The past few months have been a whirlwind of change for me. Besides the normal crush of freelance work, my wife and I finally closed on our first house. We’ve since moved in and have been dealing with the usual glut of unpacking, painting, and initial breakdowns that every first-time homeowner has to endure.

As if that wasn’t enough, I also started a new job!  You’re looking at the newest Art Director & Interactive Developer at Asher Agency.

While I had never ruled out the possibility of returning to full-time work, it wasn’t something that I was anticipating in the near future. However, Asher called me up with a great job offer that I just couldn’t turn down.

I started there on October 1st, so I’m a month in, and I’m really enjoying the change of scenery. It’s tough to be away from home and Tycho so much more, but steadier paychecks and nice benefits are hard to argue with. It’s a much faster-paced agency than I’m used to, which is a challenge but also very stimulating.  I’m looking forward to helping rebuild their creative department and help chart new multimedia territory the agency has yet to tread.

I’m also continuing to freelance on the side. Though I’m far less available than I used to be, I’ve already got some big stuff lined up for next year and am always willing to put together a project estimate. So feel free to give me a shout!

I’ve got a few more recently-completed projects to add to this site, but I’m just too busy these days to keep up with detailed blog posts. Additionally, this site is nearing its 4th birthday, which means it’s just about time for a major redesign and recoding. Who knows when I’ll have time for that! Hopefully next year, I’ve already been sketching out some ideas. So things will be slowing down around here for a while, but I’ll be back bigger and better.

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll see you around!

My biggest project during July was a major overhaul to a previously-completed project: an interactive map for internal use at Parkview Hospital. This map started way back in 2010, and has been periodically expanded on with new location sets and additional functionality. It now includes around 200 locations, drag and zoom capability, and popup address bubbles. Give it a try for yourself!

Speaking of Parkview, I also did a large set of web banners for their family birthing centers this month:

One of the less-fun aspects of projects such as this is having to resize the same basic creative into a bajillion different sizes — it’s a time-consuming process that is fairly brainless, essentially the design equivalent of an assembly-line job. But there’s usually a nice paycheck waiting at the end, so I can’t really complain. The banners turned out purty nice, too.

Last month I did some Olympic-themed banners for TriHealth — this month, St. John Providence carries the torch (literally).

Fire is always a challenge to animate — it can appear and move so differently depending on the size of the blaze. I’m very happy with how this one turned out, and feel it strikes the properly dignified tone of the Olympic flame.

I also did a small banner campaign for TriHealth’s Bethesda location, which included an oddball expandable size.

It was a big month for Black Rose as well — we released our first trade paperback collecting all six issues thus far!  The big debut for the book was at Ikasucon here in Fort Wayne, which is the first anime con we’ve exhibited at.

Ikasucon was a good show and we did well there.  However, it was also a loooong three days, and the crowd, though very large, wasn’t as interested in independent comics as our typical convention crowd.  Just a different demographic than usual.  So we may or may not be back next year — we are looking to exhibit at fewer but larger shows. I’ll have a post later this month detailing my design process for the book as well.

The rest of my time has been consumed with editing our home movies from last year (a process I’m trying to do annually to keep the queue manageable) and looking for our first house!  I think we’re finally getting things narrowed down, and should be making an offer within the next couple of weeks.  Busy times all around!

June was a slow month, which was great — this year has been so busy that I haven’t had time to deal with a lot of organizational matters and personal projects, so I made very good use of the downtime. Just a couple banner campaigns to showcase this time around.

This 50th anniversary campaign for ONE was fairly routine. I added some little touches to the provided design, such as making the pennant flags wave and incorporating a frame of rollover messaging.

This month’s TriHealth banners were Olympic-themed, which was fun to design for.

Unpredictable stretches of downtime are part of every freelancer’s life. Despite your best-laid plans, your workflow will temporarily dry up, and projects will get caught in the vortex of “waiting for client approval.” So when downtime strikes, take advantage of it!

I spent a good portion of June combing through my hard drive, sorting and deleting files. My iMac packs a 1 TB hard drive, which I foolishly thought would be an inexhaustible amount of space. Turns out I exhausted it in just a couple years! But that’s bound to happen when working on large design projects, and especially ones that involve HD video. So I’ve been doing a folder-by-folder evaluation of my files to free up some space — over 100 GB freed so far! It’s a boring task, but will save me from having to buy a bigger hard drive… for a while, at least.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on Black Rose — but I can’t talk about it yet! Soon, though. A major announcement will happen later this month, so stay tuned!

As you probably know, my wife Emma and I did a collaborative illustration series back in 2010 called “A is for Ackbar” — a Star Wars-themed alphabet for our new son Tycho. We had no idea how wildly popular it would become on the internet, or how quickly. In the first week of its release, the project’s page on my website was logging 20,000 hits a day, which doesn’t even account for the hundreds of blogs who re-posted the images on their own site — Boing Boing, Wired, io9, the Huffington Post, LinkedIn, and tons of others.

