Apple’s has to be the only company that can get people up in arms over a damned announcement. They are hype whores. I’ve seen a company make announcements that they are going to announce something.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty excited about the iPad (not sure if I want one, though).

It just seems that Apple does this for every new product they release, big or small. They did this for the MacBook (which was just a new laptop), the iPhone (something people have known that they’ve been working on for awhile), Leopard (an update to OSX, also the updates to OSX since) and the AppleTV (which was a flop in the long run). That is just the list of things from my recent memory.
I’m not saying that other companies do this. All I’m saying is that no other company does this as much as Apple. The other companies don’t do this as much or to the extent of Apple. The other guys mention something in an interview and you hear nothing from them til they make the announcement. But not Apple. You have to announce that you’re going to make an announcement, then spend the next three-to-six months building up the hype around what the product is through the numerous apple rumor sites that are purposely leaked information from Apple.

At this point it seems like a mute point for Apple to even have ads for anything, as word of mouth and bloggers do all of the work for you.
I think that I’m just tired of somethings being overhyped, that’s all.

Tags: apple rant hype

Just got my business cards in the mail today. Designed and ordered through Zazzle.com. Got here pretty quickly too.

Sorry, no watermark

Look at that gyphon. RAWR!

Tags: advertising, announcement, Design, graphic design, updates

Here is an article from the superb site Six Revisions where the author compares classic movie posters with their remakes posters, including some commentary about the designs.

A Comparative Design Look at Remakes of Movie Posters

I don’t agree with many of the author’s comments, but it’s still an interesting read.

Tags: advertising, critic, film, graphic design

As you might know, I am getting married in August. To celebrate this, though a bit late, I have compiled a list of my favorite proposals. Mine wasn’t nearly as special as these, but I thought it was sweet.

The Super Mario proposal

The GoogleMaps proposal by a Google employee

The Halo 3 custom map proposal

Getting Sandman’s Neil Gaiman to do it for you

Penny Arcade

Prior to the actual proposal, I had joke many times about doing something like this. The best one that I could think of was doing it via Ask A Ninja, she claims that she would have liked that one.

This entry is to kick-off a new page that I’ve been designing in preparation for my wedding in August. The link will be listed on the physical invitations, on the sidebar of this site and possibly on the front page somewhere. The page, which is my first real try at coding with CSS, is made to emulate the wedding invitations.

If you have anymore that you would like to share, please link them in your comments.

Tags: announcement, critic, geek, interesting, marriage, Menu, proposals, updates, wedding

40 Clever Advertising Campaigns of McDonald’s – Some of these are really kind of cool.

Lifehacker article #1 – I plan on using this article from Lifehacker to transform the classic Xbox that I’m getting into a media center.

Lifehacker article #2 – This article shows how to use XBMC (what I’m using the above article for) to watch television shows from Hulu.com.

http://frankencade.blogspot.com/, and http://steampunkworkshop.com/steampunk-mame – This guy build a MAME cabinet inspired by the old Boris Karloff Frankenstein movies and the steampunk community. The latter link being the article from the Steampunk Workshop – the guy who made this.

http://www.thecustomsabershop.com/ – Custom designed and build lightsabers, ’nuff said.

This is just a small sample of the links that I have gathered recently, but in writing them down, I have forgotten most of them. I plan on uploading more links to share with everyone as I find the (as I have been doing) instead of this one big jumbled mess. I would have done that but lately, I have been busy with a creating t-shirts, invitations and other misc. whatnot for my wedding. One item being a webpage full of extra information for family and friends (like gift registries, directions and a giant Flash countdown clock). This is my first real attempt at working with CSS. I would say it’s also the first time with Flash, but I took a class a few years ago and build some pretty impressive  pages (like a Megaman level select inspired website menu).

As I get things finished I will upload pictures/links to share. Currently I’m about half-way done with the major stuff, and the wedding is fast approaching.

Tags: advertising, graphic design, interesting, lightsabers, MAME, media center, Menu, steampunk, updates, wedding, xbmc, xbox

Here is a pretty cool idea for a CD package.

