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.

Angry Cat is the new Grumpy Cat

Meet Garfi, the Internet's newest feline of fame. His Flickr/Twitter/Facebook pages are blowing up right now because he's so much more bad-ass than Tard the Grumpy Cat ever was. Thanks to great free exposure like the above linked HuffPo piece and Chris Hardwick's Garfi-centric bit on a recent episode of his @Midnight gameshow on Comedy Central, we will no doubt be seeing a lot of Garfi in the coming months. He's a meme in the making.

So the moment I saw a Santa suit photo I thought, "Grinch. Someone has to make him the Grinch." Of course I figured that if I could think of it, someone else has undoubtedly done it already...

Guess not though. FIRST!

iPhone art for you. Merry Christmas.

I got a new iPhone 5c last week, and of course I've rushed to customize it, especially since Halloween is peeking at us from around the corner.

Since I'm a huge Mercyful Fate & King Diamond fan, I thought a themed lock screen/home screen would be perfect, so I grabbed a Melissa album cover online and doctored it up a bit to throw on there. If you like it, go ahead and grab it yourself.

Note: I changed the background from yellow to green, so it's good to go all the way through Christmas. :)

Peanutz 11 & 12

PEANUTZ 11

PEANUTZ 12

I must be stopped... Or must I?

I whipped up a few more crazy Peanuts strips. Hope you like them. Click on a strip if anything in the right margin is obscuring it, and it will open in a new screen.

PEANUTZ 7

PEANUTZ 8

PEANUTZ 9









PEANUTZ 10

Crazy Peanuts strips

I recently discovered a great online archive of Peanuts comic strips. Now I'm a huge fan of Peanuts strips and have been all my life. However, while browsing the archive it struck me that sometimes it's funnier if you make up your own captions instead. So here are a few examples I came up with.

PEANUTZ 1

PEANUTZ 2

PEANUTZ 3

PEANUTZ 4

PEANUTZ 5

PEANUTZ 6

Hmmm... A new hobby in the works? It sure is fun! Stay tuned.

New header image is up

Hey, gang! I updated that header this morning by incorporating the souvenir log flume photo from this last Six Flags trip. As I mentioned the other day, it's the first souvenir photo from Six Flags that I've actually ever purchased. Now, instead of me and some stranger's kid, it's me along with the wife and two young'uns. Thing is, the laptop is missing from the shot now. That was my favorite part of the previous graphic. Perhaps I'll photoshop one in later. It would make more sense, I think.

Mother's Day at Kickapoo Creek Winery

For Mother's Day I took the family to fancy brunch at the local winery. Just wanted to share this because it's another example of photo manipulation to create memories that didn't really happen. Rather than hand my phone to a stranger and trust him to take a decent photo, Heather and I traded off and here's the result of the merge:

This was a bit of a tough one, because merging the layers caused quite a bad fisheye distortion that I had to go back and correct. Now that I take another look, it sure did make me seem taller than I actually am... Nevertheless, I think we ended up with a fine fabricated memory to look back on with joy. Don't we all look nice? :)

Happy Mother's Day.

Photoshop to the rescue!

Tonight I tackled a tricky project for my friends at the Peoria Ballet. Their performances of Snow White start in just over one week, and they are scrambling to put together the program for the show. Part of that program is a photograph of the featured level 4 dancers. However, when the photographer came to take the picture, one dancer was missing. There is no time for a retake, because the program must get to the printer on time. There's no option other than to digitally manipulate the image using a photo taken for the Nutcracker performances in December 2012.

I do stuff like this all the time, mostly for fun or personal reasons--but this case was particularly challenging because of all the things going on in the Nutcracker photo. That's some troublesome masking. Also, bear in mind I am using Adobe Creative Suite 3 on a five-year-old MacBook. This stuff became a lot easier with CS5 than it was back in the Stone Age of CS3.

It took a few hours as well as a few days' worth of patience, but I am proud of what I ended up with. See below. (Note: I am not the photographer of these images)


The original photo for the Snow White program, missing one dancer

 

The source photo containing the missing dancer (front row, first one in from right), from five months ago

The final version of the Snow White picture, now ready for program inclusion.

Do not photoshop this image

Yeah right. The US government releases an image of President Obama firing a rifle while "skeet shooting" to bolster his claim that he shoots "all the time" at Camp David. And then they insist that the image is not to be manipulated in any way.
Guess what, White House? All photos created by the federal government are by default in the public domain. We can do with them as we wish. And we have. Many times over. For instance:

Finished another project for Peoria Ballet

As the title of the post indicates, I just finished putting together the program for Peoria Ballet's annual showcase. First they contacted me because they had no cover for the program. Got that done in about an hour. Today, they discovered they had major issues with the program content itself so I was tapped to recreate it and fix all the complications. It was a rush job, but I'm proud of how it turned out. Here's the cover image. (Photography by Ching)

By the way, tickets are still available for this show. It's the culmination of the academy's training over the last semester, and if past performances are any indication it will be a wonderful show. I did get a chance to observe a rehearsal last week, and there are some truly beautiful pieces involved.

My son, age 10, has been dancing with the Peoria Ballet for several years now. He's been working hard and is hoping to graduate to level 3 very soon, perhaps after his summer intensives.

