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7
Dec
2011
My Super Duper Versatile Desk
Put your nerd caps on, this blog post is giving you a tour of my workspace/desk/place-where-I-spend-12hrs-a-day. I’m a freelance designer/photographer, which basically means I work from home… A LOT. So having an efficient workspace is very important to me. Oh and no I wasn’t paid to write any of this (I wish).
For the short-attention spanned people out there, just watch the video below. Yes that’s right, you get to see me walk and talk (in High Definition at that). I bet you didn’t know today was going to be your lucky day.
NOW for the normal-attention spanned people out there, I’ll go in to a little more detail.
First of all it took much more time than I thought to find a good quality/sturdy desk that could roll. Simple to ask, hard to find. After some uninspiring hours of googling, I stumbled upon Anthro, a company out of Portland, Oregon. They have more options than a McDonald’s Big Mac. TONS of desks to choose from, and the one I got is the 60″ Anthrocart. Black, with 5″ caster wheels, and computer siderack.
Introducing the World’s FIRST rig shot from a desk.
It may look like a typical desk, but the quality of Anthro is top notch. You can just “feel” it. No flimsy parts here. Not to mention their customer service is 2nd to none. Ask for Doug Campbell if you give them a call.
My other quest was to find sturdy monitor holders that clamp to the back of the desk. I’m extremely impressed with the arms from Ergotron. Super snazzy, sturdy, and quickly adjustable on the fly to my heart’s content. The big 30″ monitor needed the MX model for the extra weight. For the smaller monitor I got the more compact LX model. Power Rangers eat your heart out.
See that big window in the background? That’s one of the main reasons I wanted the desk to be portable. During the day the sun can really beam down on the desk. No worries, just push it a few feet into the shade. I’d bore you with specifics on the computer. But to skim, it has 12GB DDR3 RAM, i7-920 2.66 GHz Processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 grahics card, SSD internal hard drive, and TONS of bullet proof back-up external hard drive space thanks to drobo. pew pew pew! Steve Demmitt helped me put all the pieces together, can’t forget about that.
And there it is. I’d bore everyone if I went over EVERYTHING associated with my workspace, so leave a comment below if you have any questions… Chances are I’ll be typing my response from this very desk!
29
Nov
2011
Réinvént the Résumé
Every now and then when applying for any type of job, I get a request for a résumé. Nothing extraordinary there. But in the creative field, a résumé better be more than a white sheet of Times New Roman puked out in Microsoft Word. After all I’d be competing against other designers, why not let that first knock on the door be a loud colorful one?
I’ll be the first to admit that I hop on google and dedicated creative sites to brainstorm. For example look at what I found after doing a quick search for “creative résumés” www.honkiat.com
Reading résumés can be boooooooooooring, and boooooooooooring résumés (unintentionally) can reflect your personality. I chose to be light-hearted with my approach. Specifically, talking about being the “Grand prize finger painting winner at Sunshine Preschool” in 1986, continuing my timeline to 2021, and inserting a slew of informative fun (somewhat true) graphs.
A few rules I go by when creating a résumé:
1. Keep it under 1 page (more than 1 page makes you seem egotistical)
2. Address each résumé to their respective peers (cover letters are so 1997, and wastes paper)
3. Throw in a few fun facts and/or graphics (a wall full of words isn’t very engaging)
For a final touch, I made two versions: computer friendly and print friendly.
On computer monitors (back lite), less energy is exerted with the color black. And for print, less ink is used on white. You get the idea. Not like I’ll be saving any forests here, but this small step can go a log way into showing attention to detail.
Left: computer version / Right: print version
Who is Cargo (the addressee)? A killer ad agency in Greenville, SC I’ve been working freelance for over 6 months now… See a connection here? I’ll save another blog post for that. But till then check out their website: http://thinkcargo.com
30
Aug
2011
Simple product photography setup – D2 Racing
1 floor
1 camera (and a lens helps)
2 alienbees
2 softboxes
2 pieces of white board
= results you see below
Growing up in my high school and college days, I was HUGE (massive) into cars. So much that I started a car club when I was 15. The legal age for a driver’s license in SC used to be 15 (insurance companies get confused about that). During that time I made a very good friend who is the North American distributor of D2 Racing, which is primarily a performance suspension parts manufacture.
