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.