Category Archives: Graphic Design

Gen­eral Cat­e­gory for graphic design related items

Logo Design

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Posted by Dwayne on May 4, 2011 – 12:26 am
Filed under Graphic Design

I often get approached for logo design projects. My approach is to keep the logo design sim­ple.   A logo is in essence a sym­bol or icon to rep­re­sent the idea of an entity.

As the designer it is often a chal­lenge to cre­ate a sym­bol or icon that will por­tray a brand idea.    One of my most recent projects  involves the use of a dia­mond.   At first I wasn’t so sure that a dia­mond would make sense for the com­pa­nies ideals and mis­sion.   But after con­sid­er­a­tion and research it became appar­ent that the dia­mond did con­vey the ideas that the com­pany was after.    The chal­lenge then became to explore the way the dia­mond could be styl­ized and applied with a com­pli­men­tary  font choice.   I came to a num­ber of good pos­si­ble choices.

Keep­ing it sim­ple usu­ally means that the design looks good in black, so it is often Flat.

I like to keep it sim­ple for sev­eral good rea­sons.   First of all a logo will often have a num­ber of prac­ti­cal uses.   Com­pa­nies or brands will have a mul­ti­tude of media that they can apply their logos onto includ­ing:   Printed and dig­i­tal ban­ners,  cloth­ing,  sig­nage,  sta­tion­ary, fold­ers, stick­ers.  the list is end­less.   A sim­ple logo can be trans­lated onto more media effi­ciently.   If it already works as a one color con­cept, then it “should” trans­late eas­ily to other medi­ums effe­tively.  In con­trast a busy logo design runs the pos­si­bil­ity of being hard to adapt to a vari­ety of media.  I am sure it is pos­si­ble to use a com­plex logo, but it may be harder to imple­ment, pos­si­bly much more dif­fi­cult.  Time is valu­able for both the designer and the client.

Your logo project deserves the best pos­si­ble solu­tion.   Think about what your orga­ni­za­tion does and con­sider how it might trans­late visu­ally.   Any con­cepts you may come up with can be explored to some degree.

Cheers





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Contract Graphic Design Houston

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Posted by Dwayne on December 13, 2010 – 12:57 am
Filed under Graphic Design, Web Design

I pro­vide con­tract graphic design in Hous­ton area and beyond (no Prob­lem)   My lat­est work has involved cre­at­ing an entire iden­tity sys­tem.  This includes logo explo­ration and revi­sion,  Color research and scheme cre­ation.  With these in place I am now mov­ing on to the main iden­tity theme.   This includes cre­at­ing ideas that flow from the logo and color choices.    More to come soon.

Mac vs PC Hardware for graphic and web design

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Posted by Dwayne on July 26, 2010 – 3:40 am
Filed under Graphic Design, Hardware, Web Design

I was  just answer­ing a post  for a fel­low about what type of hard­ware he might be pur­chas­ing in the near future.    I feel I have a very  good tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive on the sub­ject since I have used both plat­forms as a power user  and  still uti­lize both.

The Quick Answer

To get to the answer quickly - I have to go with MAC or OSX.    I often “get ” to do tech sup­port for my fam­ily mem­bers and friends on both plat­forms.  The issues I get from a PC hap­pen more often and are more trou­ble­some.    Most issues  on a PC are VIRUS and adware related.     I dont even run any virus apps on OSX. Not that they dont exist , there are just fewer around I guess.

Mac vs PC Hard­ware for graphic and web design

Well to tell you the truth when the machines are work­ing well, it really doesn’t mat­ter so much tech­ni­cally speak­ing.    The Appli­ca­tions used for graphic design and web design are pretty much stan­dard these days.    You have Cre­ative Suites by Adobe.  And well, Quark.    The files are pretty much swap­pable between platforms(not sure about Quark).  I can open an Adobe CS3 Illus­tra­tor file on a Mac and On a PC suited the same.   An Issue might arise when it comes to using fonts how­ever.   To get around that I try to use OPEN TYPE when­ever pos­si­ble since OT fonts work on both plat­forms.     Aside from tech­ni­cal issues.  I think MACs are just much more con­sis­tent on qual­ity of their prod­ucts.   My Power­book just feel SOLID on a tac­tile level.   The OSX soft­ware by the way is also almost always rock solid.     Even my old G4 power­book (used pro­fes­sion­ally 4.5 years) always ran smoothly.

