Question: What could I possibly be working on now?

Answer: ENIGMATIC SOCK PUPPET PROJECT.

THAT IS ALL (for now).

Labels: bloggy

Watch this video on Vimeo | YouTube | The COD Library Website

Here it is, what you've all been waiting for! The SECRET ZOMBIE PROJECT is revealed.

"But what is it?" you may be asking yourself. Well, that's why I've brought to you this EXCLUSIVE MAKING-OF SPECIAL FEATURE.

I have been doing some work for the College of DuPage Library, and one of the ideas they had was a series of videos about different parts of the library. This project started out as a simple "How to print" instructional video, until the librarian I was working with on the project said "I wish we could do something crazy, like zombies in the library or something."

Now, I wasn't sure what I could get away with. After all, librarians are bookish folks who go around filing things and shushing people, right?

Not quite. I drew up a quick storyboard with the zombie concept, and they loved it.



Then I told them it was going to be a cartoon. I got a bunch of librarians together and recorded an undead chorus of frightful moans. I recorded hokey old-timey instructional video narration, and threw in old public-domain music for kicks.

They ate it up. Who are these librarians?

Next, I threw together an animatic (moving storyboard) to be presented at the Library's staff meeting.


Watch this video on Vimeo

It was unanimously approved. They gave me the go-ahead to produce the final animation. I became known as "the zombie guy" around the library.

And now, after weeks of furiously animating in flash, there is a video about zombies on my school's library website.

I have to ask again... Who are these librarians?

...and what will they let me get away with next?

Just a couple more designs from last semester. These are typographic book covers.

Digging out a few more illustrations from last semester. I was playing with the same style for both of these projects, since they both involved representing the "green" movement in some way. The first was meant to be used as an illustration for a magazine spread, with the article overlayed on top of it. The second was meant to be a poster.

I'm digging out some work from the spring semester that I never got around to posting. This one is a simplified isometric map of the College of DuPage's Student Resource center. You might remember the SRC icons that were incorporated into this project.



The assignment was to represent the map in 3D, and I decided to go with an isometric view in honor of all the great RPG video games and technical illustrations that have influenced me. It was a lot of fun to define such a rigid, simplified world and then populate it all sorts of people and critters doing goofy things.



The way the different floors of the building were layered in space, it looked like the whole scene was in the middle of being dropped into place. I added some random objects floating around the scene to add a little more humor.

For this logo design, I envisioned a television channel for makers, crafters, hackers, inventors, and anybody who's ever taken something apart.



It's called "Great Scott!" or GS for short. The logo is a custom typographic treatment of the initials GS. The letters have been woven together to suggest the tangle that these creative tinkerers often make with their materials.



I've drawn storyboards for station identification spots that display the logo in the environment of the subjects it covers.



We will be sending these storyboards to the animation students so they can create the actual spots, but I will be creating my own when I find the time.

Labels: design

Today was the second annual Shred Day at First National Bank of Naperville. I created a series of ads to run in the local papers, and they were apparently extremely effective. At 9am, we had two lines of cars snaking through the bank parking lot, and a line around the block on top of that. We reached the on-site shredding truck's capacity of 10,000 pounds of paper at 11am, leaving us in kind of an awkward situation for the last hour of the event. We worked out a system to transport the remaining material to the shredding facility.

I'm told that we took in about 600 pounds of food and a healthy sum of money in donations to Loaves & Fishes. This makes me especially glad as a designer, because this new aspect of the event was promoted solely through the ads I designed. It feels great to see an effective design facilitate so much goodwill.

It was a crazy day, and despite the problems we ran into, Shred Day '09 was absolutely a success. All that shredded material gets recycled, and the whole thing is a great big hug to the environment. Thanks to everyone who came out to shred and donate, and thanks for those who expressed understanding when we filled up the truck.

Labels: bloggy, design