My revised version of the Cracked Desk Brush Set made it up on Brusheezy. I was worried for a bit there, because it seemed to be taking a little longer than usual.
Set 1 of 2
Set 2 of 2
I’ll get them posted up here in good time.

Finished the Cracked Desk Brush set last night only to discover that it’s 18MB. Tonight’s task will be to break it into two pieces and upload it here and to Brusheezy. Learned some new techniques as well working on this set. Burn and Dodge are my new favorite brush makin’ tools.

I’m re-hitting the Cracked Desk Brush Set. Taking a little extra time to get as much as I can from the pictures I took, especially because the desk is finally gone. A bittersweet moment…

Very cool! So far the Dirty Roots Brush Set is doing pretty well over at Brusheezy. It has a current rating of 9.4/10 with 24 votes. If you check out the post here you’ll see that somebody wants to credit it for a project they are working on. That’s also very cool.
Sharing the love…

Painted Cement Blocks Brush Set

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Dirty Roots Brush Set

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I need to get my name out and about a bit more, one way: start posting up brushes to the brush sites. It’s not like I don’t have plenty to post up. Just takes a little planning and foresight.

It’s time I started work on another “painting.” I think I’ll use the Queen of the Deeps as the base this time.

I recently started adding some of my content up on Flickr. I have plenty of Poladroids but I wanted to start putting up some of my “art” stuff. For my first addition to the Abduzeedo group, I created a painting from the Ruin image in the Collossy series.

Almost done with another Collossy themed image, probably one of the last in the series. I’ll be expanding the backgrounds for a more complete “painting” instead of a purely t-shirt approach.
I recently opened another Spreadshirt store with some of the Colleen Stares designs. The current batch of graphics are printed as digital transfer. Upside: details are all displayed. Downside: kind of like an iron-on. I ordered this one on turquoise it turned out pretty nice. I wish I had access to t-shirt printer that can do 4 color process. A little more research on how the pro-guys get their stuff done is required.

I finished the marks, updated the logo type font, built color palettes. Unfortunately the dbb site won’t reflect those changes. My client’s web developer has built a massively un-flexible Drupal site. Once I complete a “style” document for dbb I’ll post up the results.

I just completed my identity project for a series of sites revolving around beauty. The progression from start to finish is always interesting to look back on. I started with a more corporate cosmetics look that evolved into a handwritten style that looks feminine and fresh. I also added some iconography to each logotype to reinforce the title message. What I really like about the style is that it made it easy to have a flexible family of marks.
Next up: color palettes, supplemental imagery, and web graphics. Links to be provided on completion.

A couple of years ago I started a Spreadshirt account. I made a few bucks here and there, nothing really serious. I tried a couple of services, but nothing seems to be as good as Spreadshirt. Last year I let my premium account slip, but I decided to start afresh with some of my new material using a new shop name. This way I can test the waters before I finally screen print some of the images.

I will link there when things are up and running.

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I’m creating a series of images that I’ve named ColLossy. They are basically a meld of some of my Colleen images (here & here) with my older Lossy series. The original files are huge, and I mean really big. Some of them wouldn’t even save. A couple of times I reached the Photoshop maximum save size (2GB). My intent is to screen-print them, hopefully on some T’s, maybe a poster or two. There are 3 complete images so far, but I want to build a bunch of variations with different effects and moods.

I believe that I have found my final resting place in my search for the identity to use for selling shirts: I am every. I’ve locked the domain down, and now I’m working on the identity. I have little text flash file I’m working on that I will post up when it’s complete.
Stay tuned!

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Fixed the Links page problem, now it’s time to attack the Favorite Feeds and New Links sidebar not-showing-up thing.

I’m having some issues with my links pages. Most of them render correctly, unfortunately one doesn’t. All the links displayed are tags from my delicious account, which makes it much easier to add and display them here. I’m going to have find a better plugin or widget for displaying all my feed content. Dammit!

I recently did some work for a friend of mine. He has a client that needed some letterhead and some tweaks to their business card. Not really very much “design” per se but still a small paying job. One thing with the client is that they, in my opinion, have the worst brand and identity. Using their current look I built 2 versions of letterhead. I made the business cards editable, and re-built their logo so that it would scale. Not that it should scale, its design is such that scaling it down makes the text elements (5 text elements) virtually unreadable.

I complete the job, to find they are balking on the price. Not something totally unexpected but dissapointing nonetheless. I come to find out that they are wanting my friend to make more changes to the letterhead. That really riles me up! Listen people, I built you two letterhead versions that fit your brand (or lack thereof)! Be happy that you have editable files, and a scalable logo. Holy Shit!

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In my quest for more and exciting Wordpress themes, I’ve come to notice that there is a lot of “bolding” going on. Does there really need to be that much bold? Wouldn’t a larger point/pixel size serve better? I’m sure that a large part of the problem is the limitation of web fonts. Still, I think that when you are designing your theme, reduce the amount of bold.
And another thing, why are we still limited to the paltry amount of typefaces out there? It’s 2009, shouldn’t we have some really easy solutions to solve this? Smashing Magazine recently did a good article on just this subject with some good tips. Check it.

A new group of face images coming this way. Different pose, and look.

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I have new group of images I’ll be posting up tonight. I found a bunch of photos an old friend of my took of my wife about 20 years ago. Her look in the pictures inspired me and got the creativity flowing.They made a great start for a series of shirt intended graphics.
I went for the halftone look, which is an effect I like, because you can do some very interesting visual effects with dot shapes and sizes when you overlay them. Plus it will help when and if I get to print them.

Hey Kids, Veerle posted up a tutorial on how to do this, and she got instructions from the source himself Andy Gilmore. Go and check it out.
My attempts.

Correction! Read below in Veerle’s response.

After switching over from Joomla! to Wordpress, I’ve been pretty happy with the plugins and free themes. WP is fast, and easy to use. However since working on a couple of side projects, that I’m using WP on, I’ve noticed something that kind of drives me up the wall in regards to themes (theme makers?).
A little pre-emptive backstory: I created a special subdomain just to test themes for these side projects. This enables me to make sure that the elements in the theme provide the flexibility and functionality to present the content in the desired fashion. Let me also state that I’m talking about free themes. I’m also no .php coder. Testing all these themes and playing around with them has led me to this rant.

Here’s my problem: Very few people do a How To, or instructions. I know, we’re talking about Wordpress, it’s easy. For your average theme maybe so, but some of them have some pretty cool stuff going on. For instance MIMBO, great magazine theme, that uses template tags. It’s flexible and expandable, that sounds great, and from the example it looks great. How about some instructions showing how you get the content where it’s located in the sample? Maybe use some images, some arrows or something. Even better go over to Abduzeedo or Veerle’s Blog and check out how they do instructions, mimic it. Tarski is a great example of how to do a great backend and great tutorials. Do something like the previously mentioned and you might get less people asking what you might think are stupid questions in the forum or comments.

Seriously people, if your theme has some extra non-standard stuff going on,  How To’s, examples, instructions, and tutorials would help greatly. People like them.

Recently I posted about my fun new project with a friend of mine. Well that slowed down a tad but another project with him has jumped up in importance. We’ve been hitting it with a big stick and makin’ it hurt. I finalized the mark and we’ve been working on the business cards. That’s been a fun process experience especially deciding on color. He needs the cards sooner than anything else so that he can leave them with interested parties. When all the design work gets complete I’ll post up some examples here.
I also created a special site so that I can post up samples and my design friends can leave comments and also post up their projects for us to comment on. Makes it easier than email and people can really interact with each other.