Spyder Byte Design: Live!

Spyder Byte Design launched their newly redone website! Woohoo! I had a lot of fun working with them on this, and I hope you enjoy playing with our site. There are still a few bits and pieces that will be added in the future, but for now... we're pretty happy.


 Since every post should have an image:

 That guy is one of my favorite bits on the site. Now go play around with it and take a look around!

Spyder Byte Design: Preview

So, its been awhile since I posted an update. A lot has been going on and keeping me busy! You may have noticed the new look around the blog: It isn't done yet, I've just.. well. Been distracted lately. Plus there are plans in the work for an entirely new site, it's just going to take a little bit of time to get it done. So bear with me!

The most notable thing keeping me busy has been helping Spyder Byte Design re-do their website. I have to say, this has been a blast. I enjoy working with web developers who say, "Huh, maybe we could do that. Let me try to work it out." instead of, "Nope."

The site itself isn't live yet, but I can throw a few little preview graphics up... and hopefully the site will be live soon!

 possible new logo

Super Drupal!

it must be nice to have extra arms for multi-tasking.

When the site actually goes live, I'll be sure to link back. It is bound to be highly entertaining! 

Tiger Lily

I've started my next painting; it is well past time. My goal of keeping to at least one painting a month has already fallen by the wayside, but I haven't given up completely.

Today I blocked in the basic shape and colors for the Tiger Lily. Yep, I'm still keeping with a theme here of flowers. I am hoping to end up with a good series of paintings by the end of next June- and so the hope is to keep them all similar in theme. I may branch out into "botany" in general as more months pass, though!

This particular flower that I'm painting was part of a bed of flowers outside my Grandparent's retirement village in Lafayette, Indiana. I took the picture the day of my Grandfather's funeral. He was a Master Gardener, and although he didn't take care of these flowers anymore... I know he still loved them.

Anyhow, onto the artwork. This is the super-rough blocking, not a lot of attention to detail yet. I like sharing the progress pics, I don't know if people like seeing them... but it is always fascinating to me to see the different stages of progression!

Ferrum Lupi

I was asked to redesign a site for a Mechwarrior Online/World of Tanks group. Except mostly Mechwarrior, less Tanks now. I'm actually pretty pleased with the outcome- this is a bit divergent from my normal style. But it works and I like it. I think that we'll be changing it again though to match more the style that the client was thinking of.

Hack Augusta

Saturday afternoon I received a call from a friend, "Hey, I don't know why I didn't tell you about this yesterday!" she started. This group called Hack Augusta was putting on an event called a Hackathon. Of course my first thought is hackers. I think that's most people's first response. However, it wasn't what you think. She went on to tell me about how it was a group of people getting together to launch a business in 24 hours from start to finish. Graphics, Web, Business, marketing- all avenues coming together to make it happen. It sounded interesting, and I figured I'd stop by for a few hours and just meet some people and see what was going on.

4:00pm- "I've gotta leave by 6." I said.

6:00pm- "Well, 6:30. I have some Freelance work for a client.."

7:00pm- "No, no. 7:30 is fine. I can help get the logo sorted out. No problem."

12:00am- "...... I meant 6am.. not pm..."

11:00am- "I miss my pillow."

Suffice to say, it was an amazing event. We had a fantastic space in Downtown Augusta donated by Enterprise Mill to use- gorgeous, gorgeous little building that I would kill for to use as my actual office and creative space. The ideas... oh the ideas. Anyway, it was fabulous. A wonderful little coffee shop, Buona Caffe heard about the event and immediately said, "They will need coffee!" and so they decided to sponsor us and came down around 11pm with 3 huge pots of "burning the midnight oil" coffee. And we were off running.

The goal was to create "Singles Email". A curated, weekly list of 20 or so singles in the area that would get e-mailed out to members. Clean, sophisticated, elegant and simple were the watchwords of the day. And I think the words, "Can we make it thinner?" were uttered a million times, which is still making me laugh. Thank god these people understood my sense of humor and didn't seem to mind my brand of sarcasm when I was making smart ass remarks in response to that question!

Anyway, we ended up following the simpler is better mantra. The website itself isn't quite finished yet, we didn't have a lot of front end developers and the back-end guys were busy making sure that we had a rock solid foundation. Which from the look and sound of it, we totally do. The amount of work they put in was amazing.

I think, perhaps, I need to start learning Drupal so that I can be more assistance in getting the website itself set-up next time.

ANYHOW. The website is up right now, but still needing some tweaks. This is ultimately what it will look like (or, close to this!)

The sample photo will be a picture slideshow that you can navigate to in order to see who is on the site that week. When you first go to the site, there will be a lightbox pop-up that requires you to register by entering your email, name and zipcode. If you've already registered, you can enter your email to "login" to the site and look around. Once we have profilees, you'll be able to view a little bit more information about them on the inside. The "Who" "What" and "Why" bits at the bottom will either rollover into short quips about the site, or will have flyouts with more information.

The bottom black bar is a twitter feed. Then you will also be able click on the "How we did it" bit at the top to find out about how the project was put together and Hack Augusta.

We also designed up an icon for use on Twitter/Facebook/etc. We wanted to keep it relatively simple for the eventual smaller sizes, and also tried to keep it in theme with the current social media trends in icon creation. I think we succeeded!

It was a fantastic collaborative effort with the design team of myself, Alaina, Eric and Joshua. And I suppose we should also mention the other Josh who had the vision and was very clear about what he was looking for! The 4 of us worked really well together and everyone brought something different to the table. I really enjoyed working with them and am looking forward to the next time.

I'm sure there was more that came out of the night, but I have to admit it is all sort of a blur right now. I stayed up for about 36 hours in a row and am glad to have done it. I met some great, local people who I hope to keep in touch with in the coming months.

Special thanks to Josh, Chris and Tony and everyone else for organizing this event! I see a bright future for the project and can't wait to see what happens next time. And next time I'll be prepared.

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Editing to add the video from News 12!

Scratch Gravel Logo

I was fortunate enough to get to work with an awesome lady and her husband to design a logo to brand their farm called Scratch Gravel. They were looking for something simple- an outline, silhouette. Mountains and Rivers. And, they loved the mountains in Colorado.

So off I set, pen in hand... :) I sketched out a few ideas and sent it off. This was actually  pretty painless progression from start to finish. I have all 3 of our rounds of revision in one image- starting with the long, wending river and ultimately cut down and rounded out for the final.

I am very happy with this one, and I think they are too!

Sometimes Simpler is better.

The Wayward Designer...

Well, the wayward designer is back and realizing that she really, really needs to put up a new post!

I've been busy lately. Working on a lot of things for work (check out our ads in Southern Living, AAA Journeys, AAA World, Southeastern Travel Society Newspaper Inserts, American Road and more.. plug over) and for freelance land.

For work- its been a series of new ads to make sure everything matches the new visitors guides. They look a little somethin' like this:

Then back in freelance land, I recently finished up a very fun and very quick project for Criminal Knits! We had a blast working together. Criminal Knits is based out of Ravelry, and they do a lot of mystery KAL projects. She needed a new logo to use on patterns and websites and books and such- so we set out to make it happen.

I LOVE HIM. I totally want a t-shirt, just saying.

I'm working with another lady right now on a logo for their farm; hoping to get roughs of that finished up today so we can start ironing out the details.

Work on the paintings still continues; most of it has been behind the scenes planning and plotting though. I've got to start on the next piece soon, perhaps this weekend...?