…they’re filming for a movie in the Twilight series or whatever it is (I’ve never seen it so I’m not sure if it’s a serial or not, I am becoming the old man I never said I’d be). Anyway, between the Capital and the Governor’s Mansion is the biggest greenscreen I’ve ever seen:

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.

In the footwear world, the Nike Dunks probably outrank everyone when it comes to special edition shoes and an eager market of skaters and shoe-fanciers to buy them.
I had this idea that I knew would work: create a hurricane-related shoe (post Katrina and Rita), and send money to the state or the Red Cross or something like that. As it turns out, you have to have a lawyer just to give Nike a peek at your design. Either that or know a Nike rep.

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:

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:

When making ads for our local skateboard shop, pretty much anything goes. Unlike my day job where there is some formality in my work, when doing stuff for the shop I get to experiment with things a lot. This is a look at one of the elementary uses of Photoshop: taking a set of images and combining them together to make something completely different. In this case, a shoe sale ad featuring absolutely no shoes. The assets:

1. Noted conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. I don’t know who to credit this photo to.
2. My friend Kerry Simpson (shop owner, guy with the camera) mugging for the camera with our friend Terry Adams (the number one flatland-freestyle BMX rider in the world).
3. A used car lot photo I found on Google. I guess I should just credit it to “Motorama Hot Wheels,” but I have no clue where they’re located.

In a really professional scenario, I’d probably use better assets (or create them), but because we weren’t making an ad competing against Tucker or Motorama, and the ad was satirical in nature, I decided that Fair Use would allow us to go ahead and do this:

…the “Chrissly Bear” insert is an entirely different story. More on that one day.

This was basically a case of doing some really up-close “destructive” extraction (meaning I deleted pixels around the images I wanted rather than use masking), some shading, color hue/saturation, and a texture creation and overlay where the “SMALL TIME SKATES” signage is located. The one of the two toughest parts were blending Kerry and Tucker’s necks together, so I basically just cloned Kerry’s skin and stuffed my virtual skin grafts under Tucker’s collar. The other tough pat was getting the right side of Kerry’s glasses just right… if you look at the source photo, you can see that I had to remove some trees, but still retain the look of glass inside his frames.

While not a photorealistic result, I think it has quite a surreal value to it, which makes it more fun and matches a lot of the other ads we do (here’s another before and after):

Here’s one done at work… I don’t remember if my friend (and coworker) Karthik took this photo or if I did, but it needed some work… but instead of making it look normal, I decided to bring it over into a twighlight zone full of glory, where cherubs toot on horns and great masses trip at the awesomeness of our State Capitol (and it really is). The first thing that should strike you is that the clouds are wrong, and the green is way too green… but I think it works. It’s just something fun to look at.

The assignment: create an image showing some particular logos together for a PowerPoint slide.

The only logo that I created here was the Regents seal in the very center… the other two circular seals to the left and right were delivered to me as .jpeg files, so they had to be cut out (they were in white boxes, as it were). I added the border around the LCTCS banner for contrast.
For the logos and seals on top (as opposed to the reflections), I stick with the “Perspective” tool under Image>Adjust>Free Transform.
After tweaking everything, I created the blue tabletop by using the polygon “straight-line” lasso and filling it with the cyan you see above.
I grouped the logos together, duplicated that group, flipped them upside down, and used the Distort and Perspective tools under Free Transform.
For PowerPoint, I typically export at 1024 x 768, as a PNG-24 with transparency (the version of this image used in the presentation is actually see-through in the upper white areas). PowerPoint does a surprisingly good job of supporting PNG files with varying levels of transparency (even transparencies that go from 100% to 0% opacity).