What's on your shelf?

Recently My wife and I did some rearranging in our game room. We wanted to move some bookshelves around to make some more room and change where the tv was located. This meant removing all the books off the book shelves and going through them.

We removed a few to donate to local libraries and other places which made more room for the books we kept. It made it possible for me to have a graphic design book shelf where I can actually see what books I have.

I have two binders from HOW Conferences which are full of great info I like to refer back to. The next book is Political Graphics which deals with WWI to cold war era propaganda.

I have two versions of the GAG pricing and ethics guides. These are always useful when trying to price work or needing a contract or other form a designer or artist would use.

Next is a Logo Lounge book, I wish I had more of these. These are great reference materials to see what logos are out there and also to see some of the best logos being produced.

Then there are the two books by Von Glitschka. One is a texture book the other a pattern book. Both are great and they come with a DVD of art you can use in your work, not to mention Von is a pretty cool guy.

There are two books by Jeff Fisher one on identity design and the other on how to run your freelance business. Both of which he has been doing for years.

The other two books I will mention are the Caffeine for the Creative Mind and Group. These are great to get you out of a rut. If your stuck and need a fun project that will help you to think differently about things these two will do it. If you work with a team you can use them for team building excersizes.

The rest of the books are ones that I have found interesting or useful in growing myself as as designer. There is also a section of notebooks and sketch books containing ideas from over the years.

So what's on your shelf? What books have helped you in your design career or have inspired you? Leave a comment about them.

Fly By

One of the many hats I wear at my full time job is a video editor. When we first purchased Final Cut Studio Pro, I played around in it to get a feel for editing and creating special effects. The following movie is the first one I made. It is not perfect but I think it is a fun little fly through.

My idea was, a miniature spaceship was in my office and did a reconnaissance mission from my cube to an adjoining one and back. I used the sound effects in Soundtrack and the effects from Motion to create this 55 second short.

Enjoy!

FlyBy from Steve Gibbs on Vimeo.

Operation Thanksgiving Turkey - Identity

Project Type: Identity

Client: Catchafire for Q

Challenge: Create a logo and character to help promote Operation Thanksgiving Turkey (OTT).

Solution: One of my hobbies is competition BBQ. The team I'm on does Operation Thanksgiving Turkey each Thanksgiving to help feed needy families in our area. The first year we fed 40 families, last year we fed 286. After two years of promoting OTT with nothing other than some text posters it was decided a logo was needed. The word "operation" brought to mind a military operation and with all the volunteers involved it is almost like one. After playing around with some ideas for a mascot I settled on a turkey - the American symbol of Thanksgiving. I ended up creating Sgt. Gobble.

The logo will work well on stickers that can be put on the bags the meals are delivered in, t-shirts and other items. The mascot will show up on posters and brochures.

It was a fun project for a good cause.

Merry Christmas

And Happy New Year to all.

The final was printed on Curious Metallics galvanised paper.

There's the Rub

For Christmas this year I decided to bottle my BBQ rub for family and some friends. I had the logo already so I needed to come up with a label design. I really liked the look of the white flaming Q on a black background. It has a classy, high end feel to it. I thought a high end BBQ look would be cool. Yeah, I know high end, classy and BBQ don't usually go in the same sentence, but why not?

I did some research about labels to get ideas and figure out the look I wanted and settled on one that I thought worked well. It speaks of a high end product you might find at a specialty store. I also searched for just the right bottle to put it in. I found a great spice bottle at World Market that would work well for this small run of rub.


You will notice that the usage of it has changed a bit from my original post about the Q logo. I think the way I have chosen to use it now will lend itself to more applications and easier to change for sauce and other items.

Visual Journaling

I was cleaning around my house the other day and came across old sketch books. I find it fascinating to look back through them. Some go all the way back to high school. As a designer sketching is an important way to get ideas down and to work through design problems.

Comic idea from 1993

As I flipped through them I realized I knew exactly where I was and what was going on when I did each sketch. Whether it was an idea for a project, a class in college or a trip. Going analog is a good way to start any design project. It helps to get multiple ideas down in a rough stage and lets you keep a record of those ideas for future use.

Christmas 1995 "cat watching fish"

Thinking about this I dug out some of my college notes and high school notes. Looking back through these I have doodles and sketches on the margins. These doodles helped me to remember what the teacher was talking about in the classes. Being a visual person many of my notes contained doodles of what the teacher was talking about. When test time came I could never remember the words on the page but I could remember the doodles and those would help me answer the questions.

Pizza de Campo, Sienna, Tuscany 1996 "Lovers on the plaza"

Most people keep written journals about their lives or events. I find I keep a visual one. The only problem with it is in the future my kids will have no idea what each drawing was about.

2006 Gibbs Design logo sketches

Blast Off!

I recently bought Crumble. Crackle. Burn., by Von Glitschka. It is a very nice coffee table style book, with great illustrations from various artist using textures in digital media. It inspired me to play around with textures and see what I can create.

One thing I enjoy, is listening to old radio shows and finding inspiration from them. After listening to one episode, about flying in a rocket ship to a far planet, it inspired me to draw a ship as the author described it. Here is my initial drawing:


I took this drawing and scanned it in and imported it into Illustrator. I traced the image and recreated it in Illustrator and then added a background and some color. It came out pretty cool.


I liked it but it was missing something. So I played with it some more and then I remembered Von's book. It came with a DVD of textures. YES! So I transfered the image into Photoshop and started to go through the textures. After searching around I found some that would work for what I wanted and added them to the image. The picture became much more dynamic and had a really cool feel to it.

Here it is with the textures.


For now I think it is done. I may revisit it and tweak it here and there. But for now, I like "Flight to Planet X"