Design Something Everyday 9/365

Noth­ing is written…

An homage to one of my favorite movies, David Lean’s mas­ter­piece Lawrence of Ara­bia, done in moti­va­tional com­puter desk­top wall paper style. A film that was truly meant for the big screen.

Random CD Cover Design Game

Design Some­thing Every Day 8/ 365

I read about this along time ago on the Face­book Group: Cre­ate your Own CD Cover. I like to call it the “Ran­dom CD Cover Game.” By har­ness­ing the power of the inter­net, it is a way for design­ers to prac­tice design­ing some­thing everyday.

I like to imag­ine when play­ing this game that a client gives me his favorite photo and some text and then asks you to try to make some­thing inter­est­ing out of it. That’s also why the other name I give this game is the “Dif­fi­cult Client CD Cover Game.” Join in and let me see some of the things you’ve created!

Here are the rules:

1. Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “ran­dom” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first ran­dom wikipedia arti­cle you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to “Ran­dom quo­ta­tions” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third pic­ture, no mat­ter what it is, will be your album cover. I actu­ally pre­fer to use compfight.com and search for images with a ran­dom word gen­er­ated from #1, just so I can find images cov­ered under the Cre­ative Com­mons Share & Share Alike license.
4. Use Pho­to­shop, Gimp or even Microsoft Paint to put it together, who cares what you use, so long as you have fun and learn.

Design Some­thing Every­day 8/ 365

Source: Orig­i­nal photo by: Don Solo

Design Something Everyday: Retro Stephenie

Day 7 and still design­ing, though 2 days behind sched­ule in post­ing. Be that as it may, in honor of tonight’s pre­miere of Sur­vivor Heroes vs Vil­lains my design of the day is a lit­tle WPA inspired retro-esque poster in honor of one of my favorite play­ers, Stephe­nie LaGrossa. Star of two pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions of the show.

She was a con­tes­tant dur­ing sea­sons set in Guatemala and Palau. In Palau she was the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of her ini­tal “tribe,” a first for Sur­vivor. On Sur­vivor: Guatemala she placed sec­ond and was robbed of vic­tory by a petty and annoy­ing jury. Hope­fully, as in my dig­i­tal doo­dle, Pal­las Athena will be her aegis and like she did for clever Odysseus, guide her to vic­tory. Sur­vivors ready…

Sur­vivors ready?

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Links: Pal­las Athena Clip Art via Arthur’s Cli­part

Design Something Everyday: Day 6: Who Dat… with Zombies

Another non-timely post, I’ll have to get bet­ter at that. This one inspired some­what by two loves of mine, Amer­i­can Foot­ball and Zom­bies, though maybe not in that par­tic­u­lar order. I drew a sketch of a Zom­bie and played a bit in Illus­tra­tor and Pho­to­Shop to cre­ate the effect of an unstop­pable Zom­bie horde. Which reminded me of the Super Bowl, and more so of the entire “Who Dat?” mar­ket­ing and fan chants by the New Orleans Saints. Whose fan’s chant “Who dat, say they gonna beat them Saints?” Chang­ing it to the ter­ri­fy­ing world of masses of zom­bies steal­ing the chant for their own rav­en­ous ends amuses me. That being said it was a great Super Bowl if only it had zom­bies, it might have been truly epic…

Tools: Pen­cil, paper, ink and Scan­ner. Adobe Illus­tra­tor and PhotoShop.

Links:

• New Orleans Saints
• Super Bowl
• Who Dat?
• Zom­bies
• World War Z: An Oral His­tory of the Zom­bie War by Max Brooks, The best Zom­bie Book EVER!

Design Something Everyday: Day 5: Bali Hai

I’ve been work­ing on stuff every­day, but I haven’t been post­ing daily, so I’ve got a bunch of stuff to put up.

The first of these is a dig­i­tal doo­dle of a song from the won­der­ful 1949 Rogers and Ham­mer­stein play South Pacific, Bali Hai. I was inspired by the pro­duc­tion I saw last week­end at Seattle’s Fifth Avenue The­atre. Of course, I was famil­iar with the song and the play mostly through the 1958 film ver­sion, but see­ing it live was a thrill. Bali Hai is a myth­i­cal and mys­ti­cal island that rep­re­sents an unat­tain­able par­adise. That image of a hazy dou­ble vol­cano island has formed a core of the Tiki and Poly­ne­sian Pop mythos.

The song is a clas­sic in Amer­i­can Musi­cal the­ater, and for me the best part is very influ­en­tial in the world of Tiki and P0lynesian Pop Cul­ture. Below you can see the won­der­ful scene and lis­ten to the song Bali Hai from the 1958 film, do you hear it? It calls to you..

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Links:

• Bali Hai: Myth­i­cal and mys­ti­cal island, if you lis­ten it will call to you…
• 5th Avenue Theatre
• Rogers & Hammerstein
• South Pacific (1958 film)
• Tales of the South Pacific, the 1946 Pulitzer Prize win­ning  book by James Mich­ener, source for the film and musi­cal productions.