It’s been a year and a half, and “Ackbar” seems to be making another round of the blogosphere, so it seemed like a good time to post a recap of some of the coverage the project has received.  Though it would take forever to track down all the sites that featured our work (especially since most of them didn’t notify us they were doing so), here are a few worth special mention.

FirstShowing.net was, appropriately, the first website to cover us. It all snowballed from here — a big thanks to them for the publicity.

Death Star PR gave us our first interview!

We were also interviewed by Designer Daddy…

…Ziggy Nixon…

…and 8 Bit Dad.  Much of each interview is the same or similar, but each site asked some unique questions that drew some interesting answers out of us.

Recently, I was one of a small group of local Fort Wayne artists asked to participate in a bicycle-themed art show called, appropriately, Bike-It! The event was put on by the classy folks at One Lucky Guitar and Good Stuff Design, in conjunction with some other cycling-related downtown happenings. (Event poster by OLG)

Though I used to ride a lot in my youth, I haven’t been on a bike in years, and so wanted to do a piece that referenced bikes in a more unusual way. I settled pretty quickly on some sort of bike-related pop-culture reference, with Star Wars eventually beating out Tron as I started sketching.

Once I’d inked the linework and locked in the composition, I turned the illustration over to my wife (and frequent collaborator) Emma Peat to handle the color. I was juggling several other rush projects at the time and Emma’s grasp of color is far more nuanced than mine, so I was very grateful to have her help on this one.  Here’s the finished collaboration, “We Can’t Repel Bike Shorts Of That Magnitude.” Click for a bigger version!

And here’s OLG’s recap video from the event:

It was a fun show and a big honor to be invited to participate. Hopefully it’ll happen again next year!

Though I drew comics pretty much constantly for a decade or so, it’s unfortunately not something I’ve been able to keep up with. My work on Black Rose is limited to the story and writing sides of the project, and I just don’t have the time to draw my own comics on the side.

That changed a little while ago when my good friend Dan Kinnaley (the Communications Coordinator at 3 Rivers Federal Credit Union) asked me if I’d be interested in drawing a short comic book for 3 Rivers. For money! Obviously, I said yes.

3 Rivers provided me with a script, written by Rob Hines, but pretty much gave me free reign to define the aesthetic and layout of the comic. It was one of those rare times when the only feedback from the client at every phase was “Looks great, no changes!”

The comic debuted at Fort Wayne’s Summit City Comic Con in May, and was a big hit with congoers as well as internally at 3 Rivers. It was very enjoyable to get back into the swing of cartooning, even though my perfectionist tendencies made the project take longer than it should have! I hope 3 Rivers wants to develop these characters further – I’d certainly love to make drawing comics a habit again.

If you’d like to read the comic in its entirety, head over to its featured portfolio page. You can also visit 3 Rivers’ website to download a PDF or CBR of the comic.

In April, Chris and I took Black Rose to the Small Press And Comics Expo (SPACE) in Columbus, Ohio. This was our first time at SPACE, our first Ohio con, and our first two-day con, so we didn’t quite know what to expect.

Continue reading…

Another busy month complete! Here’s the roundup.

My favorite project this month was probably this banner for SPAX. It keeps the established look for the brand while adding some fun new elements like the techy type and shimmery background.

I also had another round of banners for TriHealth, this time with three sets of creative.

The campaign turned out well, and further refines the TriHealth look. The “Doctors” and “Live Better” banners were pretty short and sweet, but these “Branding” banners had a little more meat to their messaging:

My most challenging project, though, was this web campaign for Group Health. Though Group Health is partnered with TriHealth, it is still its own entity, so the look had to be similar but not identical. After several rounds of revisions, we finally got it nailed down.

These STAR banners referenced their new TV spot about their “freeasy” checking accounts with “smoptions,” so I got to smash some type together – always enjoyable.

I also had another of the usual type-oriented banner campaigns for St. John Providence:

It was a busy month for Black Rose as well. We exhibited at the Summit City Comic Con (and had a record-breaking day) and finally got a new book finished up and off to the printer! More on that stuff in an upcoming post.

This project wrapped up in April and is finally being added to my portfolio — I’m proud to show it off. Here’s the finished animation, and continue reading for the details on how it came together.

This project (done for Roche via Publicis Indianapolis) was part of a wider campaign based around the concept of a unique patient behind every barcode. Each barcode can be scanned and directs to a unique URL. I was given a set of 5 print ads and asked to adapt their imagery into a looping video for use at trade shows, etc. Here’s an example of what I started from:

I created each barcode animation individually in Flash (since these were also planned for web usage in the future), then composited the master looping video in After Effects. Each barcode brought its own unique challenge, especially the cyclist and surfer ones.

I’m very pleased with the final result, as were Publicis and Roche. Hopefully we’ll get to do some similar collaborations in the future as well.