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