Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all and peace on Earth.

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"

Branding Yourself

I’m taking the plunge and starting to do some freelance on the side. Wow! Who knew there were so many little details you have to do. My plan is to blog about the experience of starting up so others out there can learn and hopefully some of the more experienced freelancers will share their knowledge.

The first step in starting out is to brand yourself. No, this does not involve fire and hot irons (though it might be easier). It is coming up with a name for your company. I had thrown around a couple names: Gibbs Grafix, SG Design, Gibbs Design, Grafix Gibbs. I have decided to go with Gibbs Design. The reason being is that it's simple and it says who I am and what I do.

The next step is to come up with a logo, a mark that represents your company. This is one of the hardest things to do for yourself. At times there are so many things you want to put in but at the same time you want to keep it simple. Here are some of the sketches I went through before landing on my final design.

This is the design I ended up choosing. It's simple and clean. Why the break in the box? As a designer I like to think outside the box, step out of the box for new perspectives but I also have to work within a framework.

In a previous post I talked about how branding is not just about a logo but about the whole company. It is about everything that's put into it and comes out of it. So a big part of branding yourself is how you promote yourself. View yourself as an expert in your field. Do your best in everything whether it is a blog or a forum. Present yourself with your best foot forward because you never know who your next client or co-worker may be. When you are out running errands or getting coffee be polite. You would be amazed how many people remember the rude guy. Remember how you like to be treated when you're a customer and treat others the same way. Your work may be the best but if you are rude, condescending and obnoxious no one is going to want to find out that your work is good.

So as I go through starting up I need to remember that my brand is not my logo but it is myself and how I present myself. People may not remember my logo but the will remember me. If I’m friendly and helpful I will stand a better chance of getting the jobs I want.