A Rad art book, logo, & brochure

This is a project I helped friend Rad Sechrist on for Comic Con last year. Rad is a storyboard artist at DreamWorks who's worked at a number of animation studios and over the last few years has taught classes for figure drawing and storyboarding. I was excited to help him put together a logo and brochure for his online school as well as an art book in time for Comic-Con. Here are some images via @RadSechrist and some of the process of the logo (click to enlarge most).

A peek at a spread in the art book

Here is the inside of the brochure

image via @radsechrist

Here were some initial concepts for the logo:

And the final logo Rad chose:

I'm working with Rad on redesigning his website, stay tuned!

Check out Rad's work & online school here:
http://radfordsechrist.blogspot.com/
http://radfordsechrist.tumblr.com/
http://radhowtoschool.com/

The Journals of Mama Mae & LeeLee

I just came across this in the process of cleaning up & backing up some files and can't believe I didn't post it before now. The Journals of Mama Mae & LeeLee was a project I worked with Bento Box Interactive on two years ago. It's an interactive music/journal/game app by Alicia Keys and BBI, revolving around a little girl named LeeLee and her connection to her Grandmother and music. It's such a beautiful concept, and a personal project for Alicia Keys (of whom LeeLee is a reflection).
It was an honor for me to be able to contribute and end up having some of my designs a part of the final product.
Here were some of the many rough logo concepts:

 

And ultimately the final, still used today.

The yellow oriole bird character is a big part of the story and because it was to be used in the logo I was able to submit some character designs for her.

Alicia Keys ended up liking one of my designs and it was chosen to be used as the final.
Here was an early color version but it was too dark and masculine:

And the cute final version!

Here were also some visual/branding concepts for the inner journal pages and animation.

 

And that's it!

Eat This Poem

This is a logo I designed for food blogger and friend Nicole Gulotta a few months back. I was so inspired by her concept of combining two of my favorite things for her blog: literature and food. Here are my takes and the ultimate final she chose. This was a lot of fun. Thanks Nicole!

Final logo!

Some Print Design, YO!

Wow, so these are already 2 to 3 years old. I was making a conscious effort to only post my freelance and personal projects here, but since I have no immediate plans of updating my portfolio website at this time, I might as well dust these bad boys off and share them.
These are some of the posters, ads, and graphic novel cover layouts I was lucky enough to create, under the incredible supervision of Mr.  Zachary Pennington, Designer and Art Director extraordinaire. The company was small, and the creative division before I arrived consisted only of Zach. We became a department of two and he led the creative direction of everything from print to web to merchandise,  so needless to say I was lucky to get my hands on all type of projects I normally wouldn't have had the opportunity to.  Zach was incredibly talented, knowledgeable, patient, and probably the hands-down best design director I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I learned a heck of a lot. Thank you Zach!

Ads for:  “Dylan Dog” 2007 & 2008, “The Adventures of Tymm: Alien Circus,”  DrunkDuck.com, 2007 & 2008, “Atlantis Rising"
Poster for “Gravity” 2007 (Title Design by Zachary Pennington)
Cover and Back Cover design for “I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space” Graphic Novel, 2008
Cover and Back Cover design for “The Weapon” Graphic Novel 2008, and cover coloring

Old Branding

This is a logo and branding imagery I did a ways back for a project that never went anywhere. The 2 images above are a tiny morsel that represent months of work - logo thumbnails, sketches, designs taken to near final, direction changing to other new designs taken to near final, and rinse and repeat until I came to this. I was going for a galactic theme with a modernized retro feel (does that make sense?). It might not seem like much but this particular project entailed not only creating the logo, but the style guide, site design mock-ups, advertising pitches, and mascot designs and animations. My role was essentially a one-woman advertising firm, which was fun to have creative 'control,' I knew what I was getting myself into, but when a project fails to move it's always disheartening after putting so much work into it.
Maybe if I get around to it, I'll show the many evolutions the logo went through (I know I love seeing other people's process).
This project re-taught me some valuable lessons that every designer and artist will encounter at least once in their career.
1 - Know when you've done your duty, and when you start spinning your wheels, stop.
2 - Know when to put your foot down, and stick to your gut.
3 - Communicate that development doesn't just magically happen, it does take time, and show and explain your process to the client.
4 - Last but not least - "Show me the money!!" You need to be paid for your work, for your efforts. Otherwise, you end up with months worth of work to show for something that never took off, you never got paid for, but have a nice little blog post that reflects the always hysterical  "hey, you get a great portfolio piece out of it."

This little robot dude was to be the company's mascot. He's mocked up from photos I found online, but my plan was to find the actual (similar) electronic pieces that comprise him, take photos of them from different angles, and animate him. It would have been a lot of work, but I know the outcome would've been worth it.

Here is the simplified stylized version.

