24 HOUR MARATHON (GENERATE)

ING Georgia Marathon Poster Competition (Graphic Design Challenge)

This weekend there was an event at SCAD called Generate, aka the 24-hour marathon. As part of this marathon, there was a 13 hour challenge to create a poster for the ING Georgia Marathon. Now, I was a part of this competition last year, and ended up winning it, but this year, something changed. I was asked to take a different approach, instead of doing a vector-based illustration like in the previous year, this year they were pushing to have a bitmap based poster. No stock photography was allowed, but I figured that I could take my own photos, it's too bad that it was a rainy day in Atlanta and I couldn't get a pic worth anything.

After being conscious of my technical limitations, I went on to sketch. After coming up with a few different concepts, I ultimately went for creating a mosaic of the photography that was provided by the Georgia Marathon organizers. The photos were carefully selected to reflect not only the competitive spirit but also the involvement that the community has with the event. The result you can view below:




Art Director's Night (Advertising Design Challenge)

After 13 hours designing against the clock, I was a bit tired, but there were still 11 hours left, what was I to do if not work some more? So I went on to do the Ad Design challenge, which was to create a poster, a post card, and a site for Art Director's Night. This event is a night in which graduate and senior students get a chance to meet and be interviewed by some of the top art directors in Atlanta.

It took me a while to get this one. I couldn't get a right look down, but after a couple of hours and a few different directions, I started "getting it". So I created a headline that treated the students as the future superstars of advertising. This hypes not only the college, but also helps bring up the expectations of the panelists that were coming to view the students' work. The visual was reminiscent of a rock poster, and I kept it consistently through the poster, post card, and website. Check it out:

POSTER


POST CARD (FRONT)


POST CARD (BACK)


WEBSITE

CNN

Here are some posters I did for an ad campaign that I did for my Business Practices of Advertising. CNN is obviously a well-known and respected brand, but I felt like I had to bring in some elements that could be consistently used. So I created these red stripes that emulate the lines in their logo. These stripes create an interesting element that is dynamic and introduces movement to the page. The background is white but has some highlights that also relate to the reflective nature of the stripes.

The concept of the ad is to convey that CNN is the only network that can bring you the insight to understand the news. By presenting key words with the letter "n" doubled and the c,n,and n highlighted in red, it stands out and give the idea that CNN is intertwined with those words.






The other one is a print ad for the show Anderson Cooper 360, a show that comes on every night on CNN and that goes more in depth with the headline stories.

Adobe CS4

Adobe Photoshop Extended CS4 - Videos of the new features


Design Premium CS4

Web Premium CS4

Production Premium CS4

Photoshop CS4

Photoshop CS4 Extended

InDesign CS4

Flash CS4

Illustrator CS4

Dreamweaver CS4

Additional Videos

Content-Aware Scale

Spherical Panorama

3D Quick Look

3D Mesh from Grayscale

3D Eclipse Animation

Experience Wii

I've gotta say that this actually caught me off-guard. Here I was expecting it to be a simple youtube video, but it was so much more. Do yourself a favor and check it out. It's a great use of the medium in a new way that will no doubt have an effect on the target audience. The movement and the overall feel of this is also completely consistent with the concept of Nintendo's console.

Experience Wii



As I watched this though, I remembered a project I did for New Media Art class in college. Our concept had to do with chaos, the second law of thermodynamics, and erosion. We designed a website that featured videos and content that related to that concept. After a minute or so, the website would start to fall apart. Paragraphs would disappear, images would turn into broken links, etc. It was a cool project, but not nearly as nicely executed as this one.

Green Magazines

So I've been designing some websites for my Digital Studio I class. I figured I'd post it here. I enjoyed designing this site as I really went into depth regarding the style and the mindset of the target audience. This one is for a client that I've done some freelance for in the past, although the site was just done as a class project.



Here's the link for the full thing:
Green Magazines site

the one that's on the air right now I didn't design, but here it is for comparison's sake
Current Site

Motion Graphics DIN

So I've been trying my hand in some Motion Graphics because of my Typography Studio II class. Here's my first attempt at messing around with After Effects. It was an animated version of a poster I made for the typeface DIN 1451.



And here's the poster that led to the animation:

Video Enhancing Technology

This is truly amazing. It's funny because thinking about it, it almost seems obvious.


Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

Mike's Site

Here's the Beta version of what's to come, my brand spankin' new site. so far only the main page and the advertising page are working.

http://studentpages.scad.edu/~malbuq20/mike/advertising.html

I plan to get a domain soon. ;-)

First ideas

This is a really cool experiment done by the agency Taxi. I won't say anything more so that I won't spoil it, but it's definitely worth checking out.

World Cup Hype

This piece was done for a campaign in which the objective was to brand Coke for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The challenge was how to incorporate elements that related to South African culture, football, and Coke. At the same time, it had to be visually exciting and uplifting. The result was layout that I had wanted to try for a while in my pieces. And I'm pretty happy with it.

Beatles

I haven't posted in a while. This quarter has been hectic. Taking three studio classes proved to be very tough. On top of that, I was preparing my portfolio because I was trying to find an internship. Which I did, by the way, at JWT Atlanta. My grad review also came up towards the end of the quarter, and that was a lot of work too.

