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!

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.

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.

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

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!