Sword + Dagger Logo Design

I was recently contacted by two lovely graduates of my publishing program -- they had combined forces to start a publishing services company called Sword and Dagger. They had a super cool name and some fabulous design inspiration to go along with it. It didn't take me much time at all to create some logo ideas:

They liked number 9 best, and wanted to make sure the sword and dagger were represented in the design, and they wanted to see how the design would look on a black background. So I put together the following:

The final designs are below. It was a fun project that was a nice break from what I normally do, and I can't wait to see how the designs look in print!

You can check out their website here: http://swordanddagger.wix.com/publishingservices

2014 Marching Band Tee Shirt

It's that time of the year again, my one regularly commissioned project! I've been doing the tee shirt for my high school marching band for the past few years, and it's been a fun challenge since the theme is completely different from year to year. To check out some of my previous tee designs, click here

This year's theme was "Goddess of Fire" and I was able to use 2 colors (plus the tee shirt color). Fancy!

The '70s psychedelia-inspired design (I looked at lots of music posters).

An idea of what the front and back of the tee shirt should look like. 

Dam Good Books

Here's another little thing I whipped up for Ooligan Press:

I offered a beaver-less option if the press wanted to be a bit more high-brow, but I'm happy to see the little guy made the cut.

Ooligan Press is putting together "Dam Book Bundles" - basically a collection of 3 titles that our press has published. The titles are offered at a discount because you're buying multiple books. It's a pretty sweet deal, and you can check it out here if you want to buy some excellent titles from a student-run independent press. Check it out for the puns alone!

Even More Dragons

Because I have some drawing abilities, I couldn't just design a book and be done with it. No, I had to illustrate the book as well. I left things to the last minute (as usual), so I only had time to work up some line drawings. I'm content with the way they came out - I think the quality of the line in these drawings compliments the rest of the book's design well enough.

Here's some handlettering I did for the title page (of course I had to put spikes and a tail on the "g").

I love this sleeping dragon drawing.

Chill dragon is also one of my favorites.

Here Be Dragons!

For my Book Design class this term, I had to design an entire book (it was awesome!) so here are the cover comps I came up with:

This first one had some nice elements, but it looked a bit old for the target audience of this book (middle-grade level readers).

I really liked this design as well, but it looks like an adult book.

This one was the clear favorite of my peers. It was by far the most age appropriate, and since it's a book for younger audiences, I could get away with having an image-based back cover. The author photo and bio is much more of an adult book element anyway.

Here's the final! I made some suggested improvements, like handlettering the text on the cover and adding the dragon's arms to hold the banner. I obviously redrew the front and back illustrations as well, and added some cracks around the dragon butt to add to the illusion of the dragon breaking through the back of the book cover. My classmates liked where the colors bled outside the lines in the comp, so I replicated that in the final. I moved the ISBN box to a more sensible place as well.

I had some trouble finding reference images for the dragon's butt, but as multiple people reminded me, dragons aren't real so I could draw it however I liked.

Super-Sized Squirrel

You may have noticed a trend on this blog (not in the last couple posts, but in a bunch of my cat drawings) that I love drawing really obese animals that look more like toys than anything living in the wild. The following is no exception.

I put together a t-shirt design for my peer mentoring program. We have a thing about squirrels (they're in all of our program newsletters), so it was a no-brainer to draw this up:

Embrace the squishiness!

Here's a picture of mentors wearing the shirt with my design on it:

MAPS Re-branding

Ooligan is not the only rebranding I've worked on this term. I wound up reworking one of my own designs for the MAPS team, a group of peer mentors that I am responsible for organizing. Conveniently, this means I can change the look of our brand whenever I want, because I have the power (please read that in a He-Man voice because I think he says that).

Anyway, long story short, I had to update the logo to make it digital-friendly. It lost a bit of it's character, but it's sleek-looking! Also, I learned what kerning was.

Original:

Revamped:

A fancy button I made that connects to a fancy webform:

All of the revised work fits with Portland State University's visual branding guidelines, which is probably important if this mentor group is going to have any longevity. Hooray for learning graphic design things!

Ooligan Press Blog Branding

I've completed my first year of grad school. Crazy! The next few months are going to be relatively light, responsibility-wise, so expect to see new material pop up in your news feeds on a regular basis. Unless I get really lazy this summer...

Anyway, what follows are some blog badges I created for the student-run publisher I work for, Ooligan Press. We're working on rebranding the Press and changing up the website, and my silly little doodles are part of it all.

First time around I created everything in Adobe Illustrator, which made everything graphic and clean, but these were missing the hand-drawn/human element that is an integral part of the press' identity.

These initial badges aren't bad, but our digital and social media department lead was looking for something that is obviously made by the human hand. So I went back to the drawing board (literally), and came up with these:

You may notice I was roped into creating a few more badges. This is not the last you'll see of the Ooligan-related work I did this term.

All of the Cats

Here's something I did a few months ago for the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) in Portland. They needed a half-sheet sized catalog cover to promote classes and events offered in February and March of this year. To the surprise of no one who has skimmed through this blog, it features cats.

The Valentine's Day image was the front cover and the St. Patrick's Day cats occupied the back cover.

Type Specimen: Adobe Caslon Pro

One of our assignments for my book design class this term was to create three type specimen sheets. Here's the final one I made (and my favorite), for Adobe Caslon Pro:

It was tough to find a limerick that wasn't too ribald for class, though I quite enjoy the one I found.

Type Specimen: Rockwell

One of our assignments for my book design class this term was to create three type specimen sheets. Here's the second one I made, for Rockwell:

Type Specimen: Century Schoolbook

One of our assignments for my book design class this term was to create three type specimen sheets. Here's the first one I made, for Century Schoolbook:

Spaceman

Created for a high school color guard t-shirt. The theme this year was based on the movie "Sunshine."

Line art

More Sasquatch!

I've been thinking a lot about the Sasquatch because he's the main component of an image I created for a tote bag design contest at Powell's books. Here's my linework for the submission - next week I'll upload the color version (which is looking pretty adorable so far!)