I really like Sarah's color choice of red black and white. These are going in red envelopes by the way. This was very fun, very fast, and I really like the romantic elements in this design.

This is a two color business card design for Audax Strategies. They were wanting a vertical layout, and a front and back. We were given the logo and two pantone swatches to use in the design up front. Audax is a new emerging printing and media group, so they don't have a defined corporate identity at this time. So I referenced their site and email signatures to develop something that fits their theme of their business.

After waiting for the opportunity to design MTSU's Gameday book, Chase and I were asked to design for a different division of MTSU Sports. We designed the newest edition of the Kermit Davis Sixth Man Enrollment Brochure. Please tell us what you think.

We just recently designed a new Myspace Music page for a local rapper named JOJO. Along with designing the layout of the page we also take and manipulated all of his newest photos.
Check him and the new design out at myspace.com/jdoclick

A great friend of mine, Lindsey Borders, has her own booking agency for musical talent. I owed her more than one favor for all she has down for me and my own music, and decided that I could help her by designing a nice proposal template for her to use when approaching new venues, new clients, etc.

I chose to keep the design very subtle and unobtrusive, and for those of you who don't design you don't have any idea how much restraint it takes for us designers to keep things simple when we have as many tools in our box as we do. Picture a child who loves coloring and has a huge box of 150 crayons. Now challenge him to picking only three colors to use on the picture, and to not dump the whole box on the table during the selection process.

In essence I designed a letter head she could use, but added a cover to make it even more professional when submitting her proposals. I also designed her a very simple logo in the process, as well established a color pallet: a very warm and inviting pink with light browns.

We recently designed George's blog site that he is using to promote his run for senate in 2010. The next thing George needed was a little collateral to use on the trail., i.e. business cards, letterheads to print statements on, and brochures explaining his policy positions.


Consistency is great in two ways:
1) It makes the pieces seem profession if they have a central governing theme - no political pun intended.


2) As a designer, you don't have to go back to the drawing board. You've already decided on fonts, colors, and graphic elements you just have to re-work them within a new set of dimensions and function.

Clint and I were recently approached by MTSU for the possibility of doing design work for their sports programs. They wanted to see a sample of our work in order to consider us for the job, since we have not done a whole lot of design for sports we decided to do a quick redesign of their football program cover.

We recently finished one of the largest design jobs we have ever undertaken: designing and illustrating the cover and inner page elements for a novel by my friend George Smith. The novel is called 'Reveille', and it is an historical fiction novel based off George's great grandfather: Charles Andre. The story takes place before and after the Civil War, and though he travels with the war, the most central location is Louisiana.

We helped do a simple site for George's last book, 'Uncertain Times.' When he began work on the new book he thought of us, not for site design, but for illustration and design of the book itself.

I decided I wanted to do the drawing for the cover in scratch board. Scratch board (or clay board) is a piece of masonite - in the case of the one I used- painted white, then a thin piece of clay is covered over that and painted black. When you use one of the scratching utensils to remove the black clay, the white board shows through. It is more akin to carving, than drawing, and when using the black clayboard the other tricky thing is you are drawing the highlights, not the shadows. When you draw with black lead on white paper it is the shadows you are collecting on the paper, when drawing on black with white it is like 'opposite drawing'

Here is the picture I drew for the cover, maybe it will help this make sense. You can click on the image to make it bigger:


The next steps were as follows: paint the drawing, and design the full cover: front, spine, and back with title, text, and additional images. This was all done in the Adobe Creative Suite:


I felt like the muted reds and yellows, and the scratching/rough textures created a style that seemed to fitting with the story and the era in which the story takes place.

At first George wanted us to do illustrations for each chapter, a scene from each one that could go above the chapter heading. We both came to the conclusion, however, that with 34 chapters detailed scenes for each one would be very time consuming. Then I had an idea for doing icons for each chapter. Something small, that could either symbolize something in the chapter or directly reference it.

I wanted the icons to feel like the cover, but not take so long to draw. Secondly, clay board is expensive, about $8 dollars a sheet, for 34 chapters we are talking close to $300. The obvious solution was to illustrate using a computer program (Adobe Illustrator to be exact) but I had to define a style, and then I had to emulate that style 34 times.

In my mind I seen the icons as logos that might have been used in newspapers from 150 years ago. It wasn't until my third or forth one that I finally settled on a style, I was trying to make them look like woodcuts:

This process was working really well, it only took about an hour to draw one (as opposed to 6 like the cover) and I could teach Clint (the other designer) how to emulate this style so we could both draw them in order to meet the deadline in time.

The only problem with this style is it was too computer-generated looking. So after we made them I added some distress marks in Photoshop and brought them back into Illustrator and colored them the same muted red as I used with the cover. This made them look more authentic:


Next I added the chapter number and name to each icon, and the chapter heading pages should looks as follows:


We are finished, now after it prints it just needs to become a New York Times' best seller!

The company I work for is having an employee only design competition for their best selling pen. There will be 4 finalist that will receive $250 each and one finalist that will receive an additional $750. This should be easy for me as I have designed so many pens in the past for my company and know what they are looking for. The designs i am submitting are below:



Hopefully I will win something. I will keep you posted. ;-)

This was a project for a local not-for-profit organization. They were having an essay and poster contest. The winner of the essay contest will be awarded a scholarship. The winner of the poster contest will receive this beautifully designed and printed banner to display in their school with pride.

The design includes both Martin Luther King and our Master in Chief Barrack Obama. The design displays both of these men doing what they have always been best at, delivering their messages. Also incorporated in the design is a small portion of their individually inspiring yet equally impacting messages.

The banner is 7 feet long and 4 feet tall. It was printed for us by The B's Tees in Columbia TN.

Well we got it again...
One year ago we won a bid to design and layout a catalogue for World Champion in Shelbyville and won the bid. They came back to us this year and didn't even ask for a competitive bid. They just asked us when we could start.

The 2007 Holiday Catalogue


The 2008 Holiday Catalogue


This year we decided to go with a different style and layout. For the cover and interior. The inside always, of this particular catalogue, contains a lot of products in the least amount of real estate possible. So we went with a grid style layout.

This logo was designed for The Hope Organization. The are an organization that the helps the hispanic community in the northern part of middle TN. The do a lot of good work for the community and help get a lot of people on the right track that wouldn't be able to do it on their own. We were very happy and proud to design this logo for an organization that does this kind of work.