Just a couple projects to talk about today. April was another ultra-busy month, so I’ll be showing the general stuff below and following up with a couple “featured project” posts in the coming weeks.

First up is a slew of web stuff for TriHealth Hospital. As the official health care sponsor of the Cincinnati Reds, TriHealth wanted separate “takeover” web campaigns for both the Reds and Cincinnati News websites, each with different messaging and aesthetics.

The campaign for cincinnati.com was very baseball-heavy to emphasize TriHealth’s association with the Reds. I did a Flash banner, two “sliding billboards”, and a wallpaper/banner combo for a homepage takeover.

By contrast, the campaign for reds.com focused more on the hospital’s usual branding, given that the site was already baseball-heavy. This one required three Flash banners plus the homepage wallpaper.

I was asked about including a list of all 9 TriHealth locations on these banners, which I initially thought was impossible without ruining the end frame. So I incorporated that list into a rollover action instead, a solution that I’m very happy with.

Coincidentally, I also did a very similar campaign for ONE, the official team doctor of the Fort Wayne Tincaps! It’s definitely baseball season. The rollover action on these turned out nicely too.

I also finished a whopping 18 banners for St. John Providence. The simple, text-only style of their ads might look easy to do, but finding ways to make it interesting takes just as long (if not longer!) than banners with more visual variety. Here’s the bulk of that: a campaign for their Neuro center that spread four unique messages across three banner sizes.

Keep in mind, of course, that these final frame screenshots represent only a fraction of the content in each banner, most of which have at least 3 frames of messaging. Here’s the second one from that long list in action:

We also took Black Rose on the road last month: to Columbus, Ohio for the SPACE convention. It was a great show, and I’ll have a rundown of it soon. In the meantime, though, I’ll be busy prepping for the Summit City Comic Con this coming weekend here in Fort Wayne!  Summit is always a great show, and all three of us will be there with our full arsenal of issues, art prints, and sketchbooks. It’s also your best chance to commission some art from Aaron!

I’ve finally caught up on most of my work, so expect to see more frequent posting in the next month as I update my portfolio. Until then!

Bp

March was yet another busy month on all fronts, with a new project starting up every time another one finished.  Here are the ones that have made it safely out the door.

My favorite banner campaign this time around would probably be this set for STAR Bank, done via Publicis Indianapolis. The retro design elements were fun to play with and they animated nicely too.

I also did another LED ribbon board for TriHealth, this time destined for display at the Cincinnati Reds stadium!  A pretty straightforward animation in After Effects showcasing the many TriHealth locations.

I got to tackle a new client via Publicis, as well, with this web campaign for Simon Malls.  No Flash banners this time; instead, I got to design an HTML eblast and two different kinds of expandable ads.  The highlight was probably concepting the “corner peel” ad, trying to make everything fit in a triangle instead of the usual ho-hum rectangles we designers are always working with.

This Biomet web campaign (done with B&Y) was a challenge due to a very tight turnaround window — not to mention the other rush work I was already fielding for other clients!  But we got ‘em out the door on time.

And I had more stuff for Parkview this month as well.  First was a new version of the “flipping boxes” PRMC campaign I did back in January: the PRMC is now open, and Parkview wanted a similar (but not identical) banner campaign to advertise it.  B&Y’s fabulous Nicki Lewis worked some photography into the existing design aesthetic, which definitely helps this round stand out from the last.

Unfortunately, the highly technical process of coding the box flips (plus some complications from the more complex design this time around) meant that I was in for several long sessions of plug-and-chug animating, but I’m very happy with the finished result.

I also did a PRMC-themed update to the Flash header on the Parkview website.  I first built this header back in 2009, and I’ve been called upon to update it every couple months over the past 3 years.  See the latest version in action at parkview.com.

Black Rose Issue #6 was recently released, as I mentioned in a previous post, and I’m prepping for our next couple of cons.  And knee-deep in Word documents as I begin the heavy-duty editing process for our next arc of story.

The rest of my March work is still ongoing or just wrapping up, so I should have a meaty April post as well.  Plus a roundup of links and interviews from the A is for Ackbar project.  Stay tuned!

Bp

In February, Chris and I took Black Rose to Ash Con in Indianapolis. It was our first time at Ash, and it turned out to be a great show for us. Though smaller than some of the other cons we’ve been to, the demographic was heavily skewed toward comic shops selling back issues, trades, and other merchandise. This worked out well, since we were one of the few creator-owned books there, and since people were coming to the con with plenty of cash! Best of all, an Ash Con happens every couple of months, so we plan on hitting another one later this year.

