A quick and fun logo designed for a local Babe Ruth Baseball team, the Red Roosters logo came more naturally than most logo designs. For some reason when I was told the name of the team, I could instantly visualize the finished product:

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!

I recently re-designed a website for a company we do a lot of work for: Toadily Fun. Toadily Fun is a play center for children and adults similar to a Chuck E. Cheese. We designed their logo, building sign, and their first website last summer. A year later both Christina (the owner) and myself mutually agreed that it would be very effecient if we could design her a new site that she could edit and update her self.

The problem is the software I use to design and edit sites is neither cheap nor intuitive, so up until now I have had no solution for people that wanted full control over their sites after the initial design. I have recenly spent a lot of time with blogger, a free google browser based application that allows you to... ahem... blog (what I am using right now to tell you about this). It occured to me that I could design a blog site for Christina, and instead of pages she would have categories.

The nice thing about blogger is it is really easy to use from a posting stand point. From a desiging stand point, it can be very tricky and code-indusive to customize the overall look of the blog. Typically I start out with a free, pre-designed blogger template (as in this case) then edit every single element of the template to create a new design that fits the look and functionality I am looking for.

So far Christina seems to be enjoying doing all of her own posting and editing, and being the first client I have done this for I am making her my guinea pig so that I can perfect this style of web design and market it to more people.

The site we created last year: Toadily Fun designed in Dreamweaver
The new 'client-edit-friendly version: Toadily Fun modified in Blogger

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.

I could get in trouble for showing this a month before its publication, but Clint and I had fun with this and I wanted to share it. To clear up the survey jargon, canopy is any obstructions to the view of satellites, i.e. trees, tall buildings, etc.

For those of you who don't know, on the side of everything else that I do I draw a surveying cartoon for a surveying magazine. I don't expect you to find this humorous unless you are a surveyor, I just liked their little space suits.

A quick shout out to Daniel and Kevin at Hayes for helping me brainstorm.

I give you "Nativity de la Army Men"


Clint and I made this with Exacto knives, a glue gun, and three bags of plastic army men. We did this for a Christmas ornament contest at a holiday get together with friends. Just look at the attention to detail. Mary, for instance: her hair and bountiful womanliness do not come standard, we had to work a little extra for that.