Graphics & Illustrations
Not just eye candy.
Your logo. Your colours. Your image. These are very important to you. And they are very important to me too.
Whether working with your designer and existing graphics, or creating everything from scratch, I take great pride in ensuring that the visuals are accurate, clean and consistent. No jaggies, no fuzziness and no shifting positions from screen to screen. They need to be perfect before I’m happy with them.
A lot of graphics were designed for print production and don’t translate directly to multimedia or video. An 8.5x11 page cannot be squeezed into a 4x3, 16x9 or some other ratio and still make visual sense. The content and design elements need to be rearranged into logical positions. If the image is destined for broadcast video, the safe action and safe title areas need to be respected, but an online video can take advantage of the full width and height. Computer screens can be set to many different resolutions, and a browser’s window can be further resized within that, making it impossible to guarantee a specific dimenson.
I will help re-design them to fit the intended use. Whether a fixed size or something more fluid, we will ensure that the design matches the delivery.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, it had better be a good picture.
Scroll through the examples below for specifics on the various web site projects that I’ve been involved with. Click on the thumbnail to view larger screen shots.
Alberta Free-mo Poster
Alberta Free-mo is an annual event, hosted by my model railroad group, where we fill a hockey arena with a large model railway made up of modules from across Western Canada. I designed the train logo for the event, and every year I make up the poster, including a map to the location and a photo from the previous year’s set-up. This involves a lot of clean-up in Photoshop — masking out the background, cleaning up marks from the boards and floor and adjusting the colours and levels for the lighting in the arena.
View the PDF.
Beer Prayer Poster
I have a great passion for good beer, and a beer friend of mine emailed me a joke that I thought would make a good poster. So I made one up in Illustrator. It uses a gradient mesh to add subtle colour shading and transparencies for the highlights.
View the PDF.
Calgary Corporate Challenge Shirt
This was the winning design for Walton’s 2011 Calgary Corporate Challenge shirt. The theme that year was “Press Play”, so my design played upon the popular iTunes “flow” design, while showcasing the various land products the company sold.
Calgary Free-mo Logos
Calgary Free-mo is the model railroad group that I belong to. We build to an international modular standard, allowing us to connect individual modules to each other to form a different layout at every set-up. I designed the logo for the group, which emphasizes the free-form nature of the standard. I also designed the logo for the annual Alberta Free-mo set-up that our group hosts, and the layout work for the engraved module name plates and personal name tags.
Drum Scrolls
When the Naval Officers’ Association of Canada and the Calgary Naval Veterans’ Association donated a new set of parade drums to the HMCS TECUMSEH Naval Reserve Band, I wanted to thank them and honour those who did not return home. I designed a number of scrolls to be applied to the drums, listing the Canadian Ships that were lost during the Battle of the Atlantic (1939-1945). Gradients in Illustrator add to the three-dimensional look.
Maps
Maps can help your customers to find your location. But the online map services don’t always translate well — they may have too much info or be too large to fit in the given space. That’s where a custom map comes in. It can show as much or as little detail as desired, or be drawn out-of-scale to show the required path or landmarks. The following examples are just some of the maps I’ve made, for locations within the city as well as those farther out. Close-ups can be included to zoom in on a particular section. Being vector-based, they also scale well, can easily be added to a PDF and print crisply compared to a rasterized bitmap image.
Modelling
Model railroading presents all kinds of opportunities to create custom graphics and illustrations. From signs to building interiors and backdrops, the same skills used for work projects can be applied to a hobby. A custom logo designed in Illustrator, composited with multiple rust textures in Photoshop creates an old sign for a business. Billboards can be recreated in miniature to add realism to a scene. And a play on words can add humour and interest to the story being told.
Tortoise Switch Machine Technical Drawing
Technical drawings can be used to explain processes, wiring guides and user interfaces. This example explains the various electrical circuits that can be connected to the Tortoise slow-motion switch machine. It starts with the complete circuit, then breaks it down into the various portions — operational, dsplay and power routing. This makes it easy to follow along and understand how each part of the circuit works on its own and as a whole. Notice how items do not shift from one drawing to the next.
View the PDF.
Workplace Skills Knit Patterns Technical Drawings
The Workplace Skills project was a 6-CD interactive training program for the garment industry. The knit pattern images that I received were scanned from numerous sources of varying quality and sizes, and were not acceptable. I rebuilt them all in Illustrator, ensuring crisp, clean images that were consistent from screen to screen. Again, notice how items do not shift from one drawing to the next. This was very important, as they were used in the videos contained on the discs. This allowed me to animate the variations and patterns with no extraneous movement in the static areas.