Zyphost is the hosting company that I currently run my site on. It is run and managed by a friend of mine who has been in the web world for years. He is pretty much the local authority when it comes server side anything. So it wasn’t a hard decisions for him to get into hosting… the only problem was that he is a developer and not a designer. That is where I come into the equation.

They were wanting something simple and to the point. I knew just based of the name there were two things I could communicate very easily in the letters: speed, and security. These were to qualities that every hosting provider wants to ensure and reinforce in any way possible. So, I tracked down two great fonts that do that well, HTC Gotham and Calgary Script off of veer.com and mashed em together.

The marriage worked great! I added a little bit of a gradient and worked on the kerning a bit. But for the most part the logo is as pure as it can get when it comes to typeface’s. Aaron was happy with the simple and strong look and felt like it would set them up to have a professional image both on the web and elsewhere. 

Jackina Stark (her first name has a long “I,” rhyming with china, and the accent is on the KI. phonetically it’s like this: Ja-KI-na) was unlike any client I have ever worked for. Mainly because she was my English Grammar professor in college. I am one of the few that can say I survived her class. Jackina recently retired from teaching English and has moved on to pursue writing fiction novels. Her first book was published in February of 2009 and she has two more on the way in the next year. She knew that having a website to help promote her writing would be a very helpful way to build connections with her readers and further her audience.

I was also tremendously excited about doing this site because during my preliminary research I noticed that most authors websites are really rather poor. So I knew would not be hard to get a website that not only help Jackina get a presence online, but helped her stand out in the industry. I am hoping that the quality of the site will bring a little more beauty and quality into the industry.

Building this site was a unique experience for me because you rarely will you have an intimate feel for who the client is when you start. I really did feel like that worked to my advantage. I was able to more accurately capture aspects of her fun and down to earth personality and portray them on the site than with other clients.

Jackina wanted the site to have a very intimate and informal feel. I felt like the best way to approach that requirement was through the concept of a desk. I focused quite a bit of time trying to make it feel like you were sitting at her desk reading her thoughts on paper. So, instead of just simply adding a basic repeating woodgrain background, I added some depth and shadow to the background to imitate the light from a lamp.

There were quite a few obstacles to work through within this project. Much of her reader base comes from a generation that is not entirely familiar with the internet, websites and blog protocol. So much of the site had to be simplified for the most novice user. Navigation had to be natural and intuitive, forms needed to be easy and make sense. It was also fun getting some who had been writing for decades to understand the concept of a blog and what it can be used for. Fortunately, Jackina was an amazing sport and was up for the challenge.

The aspect of the site that I am most proud of is probably the comments section. This is the first site where I was able to utilize a content management system (Expression Engine) to harness and promote interaction with the end users. One of the ways I did this was by setting a simple conditional statement so that before comments are made on a blog post a simple message displays encouraging people to use the form and comment. I am a huge of fan of websites that are intentional about encouraging interaction, instead of simply being passive. I think they feel more alive and real, which means it will be less cold and corporate.

My friend Josh Willis came to me a few weeks back and told me that he was entering this contest and wanted to know if I could help him out in anyway. After some quick brainstorming, we had a name, a plan and the rough sketches of what would become his new website. Josh’s ability to convince so many creative professionals to work with him is a little scary, but when you give full creative freedom to the guys who want nothing more than full creative freedom, it’s hard to say no.

I knew that the website we were going to get set up for him had to accomplish two things: be fun for the end user, and do one thing and one thing only. That one thing was push people to Josh’s application page on the Island Reef Job website. The initial concept was born out of a few portfolio’s I had seen recently where everything was on one page, but in different level vertically. Josh came up with the name “great bearded reef” (since he has a beard) and I knew that we could do some thing that would simulate diving into the ocean.

All the illustrations were done by another one of Josh’s friends named Dino Henderson. I had never worked with Dino before, but I am pretty sure it was by divine appointment that I was able to partner with him for this site. The concept was good, but Dino was able to take it to an entirely different level with the quality and detail of the illustrations. Everything from the beard icon to the Sea Monkey as a side kick was born out of his creative mind. I am definately going to try and partner with him on future projects.

