A new facet to the same career

I've recently begun crafting business logos as a part of my job. I'm totally down with that. How cool will it be to be able to see a logo I design on a pen, tee shirt or truck door some day?

I've done probably three logo designs in the past seven years, but lately I pumped out two, and the sentiment seems to be that they'll be becoming an ever more common part of my job.

The first I did is for a charitable institution that will be opening its doors in Peoria, Illinois once all the balls roll into place. It is to be rehabilitation center modeled after San Francisco's Delancey Street Foundation. Its board of directors asked me to come up with a logo, and after a few drafts they settled on the idea of emulating the soon-to-be-iconic gabled roof of the building chosen to house this project.

The final logo ended up like so:

A few weeks later, I was approached to create a logo for a lawn service business. With little to no input from the owners I ended up with this:

As it turns out, there was a mis-communication; the company already had a logo, but they liked mine so well they decided to ditch the old one and move forward using the new one.

I had another incident like that last year with a company I thought I was designing a logo for, but instead I was trying to reproduce an existing one, sight-unseen. What I thought was creative input from a manager was instead recollection of what he'd seen on the gas station sign.

Navigating by the creative direction I'd been fed, I came up with what was almost exactly their very logo. However, since I thought I was doing an original creation, I had taken some more aesthetic detours along the way, and I think to this day that I designed one that's way better than what they've been using:

Jackson Express, if you're reading this, you're still always welcome to use mine instead. You know it's snazzier.

Early Adobe Illustrator work

These two animal drawings represent some of the first attempts I did at creating vector graphics in Illustrator CS2, way back in 2008. They were traced in the application from actual photographs. This was also long before I had my pen & tablet for line drawing, which means it was all rather clumsily done with a mouse. Regardless, I still think they look pretty darn nice.

 

Design update

Hey there! Been a long time, huh? Sorry about the delay, but things have been super busy at work and at home. Here's one of the things I worked on at the office since last I posted.

I was charged with designing a "mascot" for the company, to be used internally to bring awareness of security issues. We needed a face to go with internal messages that pass along proper procedures for keeping sensitive information safe from intrusion, keeping the building and personal property secure from theft, and maintaining a safe culture.

They wanted someone part Sherlock Holmes, part Inspector Clouseau. I came up with this inspector-type guy.

Graphic for local youth theater

This is the vector drawing I created for the t-shirts, fliers and posters of a play that my young son is in this spring. I can't take all the credit; I used Adobe Illustrator CS3 to recreate the work of artist Joseph Gleeson,which I found in a scan of a public domain printing of the stories on Project Gutenburg.

Still, it represents about 20 hours of work. I also acquired a new Genius G-Pen and I used the hell out of it. I'm looking forward to another project. Guess I can now finish the project I've been slowly working on for my teenage son's metal band.

New online ad for my company's upcoming profitability workshop tour