Friday, October 26, 2007

A Blast from the (not-so-distant) Past

I might post some old work time and again here. I know, that's not what this blog is about, but with this particular piece, I feel that it's right. So once upon a time I worked on a campaign for a Brazilian nightclub. I worked hard and long on creating digital mockups with low rez files that we wanted to present to the client before they approved the budget for the photo shoot. The work was long, but the campaign was good, and the work was noble, and was looking good. In the middle of the process, we sent a jpeg to the photographer, so he could see more or less what we were going for. I continued working at it, and stayed late at the agency to finish the campaign since the presentation was the very next day. Upon my arrival the next morning, I wanted to tweak a few things before the presentation. My jaw dropped when I was told by the owner of the agency that the hard drive where the campaign was stored had failed. For the rest of the days and the coming weeks, we tried to restore it through a bunch of different companies specialized in it, and nada. All that was left was this crummy unfinished digital rough of a postcard...

And that, it a tale to tell for anyone who doesn't back-up daily.


Thursday, October 25, 2007

Feeling inappropriate

I'm starting to get the feeling that my portfolio blog (www.mikealbuquerque.blogspot.com) is an inappropriate way to show my portfolio. Sure, it's easy to update and all, but with my portfolio now increasing its size, mainly due to larger campaigns that are coming in, I feel that maybe a website would be better.

Yes. I said it... a website.


I think its about time I get my hands dirty again and start messing with some of that lousy html coding that'll make me so unproductive :P I'm going to try to keep it simple, but who knows what could happen. I'm trying to look at some good references for portfolio sites, so if anyone has any hidden gems, let me know.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Tim Hortons unfinished

Well, there's a reason that this blog is called Rough Drafts and not Finished Works :P (Disclaimer: If you want to see my portfolio, with all my finished pieces, some of which were presented in this blog, head over to www.mikealbuquerque.blogspot.com. For all you folks who chose to stay here, I'll treat you to my latest work. I had this whole thing planned out where I was going to show you step by step of my process for this project, but I haven't found the time to scan in stuff yet, so for now, I'll just show you where I'm at right now.

This is a project for Tim Hortons, which is basically a Canadian "Dunkin Donuts meets Starbucks" They're famous for their coffee and donuts. This place is dominant up there, handling up to 78% of all the coffee sold and 56% of the pastry (in restaurants). Crazy huh? Well, they haven't yet managed to reach anywhere near that level of success in the US, which is what this campaign is about, awareness. I wanted to focus on the fact that Tim Hortons has combos and different kinds of foods, as well as their well-known (though not in America) coffee. Without further ado (sorry, this was a long post).





Thursday, October 11, 2007

Memento Poster

The following poster was created for my Typography Studio I class:




This is a conceptual poster for the movie Memento. I created the typeface for the movie title which is used in this poster as a separate project. For the poster I wanted to use type to express the chaotic nature of Leonard's memory. The big block of layered type represents his memory, and how he begins to mix up his story with his memory of Sammy Jankins. The eroding background is used to represent the fading and decaying aspect of his mind.

The project in itself was very different than what I'm used to. Basically because it was very conceptual, and instead of looking for literal or visual interpretations of what happens in the movies, I had to dig deeper and look into what made the movie stand out and decide on a way of portraying that.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Dr. Scholl's

This is an ad campaign that I created for my Advertising Design Studio I: Creative Strategies class (what a mouthful!).



The idea here was to reach out to the target audience, which is composed of people who don't necessarily use the product (Dr. Scholl's Massaging Gel Insoles) already, and let them know that the product provides them not only with protection to their feet, but also with comfort. I chose to show them that through images that have people wearing shoes in situations where they typically wouldn't be. This visual exaggeration gets the message across in a humorous and peculiar way.

First Post

Hey guys, for anyone that's keeping track, this is the first ever of this new blog, and I'll use it to explain what's the idea behind this new blog.

As many of you know, I already have a portfolio blog, but this here is something different. The idea of this blog is to be somewhere where I can post regularly, and not only pieces that I think are portfolio pieces. I want this to be a space where I'll be able to post what I'm currently working on, be it finished or not. I might have some tutorials down the line, link to work that inspires me or whatever, I'm very open-ended as to what exactly the purpose of this blog will be. The only thing I guarantee is that there'll be at least one post a week with artwork.

Enjoy!