Student Documentary Visual Identity

 

Date: November 2023

Inspiration:

    My friend asked me to come up with a poster and the graphic direction for the elements in their documentary Long Live The Kings, a mini documentary about 3 drag kings in Montreal. The package would include a poster, title card, nameplates and credits.

    After watching the documentary and seeing their drag personalities, as well as how they perform I wanted to go for a punk X medieval look to the visual identity.

     I leaned heavily into the punk look for the poster, combining the title card black script font with helvetica and courier as the body text:

    I chose a classic black script font for the main title and paired it with a modern mono-spaced black script font for the credits and nameplates:

Title Card

Rolling Credits

How I did it:

    I used photoshop to collage the poster together. Adding textues and elements to make it look like it was a handmade collage.

What I'm Proud of:

    I love how the poster came out and once it was printed it looked even better. Printing it in just black and white on 20lb paper gave it an extra level of texture to it.

    Also movie title screens are a huge inspiration to me so it was fun getting involved in a project where I was given the reigns to execute an idea like this.

To Improve Upon: 

  As much as I like how it came out, I really don't like copying older looks or styles of things for the aesthetic alone, in this case the punk look. I could argue that it fit the narrative of the doc as the kings are quite punk but it felt weird to me. Albeit, I only had a weekend to get all of this together and seeing as I wasn't getting paid I wasn't going to lose sleep over the fact that I didn't create a more complex visual identity. Going forward if I were to be involved in a project where I pulled elements from punk photocopied posters and graphics, I would want to do it all physically. When I can work like that I feel good about borrowing an aesthetic, it feels more genuine to me as opposed to just slapping effects on something in photoshop and calling it a day.

OurSquamish Tote Design

 

Date: 2023

Inspiration:

    Volunteer gig for OurSquamish to design a tote bag design for their summer bike valet volunteers. I pulled the bike characters and patterns from an old type book on the Internet Archive.

How I did it:

    I recreated the the patterns and image traced the bike figures in Illustrator.

What I'm Proud of:

    It was one of my first projects playing around with ornamentation, something I was wanting to explore at the time.

To Improve Upon: 

    I really don't like that I used image trace on the bicycle figure but it was a free job I was doing, so I wasn't going to spend a lot of time on it.

For All Posts in Dec 2022:

I have placed all of my previous work prior to 2023 as 'published' in December of 2022 for ease of managing the timeline of my archive. All posts in 2023 and further will be chronological.

Sex Pill Album

Date: 2020

Inspiration:

    A personal project.

    I saw the main photo in the background on reddit in 2020. It was a photo from Gaziantep, an explosion in an intensive care unit for Covid19 took the lives of 9 people. There was something chilling about it and it reminded me of the photo of the elephants foot in Chernobyl.

How I did it:

    I used Photoshop for the image treatment and to add the hand drawn characters onto the cover as well. Illustrator for the sticker of the album and the graphic in the bottom left corner. I used a free mockup online to make it look beat up and used.

What I'm Proud of:

    I really like the relationship between the label text, hand drawn characters and the image.

To Improve Upon: 

    Next time I would like to make my own mockup for sure, also reference less for the label, I'm pretty sure I ripped something off of Pinterest for that.

Dog Pile Album Art

 

Date: 2022

Inspiration:

     My friend Sunny (who's in the band) commissioned me for this self titled EP cover for their band Dog Pile, a prairie punk ban. They specifically asked for the a varsity font and a fight cloud like the ones in older cartoons so the inspiration was pretty restricted, yet I maintained my own taste for the project.

How I did it:

    I used adobe illustrator for the entire graphic. I initially drew the fight cloud by hand before going over it again in illustrator.

What I'm Proud of:

    Honestly I'm not a big fan of 'tracing' a drawing in illustrator but I'm quite happy with how it came out, especially the halftones in the shadows of the clouds. It was nice to get out of my comfort zone.

To Improve Upon: 

    Unfortunately the art never ended up being used because it was too 'violent'? Band drama on their end I think but next time I would have like to give it more of a punk feel, I think using exclusively illustrator took away from the DIY look that so many punk bands go for. Hell, maybe the clean illustrator look was to combat the already existing aesthetic, who knows.

Antipasto Handmade Typeface

 

Date: 2020

Inspiration:

    The only project on here from my time in design school, our assignment was to design a typeface with a physical object or group of them. Not so much stencilling the letter forms with something like a bunch of small rocks, but manipulating our chosen object(s) to work with the letter forms, letting them shape how the typeface comes to be.

    I was talking with a close friend at the time about not knowing what I would do for mine and he jokingly said 'use macaroni like you're in kindergarten' and the idea to use pasta immediately stuck. So many variations at types to choose from that I knew I was going to have a lot of fun with it.

How I did it:

    I printed out my initial letter forms onto paper so that I would maintain a consistent size as I sculpted them. I laid them out on a light table which is what creates the slight glow effect they have, it also made it much easier to mask them out in Photo shop. I ended up buying a lot of pasta for this assignment and it all was eaten over the coming years with friends and family.

What I'm Proud of:

    How consistent the letter forms are, they all go together so well. I really liked using the linguini for the straight edges and the inverse side of the macaroni to shape the curved edges. This project really brought forward my enjoyment of physical to digital in my graphic design practice.

To Improve Upon: 

     I do find some of the characters are weaker than others, they don't fit in perfectly with the entire typeface, letters like 'R' and 'U'. I wish I was able to find more types of pasta to use, even though I had a lot of choice already, it didn't feel like enough. Going forward it was important to me to make sure all elements harmonize, even if it means going back and doing the work over again.

Single Cover

 

Date: 2022

Inspiration:

    A single cover for Luis Saint Rose

    I was provided two images to chose from, as well as the typeface he wanted to use. I listened for the song for visual inspiration. Themes of loneliness, the blurring of time, and being lost in a city came through strong to me.

How I did it:

    I compiled everything in photoshop and did a bleeding/warped text effect for the name of the song.

What I'm Proud of:

    I was proud to get a job from a friend for an EP cover, it's also up on Spotify, it's cool to see my work out in the real world.

To Improve Upon: 

    Honestly, I'm not using this as an excuse, but I was extremely depressed when I received this job. I know my heart wasn't in it, during that time, for any of the graphic work I did, I just couldn't generate ideas. I felt so stuck and scared that I had lost what I once loved. I would change it all. So if I were to do it again, I would do a custom typeface for the title.