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.