But, all excuses aside, of course I've also been working hard this quarter, and I'll soon be posting here a few of the things that I've done this quarter, starting with a poster I did for the Beatles. There's also a cd packaging that goes along with it, but I have yet to take good pictures or create a digital mockup, so it'll have to wait a bit.

Roaches in NY

Some wise guys from Zoo York, an urbanwear store geared towards skateboarders thought it'd be a good idea to spray paint their logos onto cockroaches and spread the said roaches throughout NY. Here's the result:

Illustrations

Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted to go to art college to seek a degree in illustration. He built a whole portfolio with nothing but charcoal, pastel, and pencil illustrations. That boy got accepted, but decided to seek a major in Graphic Design when he got there. The rest, as they say, is history. As my computer skills increased, my drawing skills went down the drain.

But, during my years in the advertising and design fields I still kept illustrating every now and then. By no means do I mean to say I'm any good, and it usually takes me a really long time to come up with these, but I still have fun. I wish I were better, and I wish I could push myself to illustrate more often.

I ran into this file while cleaning up my design blog. It's a mascot I created for a some products from a supermarket in Recife.

Movie Posters

Here's an interesting bit about movie posters. The director of The Mist gives his take on what bugs him about some posters that are being made out there. I couldn't agree more with what he says. The interview starts at 2:10 and goes til 4:44

Pat/Mike Collaboration

These were a series of spread ads for a campaign I had to do for tequila. the concept was to portray competing drinks as characters. Vodka was a russian guy, sake a sumo wrestler, etc. And to contrast their depressive characters with the hot, young, party-going tequila girl. The result was pretty good. I love the illustrations for this. Good job Pat!

Obs: Colors are a bit toned down by Photoshop's "save for web" feature. The tequila girl's page should have a more saturated tone, while the others should be as muted as they appear.

Process Book

Well, I promised to post a process, so here we go. Today was the 13 hours 01 minute design marathon at SCAD. We were asked to design from scratch a poster for a marathon during 13 hours and 01 minute. As I had imagined, that's an awful lot of time to design one single poster. At least to me. So the marathon started at 9h30 am, and by 2pm I was pretty much done. So the next 8 hours were long as heck, but I spent them tweaking and perfecting little details in the design. Now, without further ado, the process.

1) Research. Since a poster is a very visual and not necessarily conceptual piece, the thing that was going to nail this was the right image. So I started out by going to stock photo sites to look for images. After that, I looked at google for posters designed for other marathons. With th at done, I went to step 2.

2) Sketching. I've gotta admit, I didn't do nearly as many sketches as I should. I did like 5, and I decided to try it out on the computer. But don't do this kids, you want at least 10-15 ideas under your belt before going to the computer.

3)Looking for the elements. I knew I was going to have arrows, and silhouettes, so I went to my huge personal file library, as well as the internet, and searched for that which served me the best. With that done, I started cranking out digital roughs:

1) This one had the idea of the arrows and the runners. The arrows give the idea of direction to the piece, it felt like a good start, but too bare.



2) This is when the piece started to take shape. I got all the right elements in here. I wanted to have a mixture of an urban setting with a little bit of nature, hence, the birds and tree. The larger building is the Bank of America building, which is the most prominent building in the Atlanta skyline.



3) There was very little contrast in the previous version, it almost felt like a computer wallpaper. I increased the size of the elements to create more tension and contrast. The runners became the focal point of the piece and hierarchy was established.



4) Then I played around with the elements a bit just to make sure of what I want is where I want. Tried a few different things, looked at them...

5) And finally, there's the last change that just makes the piece work. The final piece:

Outside the Box

A new trend that arrived in the last 2-3 years is to create ads that will interact with the media they're in. We've seen it done brilliantly by Crispin, Porter & Bogusky on their Mini Cooper ads, where the Mini interacts with other print ads. It seems like the trend is starting to spread to TV Spots. In this one, for the upcoming movie Jumper, the trailer goes into an HP ad, and then returns to finish the trailer. It might seem like an interesting idea, but the end result looks goofy and forced. It also probably doesn't make too much sense in the concept of the movie here. So here's to hoping that future attempts of this kind are better thought through.

Censorship

I don't want to get political here, because that's not what this blog is about, but when I heard about this, I just had to post it. Regardless of the fact that the poster that I'm going to show you is from a movie that probably has a clear political message, I still don't like to see a good idea shot down by censorship.

Here's the skinny:

The movie "Taxi to the Dark Side" is a so called documentary about torture practices of the US Army while in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo. Obviously the topic is controversial, and in times of war, that is more than enough to make people sensitive to the topic.

The poster depicts two soldiers carrying a prisoner with a hood over his head, and their shadows make the stripes of the American flag. MPAA argues that their problem with the poster is the hood and the insinuation of abuse, which isn't acceptable since the poster would be, theoretically seen by children as well. 

I won't discuss the logic or validity of such argument, but it's a shame that such a beautiful design won't be seen by the general public.