Advertising stuff for a play. Poster (11×17) on the left, postcards (4×6) on the right. That shade of orange makes me really happy.

I made the initial little shape in this pattern last year, and I haven’t really done much with it. It was fun to give it a chance to be a part of something.

It’s so impressive to me that people used to create patterns without ever-handy Adobe Illustrator. Little planning at all goes on when I’m patterning, and I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t endlessly rework the pattern with no trace of the previous attempts.

I recently created a time line of Gay City Health Project’s fifteen years of advocating gay mens’ health in Seattle. I created 6 18×24 posters full of the awesome events and programs they’ve provided from 1993-2010. Click on the sample page to see the whole thing in PDF format- but keep in mind that I intended it to be huge and printed.

I ended up buying Pixu, a newish graphic novel by Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lobos, Gabriel Bá, and Fabio Moon.

I will admit to being a diehard Becky Cloonan fan and I’ve always liked horror movies if only because they usually end up being totally mockable and silly. So a graphic novel that plunks itself into that genre was intriguing.

It ended up surprising me with how wonderfully complex the plot was- it was impossible to tell who was ‘good’ and who was a villain, and the evil that comes to consume seems to originate within the characters’ moral ambiguities, crimes, and perversions. A horror story where the terrorizing evil is driven by the characters themselves is new to me. Usually the monster is an ‘Other’ figure that has no direct line of creation with its attractive, easily separated-from-the-herd victims. Speaking of attractive victims, I absolutely love the twist on their hot-blonde-protagonist.

The visuals didn’t surprise me at all- every single one of the creators is an absolutely incredible artist. Their styles played together really well, as they tended to shift with the scenes in a really natural fashion. There were just enough disturbing images to leave me satisfyingly creeped out, if not haunted by a couple of them. But nothing was overdone and the gore was never approached in that pornographic style that you see in a lot of slasher flicks- where the special effects people go nuts and the result is too gruesome to be taken seriously.

If you want to have your expectations rocked, and if you want to get more than a little scared, go read this book. And then read it again-I found it to be even better the second time around, when the layers of meaning in the dialog become more legible.

In 2009 I headed up a student design team responsible for the printed materials of an annual event. This is the postcard I designed for it.

This is the poster I created for the Bioneers 2009 event at my alma mater. I was asked to fit to a certain style, which ended up being an interesting challenge. Poster size was 11×17.

In 2009 I created the event poster for the Maryland League of Conservation Voters’ forum at my alma mater. The final poster was 11×17.

Some recent figure studies from a live model. The numbers indicate how long the poses were. I used a mechanical pencil and Pantone Tria markers, because I wanted to force myself to simplify the interplay of light and shadow on the figure. When I use just pencils, or charcoals, I find that I get caught up in all the tiny gradations and subtle changes and then I lose track of the whole. Markers are a great way to train myself out of that habit!

I designed the visuals on a friend’s blog, Trac Changes and illustrated a big old header image inspired (hopefully obviously!) by the Book of Kells. As far as the technical stuff goes, I mainly stuck with CSS to make the superficial-level changes to a conventional, basic layout and I made only very minor changes to the HTML. Blogspot has a kind of funky system for creating themes, so that was a fun adventure too.
It’s a great blog- definitely an honor to get to design something for it.

Icons made in Illustrator for an unfinished Tumblr theme. Tumblr has a range of post-types which can be differentiated by icons if that’s the kind of thing you like. I wanted something very simple, maybe a little retro.