It really is an excellent school of ballet, and Peoria is fortunate to have an instructor and art director like Servy Gallardo around to teach here. He takes a great amount of pride in what he does for the academy and its students.

Gallardo, who has also taught in major metropolitan ballet schools, frequently comments about how impressed he is with the eagerness of Peoria students to work hard and learn.

I'm proud that my son is one of those eager students. He's just like any other ten-year-old boy in many respects. He loves NERF guns, video games and Pokemon, but above all he has a genuine love of dance. Some kids like baseball, football or NASCAR, but not my kid. He's found his calling. No matter what he does or where he goes in life, dance is going to have a big part in it, I'm confident and proud to say.

For the joy that Peoria Ballet has brought my son, I am always pleased to help the academy out when I'm needed. Whether it's set-building, backstage crew, cast parties, shooting video, grinding out print work last minute or whatever else they throw at me, they can always count me in.

A practical use for Photoshop

As part of my job I am the staff photographer. I always clearly communicate the portrait dress code, but sometimes people either don't listen, refuse to comply, or as in a couple of cases, don't have the required attire in their wardrobe. Here's how I deal with that.

First, I thank my lucky stars that there are people who do comply. It gives me plenty of source material for the project. Then, I simply do a wardrobe transplant.

Here the gentleman to the left did not bring a jacket for the shoot. Now, we have some spare jackets lying around, but this guy's a stout dude--his neck's like a tree trunk, for crying out loud. I have nothing that will fit him. The other problem complicating things was that he is a remote field employee. He hardly ever visits the home office--maybe once a year. There was no way to reschedule a reshoot; I had to get his photo this time or there was no telling how long it would be before the opportunity presented itself again.

Lucky for me I had plenty of source photos to comb through and look for a jacket to match his ensemble. I chose one from the photo of another gentleman with broader-than-normal shoulders, but I still had to do a fair bit of transforming to make it match the contours of the first man. Then just for the heck of it I decided to lighten the color a tad to more of a charcoal.

Anyway, this wasn't my first time at the rodeo. In doing employee photos I've also had to composite up to as many as four shots into one final product, add a necktie, tighten a necktie, remove wrinkles (from clothing and faces), color hair, whiten teeth, add color to dead-looking, sunless, pale faces, remove cold sores and other blemishes... You name it. That's part of semi-professional portrait photography. You have to hope for the best but expect the worst and be prepared to address it.

Tee shirt design suggestions

The Book of Mormon Broadway musical's Facebook page recently asked fans to design a show-related tee shirt they'd like to see. Here are the two ideas I sent them. I have a third idea but it involves a cartoon frog, which I'm not sure I can draw competently. Perhaps I'll give it a try this weekend.

New graphic for the ol' blog

Today I concocted and installed this new favicon for my blog. In addition I changed the header copy to read "M3 Blog" rather than "McGraw Media Matters." There might be a header graphic and title change in the works as well, but I have not yet decided for sure. "McGraw Media Matters" seems not quite right to me. But I love the M3 thing, so whatever I change it to has to incorporate the alliteration of "M."

Iron Swedish Chef

God, how I'd love to see this happen. With the renewed energy around the Muppets franchise lately, perhaps it will...

A quick Photoshop project

One afternoon I was asked out of the blue by one of my company's senior managers to whip up a graphic showing a five-point delivery system related to our estate planning services division. He wanted it for a PowerPoint presentation, I guess.

Wasting no time, I went right to work, thinking to myself, "What gives an impression of stability and reliability better than Greek and Roman architecture? It's been standing for centuries, plus they were a very educated people. I should base this design somehow on the Parthenon."

Following that inspiration I whipped this up for him in under an hour using Photoshop CS4. Mission accomplished.

Online Christmas shoppers beware

I thought it was a misprint meant to read "8.5 centimeters in width." Guess not.

New banner is up!

I finally decided to throw together a header yesterday. I knocked this out after I finished another Photoshop job for a friend during the kids' gymnastics classes. Probably not done yet. I think it needs some more layering effects, but not sure what yet. Let's call it a work in progress.

Vacation photos, Photoshop style

Usually if I post photos you can also find them on my Flickr page, which is a better option for higher quality view or slideshow format.

Anyway, here's a quick look at my family photo album. Usually at some point during a special trip, I'll want to do one good photo of the four of us. Problem is, most people in the world are useless when it comes to digital cameras, so you always end up with a blurry, horrible photo if you hand your camera to a stranger and ask them to take your picture.

"It's the big silver button on top. You have to hold it down halfway, then all the way down when you want to take it. And please use the Rule of Thirds for framing, because I don't want to have to crop this--Aw, forget it. Thanks anyway." Grumble, rumble, gripe.

How to solve the problem? Compositing in Photoshop! So here are a couple of examples, one from Metropolis, Illinois and the other from Six Flags Over Georgia.

A place for my photos

Okay, so if I'm going to make a name for myself in the graphic arts business, I suppose I should show off some of my photography examples. Bear in mind, I've never had an SLR camera at my disposal; always point-and-shoot. Here's a link to my Flickr page, which contains some of the digital photos of which I am most proud.