On June 26th, I will be getting married to my wonderful fiancée, Gina. Since most of the people we are inviting to our wedding have no idea what I do for a living, I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to show them. I spent a few months running through color palettes and collecting examples of design styles that I liked. Some of my friends saw this as very odd since wedding decisions aren’t typically handled by the male in the relationship, but I being a designer, I had to be involved. When I first sat down to design our wedding invitations, I was pretty sure I knew exactly what I wanted. After weeks of frustration working up various options, I began to realize that I wasn’t happy with any direction I was headed.
Last weekend, I competed in a hockey tournament in Kansas City with my traveling Omaha team, the Swift. Although we weren’t exactly what you would call competitive, I’d like to think that we were the best dressed. I worked with Joe White from Sticks and Kicks to find the right jerseys and the set up the printing for my design. This was particularly exciting for me, since it was the first hockey logo I’ve designed that actually ended up printed on a jersey. The jerseys were sponsored by the good people at FSB Warner. …
The subscribers of our blog have probably noticed that a large percentage of my posts are hockey-related (see Good Life, Zombies, and Regulators). So this post on the new logo for my traveling hockey team won’t surprise you. The Omaha Swift will make their travel tournament debut at the 2010 Kansas City Showdown in a little over a month. Named after, you guessed it… Taylor Swift. I was faced with a very difficult task: create a logo that would please our Swift-crazy female captain that, at the same time, wouldn’t offend the 15 males on the team. …
A few months ago, a friend of mine from the local hockey league, John Byrnes, came to me with a dream: to start a novice adult hockey tournament in Omaha. What he had was an idea and a pretty detailed proposal for the local rink, Moylan IcePlex. What he didn’t have was a name or logo to make the tournament look legitimate. …
As promised, here is my MCHL hockey team’s new logo. This time around, we wanted a more intimidating name — and what’s scarier than a reanimated corpse? I’m not talking about the clumsy mindless wanderers of George A. Romero’s trilogy, or even the skilled dancers from Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Our team is modeled after the blood-thirsty speed freaks you find in modern zombie movies like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days Later, and House of the Dead. Now that’s intimidating! And don’t forget, zombies are relentless. …
I have an awkward relationship with extracurricular design work (defined here as the “friends and family” “design on the side” kind of extracurricular work). At times, it’s an opportunity to get some solid work out into the world without the usual bottlenecks. That’s pretty cool.
In the second installment of my college projects, I would like to showcase a fictitious coffee company that I created a few years back. This was my first stab at package design, and also one of my first logo projects. Growing up, I was always fascinated by the arrowheads that my grandfather’s collected. He grew up near Native American land and collected them as a young boy. He even taught me how to make my own arrowheads by carving away at pieces of flint. With Native American lineage on both sides of my family, I felt I would have the available resources to create a respectful identity, which was a concern of both my professor and myself. …
In the second installment of beer labels designed for friends, I would like to showcase Jim Brown Ale, an Imperial Brown Ale brewed by Brian Hoesing and Chris Vejnovich. …
This is the first of several projects from my college days that I would like to showcase. Even though this isn’t current work, it was only a few years ago and I think it is still relevant. I would also like to take this opportunity to recommend the University of Nebraska at Kearney to anyone who is looking at design programs. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the dedicated professors that teach there. …
I come from a fine art background, so there are days when I’m ready to stop staring at a computer screen and go back to getting my hands dirty. (This is one of the reasons that we always do preliminary sketching by hand at the start of every Oxide project, but that’s a whole different post.) Last spring, an opportunity arrived that I couldn’t pass up. …