left at various sponsors around town.
Like with the business cards, the big goals were to showcase the brand, the contact information and the free health camp offer. Been a few months since I’ve done something for print, so I’m pretty damn happy with this.
Continuing work on the Lionheart Health Brand, these business cards were built to be bright, and attention grabbing.
We wanted something that had a classical (1900s) feel combined with a modern edge.
For the client, there were three big things the card needed to accomplish:
- Showcase the company name & brand
- Clearly display name, telephone number and web address
- Work double-duty to advertise their unique feature of letting people experience an entire class for free
Can’t wait to see what they look like printed up!
Lionheart Health is a great company here in Austin that provides Health Camps/Boot Camps for those looking to get in shape. Deric & Eleanor Williams are a friendly, enthusiastic couple who love what they do and are good at it.
When Deric started talking to me about redesigning the logo for Lionheart, we were immediately on the same page. He had done a drawing of two lions, facing each other, roaring, their manes forming a heart. I loved it, had a very classic feel.
And I love designing classic logos that seem like they could have been created anytime in the last 150 years. Something that will work 30 years from now, just like it would have worked 30 years ago.
Deric and I talked about making the two lions look like reliefs or statues. To visualize a stone crest for the company, something carved from marble by a skilled artisan. I’m very happy with the result.
Gray/Black, white and red. You may notice that the WhisperWire collateral, the iD3 collateral and the Red McCombs Media collateral use a very similar color palette. This was not my doing. Well, it was sort of. But not really.
WhisperWire I absolutely chose – but it was this WhisperWire collateral, and showing it to other clients, that ended up inspiring iD3 and Red McCombs Media to take note and want to see something similar.
Hopefully, the rest of my oeuvre shows how much I love other colors – like green, purple and orange. Red and Gray/Black are just bold, sexy colors and people seem to gravitate toward their starkness. It’s interesting, when you think about it.
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