Adrenalina Skateboard marathon and Scion had a contest recently, the only rules were to make sure the deck met the template specs, and include the logos of both companies. I didn’t win, but The design was fun to make.

A new one for today, plus I resized them all to 100×100 pixels so it’ll be easier for you to use these as avatars or icons if you don’t have the ability to resize them yourself. First the new design (free to use as you wish with no limitation or any need for that crap, just take it) followed by thumbnail-sized versions of each:

Thumbs (right click and save the image locations, feel free to link these images from my server):

I don’t now who to credit for the skull itself, I only did the overlays and other adjustments.

Take any and all of these graphics. More to come. No credits or anything, just take them. Maybe they’ll start a conversation about what’s going on here.

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.

This is a really old piece that wasn’t so much designed, as it was a series of experiments that I hobbled together.
I mention “mixed digital media” in the post title because it should be noted (to the non designer/techie) that there are nearly as many digital approaches to art creation as there are in the analog world. Inside our computers we can paint, sculpt, construct, and modify anything just like we can in real life.
I’ve come across some people (proficient in some of the traditional hands-on genres of certain artistic disciplines) that were  under the impression that doing stuff on the computer is just “easy,” as if the computer just makes stuff up by itself.
Truth is, if you can’t draw in real life, you’re not going to be sketching masterpieces on your machine any time soon.
Granted, while in the digital realm we have the luxury of hitting “undo” to correct past actions, when you consider that you have the power to adjust each and every pixel inside an image, it’s easy to spend hours simply making adjustments that only you would know about. In many cases, creating art from the ground up in a 100% digital environment may take as long or longer than making the same piece by hand… just for different reasons.
So, digital mixed media:

As one can plainly see, the image is divided into three irregular sections (from top to bottom):
1. Arial (bold) written out to say something that I thought sounded cool at the time, a 3D Studio Max model (color, render and text in 3DS-Max).
2. Another 3DS model, rendered at three angles inside of Swift 3d (it converts several 3D formats into vector images/animations). The background for this section is a collection of made-in-photoshop textures, colors,  and manipulations layered on top of each other.
3. Though I don’t still have it on me, this bottom panel was a photograph I’d taken of a stack of quarters. I attacked the photo with nearly every tool in PhotoShop until it both no longer looked like change, and fit with the other panels.

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.

The three main segments of the process for this image: photo for (some) anatomical accuracy, vector line art, and PhotoShop for the color, shading, and magic:

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:

Same Photo, just edited (color/contrast corrections, and a smile replacing a lack thereof):

…this was never used for anything, just a proof of concept. Except for the corners, the mouth in the smiling photo was created with the airbrush and clone stamp tools in Photoshop.