There wasn’t anything too tricky about the site. It’s features a simple javascript that makes interacting with the anchors more interesting (same one’s used on this site). Trying to get the menu bar to be fixed with the top of the browser was a little tricky since I hadn’t tried something like that before… but I got it down with no problem. Other than that, building this site was a total dream. Josh was down with all the fun ideas and trusted me and Dino to deliver a kicking site that would not only get him some recognition, but beef up our respective portfolio’s as well.

A friend of mine named Kari was going to be opening up an Etsy.com shop and needed some artwork to put on the site and a few cards tag her items with. She makes funky children’s shirts with artsy hand made designs using custom cut fabric. They are really incredible and I would totally dress my children in them if I had any. Kari wasn’t picky about the artwork so I was excited to work for her (those types of clients are awesome!). She sent me a few pictures of her designs and I just ran from there. I knew that the designs needed to be fun, playful an mimic her existing work. And since I had never attempted this style of art before, I was looking forward to the challenge of learning a new technique.

There were three designs that stood out to me the most: the octopus, the mushrooms, and the monster. I knew that there would be enough material between the three of those that I could get something great going. Using the stock pattern in Adobe Illustrator i started concepting them out and they turned out great. I used a font called Cheboygan for the logo (it has the best lower cae “g” ever). The octopus ended up being the one that stood out the most. Her shop has been open for about two months now and she has added some great stuff.

She sells everything under the name Wide Eyed Musings. You can check it out at www.wideeyedmusings.etsy.com. If you end up getting anything, tell her I sent ya!

When the head of Ozark Christian College’s admissions department came to me about this project, he was wanting to find a new medium through which he could reach future students. Prior to the launch of this project, the school had used various print pieces to give away at conferences and use in mass mailers. The costs of printing for these pieces every year was beginning to add up and they were wanting to find something more cost effective and long lasting. A website was the most natural answer. It allowed the school to reach students without having to be physically present at a conference and moved to a medium that was very familiar to it’s target audience.

The site was originally presented under the theme of “Ignite Your Passion” however, midway through the design process the content changed drastically, and as a result, the original concept became irrelevant. Th new content presented three primary analogies to describe what the college did, and I knew that the new direction for the site needed to center around pictures that helped carry those analogies. The paper boat became the primary image for the site, and the foundation upon which the rest of the media for the project would center around.

The main goal for the site was to provide students enough information about the College so that they could then make a decision for or against the College. It was very much a fork in the road. I tried to design it with a very simplistic user interface and the path of the user needed to end in the same place, regardless of which page they navigated to. The photography was provided by one of the students currently enrolled at the college.

View the completed project here.

This logo was for one of the youth retreats that Ozark Christian College puts on through out the year. They were wanting to take a “school” feel because the weekend was going to based primarily around forum style presentations with a panel and topics, etc. The logo needed to appeal to youth and still communicate the “school” feel. I knew right out the gate that the “Q” and the “A” were going to be the primary mark of the Logo. I chose Gotham as the primary font for the mark and did a bit of manipulation on the letters to help give it more of a modern feel. I knew i could find some balance between the “Q” and the “A” so I worked that for a while which you can see in the concepts… It kind of has a kinship to the Poison logo (yeah the band!). For the final piece I ended up sketching out the logo on a chalkboard and taking a snap of it to cement the “school” feel that they were wanting.

The mantra of “work smart, not hard” was my motto for this project.

I was approached by a childhood friend named Brandon this past summer to help his company integrate the CMS for the new Fiesta Bowl website. The Fiesta Bowl had hired out an ad agency to design their website who in turn hired Red Pear, who then hired me. I was a tad bit down the line when it came to decisions, but I was the workforce behind the actual site concepts becoming real css and html.

Prior to this site I had no knowledge whatsoever of Expression Engine other than the fact I liked what I saw on the website. I had been involved in a few other CMS integrations with prior projects, but for the most part I was a noob when it came to this sort of stuff. Naturally, I told Brandon that I could do it… Sometimes you gotta stretch yourself and I knew this project was a great opportunity for that. I also knew that it would be a great name to have in portfolio. Little did I know that this would become the biggest project of my life in more ways than I had imagined.