We’ve also hit another very exciting milestone for Black Rose: the release of Issue #6, which finally completes the first arc of our story! It’s been a long time coming and we couldn’t be happier to get this issue out there. Get your hands on a copy pronto!

There’s a lot more ahead for Black Rose — and a lot of new work I need to get on here, too. More stuff coming soon!

Bp

After a slow start to the year, things quickly ramped up in mid-January, and in February jumped off that ramp over seventeen school buses. It’s been busy. Here are some projects that wrapped up this month!

I’ve been continuing to do a lot of work for TriHealth Hospital through Publicis Indianapolis, including this multi-pronged banner campaign:

Besides the usual stuff, I also designed a “pencil pushdown” ad – you know, one of those skinny ads that pushes the rest of the page down when it expands, the kind you hate? You’re welcome. The challenge for this one was finding a way to simulate a seamless expansion between the two states.

I was even called upon to do an animation for an LED ribbon board at the Xavier University Cintas Center basketball stadium. I’ve done similar ribbon boards before (for the Colts and Pacers arenas), and it’s always a challenge to design something that is over 10,000 pixels wide… and only 48 pixels tall. Publicis gave me the rough storyboards and I took it into After Effects to bring it to life. Here’s a scaled-down section of the quick 10-second animation – if you squint, you can see the jumping people in the background!

This one-off banner for SPAX was a different sort of challenge – finding a way to cram in all the bitmap images specified in the comp. The talented Paul Ryan at B&Y graciously worked with my input to come up with a design that could achieve our tight file size limit. The end result looks great and made the client very happy.

A somewhat cathartic project this month was finally being able to finish these Hip Preservation banners for ONE. The campaign began back in June 2011, but was shelved in favor of another concept, and only re-activated a month ago.

I was glad to finally go back and finish out these banners – it was fun trying to come up with visual metaphors for the beginning “dance craze” vocab that were still easily legible. Check it out:

I also had to do some routine maintenance and updates to the Smokercraft Family website, the original incarnation of which I designed and built a couple years back. The current version was heavily modified by somebody else in the interim, and it’s always an interesting experience to dig into someone else’s code and see how they do things.

Another project I worked on with Publicis was for St. John Providence Health System. This banner campaign was about someone you love “disappearing” through alcohol or substance abuse.

I think the finished banners are not as successful as they could be – the eye is naturally drawn to objects moving or appearing, and not so much to objects that simply fade away. Without adding a cartoony POOF of smoke, how do you make a disappearance catch the eye? I tried to add a subtle glow to attract attention, but overall would have preferred to run with a different concept. Sadly, that’s not always an option when the creative is pre-supplied and you’re on a very tight deadline.

Black Rose has also been keeping me busy, with a whopper of a lettering job on the nearly-completed Issue 6. We also exhibited at Ash Con in Indy this past weekend, and I’ll have a writeup of that coming next week.

Until then, I need to get back to work!
Bp

Welcome to a new series I’m trying out: What I’m Working On, a quick rundown of all the jobs I’ve worked on or completed over the past month. I’ll be showing everything from new portfolio pieces to soul-sucking grunt work, so as to give the most complete picture of what the life of a freelance graphic designer actually entails.

January is typically my slowest month — agencies and clients are regrouping, getting plans (and budgets) in place and approved for the coming year. That’s fine with me! Most Decembers are a crazy Christmas rush of last-minute work, and this past one was no exception. I’ve been using my downtime to get better organized and start a thorough sorting of my messy files (both physical and digital).  But aside from that, here’s what I have been working on!

I was happy to add a new client — WaterFurnace — to my roster in late 2011, and finished up my first job for them right after Christmas vacation.  This three-banner campaign was based on an existing print ad and destined for placement as Google ads, which meant higher file size limits and a cornucopia of bitmaps!  Yes, if you work in the strange realm of banner ads, you too can be thrilled at the prospect of getting an extra 20kb for your banners.  A Christmas miracle!

One of the fun things about being a graphic designer is the ability — and sometimes, the request — to hide little details in your work. For these banners, I wasn’t allowed to use images of any Nascar cars other than Jeff Gordon’s, which meant I had to design his two competitors from scratch.  So I altered some paint schemes and had the cars be sponsored by “Lorem Ipsum” and “Solor Dolit,” the famous bits of placeholder copy used by designers in lieu of final text.  Here’s a closer look!

