Some designers are split when it comes to web-based graphics and print media, but I personally enjoy working within the limitations and possibilities with both mediums. When it comes to print, I really like doing the bigger stuff… there are few things that are more gratifying than seeing an image you’ve stared at on your monitor forever become something big, shiny, and real.
The key is planning everything out, and plans can be as different as the design itself.

Currently I produce one to three table top displays for national, regional, and statewide conferences, which are very similar to trade shows (with booths, networking, etc).
When I work in larger dimensions, I try to fill as much space as possible without losing the message inside a barrage of imagery… as with any design project, the artwork should push the message and make it easier for the viewer to digest.

Here are a few sample pieces, detail shots, and descriptions:

This is a four-panel work-in-progress shot (right, center, left, and center banner) that went to print about a year ago (as of this writing). Most of the art on the site panels was created  in Illustrator, but everything was composed in PhotoShop (at scale, 300dpi). The general height (not including the center banner) is 22 inches, printed on foam board with a gloss finish, and velcro’d onto a four-panel fold up backboard (the center piece takes up two panels). Once velcro has been attached to the back of each panel beforehand, set up and breakdown of this display literally takes less than three minutes:

One thing to keep in mind is that during trade shows or events like the ones these displays are used for, people are constantly moving. The goal is to create something striking, and not be dependent on handing out free trinkets with your name on them (pens, mousepads, etc). Remember that like billboards, too much text will make people look the other way… with displays, people will read bullets, but rarely paragraphs. Displays should be outlines, and usually the table top should have supplementary material (pamphlets, even photocopied documents) that expand on the points made visually.

The “Battered, Unbroken, Ascending” display below is my favorite for two reasons, the first being that it was the most personally-charged, and secondly because I was allowed full control over the visual assets. This display was shown at an education related conference soon after hurricanes Katrina and Rita… for those of us here in the state, the storms are scorched into our minds forever… but for a lot of people outside of the gulf south, what happened really is still sort of an abstract tragedy.

This was printed on one sheet of polystyrene (22″ h, 90″ w) and composed in PhotoShop at 300 dpi. The PSD file for this was done at scale, and weighed in at over 8 gigs in size. Every time I nudged something, it took my old machine between five and 10 minutes to render the new image. File size strain is one of the biggest problem for large format printing with raster files, but it’s all about the end goal:

Here’s a detail on the left and right sides of the display… of note, the different pieces of paper on the left were regular household items that I ripped apart and scanned in at roughly 1,200 dpi, then artificially weathered and distressed in PhotoShop. The paper pieces were scanned in at such a high resolution because they needed to appear large on the display… had I scanned them in at 300 dpi, they would have been printed at their real-life actual size (tiny scraps). The paper products used (from top to bottom) were a paper bag, a sheet from a steno note book, a chunk of cardboard, and envelope, some corrugated cardboard, and a paper towel:

The same display in use:

…the logo on the table skirt is a design I developed nearly seven years ago, in this case the table-skirt vendor simply needed a vector file (.eps).

One last display, simply because the ones presented so far are basically the same, they both attach to a paneled backboard (though with the long one-piece polystyrene print, the four panels become one curved surface).
On this project (San Francisco, 2006), I opted out of using the altogether. I had a basic idea in my head… I wanted to create something that the panels would hang from instead of being stuck on to.
I went to Lowe’s, and initially built a framework with PVC pipes (right there in the isle), but the weak plastic caused instability, and I knew there would be no way to use them to support any weight whatsoever. Luckily, Lowe’s had steel pipes, elbows, T-shapes, and bases. So again, right in the isle, I constructed a booth-like frame that looked just like the one I’d made with PVC, but this time it was incredibly stable. I bought spares of the smaller pieces, and even came up with alternative ways of putting the frame together (in case we were put in a corner or in the middle of the room):

…I was really excited about the way this one came out. The graphics (aside from some photos) were all vector, and the little airplane flying up in the center panel was a 3D model created in Animation: Master, exported as a .3Ds file, imported into Swift 3D and then rendered as a vector image. One of the funniest things about this display is that people were approaching me, asking me where I’d bought the blue “feet” for the display. All they really are were some little one-dollar garbage cans that happened to be shaded pretty similarly to the table skirt!