The one good thing about this project not taking off, is that I at least get to keep the rights to my designs. So maybe one day if I ever feel like it, I'll use him in a story or for something else? Eh, we'll see....

Site promo!

I've posted about this before (in a lengthy, rather cheesy post), but if you haven't checked out Chris Sanders' website lately, you're missing out and you really should right now! Chris Sanders is an artist/writer/director extraordinaire, co-director of "Lilo & Stitch" and most recently "How to Train Your Dragon." I've been lucky enough to be his website designer, and recently did an overall design refresh. These days he is posting up a storm of his adventures, currently daily, while he travels through Japan with co-director Dean DuBois.

JN Logo & Business Card

I designed this logo for one of my best friends, Jamee Nicole. She is a very talented jewelry designer & diamond specialist with an edgy fashion sense and great eye for detail. She designs high quality fashion pieces, and also bridal sets (I think that's what they're called?). Anyway, she really knows her stuff. If you're looking for a jewelry designer, she's fantastic.

Here are some designs I mocked up for the back of her business card, but ultimately decided the simple and clean design worked best.

Here is her final business card. The front side is being printed in gold foil. I can't wait to get them and see how they turned out.

Black Butterfly Productions

Some months ago my sweet friend Shev asked me to help her make a logo and business cards for a business she's starting up. I love the name and jumped on the opportunity. These are the finalized logo concepts I presented her, after getting a good grasp of what she was after, and thumbnailing out initial ideas.


She really liked the bottom one, and from there I did various layout ideas for the business card.


And then ultimately, the finals!
[back]


[2 versions of the front, with different font choice for her to choose from when she's ready to print]



This project was a lot of fun for me and I like the way it turned out. Shev is a great friend and she was suuuper easy to work with and let me run loose. I don't think I've really shown the process of many of my projects before and thought I'd mix it up a bit.
Have a great weekend!

Epically long post.

Where to begin! MrTiki was a massive project and a labor of love. It was a virtual world, based on a magical island where almost every decision you made on the site affected your alignment to good or evil - the inhabitants and animals (called "Spirits") of the land vs the villainous, rich Mr. Woo (and his team) who "discovers" the island and plans to take it over and turn it into a tourist trap. I was invited to come on board as the third partner in Dec of 2006, to be the Co-Creator/Art Director/Artist. We all loved this brand we created, and I absolutely loved being the artist to bring it to life. I worked on it up until the summer of 2008, so you can imagine the amount of work that was produced. It's daunting to even think about it, looking back. To start there were only three of us: myself, "Volte6," who was master programmer and infrastructure, and "mrdweedles," game programmer and marketing person. Then Wee joined us, a very talented game developer. Kinh came on board as our amazing writer (who ended up writing altogether about 300 pages worth of damn gripping story). Much later, "TikiMaestro" joined us as our audio engineer and created beautiful theme songs for the world and sound effects for the games, and his wife "WeeOne," later joined as an artist to assist me with overflow. Aside from getting the actual site design/layout/infrastructure developed, we updated weekly with a continuing story line for our readers that included news images, usually involved site events happening on the island, we had a crazy amount of games (including multiplayer), shops which contained insane amounts of virtual goodes in the economy, a working economy system (currency was called "Tiki Tokens"), maps of the world, quests for users to complete, a system to own a "Spirit" feed it/play with it/care for it, a battle system to fight your Spirit against others, we had downloads for users, ... phew, this was an undertaking... a tiki mail system, a forum for users, collectible coconuts, high scores systems with trophies, etc etc ETC.... It was so cool, the site even changed from day to night depending on the time.
We had a steady and growing userbase - I'm not sure on the numbers but I believe we reached upwards of 10,000 users (I could be way off here), without much marketing at all. We also had a wonderful beginning of a fanbase with lovely fansites such as: http://mrtiki.wordpress.com
It was a HUGE accomplishment.. is, rather, and I'm proud of all of us for what we did. Unfortunately some months ago, there was a mishap with our servers and the site experienced a heartbreaking meltdown. I hope one day it all can be recovered and mrtiki can live on in all it's awesome tikiness. In the meantime I believe some of our games can be found on newgrounds.com
Here is a selection of art I produced. I hope you enjoy and thanks for reading and looking.
Click images for larger view.
Site design for homepage in the day and in the night:

Logo sketches to final (bottom right)

Tiki Island Map

Tiki Village Map

Wootropolis map & a couple shop interiors

Misc art: Konoso gravesite, Anantiki holiday scene, Cave of Impending Doom sketch, Tiki Temple interior

Foggy Coast sketches:

Some character dev:

Some Spirit art:

Some game art:

Some virtual goods:

Battle system and Spirit care system interfaces:

 A selection of weekly news images that accompanied the weekly story:

 Misc art: Calendar for users to download:

Concept backgrounds:





I will try to post animations another time. :)