I’ve also been juggling a series of quick-turnaround banner campaigns for Publicis Indianapolis.  Here’s one of the latest, done for TriHealth Hospital and based off a sleek rebrand Publicis did for them.

The diagonals and clean vector-based style were a breeze to animate, and I used those elements to create an illusion of depth in the banners.

My most challenging banner campaign, though, was done with Boyden & Youngblutt for Parkview Hospital, to promote the March opening of the new Parkview Regional Medical Center.  While the storyboards B&Y gave me were simple enough, they wanted to transition between each frame of messaging with a 3D “flipping boxes” technique.

That turned out to be much more challenging than I’d anticipated.  Flash does have some built-in 3D tools to achieve this sort of thing, but they require exporting to Flash Player 10 or higher — and most of the sites these banners were going to be running on require exporting to Flash Player 9… or lower.  D’oh.  So I wound up doing the 3D box flip “by hand,” so to speak.  The good news was that once I got one box working, I could simply duplicate that movieclip across the stage and trigger them in a staggered order with a little Actionscript.

It’s not quite true 3D, and if the boxes flipped as slowly as the above you’d be able to spot the flaws quite easily. But I think it works quite nicely in the much speedier finished product!

Not all jobs are that flashy, unfortunately — often times, a client will simply want to rerun an older campaign as is (or do a slight revision) to save on cost. I did one of these resend campaigns earlier this month, also for Parkview. The original banners ran about a year ago — all I had to do was add one frame of messaging and build out a couple new sizes.

Likewise, I was also called on by Ferguson Advertising to update a Flash game I’d put together last year for Zimmer: a Jeopardy-esque interactive quiz that needed to be refreshed with new information and questions for this year’s sales/marketing conference. Click here to experience last year’s version for yourself!

In my spare time, I’ve been doing quite a bit on Black Rose. Issue 6 is nearing completion, which means I’ve got a stack of pages to letter. There’s extra lettering work on this particular issue due to a meaty fight scene — I hand-letter things like sound effects, which takes longer to do, but (in my opinion) blends more organically with Aaron’s rough and gritty art.

I’m also assisting with the next batch of scripts, as Chris continues to refine and rewrite the material for Arc 2. My role in this phase is mainly to be a sounding board, assist with writer’s blocks, and play occasional devil’s advocate.  Chris does the hard work!  My primary contribution to the writing comes later, once Chris has an arc (about 6 issues) completed.  Then I dive in and do an overall edit pass, focusing on clarity, conciseness, and rooting out potential plot holes.

And I’ve also been researching comic conventions for us to exhibit at this year. We just announced our first three — Ash Con, SPACE, and Summit City. Head over to the Black Rose site to get the details!

It’s going to be a big year for Black Rose, and I’m also working on several projects for BR that are (for the moment) top secret, but which all should debut within the year.  So stay tuned for that!

Yikes, where did 2011 go? The back half of the year was completely buried in a flurry of rush jobs and holiday traveling. In years past, I would have taken this opportunity to ponder the passage of time, meaning of life, etc. But now that I’m a dad, all I have time to think about is getting to bed early to try and keep up with my rambunctious son!

Speaking of which, here are a few pics from this past November, when Tycho and I celebrated our 1st and 27th birthdays together. We’re only 6 days apart, so I imagine this tradition will continue for some time.

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As I mentioned in my last post, it’s been a busy time for Black Rose recently too. Here’s a recap of what’s new on the project!

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I’ve been absolutely buried in work for the past several months, and have been seriously neglecting this blog! Why, you might ask?

Well, a lot of the work I’ve been doing is on the web coding/development side, which is a little less easy on the eyes than purty illustrations. I’ve also been doing a big new business push, with lots of interviews and several new clients. Not to mention that several of the most fun projects I worked on haven’t gone live yet, which means radio silence from me (for now). It’s just been a crazy summer!

A big part of my summer was learning Joomla and building a corporate website that ran on it. Joomla is an open-source content management system, and initially I hated it, since my previous CMS experience was with Wordpress (a very different piece of software in many ways). But I’m happy to say that I’ve come around — once you get the hang of Joomla, it’s pretty user-friendly. I’ve got a couple more Joomla jobs in the pipeline as well, so I’m sure I’ll be learning more about the program in the months ahead.

I also went on a week-long family vacation with my side of the family, which was a much-needed break and a lot of fun. During the trip, though, Tycho finally figured out how to crawl, and our lives have not been the same since. That little boy takes a lot of looking after!