Hard­ware — Other considerations

The hard­ware these days for WINDOWS and OSX are very sim­i­lar. In fact ‚if you need to, you can run a DUAL boot sys­tem on an Intel MAC and choose to run win­dows on one sec­tion of your drive and the OSX on the other. This is a real issue as there is much more soft­ware avail­able for the PC (all viruses, just kid­ding). You may also have some old apps you still need to use.   Also as in my case I have an older piece of hard­ware , a Kon­ica Minolta Laser printer that really only has soft­ware for Win­dows XP.   Since I have my OLD Dell Insp­iron 9200 lay­ing around I use that any print­ing pur­poses.  I didnt bother with the dual boot setup on my work machine.

You have to look at specs closely when shop­ping.   Proces­sors, RAM, video graph­ics abil­ity all vary.    I found an amaz­ing deal on the last gen­er­a­tion Power­book at Micro­cen­ter about a year and a half ago.   It was right when they came out with the new uni­body. It had a CORE 2 DUO proces­sor at 2.5 GHZ and 4 GB of RAM.    Many of the new proces­sors are close to that or just a bit faster on clock speed. But these days its about mul­ti­ple cores.   BTW the Mac­Book Pro is still run­ning very well and sta­ble.   I often run it with­out reboot­ing for  30+ days

OSX vs Windows

Win­dows

Ok to be fair my Dell has XP on it.  After installing a bunch of apps on it for some rea­son it gets way bogged down.     Pretty much every time.  Now,  I just dont install all that much on it.      How­ever I have done sev­eral help calls for friends and fam­ily  using Vista.  Not much bet­ter really than XP in my expe­ri­ence.    Ad ware prob­lems,  viruses, HiJack­ing  pro­grams.  Just painful.    Time con­sum­ing.  It used to be fun to tackle the issues , now its just old.  Id rather be get­ting creative.

OSX

The soft­ware just works con­sis­tently and sta­ble.  At this time I really cant think of any big issues on OSX that I have had in 7 years.   I may have had to cold boot a cfew times but thats it.     I am run­ning power apps like Adobe CS3 — Inde­sign, Illus­tra­tor, Flash, Dreamweaver, Logic Pro, Rea­son, Gui­tar Rig, Coda,  MAMP, Blender, Skype, GIMP,  AFter Effects, Suit­case Fusion, Omni Graf­fle,  Office for MAC and more.  No prob­lems.   Just have to keep an eye on RAM when I have  10 or so apps open.


Price

This might be a huge fac­tor for many.  Self included.  I recently steered a cou­ple of folks over to a new PC after their OLD PC recently died.  It was most likely a moth­er­board or hard-drive fail­ure.   There was no rea­son to spend $100 + dol­lar to pol­ish that old turd.  So I told em’ to go new (er)  They wanted some­thing under $350.  You cant get a Mac­Book Pro for that.  Well, maybe off of craigslist.com.  Be CAREFUL over there.  Deal Local.    Any­how they got a sin­gle core lap­top for about $300 , it was a refur­bished, but its  runs good from what they tell me.   They were run­ning a circa 2000 com­puter before,  so this one will blow it away no mat­ter what.      My guess is though that I will be get­ting some calls in the not to far way future  about virus and adware issues.  Hope­fully not though.     Mac­book Pros run more along the lines of  $1,600 +.  Go to apple.com to check’em out.    A Mac Mini  is run­ning  for about $699 new …


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