Boring Book Covers

I submitted two covers for Boring Book Covers at Before and After Magazine on a lark. It was fun and humorous to come up with a boring book cover that would put you to sleep. One cover The Art of Folding Clothes they actually posted with comments. What FUN!












I did another one, The Truth About Nuts & Bolts.

They had about 120 submissions and eventually hope to post a PDF of all of them.

Should be fun and interesting.

Networking

Realize I haven't posted anything in quite a while and feel that I should make some comments.

I have been working long, long days at trying to get approximately 1200 pages to final PDFs and get 1200 more reformatted and into K4. It is killing me and taking its toll but getting there.

I have been spending a lot of time on twitter. At first I thought "What is the big deal with this thing?" but the more time I spend on it the more I learn. Especially if you follow the right people in the same or similar fields as yourself. You can learn a lot.

I have found a lot of very talented people, many freebies, many exciting blogs and sites, and met some great helpful people. It is amazing that if you have an issue or a problem you need resolved, you can get an almost immediate answer or a reference to an area that may help you.

Afterall, it is all about learning, keeping up on new ideas, and getting yourself out there.

Networking, Blogging, Getting Myself Out There . . .

OK, here we go, my latest attempt at networking is adding "Follow This Blog" to my gadgets.

I have so much to do to catch up with everyone else. What seems to come natural for so many is a big learning curve for me. I have spent the last 11 years working in a pre-press house as a production artist, embedded first in Quark and then InDesign. I have been buried in specs, page layouts, typography and master graphics. This has been all wrapped around the aspects of building school book pages for major publishing firms.

While it has been a good learning experience, it lacks a lot in developing my creativity. It has taught me a lot about the aspects of good page layout, proper development of style sheets, the importance of consistency etc.

The publishing industry has greatly changed in the last few years. The biggest change is that most of the work is being outsourced to areas like Asia, the Philippines, and India. Where once you were a production artist, in today's industry you have become a project manager. I much preferred being in the trenches and doing the actual work.

To continue with the subject at hand, I have been very lax in networking and focusing on the whole world of design on the web. For the last several years, I have been playing with, attempting, working toward, developing my own company called DreamSpeaker Graphics.

Now it is time for catch-up. And I have a lot to do. So, I have started this blog, I am getting involved in twittering, I am following several blogs and sites, I have portfolios on Jamuse and Graphics.com. I still have a lot of work to do. I don't understand yet the whole aspect of digging, dilicious and so much more. So much to learn, and so much to do. Its boggling how so many people do so much. Calvin Lee at Mayhem Studios, David Blatner of InDesign Secrets (among other things), and Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design seem to have made the day 48 hours long with all that they do.

Gonna enter this in the Designer Writing Project. One more way to network and hopefully get some helpful advice, thoughts, ideas.

So, if anyone out there is reading this, thoughts, suggestions, and ideas are most welcome.

Okay, this months photo challenge on Graphics.com was to take the 6 samples and use at least 3 of them in a creation. They are actually blood vessels. Yikes. I used 4 of them. I went into Illustrator and made a grid. Then I colored some of the boxes and placed squares of 4 of the samples in to. Then I took it into the 3D effects and rotated it and free transformed it. Copied it 3 times vertically and three times horizontally. I then intertwined them vert/horiz, vert/horiz, vert/horiz.

After that was completed, I went to stock.xchange and found a room setting. I got rid of the photo that was on the wall and then replaced it with my design. I did some effects on the photo layer. Then I was done.

Twittering, Blogging, Working, and More

Well, I just read an article by Jay Hilgert, at Bittbox, on Twittering. So, I thought I would try it. Between trying to learn about this, trying to better establish my blog, working and trying to establish my own company, DreamSpeaker Graphics, sometimes it all gets to be too much.

Ideas, suggestions, thoughts on improvements, are all greatly appreciated.

Small Bi-fold Design Project

Project: A design for the inside of a small bi-fold brochure promoting a new CD for winning at Texas Hold’em poker, featuring professional player and tournament winner Floyd “Pitbull” Silver.

Christmas Card Designs

Design of some Christmas Cards for a Print contest.
Click on it and tell me what you think!

Butterflies, butterflies, butterflies

6 butterflies are supplies and you have to use 3 of them to create a piece of art.
In the first I made a pattern of parts of all 6, and then made a pattern and background for the book cover.




In the second, I put a butterfly in the flower from my garden and then used two of the butterflies to incorporate them into the background.

Letterhead Design

Letterhead and business card designs I came up with for another challenge on graphics.com.

Chadwick

This is Chadwick. We were supplied some light beam brushes and asked to use them to create an effect with an image. I did a very simple project of clipping Chadwick from an old photo and placing him on a black background trotting across light beams. Sometimes simple is best. Actually simplicity is most often best. Anyway, this is the result.