"Care To Compete" Logo Design Process

Hey all, it's been a while since my last post. Fear not, I am still drawing everyday, but I have not posted here as most of my projects are in flux at the moment. Also, there are a few I am keeping a bit close to the vest until completion.
In the meantime I would like to show you a little graphic design project I took on recently for a new golf charity business, Care To Compete. When I started, I was given this proposal to go off of:

This was an interesting design but I thought it could use a bit of work. My client gave me some latitude to play around as long as I maintained the essential parts. These being: two C's, a T as a golf t, and the earth. As you might imagine I had quite a lot of fun pushing vertexes around in illustrator. I wanted to provide a few options for review, some which maintained the original shape and others which I thought kept the essentials but pushed towards a softer and more elegant solution.

 My clients liked one of the new designs. This was the third from the bottom on the right, but requested a few revisions. These were fairly simple and I provided them with a some options to go with for the final review and changes.The results of the revisions are below.

The notes came back for the final alterations. The requests were: the shading on the globe on 9, the colors on 7, and the shading around the globe on 5 to be applied to the rest of the design. The results were 4 final design options with some minor differences for the client to choose from, shown below: 

They decided to go with #1 from the group, which to be honest was my favorite as well. 

This was a great project and it was tons of fun to do a little straight graphic design.  Sometimes I get so into working on illustration and formatting that I forget how enjoyable it is to jump in and do simple logo designing. I love working with clients to find a design we can both be happy with and the challenges that come with the process. In my next post I'll throw some illustrations up so you can see some of the drawing work I've done lately. Till then I hope you liked looking into the process for this one, see you next time!

Deep One Female

Hello again gentle viewer.  I have another in-progress piece for you to have a look at. I know it must seem as though I have painted quite a few of these horrid fish-men this year, but please note I come from a very fishy town in Massachusetts. Doing these abominable batrachian monsters often helps me get a feeling for the hometown I rarely get around Seattle. Hmm, I re-read that sentence and on retrospect that could seem like a negative. Trust me I have only love for my birthplace, but anyone from that lovely New England town should be able to admit it's got some fairly fishy overtones. Thanks to a longstanding longing for my town's beaches and a persistent request for art from a certain good chum of mine for use in his card game, I present the next in the fishmen paintings: 

She's not done but I figure I should be finished with her by the end of the week. Let me know if you have any suggestions for the background!

Humming Bird UI test

Hello again! 

I have had a humming bird game rattling around in my head coming on a few months now. You might recognize the idea from an earlier post: http://sketcheveryday.blogspot.com/2013/04/humming-bird-vector-character-concepts.html . I am still quite interested in developing it further so my task last week was to make a fairly simple and stripped down version of the game view-port. I started by drawing a page or so of flowers to obtain some reference and work out the mood. Rather than keep drawing for weeks on end I went ahead and just got down to some quick layout/design work done. This was the result:

First I used illustrator to sketch out a few vector flowers and some assets.  Once I had vector flowers as close as I wanted I imported them into PS to add some tones, I think it gave them a bit more of a soft, and happier feeling.   

When the tones were where I wanted them I brought in the other assets: a time clock, score toast/label, and life/energy bar.

Once everything was laid out I thought it needed a little something to give it a bit more depth so I threw in a bit of shadow. Overall I'm fairly pleased with where it is at the moment but that just means I now have to design menu screens, items, power-ups and a few level backgrounds.  For now, I like where it's going. See you next time!

Sketch Dump Day! Now with more goats!

Ok, so it's been a few weeks since my last post. Fear not, I am still getting at least a few sketches out each day and even a concept piece now and then.  After my last post here (Goats and Gardens) I found a hitherto unknown love for drawing goats, more specifically their exceptionally odd face structure. I am not sure why I like the lines on these animals faces as much as I do, but this has resulted in a sketch log for the past 1.5 weeks of almost exclusively goats. Today's post is a cross section of that log.

I've taken the pages, pared down the ones I was least pleased with, and condensed the remaining into three pages.  I think it gives a good overview of the week for me; a long somewhat obsessive struggle to understand how the strange animal's faces work.  What I need to do is go to the zoo and look at some living goats, maybe get a bit of life drawing in.  For now, let's just go with the sketches I have at the moment, shall we?

The crazy thing with these faces is I still have about 3 pages I haven't included. I often find when drawing something like this I should give myself an arbitrary limit, lest it eat up all my sketch time for the week. It's very hard from time to time not to return to familiar lines once you've drawn a face 20 or 30 times. If you don't stop and move onto the next project or sketch, you could easily fill a sketch book within a month. As for my current next project in the queue, this week I should have time enough to finish a painting for a friend as well as maybe post a few more sketches. Until then please enjoy the goats. As a side note, does anyone have any ideas for an icon set? I have become bored with my current graphic design self challenges and would like to to another icon set.  Hit me up with any fun or weird concepts that might make for a good group of icons. I'm thinking my next icons should be cutesy but we'll see what strikes my fancy.

Goats and Gardens

A good friend posted on his facebook feed about wanting to start a landscaping business using goats. I loved the idea and got a bug in my ear to make a little logo for it.  For some reason I have wanted to draw a goat for ages and this little project gave me a chance to practice. I'm not sure exactly why I've had this desire to sketch a goat for a while but it sure was fun doing a concept page to figure out which type of goat I liked the most.  In the end feel as though this turned out well, although now that I've finished this one I might do a few more later on for fun. For the time being however, this should work.

The Birds, version 02

So I kept working on adding some more bird silhouettes with additional positions and beak types. Overall I like the result. It's funny how you can come across something that really adds to the design just by taking a break and cruising the internet. I stumbled across a few images that gave me more ideas for the background and the shape the bird flock should take. Once I had all the shapes I wanted I exported a jpeg, pictured below:

 I thought this looked much better overall and the way the red acted with the blues was much more interesting. I wanted to see how the image would look with an overlay of a texture though. To do this I did a quick search for a free stain texture. I found a great one here : Flicker texture. Once I did a quick alteration to make it more solid red the overlay gave me a great idea. Rather than the blue and red I would desaturate the background and overlay the texture on the shapes. The end result is pictured below:

My wife noticed the bloodspot and said it might look a little better without it, in the end I think she was right so I output a version without it. I think a red border works better overall but if I'm super honest I kind of missed the blood drop, so because I couldn't help it: 

I think this is as far as I'll take it, maybe next I'll try another short story. The most dangerous game maybe? Or maybe even some H.G.Wells?

The Birds in-progress

I re-read the short story The Birds a few days ago and happened to be making some vector birds for a little design practice. I thought it might be fun to do a book cover for it and gave it a go. I didn't really have the time this week to take it as far as I would have liked but for now I feel alright about it. I'm thinking this weekend might leave me enough time to work it to completion but for the time being, here is the in progress piece.

Used some reference from the old Hitchcock with Tippi Hedren as well as google image search for a bunch of birds I could make vector silhouettes.