It’s amazing how much time I don’t have here. There’s so much I want to do but never have time to. Lately though, I’ve been finding some time to do a lot of the things that were just a pipe dream before, and a lot of them have actually been finished!

I decided it’s been far too long since I posted up work, so here goes: all my work for the past month or two as well as descriptions.

For starters, the debut theme for mookilove, a blog I set up for my friend. Running on Wordpress, as usual, however this theme is special in a sad kind of way. It is officially my exit from Wordpress theme development as I announced in a previous post. Although none of my themes were published publicly, designdraft v2 got some internet mention for it’s use of an AJAX shelf. I’m not fretting though, I’m building some of my own comprehensive internet applications (and RIAs) as well as working on platformless websites from now on, so I’ll probably port these themes over as well as make a lot more for some of my ideas.

>>visit mookilove

This one is a dream realized. For years I’ve wanted to make my own sketchbook and after a month of pretty hard work, I have something that no one else in the world has. Made from chipboard wrapped in synthetic leather, this sketchbook is filled with 50 or so sheets of Bristol Plate: a 1in. thickness. It’s all bound together by 3-1 in. length brass post screws bought from Talas Bookbinding in New York City. The use of post screws allows for reusability of the covers. Furthermore, I labeled it using a vinyl white Helvetica letter set, as it’s my fifth sketchbook since I arrived at Carnegie-Mellon. I’m not too sure about this aesthetic decision but at least it’s easily removable. I might stick some cougar paper in there next before I make my full leather round spine sketchbook this summer.

They said I wouldn’t do it. They said I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t help but prove them wrong. I’m a nice guy though: I don’t hold grudges. Now they won’t go back to the old lightbox in studio unless they have to. I made a pretty comprehensive set of rules for it, too, the most important of which being, “I can kick you off whenever I want.” Family bonding is great, I couldn’t have made this without the help from good ol’ dad, so thanks. I’m looking forward to learning how to use all the wood tools in our basement this summer and making more cool stuff.

This is our most recently completed project in Design Drawing here at Carnegie-Mellon. The assignment was to take snapshots of a hand interacting with some sort of object and communicate the action through a series of drawings. Each drawing was 5″x5″ and was mounted on white illustration board.

The drawings were to go through a six-frame narrative translating them from a representative and communicative rendition to an iconic representation of the action. I’m largely unsatisfied with the last frame, but I’m pretty satisfied with the first five, especially the first four and my marker rendering.

Lastly, we were to take one frame, most likely the one that communicated the action the most effectively in our narrative, and “design” it at 200% size of the original. This meant to pay extreme attention to your lineweight and visual elements to make sure that everything served a purpose and contributed to the composition and it’s communicative value. This was my final result, sizing out at 10.5″x10.5″ before mount, and 14″ x 14″ after being mounted on white illustration board.

This is something from my sketchbook, depicting Krue from Naku (I haven’t forgotten about it), and a version of the image gone through Illustrator CS3’s Live Trace tool. The image to the left is the original work touched up a bit in Photoshop (Contrast, Brightness, etc). It came from a camera shot since I was too lazy to go to the scanner and get it digitized proper. The second image is the touched up version gone through Illustrator’s Live Trace tool. I really didn’t want to make much of it except see what Live Trace could do, and I ended up spending way too much time fixing it up so that the results would end up nice. I might color it, I might manually digitize it before I do so, but I do love the idea of making some new posters this summer. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll try to update again soon, be it a proper entry or another recent works related one.

Filed under: Design, Graphic Design, Illustration, Industrial Design, Web Design, Work by Justin