Logo Designs

These are some variations on a logo that I am designing for a client.  The M was taken from their signature. 

The finished design can be seen here: Watercolors by Marilyn Lebhar.

Cleveland Gets a Bum Rap

Yesterday was a gorgeous day and I took some photos while walking around downtown Cleveland.  The titles are below each pic.  As always, you can click the images for a larger view.

In Da Park

Merman With Aspirations to Fly

Reflecto-Cleve

Too Lips

Statues Are Cool Too, Guys

In Da Park 2

City Hall's Rear End

Shaded by Justice

Ye Olde Courthouse

Walking on Sunshine, Whoa-Oh

Science, Wind, and Rock N' Roll

Bootsy Collins Loves Me

My coworker took print-outs of my Bootsy Collins illustrations with her to hang out with him this past weekend.  He apparently loved them and he signed the one with the boot hat (which was his favorite).  Here is a black and white scan of it -  I apologize for the bad quality scan.

Frost/Nixon follow-up

These are updated designs I made for the Surfside Players theater troupe's upcoming production of the play Frost/Nixon.  I had to change some text from the last version I posted, and I darkened the courier type in the background to show up a little better in print (although some of the effect is lost in conversion to lower quality images posted here). 

11x17 poster with sponsor boilerplate added at the bottom

 Smaller version used for flyers with Surfside Players boilerplate at the bottom

Postcard flyer 

Lots of Scary Shhh in the Ancient Land

This is a T-shirt design for my friend (and for me) based on a song we wrote when we were kids called "In the Ancient Land."  Just for fun.

Lemme know if you want to buy one when we get them made (on American Apparel shirts).  Please don't forget to vote for Bootsy's new hat on the right side of the page.

Bootsy Redux

Shortly after I posted the Bootsy Collins illustration, I got the following comment:

"Did you know bootsy collins is so named because he wears boots on his head instead of hats? If you don't believe me, listen to his music! Especially the single "Gonna Wear this Goddamn Boot on my Head." You should change it so there's a boot on his head."

To satisfy my readers, I have done the following:

Bootsy "BootHat" Collins

Please vote in the poll off the the right where YOU can decide what Bootsy will wear on his head next.  

It's Bootsy, Baby

I found out today that my co-worker is going to hang out this weekend with Bootsy Collins of James Brown band and Parliament Funkadelic fame in Cincinnati, so I decided to do an illustration of Bootsy for fun.  I hopefully will finish the whole picture eventually, but for now you get a floating, psychedelic Bootsy head.

Groovy, baby.

The Captain

Here's a T-shirt design I did for a friend of mine.  She gave me the text and a description of the images she wanted.  I drew the duct tape using Illustrator and the helicopter is a specific model so I took a photograph from wikipedia commons and live traced it with some edits to get the detailed hand-drawn look.  Here is the front:

...and the back

You Landerbrook, You Brought Her

Don't have much today - I've been working on a website for my boss.  This is a photo I took of our office building on Landerbrook Drive for the home page.  The picture used to contain a car, a van, two signs, and an orange post.  I love photoshop.

Click here to see finished website.

All De Colours, or, The Evolution of a Business Card

I recently designed some business cards for my mom's freelance art business.  She paints beautiful watercolors, makes jewelry, and offers home organization assistance.  You can check out her paintings at watercolors1.blogspot.com.  Below are 4 designs that I created to get to the final product.  As always, you can click the pictures to enlarge (some quality was lost converting for the web).  

I was instructed to make something arty and fun, with lots of color.  I sent her this...

...and this.

She liked the first design better, but wanted it brighter and more fun, so I tweaked the colors and added stars to make it more playful upon my mom's request.

This was a little too bright, and we went back to some of the original colors to get...

...the final design.

4 Red Cars and a snowy tree

I spent the afternoon working on some business card designs and on a website I'm building for my boss.  The business card ideas will be posted tomorrow, but until then you can enjoy 4 red cars and an FX-y photo of a snowy tree I took in January.

It was really weird - I walked outside and the world was black and white except for my car and the three red cars surrounding it.

Just playin' with filters.

Freaking Clown Shoes

This is an exercise I did for a class for a fictitious event called "Clown Town".  We were given an 8.5 x 11 flyer and a bunch of clip art like the ones used in the ad.  We were instructed to use the same copy and do whatever we wanted with it to publicize the same event.

This was the example we were given.

This is what I did with it.  I decided to do away with the clipart examples because I really disliked them all and ended up drawing the clown shoes based on a photo I found.  

Frost / Nixon

This is my first stab at the Frost / Nixon poster for the Surfside Players.

 The faded text that forms the back layer of this poster seems to not appear very well when I converted to jpeg for the web.  I may have to tweak it!

Middle of Nowhere, Ohio

Haven't posted in a few days because this past weekend I was at Kenyon college visiting friends and singing with the Chasers.  Here are a few pictures I took of Kenyon's beautiful campus and the surrounding Ohio countryside.  Click any of the pictures to view them full size.

Kenyon's pretty church.

This horse was chillin in someone's yard.

Click to view this whole panorama of Middle Path.

Elementary school

Black Box theater

Someone's yard.  Awesome.

This one had huge powerlines in the shot.  No more!

Little stream along the road

Ah, America.

Many photos taken, One photo posted.

I took a bunch of photos yesterday because the sky looked weird when I got home, but this was the only one I really liked. It was originally a much bigger scene, but I thought the tree was a much more interesting composition on its own.

Selections from Magazine

These are some layouts for a ficticious bank publication done as an exercise in InDesign.  The images and the text used is generally placeholder text and stock images, and are shown here for layout purposes only.  Because this blog does not easily support PDF format, I have taken selections from the magazine and converted them to JPEG for easy viewing.     

The front cover.  The Generations Bank logo is my original design, and is up on an earlier blog post.

Table of Contents.  Obama, Avatar, and shopping.  What more could you ask for?

Editorial Spread (using placeholder text).  I designed grayscale fake advertisements for "Giant Mattress Bank" as well using a stock photo image.

Cover story spread (space in the word "Recession" is for the gutter).  Avatar, woot.

Back cover featuring an original CoffeeBean advertisement using a stock photo, along with mailing indicia at the bottom.