I recently added the following three space designs to my nd.edu portfolio set on Flickr. “Spaces” is our in-house term to describe the graphic elements that spin around in the Flash carousel on ND.edu.

The spaces are like little mini-projects that arrive on my desk weekly. They don’t usually have a lot of direction and as such, get left up to me and my colleague Jim to design however we think is best. All of these graphics are produced in Photoshop, and my favorites get collected in the set linked above. These are the newest additions.

Ash Wednesday

About 150 times a week I spend a few moments thanking whatever deity appears to be listening for blessing me with Matt Cashore (who’s a fan of ATCO. Hey Matt!). His pictures are so well done that most of the time, turning them into a good design is a simple matter of “not screwing it up.” This space is a perfect example.

He actually shot the image with that space on the right hand side so that I’d have room to put text in, but it became clear to me pretty early in the design process that the text was completely extraneous. That little bowl of ashes and the regal purple of the cloth conveyed the whole message. I even made an attempt to remove the words “Ash Wednesday” from the design entirely. I thought the image and “Pray with Us” was all that was necessary. I was over-ruled.

DeBartolo Performing Arts Center

I don’t have a tremendous amount to say about this space except that I think, compositionally, it’s one of my all-time favorites and also Univers Extra Thing (or whatever face of Univers “Research” is set in) acts as if it was cut specifically for display on ND.edu. It always looks good and the only issue I run into when using it is to fight against over using it.

Fifth Annual Eucharistic Procession Space

I had some trouble with this one. Of the five or six images I had to work with, this one was the easily the most dynamic. I really liked the perspective that the priests formed as they trailed off to the left, and the dominant priest in the foreground swinging the incense was a really neat element. In order to get all of that into the center of the frame I had to find a way to reduce some of the distracting side elements like the grass and the weird tree on the right. I ended up using a dark blue with a soft brush on a Multiply layer and enhancing that with a radial box blur on the priest layer. The image has also been desaturated slightly.

Spring Break in Appalachia

This is a composite of two images. The house in the back has been blurred and darkened to increase the depth of field effect. and if you look closely, especially around the back of the girl’s head, you can see where she’s been masked over the other image.

Sometimes I’m given a nearly flawless image to work with but it isn’t wide enough to allow for all of the detail that I need to fit into the format of the space template. The original picture of the girl didn’t have enough content to the left of the figure, so i had to mask it over the other image so it would fit.

Some other cool things about this space:

• That’s Noah’s stunningly cool Center for Social Concerns mark there on the lower right. You can see it in more detail on the AgencyND site.
• The font I used to set “Appalachia” is a beautiful free font called Jura which is available here.
• The bottom button bar I usually leave plain, but buried in the pile of source imagery I was given to work with on this space was a really cool, beautiful image of a wall of pictures of coal miners and their families that must have been sixty to seventy years old. I love old collages and busy images with lots of detail, and it was the kind of image that I would have immediately jumped all over to serve as the dominant image in the design. It simply wasn’t the right image for a space intended to attract ND students to Appalachia program though. It ended up serving as a decorative element in the button bar where, I’m sure, only I would notice it until now.
• This space has pretty vibrant color when compared to other spaces. In this case, I literally just sampled blues from the girl’s sweatshirt to put together the gradients in the design. (That might be less “cool” and more “informative.”)

-oAk-

Grace Hall is currently experiencing an active fire alarm. While sitting out here in the cold (on a rock), I remembered the following story about fire drills and conditioning your audience to expect certain things.

We had to hold ten fire drills a year when I was in elementary school. Concern that a bunch of six-year-olds wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of their first fire drills prompted the school principal to call each of the kindergarten class rooms to pre-announce the first two.

You can probably see where this is going: the third of ten planned fire drills was unannounced, so naturally, we all panicked.

Here’s another in a long string of “things I’ve learned about Illustrator by accidentally turning essential settings off and then having to figure out how to get them back.”

I was working away just now, minding my own business when I no longer had visible anchor points. The shapes were selecting as usual. Using the white arrow tool even made the anchor points select as usual, I just couldn’t see them. Turns out I had accidentally hit “Ctrl+Tab” which cues Illustrator to do something called “hide edges.” Among other things, it turns off the visibility of Anchor points.

It’s easy to fix, just go to “View>Show Edges.”

I have a friend who I find incredibly fascinating. This is because he always has amazing ideas for businesses. The ideas don’t tend to go very far, but it’s not for lack of creativity. At one point, my friend came into possession of a still which he set up in his basement. It didn’t take him very long until he learned how to distill honey in to mead (honey wine) which, naturally, led to a business plan to produce and sell the stuff. Also naturally, this called for a logo. I provided the little bee mark you see above.

The mead business didn’t amount to anything, but the logo lives on: cut into adhesive vinyl and applied to the side of my buddy’s Wrangler for reasons that escape me. I am, of course, flattered.

My next goal is to get one of my designs voluntarily tattooed onto someone. Any takers? Chas?