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

Hey all, been away from the blog a long time. Unfortunately, though I have a bunch of new work I’ve been dying to post, it has all been stuck waiting for client approval or payment. But it looks like I can finally start sharing some of it!

Today’s update in the Design section is a wedding invite and RSVP card I designed for my younger brother Eric and his lovely wife Kayla. Their wedding just happened a week ago and was a total blast. We’re very excited to welcome Kayla into the family!

For their invites, Eric and Kayla wanted something vintage-looking, so I used some old printing press typefaces and aged the photography appropriately. (Can you believe they shot these photos themselves with the camera’s timer? Crazy!) I’m a big fan of the industrial-revolution-era aesthetic of filling 100% of the available space with type and graphics, and that was certainly required here in order to get all the info on the invite’s back side.

I used this same style of invite for my own wedding a couple years ago — it looks great and is very economical to print and mail. So if you or someone you know needs wedding invitations designed (similar to this one or any design at all), send them my way! They’re always fun to do.

More new work to come in the following weeks, as well as a very big announcement in store for the end of the month. Stay tuned!
Bp

Lots of long-overdue site updates to announce today, some under the hood and some…over the hood? On the hood? Ah well.

A new homepage with a flashy Flash animation!

New Brandon Peat Design, LLC branding everywhere!

Portfolio updates! Reshuffled the Design page for easier browsing, new banners and video work on the Multimedia page, and this new collaborative piece on the Illustration page.

Revised About Me page with updated info and three big new sections: Why You Should Hire Me, My Creative & Billing Process, and The Rad Project Discount.

I put a lot of time into these last three sections, and I feel they really tell a lot about me, my business, and my mindset. I’ll probably be blogging about these again in the future. Make sure to check them out if you’re a potential client!

Work has been slow but steady these past few months, and I’ve been kept pretty busy between these site updates, new business research, and an adorably cooing baby. Hopefully I’ll have some more new stuff to show in the next couple of weeks!
Bp

So, as some of you might know, Emma and I had a little Thanksgiving surprise — our son Tycho decided to show up almost two weeks early! Tycho Maximus Peat arrived on Monday, 11/29 at 10:30 AM after 9 hours of labor. He is a strapping young lad at 6 pounds 15 ounces, measuring an immense 20 inches long. Emma delivered without drugs or epidural, through sheer force of will. First-time father is very proud of both son and wife.

Tycho’s early arrival definitely threw a wrench in my plans for the next two weeks, including a very exciting project unveiling! So I’ve decided to put the already-prepped project up today as planned, and will follow up next week with some adorable baby pics and the ridiculous tale of Tycho’s delivery. Wacky hijinks are in store, I promise you.

Hopefully, then, this unveiling will not disappoint…

When my wife Emma and I found out we were pregnant with our first child, we began thinking of fun ways to decorate a baby boy’s room. Since we live in an apartment and aren’t allowed to paint the walls, that meant posters or prints of some kind. And, being artists, we naturally wanted to create those prints ourselves. In the end, we decided to illustrate an alphabet of characters from one of our favorite franchises – Star Wars.

Selecting each letter was a lengthy process. The characters who made the cut are primarily from the Original Trilogy (no Prequel characters here!), with a few from the Expanded Universe of books, comics, and video games. We also tried to keep the illustrations as non-violent as possible (in the words of Wuher, “No blasters!”) for maximum kid-friendliness.

I sketched the basis for each character in pencil, which Emma then rendered and colored in Illustrator – it was very much a collaborative process, and if Emma had her website designed yet I would be linking to it here. The project was actually her idea, after all…man I love having a nerdy wife.

So to see the rest of the alphabet, head on over to the A is for Ackbar project page. We hope Tycho (and you) will enjoy this alphabet as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.

Brandon and Emma (and Tycho) Peat

The difficult thing about being a graphic designer is that a lot of your work never sees the light of day. When you work at an agency, you’re not just pitching to a client, but generally pitching against several other designers on the same project — your design might not even make it in front of the client. And even when it does, there’s nothing to prevent the client from taking a project in-house or canceling it entirely.

Here are a few project I’ve worked on recently that failed to launch.

This logo concept was for an All-Star baseball game held in Fort Wayne at the new Tincaps stadium, so I incorporated the Tincaps logo into a stylized Fort Wayne skyline. I think they didn’t like that the logo was partially obscured (even though it’s obvious whose logo it is) or that I subtly red-shifted the linework to better blend with the skyline. It’s not my best work ever, but I do like the typography and the little star in “All Star.”

In my experience, nearly every client expects you to work for cheap (or free), and this is especially true when pitching to a new client. In those situations, you want to impress the client enough that they’ll hire you, but guard against racking up a lot of hours for a paycheck that will never come.

This billboard concept was for a B&Y pitch to the Fort Wayne International Airport. We weren’t supposed to spend a lot of hours on it, so I opted to let a humorous tagline do the heavy lifting, with a simple design and color scheme backing it up. (And if you haven’t seen Airplane, quit your job immediately and go watch it.)

This pair of logo concepts was for a race to benefit literacy entitled “Feel the Learn.” I chose to use a lot of fire imagery (tying in with the original Burn wording of the phrase) and tried to keep things fun — we didn’t want the usual lame-o event t-shirts as the end product. Unfortunately, this year’s race was postponed due to lack of sponsors, so hopefully I’ll get to pitch these again next year!

Persistence and perseverance are a big part of what being a designer is all about, and they are lessons I’ve certainly learned the hard way. Ah well, that’s how the business works — just shrug it off and move on to the next project!
Bp

Can I be real with you for a minute? Can I be real with you.

Today is my wife’s birthday, so it seems an appropriate time to post this new work to the portfolio: the collateral material for our wedding. Emma and I recently celebrated our first anniversary and already the wedding day seems so long ago.

