I created a new website to display my cruddy man-child drawings. The drawing are mainly of animals, but also of other things. Sometime in 2008, I started making these little doodles in my sketchbooks in between the serious thumbnails for actual design projects. Here they are. For the whole wide internet to see.
It is becoming a habit of mine to do goofy logos for local amateur sports teams as a means of procrastinating from actual work. The Hockey Bunnies, Gold Diggers and War Kittens for example. In lieu of preparing for a major presentation that I need to give in Japan in two short weeks, I decided that my 3-year-old’s soccer team, The Bone Crushers, desperately needed a logo for their jerseys.
Local musician and friend Tim Scott asked me to quickly throw together a cover design for an EP called The Domino Hall Recordings. Only a short run of the albums were produced and sold mainly in Scotland. The design is a hand drawn version of the usual western-y tropes: slab-serif type, filigree and stars.
I was invited by the Brand Design Association of Korea to contribute a poster for their International Brand Design Forum and Exhibition. Projects like this, where there is little in the way of content or direction, are an opportunity to play with new design approaches. New to me, at least.
Each year, the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati hosts an event called Typography Day. It consists of workshops, an academic conference, and an invitation for poster submissions over a particular theme. This year’s theme is ‘Between the Lines.’
To announce the day when our students’ experience passports are due to be turned in and stamped, I quickly created a few posters to hang in the classrooms. The illustrations were leftover drawings from my earlier exploration when designing the passport books. Each drawing is a before and after, showing the transformation that will take place as you complete the passports.
UNT Quail works with researchers and landowners to create wildlife corridors for the northern bobwhite quail. By combining many fragmented plots of land, UNT Quail aims to provide increased habitat for quail to flourish. This logo design is a visual encapsulation of their mission.
There is a Michael Beirut quote that often I use when explaining to my design students the value of a liberal arts education. Or, more specifically, to explain the value of reading novels, trying exotic foods, and watching reruns of The New Yankee Workshop. “Not everything is design. But design is about everything.” To that end, my colleagues and I in the University of North Texas communication design program generated a list of life experiences that we feel budding young designers should have in addition to their in-class studies.
A logo for an under-7 girl’s soccer team named the War Kittens. My goal was to create something that was equal parts adorable and terrifying.
In Spring of 2012, I was asked to participate in the International Brand Design Forum and Exhibition in Gyeongju, South Korea. The theme was Place Culture and Tourism Brand Design (though I’m not sure what that means). I went to graduate school with one of the event’s organizers, so I was happy to help out despite having only a vague understanding of what I would be creating.
Poster for Tomorrow is an annual design event that attempts to draw attention and discussion to humanitarian causes. In 2011, the topic of focus was Right to Education, promoting greater access to schooling for people of all nationalities, income levels, and genders.
The Denton Domino Hall is a music venue located in—you guessed it—Denton, TX. Each month a pair of musicians, one local and one national, perform on the Domino Hall’s porch. It’s an intimate outdoor setting and always a good time. To help promote the concerts I created a new identity mark for and a series of four silk-screened posters.
The University of North Texas Communication Design program needed a call-for-entries poster to promote an alumni exhibition. As both a UNT professor and a UNT alumni, I was happy to have the opportunity to work on the project. The intent of the exhibition was to ‘reveal the best kept secret in design education,’ a theme that sparked both the title of the show and the poster imagery.
In February of 2011, I gave a poster presentation at the College Art Association annual conference in New York City entitled How the Sausage is Made: A Model of Communication Design Practice and Education. The result was 32 square feet of convoluted information graphics that included, among other things, a beef steer, butchering diagram, and sausage grinder—all integral components of the design process.
4tomorrow, an independent, non-profit organization based in Paris, is the annual host of an international project to promote active citizenship through the medium of design. I designed and illustrated a poster to raise awareness of breaches to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas,
I have the opportunity to work with certain student organizations as an academic adviser. One such organization, the UNT In-Line Hockey Club, was planning to sell t-shirts to their fan base, the Hockey Bunnies, to raise money for paying tournament fees. I volunteered to do the shirt designs and developed this bunny icon as the mascot.
The Goal Diggers are a women’s recreational league soccer team (of which my wife was a member) who allowed me to give them a free logo. Shovel + soccer ball = goal digger. Consider your mind blown.
Designed to promote my MFA graduation exhibition, this poster is a composite of details culled from my thesis document.
It all started in Hanover, PA, later known as the Snack Capitol of the World. An enterprising young couple named Bill and Sallie Utz began producing Utz Hanover Home Brand potato chips in their summer kitchen. Batch after batch, at 50 pounds of potatoes an hour, they laid the groundwork for what became the United States’ largest privately owned snack brand. What makes Utz potato chips so special, so unique? Nothing. They’re just potatoes, grease and salt—like every other potato chip out there. It’s not the chips that are special, it’s her: The Little Utz Girl. Those rosy cheeks could sell anything. This is a self-authored project about her life.
My thesis project, The Dismissive Actually, contains a series of self-initiated design projects exploring themes of visual wit, personal narrative and processes of idea generation. The projects describe my creative methodology through typography, hand lettering, photography, illustration, information graphics and creative writing.
