Here’s a quick ‘landing page’ styled site I did for musicpets.com, a casual Facebook game based around feeding and playing music for your own cute little pet. The background art, fonts and assets were taken from the game itself, and site content uses Facebook’s developer’s tools for ‘Find Us’, ‘Like’ buttons and ‘Recommendations’. Amazingly cute pets concepted and 3d modeled by the freakishly talented Damon Iannuzzelli.  Play the game here.

Hey guys – I’ve got another website up , a WordPress-based portfolio site for the sickeningly talented sculptor/movie effects artist Scott Velenovsky.  Scott contracted me to design an appropriately horrific framework to house his creatures, art and for pitching his impressive abilities to potential clients.

After a look through his work, I knew I’d have to step up the gore, splatter and horror aspect a bit… not my usual style, but still, fusing two mutated aquatic old men into a wall of skin with a dripping blood logo was fun.

You can view the rest of the sculpey madness and abominations at www.svcreations.com.

There’s a longer-winded piece up on blog.conduitlabs.com about the direction and iteration through these logo designs for loudcrowd.com as we struggled to find a worth concept.  I won’t repeat all that here.  The short version is that we wandered around through a lot of concepts dealing with music, explosions, fun, volume, social connections, groups, games etc, while still trying to hang on to ‘playfulness’, and eventually ended up with ‘shared music experience’ as the core concept, with kids sharing that music to hopefully also hint at ‘play’.  The final logo has a sweet ‘The Shining’ vibe as well.

Here’s a few of the brainstorming concepts:

The final logo, with a little of my siamese-twin + The Shining vibe intact:

Here’s another bit of concept art that I’ll post rather than letting it sit on my computer gathering dust.  It was one in a long series of logo concepts (I think somewhere around the 50th or so) for Loudcrowd.com, which is currently getting a final round of polish before we let people start banging on still-quite-rough alpha.  The ideas the logo needed to express were ‘play, social activities/games, and possibly music’.

I’ll also post the final selected logo once it’s up on the landing page, and maybe a few sheets of concepts.

I designed a cd cover for Troy’s new single ‘Never Walk Away’ which is already out via mp3 download on ITunes, Amazon and a few other sites.  Dead media cd format coming soon. 

The cover design is somewhat of a break from the website’s aesthetic, features some bold colors and knockout effects based off a rockin’ out photo, and fits a little better with the upbeat, almost inspirational tone of the new single.  As always, Troy’s got a legion of loyal fans backing him up over on his site:  www.troymaccubin.com and Troy’s Blog.

I did a two-page interview in Advanced Photoshop magazine (issue 33) that broadly covers the use of Photoshop and Flash in design and illustration work, a few pros and cons of the software (heavy on the pros, it’s a bit of an Adobe promo-piece). I was actually a rather hard article to put together – Adobe is ubiquitous in the design space now, they do it all. The Creative Suite is comprised of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Acrobat… you can’t really design these days without this software – consequently, it’s hard to make comparisons when there isn’t anything to contrast it to.

A few of my illustrations are featured, the H-Lounge UI layout, and H-Lounge avatars are shown off in a nice light. It’s crazy to see them stacked like so. A few other artists in that graphic/vector style space are also featured.

Thanks again to Adam Smith for the writeup. (Click image for full-size version)

I just finished up this logo and silkscreened poster for Gabriel Lopez – a San Francisco based photographer and designer. He’s doing a 10-year featurette on one completely awesome labrador who’s getting on in years. Silkscreening is a great way to reproduce prints very quickly and cheaply… and the imperfections add to the style.

The logo’s been shipped off in .eps format – expect to be able to buy your own Miles coffe cups from CafePress soon.

I’ve been working with Harmony for about two years now – here’s the run-down for those of you not in the music software/social community space.

Hyperscore is music-authoring software originally created in the MIT Media Lab. You create music by drawing lines and adding in a Bach-style harmonization. Hyperscore won a 50k grant from MIT for new businesses, and Harmony Line was established to leverage the software into a business.

A bit of venture capital and key hires later (including myself), Harmony Line’s first project was H-Lounge.com – a website launched off of this Hyperscore, creating a music community for Hyperscore users to show off their music, rate, chat, hold contests and collect and upgrade rockstar-styled avatars.

You could also send your Hypscore music as ringtones to phones for $2, and keep 50% of the fee, and a little bit later mp3 support was added, so that any music artist using any software could upload music (essentially putting H-Lounge into competitive ‘sell your music’ space – PureVolume, IndieTunes, CDBaby).

This was a big shift in my opinion. The original users of the site had only been using Hyperscore and midi-format music and established their own rules and community (and worked hard to upgrade their avatars and gain points). Allowing anyone to upload mp3s created in Fruity Loops or Garage Band expanded the potential user base to anyone- not just Hyperscore users, but ended up pushing aside the original community.

Another side project I worked on was hyperscore.com – which spun off a educational-themed Hyperscore as a tool for teachers. It ended up with a different visual style along with another social community, tools and lesson plans for teachers, and evolution-styled avatars.

I illustrated a two-page spread of a grungy, run-down theater for Advanced Photoshop Magazine this month (issue 26). Its got a little popcorn, a screaming estatic zombie-loving patron, a little spilled soda, some grime.

I have no idea why, but little kernels of popcorn are pretty fun to draw and shade. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the most satisfying things I’ve drawn. Very relaxing. You can view the full illustration here. Thanks to AP and Emma Cake for the spot (awesome editor to work with by the way. She left me a lot of room to play around with the concept.)

I’ve finally pushed Troy’s site live. I pulled together a lot of difference 3d textures I used to get the right color and feel he was looking for. Lots of wood, stone and concrete went into the finally comp, along with a bit of grunge, graffitt and paint drips. I created a hand-drawn font for the navigation, and did a bit of custom grunging work on his photographs for the backgrounds (awesome photo work, half the work is already done with good material to work with).
The guestbook has since gone crazy – this guy has a legion of fans from all over the world. Too bad designers don’t attract fans… I could use some minions.