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

Time for a different sort of “latest work.” More pics below!
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I’ve been away from the blog for a good long while, which is due to several factors: lots of freelance work, wrapping up Black Rose #3, some long-needed updates to my portfolio, resume, and website — and, oh yeah, I’m a dad now!

Tycho is just over two months old and starting to smile and coo, which is a big improvement from his previous best trick, Peeing On The Wall. He is a lot of work, a big stresser, but super adorable and very worth it.

Here is the crazy story of how our son decided to make his grand entrance, and plenty more baby pics too.

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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

Alright, this one is way off-topic, but it’s my blog and I’m entitled to rant about whatever I want. So nyeh. This one’s about music and TV — and one show in particular.

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So I haven’t been posting a lot of new work here lately — I’ve been mired in the business side of freelancing and getting some projects ready to launch behind the scenes. Not nearly as much fun, but very important to do, and very exciting to finally reveal… which is what I’m doing today, with not just one but TWO most excellent announcements.

I am now operating professionally as Brandon Peat Design, LLC. What does that mean? That I’ve filed a lot of paperwork and am now a sole-ownership limited liability company. It also means that I will get some tax breaks, and can file annually instead of quarterly (as self-employed individuals are required to do).

But it also means that freelancing is here to stay, and is a statement that I take this switch seriously. This year has been a blast creatively (and a success monetarily), and I firmly intend to carry that momentum forward.

Expect to see some LLC-related updates trickling through the rest of the site in coming months, especially as I gear up for next year’s big new business push. You can always use more legs under the income table when you’re a freelancer! Speaking of which…

I just launched my online store! Though currently exclusively populated by art prints, I hope to eventually expand the store into books and maybe even t-shirts. I’ve wanted to start a store for several years, and have been working on this one for several months — selecting the prints, doing some additional touchups, designing and building the pages, crunching the numbers, and doing the final Paypal integration. It’s finally ready to go!

Next week marks my 26th birthday. So instead of buying me a present, why don’t you get yourself a present from the store? You get some rad art and I get this store off to a good start. Everybody wins!

I’ve still got a couple other major announcements to make before the year is out. Stay tuned!
Bp

We took Black Rose on the road last weekend to the Kokomo-Con in (where else) Kokomo, Indiana. The con was smaller than Summit City, but they gave us a pretty nice booth setup and we got to meet a lot of cool new fans. More pics below!

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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