I don’t think that the design is cool. It’s OK, I like the circuit board design but they could have hidden the wires/headphone jack/etc. better.

It’s a cool/innovative idea, but the visual design could have been better.

Tags: cd, Design, graphic design, package design

Click to see more from my deviantART account.

I was thinking about this image after someone had faved the t-shit version on deviantART. About how the image came to be. So I’m going to let everyone in on the origins of this piece. I’m going to let everyone in on my creative process (which seems to be very popular these days).

It all started when I had an alliteration stuck in my head. I thought that it would make a cool slogan for a green campaign of some sort. Then I started playing around with it trying different things in Illustrator. I played with the wording some. Finding it helpful and a little funny that it was an alliteration of three five-letter words (pure accident).

After playing/fidgeting with different fonts, I came to really like how this one reminded me of nature and dirt. After moving the text so that it fit REALLY tightly (yet still readable) I looked at it and decided that it needed something. GRASS! Of course. So I started playing with the different grass brushes. I made them into shapes, and placed them/re-sized them to seem almost natural.

After some tweaking and whatnot I came up with this finished product.

As for the t-shirt version, it’s a little less glamorous.

I had just downloaded a few new templates for t-shirt mock-ups, and was searching my hard drive looking for something to jump out at me to test the new templates on. That was when this almost forgotten gem jumped out at me.

That, for the most part/in a nutshell, is my creative process for how I come up with an image. Sometimes there’s more to it, sometimes there’s less. I the end, it’s all about trial-and- error and tweaking the image til I’m content with how it looks.

I usually say that an image is finished when I step back from it, take a look and can’t see anything that I can do to make it better. Sometimes I look at it and don’t feel like it’s finished, but when I think about what can be done, I can’t come up with anything. At that point I walk away, come back later and see if I can see anything. IF at that point, I still don’t see anything, or that I now feel/see that it is done, I’ll declare it finished and upload it on here or deviantART.

But then, sometimes, there are deadlines (which change everything).

Above is the new logo for the college that I recently graduated from.

Now, it’s nothing new that the graphic design department teachers and students generally want nothing to do with the layout and design of the schools image/website/ads/what-have-you. A former teacher once noted that he wouldn’t want the job of redesigning the schools logo/website/…, and that they couldn’t afford him for THAT job.

When I saw the new logo in the other days paper, I was reminded of something that I had seen since childhood. My earliest memory being the beginning of one of my favorite films when I was about seven.

The Mogan Creek Productions logo. Some people I’ve talked to say that it’s similar but not enough to say anything.

I’ve done my far share of borrowing images from other designers, but they have usually been in the public domain and how I used them was fair use. I always put my own spin on the image. But, personally, I think this is borderline plagiarism. They simply flipped the logo around. They’re way to close to be considered different. They look more like different versions of the same logo one might make when developing a logo, but not two completly different logos.

And that type treatment!?! What is that? They claim that they’re trying to show how Shawnee State University offers students something different. Sure it works, if you mean that it make us look like every other college (hell! school for that matter) in the country.

Shawnee State president Dr. Rita Rice Morris says here that this redesign of the schools branding is a “tremendous leap forward” for increased enrollment.

Hmmm. Well. I guess one step forward… two steps back?

Tags: critic, Design, graphic design, school

Courtesy of The Portsmouth Daily Times

Actually I asked her to marry me back in February, but with the date not planned til next summer, the announcement just appeared in this past Sundays paper.

Pontious — Flanagan

The parents of Megan Marie Pontious of West Portsmouth and Charles Raymond Flanagan of West Portsmouth announce their children’s engagement and forthcoming wedding.

The bride-elect is a daughter of lou and Barb Pontious of West Portsmouth. The future bridegroom is a son of Ray and Pat Flanagan of West Portsmouth.

The bride-elect is a 2003 graduate of Portsmouth West High School and is employed in the deli department of the Kroger store.

The future bridegroom is a 2003 graduate of Notre Dame High School and a 2008 graduate of Shawnee State University with a degree in graphic design. He is employed as a copy editor by the Portsmouth Daily Times.

The couple has set a wedding date of Aug. 21, 2010, at Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

Tags: announcement, marriage, wedding