Atl. 27.
This blog post may be incoherent. I have not slept in a very, very long time now.
So, Tuesday morning I rode with Jeff out to the burbs to hang out at the Catalyst offices for the day. It was a pretty sweet set-up. For such a huge conference, you’d think it’d be a lot more business-y, but it was just a really big, creative-feeling space with a bunch of goofy people hanging around. The Catalyst interns (who were all really cool) were apparently having Spirit Week that week, and were dressing up as something different every day. Tuesday was Captain Planet day, apparently. It was pretty funny, to say the least. So I got to have lunch in Brad Lomenick’s office with him and Jeff, and listened to some of the brand new music submitted for play at Catalyst this year (good stuff!). The rest of the day I hung out in the lounge working on designs for the Flash invitation (just when you though it was finished… haha). That evening, we headed back to East ATL. I was going to go back to the park to hang out with the homeless but we got back too late. Dee said next week I could come and she was planning on staying for a long time to play cards and just chill with them, so I’m looking forward to that. Andre cooked enchiladas and I learned her amazing guacamole recipe. And then I pulled an all-nighter finishing the Flash designs. Jeff had to leave to meet with HOPE International in Pennsylvania this morning, and I actually saw him off, haha. Now I’m at MetroMerge for the day, still haven’t slept, but have destroyed the Flash invitation, so I’m at least on top of everything now. Now I can start working on logo designs for “Green My Hood” and some t-shirt designs for this year’s Catalyst conference.
Design: Kinda funny how concepts can go in cycles. So the original concept of the Flash design was to follow the blog announcement’s image: a hand-drawn, vector treatment of an image, with white fills, black strokes, and a bright yellow backdrop. None of that Live Trace mess; pain-stakingly long, manual tracing - the real deal. So, I was going to manually trace a recognizable scene from each of the cities that we’re visiting on the tour to really personalize the Flash document (it’s not just a general mail-out; it has your city’s skyline, or some landmark from your town!). Jeff wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea at first, for some reason. He liked how it looked, but said it would take too much time and wouldn’t have the right impact. Then, all of a sudden, on the ride to Catalyst he said he had been thinking about it and thought it’d be the perfect treatment for the invitation. The problem is, a couple of weeks ago, it was no big deal. But it’s crunch time now, and I had to make 7 more hand-drawn images for the other cities (and it really takes forever). Jeff told me Tuesday night that he wanted them all done by 5:00PM Wednesday. Well, I took that as a challenge, of course, because he was pushing me on whether or not I could meet a deadline. So I stayed up all night and did them all. And they look incredible, if I do say so myself. I actually retouched some of the originals so that they could keep up with the newest ones. I am really, really comfortable with Illustrator now; I’m using it for the majority of my projects lately, something I NEVER thought would happen. And I’ve gotten pretty good at hand drawing vectors, which is something I’ve always wanted to be better at (now if only I had a tablet). So I merged the latest Flash concept (having a gift card-shaped text box “swipe” across the screen, containing all of the relevant information to compel someone to come to the event) with the original idea, and it looks great. I sent the Atlanta invitation to the Flash programmer last night. So, I’m learning more about Illustrator and vector graphics, about planning images that are good for animated/dynamic Web content, and images that will personally appeal to a target audience. Good design lessons lately.
