M. Finley Designs

Freehand Futurist

morgan — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:05:45 +0000

Drawing is the most essential tool in my design process, as I often use pencil and pen sketches in conjunction with design software. I’m a designer that draws… alot, so I wanted to create a website about freehand drawing in the design process. I also love vector illustrations and design resources, so I turned my sketch ideas into digital illustrations. Many of the files are free to download. Freehand Futurist is about bringing tradition (hand drawing) into the modern design process, and with time I hope the site will show people the value of freehand drawing.

Ampersand Project Finish

morgan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:01:56 +0000

This was my senior project. It consisted of 24 ampersand designs which I printed in two layers on 5×7 Mr. French paper. Each is printed with transparent ink in two layers, giving the illusion of more than two shades of the color. After completing the prints, I printed a cover wrap using the three colors, and named the collection, “Another & Another & Another &.” This was the largest edition I’ve ever printed, coming in at 30 public copies and 6 artist proofs. I’m selling them for $40 apiece, if you would like to purchase a copy please contact me.

Offroad Marketer

morgan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:31:57 +0000

Offroad Marketer is a blog for small and medium business marketing theory and practice. For this site I designed the header, footer, image links and customized the layout and colors. I created the header illustration and the social media icons (including the Creative Commons link) in Adobe Illustrator. This was my second Thesis Theme mod, this time using the full width framework. Thesis is a premium WordPress theme from DIYthemes.com that comes loaded with features.

TATE Website

morgan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:10:03 +0000

The Tulsa Awards for Theatre Excellence, TATE for short, is a not-for-profit organization recognizing outstanding theatre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I built this website using WordPress, and the custom theme is adapted from a design by Ruby Whitney.

"Caught In Play" Website Design

morgan — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:38:42 +0000

This past May and June I was designing and building the website for Peter Stromberg’s new book, Caught In Play: How Entertainment Works on You . The book was designed by Stanford University Press, and served as the launching point for the design of the website, and I designed the site to be consistent with the book and it’s visual presentation.

Beyond visual design, it was important that I give Peter a flexible solution— a website that can grow and change as he develops content. WordPress was the immediate choice, as it gives Peter complete control over his content, and the power to engage with his audience through blogging and commenting. It was also very quick to design and implement using the Thesis Theme from DIY Themes.

Along with caughtinplay.com, Peter currently writes the blog “Sex, Drugs and Boredom” for Psychology Today.

[flickr pid="3695306698" size="medium"]

Web 2.0 Watercolor Icons

morgan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:45:55 +0000

I really love some of the hand drawn icon sets I’ve seen around the web lately, so I thought I should make some of my own. I’m releasing these icons under a creative commons license (my first) and you can download them individually from Flickr or as a a zip package by following the link below.

Download the Web 2.0 Watercolor Icon Pack

Web 2.0 Watercolor Icons by Morgan Finley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Ampersand Project – A Beginning

morgan — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:28:43 +0000

So far this summer has been pretty laid back, but I have been keeping myself pretty busy screen printing. In the past month I began exploring a new subject matter in my screen prints— ampersands. I first became interested in ampersands as a typographic form after reading The History of the Ampersand. Shortly after reading this I started filling page after page of my sketchbook with ampersands in varying shapes and styles. In these drawings began my interest in the visual construction of the symbol. So I decided to make ampersands the subject of my senior design project.

Every good project starts with goals and limitations

In this project I will create multiple ampersand designs from both sketches and digital sources. I will then screen print them onto 5×7 cards, and compile the prints into a box book. This means designing all of the actual prints, and the box which will hold them, to work as a single unit. In order to do this right, I first need to answer some important questions, and start asking questions for further research.

How many box books should I make? More importantly, how many can I afford to make? I would like to set a goal of twenty, but I will have to research materials and construction methods.
How many ampersands should I design and print? I would like to set a goal of fifty, but it depends on what kind of paper I can find. I should probably look into an affordable cover weight paper.
How should I limit my colors and layers? I would like each print to consist of two layers of the same transparent color. I am thinking of using just three colors, although I don’t yet know what colors.

Mannequin

morgan — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:43:40 +0000

This is a screen print I made this past semester, my second screen print to be exact. The image is based off Gary Numan’s first album cover, Replicas. With this print I was experimenting with using screen-filler for color reduction, the white and green layers, with a black layer on top. The design is simple and serves this kind of technique well, and I feel that is what makes the image work. I’m most proud of the colors I used and the graphic style I gave the original image.

ChoicePay Web Internship

morgan — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:05:32 +0000

From May of 2008 to January of 2009, I was a web and marketing intern at ChoicePay Inc., an electronic payment service. I was brought on to aid both the marketing department and their web developers. The marketing side of this job required me to work with existing design resources and to create new resources such as email templates and marketing materials. The web development side of this internship required extensive use of HTML and CSS to clean up both the code and design of ChoicePay’s existing web pages and payment systems. The developers and programers on staff taught me a lot about web development procedures and practices, from development to implementation, and even some handy tools and techniques.

While I was at ChoicePay Inc. I also redesigned their website, www.choicepay.com, using strict HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, ChoicePay Inc. was bought by Tier Technologies before my site design could be implemented. Still, my time there was highly valuable for the skills and experience I gained.

Ampersand Prints

morgan — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:49:32 +0000

I recently read an article on the history of the ampersand, A Short History of the Ampersand, and was inspired to make these ampersand designs. After making these, I have decided to do more ampersand designs and combine them into a box book for my senior project. I will write about that as a project more in the future. In these screen prints I was experimenting with transparent ink, and I love the effect I got by overlaping the ink in the first two designs. I will have to consider this effect in my future screen prints.