For a graphic designer, getting to design all the collateral material for your own wedding is not only a dream job, but a prerequisite for getting engaged.

You can see all of the wedding material by clicking here, but I wanted to pull out a couple of highlights:

These were our bridal shower invites — what we really wanted for our wedding gift was an Apple MacBook Pro for Emma’s school and work use, so my mom threw Emma an apple-themed shower. There were apples to eat, apple-oriented recipes exchanged, Apples to Apples the card game, and Apple gift cards donated. I designed the trademark-infringing invite with our wedding green across a lineart MacBook — I think it turned out pretty fun.

One of our mandates was to keep everything as cheap as possible. Printing and shipping costs add up fast when you’re inviting about 300 people to anything. Our invitation was a simple two-sided oversize postcard, featuring an illustration by yours truly on the front and all the relevant info on the back. An RSVP card and SASE rounded out the ensemble, all fitting in a large envelope that just barely qualified as regular single-stamp postage. Cheapskate success!

Months after the wedding, when we received our thousands of pictures, Emma and I collaboratively designed a hefty photo book (200 pages!) for ourselves, our family, and posterity. I have to give a shout out to our talented photographer friends — Rachel Nelson, Brooke Littell, and their husbands all did a killer job shooting our wedding, and this book really proves that. That cover shot is to die for! We gave copies of the book to our parents for Christmas last year and they were pretty blown away.

Speaking of collaboration, I suppose I should mention that Emma and I are about to begin our greatest collaborative work yet:

We are in the third trimester now; our son, Tycho Maximus Peat, will be born in December. He was a bit of a surprise, but we are excited to meet him and begin his indoctrination in all the things we love.

And on that note, Emma and I recently finished a collaborative illustration series that will be debuting at the USF Faculty-Alumni Show on Saturday, October 2. It was originally done for Tycho’s baby room and involves the alphabet…and a certain galaxy in a certain faraway location. I’ll be teasing more info on that soon — it’s gonna be a blast.

Happy birthday, Emma. I couldn’t ask for better. I love you.
Bp

Here are two new pieces of work from the opposite ends of my creative spectrum!

The first is an interactive map I recently completed for Parkview. Featuring drag and zoom functionality, it allows the user to toggle several sets of medically-related locations for comparison purposes. While dragging and zooming are easy enough to implement on their own, making the functions work together was a great deal harder, and I’m very pleased with the result. Click here to try it out yourself!

The second is actually a piece from last year that got lost in the shuffle until now: a portrait of one of my favorite actors, Nathan Fillion, as the character that I was introduced to him through, Captain Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. Part of my Rad People portrait series.

I used several photos of the planet Mercury to add texture to Mal’s portrait — my goal is to do portraits of all nine Serenity crew members as embodiments of the nine planets (yes, I’m counting Pluto). But I’ve got at least one other illustration project to do first.

Thanks for reading! More work coming soon.
Bp

I recently completed my second book-themed identity redesign, this time for Karin’s Book Nook. Karin had seen my work on Librarified and hired me to give her blog a similar overhaul. Here is the result!

Karin had already strongly associated the color blue with her blog, so I kept her logo with a monochromatic blue color scheme. I’m particularly happy with the way the K and N interlock with each other and the book graphic.

Designing the blog was quite a challenge –- Karin only wanted a new background and header, while leaving the main page contents as is. This was severely limiting, as whatever I did would have to work with her stock template seamlessly AND be visually distinct from what I’d done on Librarified. I settled on an oil-pastel-based illustration that flowed seamlessly between the background and header areas, appearing to be one unbroken image. I also pulled in some of the bright teal color from her template to help tie the foreground and background together. I wish I could have done a more complete redesign, but I’m happy with what I was able to achieve here. Take a closer look at her blog!

Last on the list were business cards. I devised a one-color design that features contact information on the front and a witty prompt on how to use this card as a bookmark on the back. Overall I’m pleased with how this project came out — it’s quite difficult to do multiple takes on the same subject matter and not self-plagarize, and I definitely pulled that off here.

Thanks for reading! More new work on the way next week!
Bp

Let the updates begin! First off, I’ve done some fairly intensive under-the-hood changes to the website, the biggest one being ditching my old Lightbox variant for Shadowbox, a truly fantastic image viewer that included a variety of new features and fixed some lingering functionality problems that had been bothering me for a while. I’ve spent quite a while tweaking it to get it to look and function how I want, so if you can’t notice the difference, I’ve succeeded!

Unfortunately, there is one tiny glitch that is now more apparent: Mac users viewing the site in Firefox might notice a weird 1 pixel jog when Shadowbox overlaps other Flash content. This is a known Mac Firefox bug dealing with swfobject and is out of my control. But there’s an easy fix! Just resize your Firefox browser by 1 pixel (wider or skinnier, either works) and that pixel shift will disappear. Ah, the joys of developing for different browsers.

I’ll be adding a wide variety of new work to the site in the coming weeks, but for starters here is the animated intro to the Behind Bars show I posted about a while back:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

The showrunners gave me free reign to concept, illustrate, and execute this animation, which was a lot of fun to do. I decided to tell, visually, the premise of the show: the host travels to various college campuses and their local bars to learn each bar’s history and special drinks. The music is a snippet from my good friends Like Science’s Alchemy album. Unfortunately a lot of the detail, like the cool overlay texture effect, is lost with this lo-res web version — the HD version looks even better!

My animation background is in Flash, but since the show was being shot in full HD I had to learn After Effects on the fly for this gig. I think it turned out pretty well for my first AE project! Since then I’ve been using the program a lot more — expect to see some more animations on the site in the months ahead.

That’s it for now — more work coming next week!
Bp