My buddy wanted me to take a few pictures of his new inventory. Being the good friend I am, I gladly obliged… However I’ve never really tried my hand at product photography. I’m NOWHERE near as patient and talented as my friend Jeff Creech, but thankfully the pictures were requested to be a simple white background.
So, I took a quick trip to Micheal’s crafts store, picked up two pieces of big white cardboard (I asked the young cat-crazy cashier if she could put them in a bag… she didn’t think that was funny). Set them up in an “L” shape, flanked the 2 alienbee large softboxes, and was amazed at how easy it was to snap away beautiful solid shots. Now I’m not going to write a book about product photography, I’m just letting you know how simple it was to get the following shots:
As you may imagine, a little bit of photoshop was involved to nuke some of the trailing shadows out. Other than that, the images are practically untouched. Not bad for half a days work!
10
Aug
2011
WMB 3D, and how I designed it
OK first and foremost, Nick Saglimbeni is the mastermind behind WMB 3D. I was lucky enough to be trusted with designing the layout for the magazine. After hearing his vision, I was on board faster than a cat on a ship full of tuna. My main job was to layout the magazine, however Nick is quite a talented designer as well, for he did the logo, and many of the ads you see in WMB 3D. Now I’m not one to boast about something to make an extra buck. I truly believe what has been done to accomplish WMB 3D is ground breaking. I’ll say it now, Nick has established himself as the best 3D photographer in the world. Correct me if I’m wrong. And if you don’t believe me, view the magazine for yourself (free sample gallery, $5 for full magazine):
iPhone/iPad iOS version
Android version
If you haven’t figured out already, WMB 3D is the world’s first magazine fully rendered in 3D, from the photography to the design. It was originally planned to be a tablet and smart phone (backlit) only magazine, but we also decided to print a limited run of beautiful 9×12″ collector’s magazines as well. We chose to do the red/cyan 3D approach because it is the most accessible across the world, and the least expensive. When technology progresses we will move towards glasses-less 3D.
3D lately has made a comeback and has seen it’s ups and downs since the recent explosion of Avatar (up), and the lackluster-last-minute botched downs of The Last Airbender (down). Seems like everyone was trying to hop on the 3D bandwagon, and in return there are a lot of bad apples to ruin it for the artists that follow through from beginning to end. I will not give away Nick’s secret on what camera he uses and how he processes the images, but I will say it’s certainly not as simple as mounting 2 cameras side-by-side and pressing a button. The attention to detail in WMB 3D is stunning. The ability to see immersive depth, and every minor detail without straining the eyes is mind blowing. Have I used enough flattering adjectives yet?
DESIGN
I’m all about the saying “less is more”. Taking any idea and condensing it into a design that fully describes what needs to be said, in a minimalist way. Too many shapes, colors, fonts and pictures can quickly turn a classy Dwell magazine into a Star magazine. Minimalist was the way to go with WMB 3D, mainly because the images were the #1 stars of the magazine. The bigger and less cluttered I could make the pictures, the better. Because of that, the articles are well written, but again, minimalist so the images aren’t covered by walls of text.
Font is by far the most important design aspect we had to decide, because on most pages they will simply contain an image and a few words. After going through hundreds upon hundreds of fonts, we agreed on the sleek rounded font Quicksand by Andrew Paglinawan. We chose this because 1. the curves match the WMB logo 2. the font family is quite large (7 variations) and 3. it is very user-friendly, modern and easy to read. To add a little spice when needed, we decided to use various fonts for section titles.
Designing with 3D images was new territory for me, but turned out to be more convenient than traditional 2D magazines. Funny thing is, you can literally place text anywhere on the image, and it WILL be able to read when viewing in 3D (unless the font is a very similar color to the background). This is because the font is being placed on the plane closest to your perspective, while the 3D image is “sunk” into the page, so you are actually reading the font as if it is floating above the image… therefore making it easier to read on busy backgrounds. Trust me once you put the glasses you will instantly see what I mean.
RESULTS
Thanks to Nick and the team’s hard work, Kim Kardashian blowing the lid off the premiere, and E! News leaking the details days before the release… the magazine has been a major success on it’s first week. But we could of told you that after documenting people’s reactions on the Las Vegas strip:
I’ll be happy to answer any questions, so feel free to comment. But overall, download this revolutionary magazine, I promise you will be amazed by the amount of detail Nick has gone through to deliver you the ultimate 3D magazine.
iPhone/iPad iOS version
Android version
