Eye Opening Design

Pizza Party Photoshop Action

Years ago, I stumbled across a Photoshop action that could make type look like it was made of pizza slices. Being too cheap to buy it, I set out to make one of my own. The results of my labour as seen in the image above. Even the placement of the pepperoni is handled automatically by the action.

The other Photoshop action I mentioned earlier has since been released as freeware, but I prefer mine.

EDIT: This post actually gets quite a few hits. Since there appears to be some sort of demand for this action, I’ve released it over at my DeviantArt account. Follow the link there.

Ninja

Mermaid

Not too long ago, I had to do a series of lottery ticket designs based on fantasy/mythological creatures. They turned out okay, but there were so many time restrictions, odd marketing demands to follow, not to mention a few technical restrictions, that I felt I could do better. So I set about to re-create one of the images as if I were the boss (and didn’t have to worry so much about reproduction restrictions.)

Marbles

A few years ago, I got interested in the freeware renderer, POV-Ray. This image was a test of various materials you could use to render shapes with.

Manitoba Moose

Alas, the Moose are no more.

When they first came to Winnipeg, I was asked to put together a design for their presentation folder. I also put together the design for the inaugural opening ticket.

Joan of Arc

An early attempt at 3D rendering. Most of the model work was from free online sources. The pose and attempt at traditional toon rendering was all me.

Jet Fighter

ID-90 Logo

This was a logo that was created for a local print broker. The only real direction we were given was to develop a “3D” looking logo. The hard part was the name of the company itself – it didn’t really mean anything. Juxtaposing the “ID” portion of their name and “identity” I came up with the idea of a fingerprint that was used both as a part of the logo and a design element for other elements of their visual identity. This was my favourite piece, a puzzle that was sent out as a teaser for the launch of their new logo.

Harrisontour.com

I was asked by a first time author to design a website to help promote his new book. Since this was a travelogue that was based on notes written in a leather bound journal, I decided that a travel journal look was best. I also built the site on WordPress, so as to make updating the site and charting the progress of the book as easy and painless as can be. The author is not very tech savvy. You can find a link here.

Guy Smiley

I did a bunch of pencil roughs of a whole series of people. A real cross-section of North Americans. They were all punted in favour of a mod/hipster type drawings similar to this guy here. (that were ultimately rejected in favour of just not doing the project at all). I always thought it was a shame the drawings never made it past a very early conceptual stage. So I set about to change that. This is the first one. I’ll maybe do a few more later on.

This one was my favourite of the bunch. My wife thinks he looks a lot like Billy Blanks of Tae Bo fame. I have to admit, there is a resemblance, but he was the furthest thing from my mind when I was originally sketching out the images.

The image started off as a scan of the pencil drawing and then I went to town dropping in colour. Starting out with flat tones of colour and then built up the highlights and shadows. Pretty straightforward. The only really crazy thing I did was essentially re-do all the linework directly in Photoshop. Lots of fun with the Paths tool and a custom Photoshop brush. Resulted in some nice a slick lines.