Logo Design: Fixing the Detroit Zoo

Some examples of bad logo design… let’s see… The Detroit Zoo, the Orlando International Airport and the 2012 London Olympics… all bad. I chose to tackle the Detroit Zoo and see if I could come up with something better. My goal was to simplify the design and create something more iconic, recognizable and versatile. The main logo is up top, while the two below the text are examples of how the logo can be utilized for other reasons (i.e. business cards, hats, staff t-shirts, etc.,). If you’d like to read more about the essentials of logo design, or design in general for that matter, check out a guy named Paul Rand.

Here’s what the actual Detroit Zoo logo looks like… gross!

Alberto Seveso Style

This piece is basically an attempt to reproduce the style of an Italian illustrator named Alberto Seveso. I find his work amazing and wanted to see if I could reproduce what he was doing. It seems like a simple concept but proper execution, I’ve found, was surprisingly difficult.

Design & Art Theory: Final Project

Finally! I’ve discovered an awesome name for my production company! It’s called “WeAreTheLight.” The logo is a conglomeration of doodles in my sketch book that I scanned into Illustrator for cleanup and then Photoshop for layout. I ended up turning the final composition 90 degrees to the left before it was finished… I thought it looked better.

Digital Story Telling: The Final Product

This is a short film I did for my digital story telling class. The idea was to sell a product using story and emotion, as opposed to the traditional thirty second television format. I developed the concept and saw it through to fruition over one month’s time. It’s not a perfect product, however the point was to tell a story and not to get the production value perfect. Enjoy!

Self Branding: Business Cards

Well I’ve begun the process of redesigning my business cards. My main goal this time around is to begin branding myself and my name rather than some fictitious company I’m pretending to work for. Ha ha. As far as the design goes, this is my first crack. It actually makes me a little uncomfortable that it’s so simple, but I kinda like that about it as well.

2D to 3D Motion Graphics Test

This is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while now. I’ve seen this technique used in several documentaries recently and wanted to try it out for myself. The idea was to take a 2D image of some kind and move a camera through the scene to reveal that there is actually depth. What I did was break this painting (The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorra by John Martin) up along what I perceived to be the foreground, mid-ground and background using Photoshop. I then imported the layered Photoshop file into Apple Motion where I spaced each, of what ended up being almost twelve layers, out along the Z axis. It took quite a bit of tweaking, but ended up being really easy to do.

Digital Abstract

With this one we were tasked with designing an abstract digital art piece, which is basically using the canvas to convey some kind of emotion rather than a specific image. I was in a particularly good mood when I did this, and apparently when I’m feeling this way I produce colorful fuzzy images. Ha ha. This one started to look kind of like a caterpillar to me by the end, but in the interest of sounding “artsy,” I think I’ll call it, “The Explosion of a Lonely Star” just to make people think. Either way, I received positive accolades from everyone who saw it. Hooray!

Full Sail Student Gallery Flyer

Here’s a flyer I just finished for the Full Sail Student Gallery. I’ve had this image of the colors of light floating around in my mind for a while now. My foundation for this comes in no small part from my good friend Ben Phenicie who does a lot of work with bright colors… of the neon persuasion. Ha ha… any way, as a new student I’m pretty excited that this will be used school wide.

Digital Cave Painting

I actually don’t like this piece. But in the interest of keeping an accurate log of my design work at Full Sail, I decided to include it any way. We were given an assignment to do a digital painting which mimicked either prehistoric or medieval art. Obviously I chose to do a prehistoric cave painting. This image actually popped into my mind as I listened to “Robot Rock” by Daft Punk. I think it was the phrase “robot rock” being repeated over and over again that influenced my decision to place the two Daft Punk guys (who coincidentally look like robots) on the face of a rock. I was actually working on a medieval piece when it hit me, and having just impressed myself by my own whit, I decided to scratch what I was doing and work on this.