brand-x design

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noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:01:00 +0000

Oh my goodness. I never put anything here! But, then, I haven't been doing much design work lately. All that has changed, though, as I have a gig with a restaurant working on stuff for them. Packaging. Menus. T-shirts. Everything!

Here is something I've been working on. Moving towards something I think is better. Maybe? Still not there yet. But feeling closer.

I think I might try putting stars instead of asterisks. Trying some different color schemes. This place is fun and their label should be, too! I'm trying to find all the info on the nutritional labels. Haven't actually touched that from the file they gave me to begin with. Anyway. I'm kind of excited where this is going.

Angel Cover

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:27:00 +0000

Been working on a cover for my graphic novel that I've been writing. Had the thumbnailed idea for a while, and finally sat down yesterday and drew the mofo. Marathon drawing, for sure! Actually, I've gotten a lot faster than I used to be. From pencils to completion, only around 3.5 hours.

I did a bunch of color combinations and then asked a bunch of people what they thought. Apparently they think like I do because this is the one with the most votes.

And this is the one with the second most votes

T-shirt design

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:07:00 +0000

I was recently asked to design a t-shirt for this church up in upstate NY. The pastor there had seen my bulletin covers that I did for Greenpoint Reformed Church and really liked them so wanted me to do a t-shirt for them in that vein. Here's what we finally decided on. It will be printed on a cream colored shirt (hence the cream background). I'll try to get photos of the actual shirts once they get them.

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:50:00 +0000

I mentioned in class last week that I had some posters and a banner to make as a favor for some friends and their rock camp. I've been packing my house up like crazy since we're moving next week, and also since we're flying to Seattle on Wednesday morning at the crack of dawn. All of that together didn't leave too much time to make said posters and banners, but I took the better part of this evening and gave it my best shot.

Try 1. I thought this was a little stiff. After this, went in a different direction:

Try 2. Thought that maybe illustrations more like I've been doing on my project would work for this. Decided to stick with this style:

Try 3. Different illo:

Try 4. Adding some color:

Try 5. Playing around with colors. Liked this better than the one before:

So then I ran with those last colors and made a banner kind of putting everything together that I liked from before:

To date

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:26:00 +0000

NB: Still trying to figure out friction spread to get more of a feel of friction. For now, it's as it was. For now, most copy is just copy/paste from various things.

zine

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:11:00 +0000

I also worked on this bird zine a bit more. You can click here for the LoRes pdf

HiRes pdf here.

Here's a couple of spreads I reworked, trying to take your advice and work the colors/etc from one side of the page to the other a little more.

Poster

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:44:00 +0000

Trying to find a happy medium on the type size.

And on a completely different note

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:32:00 +0000

I've been working on compiling and working together this bunch of things my friends and I made several years back all having to do with birds. If you want to see what I've done so far, you can click here for the LoRes pdf. There is HiRes pdf here. LoRes is probably better for your download times, though.

Posters

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:20:00 +0000

I also figured I'd jump on the b/w poster bandwagon. Here's the first results of me playing around.

Try 1:

Try 2:

Try 3:

And I know you said black & white, but I thought I'd play around with just one color.
Try 4:

Try 5:

Hexadecimal Symbol

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:37:00 +0000

Was thinking about this project while walking somewhere the other day and was wondering if there was a symbol I could figure out that would represent it somehow. I thought that a hexagon might be a good place to start (even though hexadecimal is 16) for its connections with chemistry (aromatic rings) and materials (honeycombs, hexagonal close packing crystal structure). The dot and arrow are a vector acting on a center of mass. Also the dot is a symbol for a decimal. Thought I would keep it visually simple like the rest of the project seems to be going. Maybe I'll try to do some more variations on this later.

First try

Second try, changing line thickness

Spread 3 variations

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:15:00 +0000

Trying to figure out a layout for the spread. For now, the copy is just filler. I'm still working on the actual stuff.

spread 5 variations

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:00:00 +0000

First draft:

Second draft:

spreads

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:28:00 +0000

NB: the friction spread and the group/sets spread are just rough rough drafts. I figure I should make rough drafts of the stuff I have planned so far and then work on them over this week. Still a lot of copy to write. For now, it's just copy/paste from various things.

First few spreads - try 2

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:54:00 +0000

playing around with adding a little bit of color. Wanted to keep it simple.

First few spreads

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:18:00 +0000

Here are the first three spreads as they currently stand. Modified the copy on the second spread. Put Newton's laws in Latin with English translation. Changed the figure a bit. Still some tweaking to do on the type. First try at spread 3. The gray lines at the top and bottom are where the page would be cropped.

Spread 2. Redone graphics.

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:58:00 +0000

This and the first spread should match a bit more now. At least tonally?

A spread progression

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:43:00 +0000

Ignore the copy for now. I'm working on the writing. For now, it's mostly just for composition's sake. Still playing around with things. Need to get the graphics a little more similar. Adjust the curves. Maybe redraw them. Or at least do them in the same manner.

Diffusion - spread in progress

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:58:00 +0000

Worked on this some more.

System of Individuals - spread progression

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Been trying to figure out a spread for each topic. Here is topic one. Slow goings due to the fact that 1) I'm incredibly slow at anything having to do with me coming up with words to say and 2) my scanner is on the fritz. But I persevered (I think maybe one of the programs I'm using has a memory leak? Or maybe it just takes a lot of memory?) through a bunch of off and on and reboot and the like.

First try:

Second try, different drawing:

Third try, same drawing as #2. Scaled down a bit:

Spread in progress

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:14:00 +0000

Trying to give things some order. Still a lot of work to do.

Type specimens

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:14:00 +0000

A comparison of several (similar) typefaces:

Diffusion - spread in progress

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:29:00 +0000

Working on this. The graphic on the right is a representation of a game of "Telephone" I played with 12 people passing the message "Gossip follows the law of diffusion". I was trying to show how it mutated. Am still playing around with this. So if you have any suggestions, let me know. This is a sort of mid-process snapshot of what I'm working on.

(also, the margins got cut off a bit exporting as a tif, so just trust me that there are a bit more margins on the printed out physical version)

Diffusion

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:26:00 +0000

Taking type and doing some physical processes with it after printing it out. This is diffusion at work -- sandpaper then water. Both color (the actual colors it separated out as) and b/w.

Type

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:23:00 +0000

One thing I remember well from my years studying science and math is how most of my problem sets and most of the technical papers I had to read all looked the same. This is because a vast majority of stuff is written using LaTeX, a program that basically typesets everything for you after you write it all using something akin to HTML mark-up (only with LaTeX code) on plain text. LaTeX makes is super easy for anyone to write equations and formulas, which is why it's so popular. Scientists/engineers/mathematicians don't like getting frustrated with things like formatting, so it makes sense to have a program that will pretty much just format it for you.

Anyway. I was thinking about type in relationship to my thesis, and I was trying to figure out what this seemingly ubiquitous typeface I saw was. So after some internet poking around, I found out that it's Computer Modern Unicode. Comes in a variety of weights. Serif and sans. Small caps. Itals. Plus a whole slew of glyphs: Greek, math, Cyrillic, etc., etc.. It was originally made using the METAFONT system (but has since been converted to TT and OT) and was intended specifically for computers and LaTeX/TeX. The range of CMU makes it pretty ideal for math, since it has all the symbols that you could possibly want.

Long story short, I found a download for the typeface and decided to play around with it. It's not necessarily the most elegant font, but what it does have is a whole host of connotations that anyone familiar with reading math/science papers will see and recognize.

Entropy

noreply@blogger.com (l. nichols) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:07:00 +0000

A start. More to come.