The project took somewhere in the ball park of 150+ hours to complete. And I did a majority of the CSS and html for the site. I was able to build a custom breadcrumb that was driven through Expression Engine template variables. I also used the embedded template feature heavily and it made my life easy. There were quite a few obstacles that I was able to meet through so many of EE’s built in capabilities… we were even able to offer basic IE6 support. All in all there were about 15 unique sites and I would guess around 100+ unique pages that were built in around a month. Expression Engine definitely made this project possible and easily increased the build time by at least half.

This was a fun project for me to work on because the client was very open as to what the logo could look like. The only objectives for the logo were that it had to relate back to the theme of the conference which was “Grow” and appeal to a young audience. This naturally lent itself to some type of organic looking image.

I knew this would be a home run and a pretty easy logo to create so I skipped over my normal first step in a logo design and went right to Illustrator. My initial two concepts were very similar to each other. The first had a text treatment with plants growing out of the “o” in the word “grow.” This had a very edgy and young look to it. The second concept was just a simple placement of the work “grow” with a plant growth above it. I used one of You Work For Them’s stock vector packs to create the plants in the logo. With some other photoshop effects I knew that had two really strong concepts that would both appeal to a young audience and illustrate the theme of the conference as well as tie back into the name.

The school picked the first one. They liked the clean lines of the text treatment against the dirty feel of the plant’s growing out of the letter “o.”

This was the second identity project I did for Ozark Christian College. The first was for an recruitment campaign called “Just One.” This project was similar in that they were needing an identity for a campaign but it’s primary audience was not current or prospective students it was their donor base whose age range was 40+. In my initial meeting with the president of the college he communicated the objective of the campaign was to help raise funds for the schools technology upgrades. He wanted to do this through communicating specific ideas about the College, the first being the approach the school toward leadership training. The were wanting to highlight the personal focus each student receives, but at the same time communicate that the process of training leaders done over and over again has the potential to build something big.

This was what was set before me as far as objectives for my first round of concepts (seen at the bottom). I enlisted the help of a friend Jason Courtney who is amazing with logo concepts. My first thoughts of how to illustrate this process were through something similar to building blocks or Lego’s. I thought a stair case was a good concept, but was unsure on how to make it both visually appealing and still carry meaning. Jason came up with the concept of the ladder and puzzle pieces, which both carried the idea of doing something “one at a time.”

I presented the first round of concepts, but as I presented them I was given a further objective. The school wanted to try and communicate a second idea through the logo. It centered around the idea of the leaders being trained to go out and change the world. None of the initial concepts communicated both of those ideas together. The President did feel like the puzzle piece concept was strong enough to illustrate the “one at a time” idea. Also, with the addition of some form of the world second objective could be met.

Jason ran with the puzzle piece and globe idea and came up with several more concepts and color variations. The school wanted their colors incorporated into the design, so Ozark blue was chosen as the primary color for the logo. They chose to use two variations on the final concept for the campaign (which I advised them against… oh well). You can see the final product above.

Newfrontiers is a word wide network of churches that was started in Brighton, UK. They currently have over 600 churches in over 40 nations including the United States. The US portion had an existing website however, it was terribly out of date and had an irrelevant look. I was hired through SPI Creative to be the primary designer for the site. Newfrontiers was wanting to role out the first phase of the redesign during their annual US Leadership Conference in St Louis at the beginning of March, despite the fact that we began the project in February. This gave the team a little more than month time line to design and build the site which made things challenging.

When I approached the redesign, I knew there were going to be several objectives and obstacles with the sites scope that were going to need to be met. The over all look and feel of the site needed to be updated and there was also a pretty big emphasis on making the navigation much easier to use. I tried to take a more classic approach to the design by keeping the menu at the very top of the page. We went through about six rounds of concepts before I was able to land on a design that had both a nice simplistic layout on the front page and made sense from a information hierarchy standpoint.

The final product of the site came out very well. I was able to keep things organized and use a color scheme that could be carried through the different sub sections. We implemented a simple js to scroll through some key statements on the front page. Joomla! was used as the primary CMS for the project.

The site features some great custom applications like the ability to search through a DB of churches using the Google Maps API. There is also an app that was developed by SPI called MediaArchive that allows Newfrontiers to maintain a searchable archive of sermons and teachings from events and churches associated with Newfrontiers.