I spent some time this afternoon playing with paper and rubber cement.

it's a very rough draft, but a start.

Well, this is a bad idea.

415, count em, 415 sharp metal objects in a blister pack on a hang card! Once you open it, it can never be closed again. What to do with the 412 of these that you don't have immediate use for?

Next up: packaging design

I think I can improve on this. Not only is it an idiotic way to package this type of product, it's almost as if they went out of the way to make the graphic design on the card as bland and uninspiring as possible.

I have a problem in that I forget to save an extra copy of my pieces as a JPEG (and can't post them as illustrator or photoshop files). It means that a lot of the work I do doesn't make it onto this blog. This image of my finished book jacket design was taken by a drone aircraft hovering 5000 ft above my house.

For the next project I will have to design a book jacket for a novel. The novel I have chosen is a book that I read as a teenager and loved, Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. It's the story of two friends in the medieval Europe and how our personalities affect the paths that our lives take.

This is what the cover of the book I read in high school looked like and the following are examples of other artwork that has been used for the cover of this book.

The nice thing about this project was that for the first time I really felt like I was using Adobe Illustrator to create an actual illustration.

The next project we wound up working on was to be a poster for a music event. For my poster I chose an actual concert that Elvis Costello happened to be performing in Dublin, Ireland this month. Before I started I created a mood board for the piece.

As you watch the Top of the Pops youtube link below, think about The Eagles, think about Fleetwood Mac, think about Rod Stewart, think about men with long feathered hair and shirts unbuttoned to their navels and gold chains and flaired jeans and platform shoes. That was how everyone dressed. It was a uniform. Here comes this guy with short, cropped hair, who wore suits and dark rimmed glasses. In 1976 the only person you knew who dressed that way was your grandfather. His sartorial choices were shocking, but so was the depth and originality of his lyrics and the fact that he spit words out like bullets. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHmX1wbdBoA

He went on to become a huge influence on Generations of singers and songwriters since. The link below is Fiona Apple covering a song of his from the mid 80's with him and his band (sorry, his original recording is much more striking than the cover)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAJ2HK2Epqs

Or if you don't like Fiona Apple, here's an interesting thing about The Beastie Boys.
watch both of them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H_6pHfKRqU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E6fvVaVgOQ

So, I have been very remiss in updating this blog over the last couple of weeks. October has kinda gotten away from me. I'm sorry and I intend to remedy that. Below are the finished ads I created for Mini Cooper.

My concept involved taking a brand that was established very successfully back in the late 50's and then relaunched in the 2000's and using images of the contemporary cars placed in the types of ads you would find for cars in the 50's and 60's to draw a connection between the current brand and it's well loved history.

So, my next school project involves building an ad campaign for an existing brand. I've decided to create a new direction for Mini Cooper. I have some solid ideas, now I just need teach myself Photoshop (which I've never used before and don't understand). Lynda.com, HERE I COME!

This is a really clever, thoughtful, touching series of ads.

The logo finally became this...

The runner up,

A lot of work went into the crafting of the lettermark logo I've been working on, lots of revisions and editing. Maybe it's not totally obvious to the casual observer, but the design dept of GSU is actually making me work my butt off.

So, why graphic design? Well, it seems like a good way to take the skills I already have and apply them to a real world career trajectory. When you enter the workforce without career training it is entirely possible to make a living, you just have little choice in what you do. You take a job with a company and work hard and learn how to move yourself up. You acquire skill sets based on the work you happen to be doing and the specific company you work for. This is different than a career path. When you work in this way, you may well earn a decent salary (I have), but you gain skills and leave them behind on a job to job basis. You become a generalist with a smattering of job skills here and there that don't add up to a career path. A "Jack of all trades". It makes it very hard to market yourself and move forward in any kind of meaningful way. You wind up beholden to whoever last hired you and incapable of taking those skills and finding work in another place at the same level, because that same level job at a new company may involve learning a new computer program or a new workflow system or whatever (all of which you're perfectly capable of learning), but in order to get the chance to prove that you can learn these things, a prospective employer wants certification. They want to see that you've completed professional training and are moving in a specific direction with a career path before they'll see you as that type of employee. So, you'll likely start at the bottom unless you turn yourself into a "professional".
So, why graphic design? As an artist, I have long used typography and graphic imagery in my work, so it seems to make sense. In art school (the first time round) I studied under one of the founding members of the "Chicago Imagist" movement, an artist named Karl Wirsum. I was fairly influenced by the imagists as well as Pop Art, Comic Book Art, American Regionalism, Surrealism, German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, etc. The imagists, as well as pop artists, comic book artists, regionalists, and constructivists often straddled the worlds of art and design. I have too, as evidenced by the following pen and ink drawings. Most of these were done for an underground zine in the mid 90's called Fuel. Some are covers, some are other illustrations. Enjoy.

Sorry the photography isn't better, these were taken off the cuff with my iphone.

So this weeks adventure in design involved drawing. 100 drawings of lettermark logos, to be precise. This is the sheet contains the first 50. Nothing says "graphic design class" like tracing paper and Prismacolor.

These are a grouping of more illustration based logos. This is also as far as I got by 2:00am. Were I a younger man, I would have pushed on and spent the wee hours of the morning filling the rest of the page. However, I am not a younger man. I needed some sleep. Oh well, onwards and upwards. At least I still have plenty of material to work with.

The list of adjectives used to develop this mood board: creative, productive, persistent, knowledgeable, thoughtful, tall, middle-aged, inventive, resourceful, experienced, even tempered, intellectual, working class, tired, hopeful, realistic, accepting, resurgent, reliable, strange, funny, pessimistic, fair, hard working, trustworthy, helpful, anxious.

The words in bold were the primary focus of the board.

Just finished my first assignment for my intro to graphic design class, a mood board. I'm a 44 year old college undergrad with no savings, little means of income, and a 30 year mortgage, but I'm still here and still working forward. I was asked to generate 25+ adjectives that describe me and the 2 of them that I used to develop the mood board were "anxious" and "persistent". Needless to say, the mood board turned out a little bit weird. More art than design, hard to read, but bristling with a sense of anxiety and determination. We'll see how this goes over in class tomorrow morning at 8 am. Think kindly of me, I'm an artist by nature, I don't know how to function in the civilized world.

Well, here we are, 26 years after entering art school and dropping out, after decades of dong things that I didn't want to be doing to put food in my mouth, almost 30 years after the professional aptitude test that said. "be a graphic designer"...  a design blog. Sure. Why not? I have relevant things to say. The world wants to know what I have to say.