It’s also been a busy time for Black Rose, with another con appearance last weekend and Issue 5 heading off to the printer. I’ll be posting more stuff (Black Rose and otherwise) in the coming weeks.

I’ve updated the Multimedia page with a couple recent web banners I did, as well as replacing the sometimes-fritzy Flash videos with nice new mobile-friendly YouTube embeds.

And, in a first for me, one of those web banners actually popped up for me during my normal internet browsing! Most of the banners I do run on local sites, not major blogs or national sites. But here’s my Parkview banner in action!

(It should be noted that this screenshot of my “normal internet browsing” not only places me on Memory Alpha (the Star Trek version of Wikipedia), but on Wesley Crusher’s article. That’s a pretty damning nerd alert.)

And speaking of nerd stuff, here’s a quick doodle of Luke Skywalker that I did at the Summit City Comic Con.

That’s it for now. More to come!
Bp

During my daily internet surfing the other day, I came across a nicely designed/illustrated article entitled The 50 Things Every Graphic Design Student Should Know. It was very informative and had a lot of great tips.

It also contained a glaring error:

This is not only a horrible lie, but also the absolute worst advice that any design student could get. If you go into this business assuming that all your prospective clients are as educated, responsible, and ethical as you are, you are in for a very rude awakening. (Assuming, of course, that you yourself are any of those things.)

Not all clients are bad, of course, and the onus definitely should be on the designer to try and make the designer-client relationship work — i.e., just because they don’t like your aesthetic sensibilities doesn’t mean they’re a terrible client. But some clients simply are bad, and if you’re not prepared for them, they’ll walk all over you.

I’ve been pretty lucky — most of my clients over the years have been a pleasure to work with, trusted my artistic instincts, and (best of all) paid promptly for services rendered. But I’ve had a rash of bad client experiences lately, mostly relating to payment — or a lack thereof. I’ve definitely learned some hard lessons over the past couple of years about proper client contracts and invoicing.

This latest incident probably takes the cake. I was contracted to do a “sexy librarian” illustration in the style of a classic pinup girl. I jumped at the chance (because, well, who wouldn’t?), and lowballed the budget, knowing that this would be a fun gig in line with my Rad Project Discount. The client agreed to the budget and I began doodling.

Along the way, the client had a variety of artistic changes that clashed with my own artistic vision for the illustration. “That’s fine,” I thought, “I’ll give them what they want and then do my version for me afterwards.” But the tweaks and unplanned changes were definitely racking up more hours than I had wanted to spend on the project. I negotiated a very slight budget increase in an attempt to make up some of the difference, but was beginning to regret taking the project on.

I finally finished the illustration to the client’s satisfaction and sent an invoice their way. (Thankfully I was smart enough to not also send along the final files — another lesson I learned the hard way.)

Almost a month passed.

I emailed the client and informed them that their check had not yet arrived. They told me that it had slipped their mind. I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Two more weeks went by.

The client then informed me that they had run into some financial issues and while they still intended to pay me, it might take a little more time. I replied that while I didn’t want to seem unsympathetic, this job is the sole source of income for my family and I can’t simply defer payments that are already over a month overdue.

Then the client finally let me know that they had maxed out their credit cards and were being pursued by several creditors, which would have been nice to know at the beginning of the job. Funny how this sort of thing never comes up until after the work is done and the invoice is sent.

That was about a month ago, and I’m still following it up, but who knows when (or if) I’ll see the money from that gig.

I hate being the bad guy. I don’t want to contribute to anybody losing the roof over their head. But this job is how I keep a roof over mine, and sometimes that means holding people accountable for what they agreed to pay you.

In the meantime, though, I finished up my version of that pinup illustration, and I’m pretty pleased with the results…

In an effort to recoup my losses from this job, I’m selling prints of this fine lass in my online store for the mere price of $10!

Have you ever been hung out to dry by a bad client? Do you like classy art to hang on your wall? Are you a philandering philanthropist who loves literacy and leggy librarians?

Then do me a solid and buy a print, or send this around to your friends — or better yet, do both! You’ll get some nice art and I’ll feel like this job wasn’t a total wash.

And design students: there are bad clients. Some are truly out to get you; some are just not very fiscally responsible. But they do exist and you will run across them. Consider yourselves warned.

I’ll be back next week with more new work!
Bp

This past weekend, we took Black Rose to the Summit City Comic Con here in Fort Wayne. Pics and more below!

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