Progress is finally moving forward on my AWA project. Had a couple of meetings with the Event Coordinator, but winter weather kept alot of people out of school and the office. My first task is creating a logo for their upcoming Yappy Hour campaign. They’d like to get people to come to shelter with their dogs to drink wine and socialize. I submitted my first drafts to the Event Coordinator for review last week, and after the weather delays got some feedback. Will be working on adjustments based on her feedback. Here is the first draft.yappyhour
It gives me great pride to chose the AWA of South Jersey as the focus of my senior project. They are a no-kill, non-profit shelter that will care for an animal as long as it takes until they can get them adopted. As a recent example, there was a cat there named Black Magic Woman that had extreme dietary issues, and could only eat expensive food. They were caring for this cat since back before I adopted mine last year. She was finally recently found a new home.
As of this post, I have had 2 meetings with the Event coordinator Maria of the AWA. She has a lot of work that needs to be done, such as a logo design for an event, ads for facebook, and even material for their big annual Paws&Feet event. I will have my work cut out for me, but it will be work I can be proud of as a graphic designer, because I know it will be going to a good cause, and one that I firmly believe in. I really hope what I can design for them will help get more donors in to give, and more animals adopted to good loving homes.
The first logo of the series.
Another of the four logos in the series.
Above the fold of their site, showing banner in use.
A header designed for their website.
The owner of capemayresort.com hired me on freelance to develope a series of logos and web banners for use in his various sites. I designed four logos that meshed as a collection, under the guidance of the owner. I wanted to feature the four watersports ventures that he offers online ticketing for: jetski rental, jet-boat excursions, parasailing, and whale watching.
This project also includes several headers and other banner ads or side-bar ads for use on client’s website. The site is live now with the various logos and banners in use.
Poster for the CD campaign.
Cover of the CD booklet.
The case before being assembled.
Perhaps my first exposure to graphic design, before I even knew what it was, came from looking at the cd cases, posters and inserts from the bands I grew up listening to. When I started this career path, this was something that I always wanted to be doing, creating the packaging for a band I love, and combining my art and ideas with their own. This cd campaign is my answer to that love and inspiration.
This project grew out of an earlier project, a constructivism-based poster. From that poster I developed a campaign that would include a case for the cd, the cd itself and cd booklet. Rather than creating just a plain jewel case design, I wanted to create a bi-fold case with two pockets, one for the disc and one for the poster and booklet.
Front page, above the fold.
A sample content page.
As an avid gamer, I play an online multiplayer game know as an MMO (massively multiplayer online) game. These games are very popular. Players that work together and do things as a group form guilds. Guilds will often use website to organize their play sessions, communicate outside the game, and present game news and info.
I designed my personal website to be the guild website for the guild that I am the leader of. The site was designed to be a resource for my fellow players. Our guild name is a spoof of the Baltimore Ravens football team, as such I made some slight edits to their logo using the Star Wars font.
Poster that was the origin of this campagin.
Promotional Hoodie.
DVD sleeve insert.
This campaign spawned out of my love for a poster I designed for Concept Developement class. We were challenged to create movie posters without featuring any images from the movie or of the actors whatsoever. We had to create an illustrator that was minimalistic, but immediately recognizable as from the source material.
The iconic “thermal bandages” outfit and orange and red hair of the female lead in the Fifth Element came to my mind almost instantly. This campaign grew out of a love for the end result of that poster. I envisioned this as a 15th anniversary collector’s edition that would come with the dvd, hoodie sweatshirt, and poster.
Main welcome sign.
Size and height comparison.
Exhibit Sign.
QR codes allow access to maps and additional info on your mobile device.
Rittenhouse Square currently has at most a very basic wayfinding set up. Exhibits do not have signs, but mainly plaques. As such, there was an opportunity to provide the public with information about things in the park that is not necessarily readily available.
Since many of the current elements of signs and plaques in the park are quite old, I wanted to aim for a more modern feel to a wayfinding system. The park gets visited by many families, children, or couples looking to escape the city and get a touch of the outdoors. I designed the wayfinding to be more fun and inviting in appearance than a traditional matter-of-fact signage. I drew inspiration from what many museums and zoos are doing to make their exhibits more appealing to people of all ages.
An additional concept I added to the wayfinding was a QR code system that would allow mobile phone users to pinpoint their location in the park & have an online interface with additional information about the exhibits or events in the park.
The logo page of the graphic standards manual.
The wordmark page of the graphic standards manual.
The color guide page of the graphic standards manual.
Burlington Coat Factory needs an identity update bad. First, they sell way more than coats (men’s clothing, women’s clothing, children’s clothing, furniture, etc.) but most people I have asked had no idea. Secondly, their current logo really seems to pigeonhole them into only advertising toward women.
The first part of my redesign was to drop the “coat factory” from the name. It’s limiting and unnecessary. Second, was to come up with a new design for logo. I drew inspiration of the fact that almost all the major clothing retailers utilize an animal symbol as part of their branding. So keeping that in mind, and drawing from the Native American history of the location the company took it’s namesake from, I decided on a feather. The feather relates back to coats and clothing, but also much more freeing than the heart logo they use now.
I decided on a combination of blue, green, and gray colors for the color pallet for the new corporate identity to be more gender neutral as well. All logos and wordmarks were carefully detailed to show the exact clear zones, sizes, and uses.
Mock up of how the Infographic would be used on a news site.
Full Infographic.
Infographics are another category of graphic design that is becoming increasingly popular. News and information are available on demand, and and such news sites need ways to convey large amounts of information to the reader without dumping a collection of unwieldy numbers on them. The infographic is the solution to this problem, providing an easy to understand, visual representation of the information you are trying to convey.
This project was inspired by the bombardment of articles related to gun control you’ll find on any news site lately. While there is certainly a great tragedy whenever a shooting occurs, I feel that the news agencies and politicians like to latch on to such occurrences in an attempt to beat people into submitting to their way of thinking about such issues.
The amount of people that get killed by gun incidents or shootings is a very sexier topic for the news to cover than the amount killed by smoking or alcohol. In a way, this is probably my first political piece. Inspired by my own decisions to quit smoking by switching to electric cigarettes, and by the number of people I have recently seen been taken by cancer, I decided to do this infographic. It was no small task, as tracking down the numbers and distilling them into a form that could be easily comparable was daunting.
An example of some of the sketches I made for my icons.
Using an existing CCG card, a mock-up of how the icons might be used, representing that this card is a Jedi card.
The icon for an Indigenous Species.
The icon for a Bounty Hunter.
The Icon for a Jedi.
Using an existing CCG card, a mock up of how the icons might be used, representing that this card is a Bounty Hunter card.
Something that is in high demand right now for any graphic designer is the creation of icons. Icons are found just about everywhere these days. You’ll find them on maps, street signs, web pages, phone apps, books, and even games (both tabletop and digital).
When I set about creation a collection of icons, it was an easy fit to pick Star Wars. Not only do I love it, but there is a constant flow of books & games coming out under the Star Wars brand. One such type of game would be a CCG, or Collectible Card Game. The collection of icons I made would be tailor-fit to be used on the cards for such a game.
What you see here is only a small sample of the entire collection. The collection was broken into categories that could be used for the game: Archetypes, Factions, Alignment, Vehicles, Weaponry, and Armor. Using per-existing CCG cards, I have mocked up how the icons would be used.
Dameon Garamond 