Here’s one last shot with a detail of the steel on top:

Each of the panels had two holes poked in at the top, and were literally strung up around the pipe with steel wire I’d bought at a craft store. Although this display was very successful at drawing in people, I probably won’t do another one like this for an out-of-state conference because dealing with over 100 pounds of pipes is a real drag (when you consider that you’re also packing other work materials, personal luggage, and the fact that you have to get it all back home, too).

One very important note:
Although I do the layouts, designs, and concepts for projects like this, I don’t do the actual printing. I have a friend at the main Kinko’s in Baton Rouge (on Airline Highway) named Gia… we’ve been working together for over six years, and she’s awesome. She treats print like a craft, and she’s a great designer and artist as well. Glad to have her as a friend and frequent working partner. Whenever you any large print jobs on this site, my friend Gia’s the one who made it go from digital to tangible. She understands the art of printing, even when it’s production stuff.

Illustrator, on a canvas of 33″ by 9.5″. Four color print on a white-dipped board:

The assignment: Create a cover page for a program pamphlet.
The limitations: The cover should be done in black and white, as the pamphlet may be photocopied multiple times as well as sent over the fax machine.
What I don’t want to do: Make a boring cover, use clip art, or miss a chance to make something fun.

Solution:
1. Ask a student worker at the office to pose his arm and hand in a few different positions and start taking photos.
2. Grab a white sheet of copier paper and another sheet of paper with a lot of contrast. Take a photo.
3. Bring both pics into PhotoShop. Knock out a hole in the paper rippage, desaturate both photos them so they become greyscale, then increase the contrast a lot.
4. Clean up the images, trim away the edges, and cut the student’s worker’s shoulder and upper arm into two pieces (so part of him is inside the hole, and part of him pokes out).
5. Draw a thing that fits the layout in Illustrator, then import it into Photoshop and chip away parts of it (where the thumb is located).
6. Throw some words behind it, drop it in Word, and you’ve avoided all of MS-W’s limitations.

From concise to loose approximations, I think I make at least one Louisiana map a month. I try to give each one its own flavor. The line art is vector (Illustrator), the fills, shading, and composition are done in PhotoShop:

Logos should be easy to recognize, and they should work well in black and white (for faxing). Beyond that, it comes down to making the client happy. I don’t usually work with shades of pink and baby blue together, but I think it came together. The logo has since seen some desktop printing and recently some large format printing as well (a large version of this image is on a vinyl banner now):

Stock Photo:

Skate Shop Ad:

This was part of a series of ads we did that were decidedly against our “competition” as it were… a shop called “Go Big” owned by a guy named Gary. Go Big no longer exists, but the ads are still funny. Here’s another old one:

This was a pretty normal half-page ad in a coupon book… one thing I was especially happy about was the Latin text Photoshopped onto the right door… “vado magnus combibo” roughly translates to “Go Big Sucks.”

I know silkscreening is the ultimate craft, and I know three and four color prints are awesome, but there is something gratifying about dealing with heat transfers coming from a digital press… unlimited color, gradients galore, and you can shade as much as you want to, however you want to.
This was a graphic that became Wayne Patrick’s pro model for Aminal Skateboards (intentional misspelling, by the way), a company based out of New Orleans and owned by my friend Shawn Fleming.

The artwork itself was done by Wayne’s friend Wil, my task was to take the drawing, make it print-friendly, and color it… with one complication… I had to maintain the original line work (whereas I’d normally redraw the lines clean). I was also asked to remove the “Friends Forever” text and replace it with the brand name. The turnaround time was quick, but I thought it came out pretty neat:

I’m a friend and fan of a skateboard company called Deluxe Distribution, and often times in the past I’d send over random graphics to my friends Jim and Mic E. These are a few shots of me playing around with one of the brands that Deluxe has under it… Real Skateboards. These didn’t make the cut, but I like to think of this as a high-tech and adult way of scribbling your favorite skate brand’s name on the back of a notebook or on your griptape. Just showing love:

It’s still fresh after Halloween so I figured I’d share this… I went through a phase a while back where I was really having fun drawing zombies… mine, though gory by some standards, are probably a bit too cartoony for anyone’s use but my own.

It just so happened that the skateboard company I was riding for at the time wanted to do some zombie graphics, so I pulled out my sketchbook and cleaned them up. The deck never happened, but I still dig having them.

Sketches:

Zombies cleaned up via the drawing tools in Adobe Flash and Adobe Illustrator, using a Wacom Graphire pen pad: