Archive for the ‘Graphic Design’ Category

VectorDefector Gates are Flooding!

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

I’m proud to say business is booming this summer! I know I’ve addressed this topic before, but now is the time to be a freelancer. Its nice to have that “busy but not overworked” feeling again. Moreover, its even nicer to be busy and not have the general stress that goes along with working in an office (even though I miss the water-cooler talk).

I’m collaborating with a number of friends and agencies over the next couple of months and, quite honestly, they all kick butt! I’m working with my associates CustomChannels.net to establish some rockin’ home-grown Flash-based radio stations, my buddies at Mindflint and I are cookin’ up some fun and creative web projects, the folks at GraphikCreative and I knocked out some simple quizzes for Sleep Center of the Rockies, the crew at Barnaby and Associates and  I are about to produce one of my most ambitious WordPress sites, B-Squared Design and I are collaborating on a nice new portfolio site, and my buddy Doug Koke and I have landed some team design projects.

Whew! I’ll have specific updates on each of these projects as soon as they’re to go. Stay tuned!

Also, if you’re looking to contact me for work, I’m probably going to be busy until the middle of July at least- but that doesn’t mean we can’t chat about a future project!

Project:Whitespace – Flash Animation

Friday, May 8th, 2009

While I normally don’t favor doing animation work, I was offered a well planned Flash job this week, and I have to say it turned out better than most. Project:Whitespace is a side project from some associates of mine at Ando Media. I used some of Ando’s ad-delivery toolsets back when I was doing internet radio and was very impressed!

whitespace

Project:Whitespace

This new product is a method for allowing bands to promote themselves using the unpaid filler space thats common on many online radio stations. As they’re not necessary allowed to play the same ads online as they are on terrestrial, there’s often a need for different audio “overlays”, so why not use a band promotion? This animated demo explains it all.

Smile-Radio: Launch

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Earlier last week, I completed and launched Smile-Radio, a marketing site developed for my associates at CustomChannels to pitch their new product: streaming radio targeted at dentists.

SmileRadio.com

SmileRadio.com

Dubbed “Music for the Modern Dental Practice”, Smile Radio is a very “Web 2.0″ looking custom-themed CSS site running off the WordPress platform (along with a few strategically placed custom plug-ins) and will soon have an automated ordering and tracking system for e-commerce payment traction.

In addition to the layout and tracking system, I also developed the accompanying Flash streaming media player and hand-crafted the branding. Lookin’ sharp! CustomChannels and I will be doing more work in the future including a new Flash radio player with unique statistical tracking. Look out, web!

LivePresenter Launch!

Monday, April 13th, 2009

My client, Mortgage Training Institute recently launched our latest collaboration: a new pure CSS site marketing their new product LivePresenter, a top-of-line yet inexpensive product that streamlines online video presentations.

MTI: LivePresenter

MTI: LivePresenter

Designed and developed by yours truly, the LivePresenter site was built for marketing and search engine efficiency. Along with creating a series of hand-crafted logos and icons, I also developed a media player in Silverlight 2.0 to showcase customer testimonials. I also designed layouts for their nifty back-end toolset that allows users to manage their online presentations.

Great product + great collaboration = great results! Congrats, guys.

Sharpening my Design Chops

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

I’ve been very pleased to say I’ve been bidding and contracting for more and more jobs that involve both design and development this year. When I re-established my business, it was one of my goals to be the most well-rounded creative professional I could be and admittedly had some rusty spots- design being one of them as it wasn’t a huge part of my last job and practice makes perfect.

I proud to say a lot of my designs and logo illustrations are really coming around. I’ve always thought my metaphor for design was painting on a large blank canvas and the idea is to get one great idea; whereas in development its more like putting a big puzzle together- the painting is already there, you just have to figure out the most efficient order in which to put the pieces together.

It all seems to be relating together well this month. Three cheers for covering all bases: design, development, search optimization and streaming media! Case studies to follow soon.

Upgrading to Adobe CS4

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

I’m admittedly a late one to getting the most recent software, but today I finished upgrading all my Adobe software to the latest version (CS4), and have been pretty pleased with the results so far.

It seemed to me like CS3 was still a little clunky with leftover pieces from old Macromedia software and ran a bit slow on Vista; not nearly as bad a CS2 however. The newest versions run noticeably faster on my machine and have a number of neat new innate features that make each application more compatible with its associates.

I’d recommend upgrading to the new version. While I hate the fact that the new model for software is to force an upgrade every year, I agree that this upgrade was worth it. Check it out for yourself by going to Adobe.com and downloading the free trial, or click the link on the bottom right of my blog- I believe you get a discount.