TwoJeez

I found some time between work travel and bike racing to put together a quick poster for my friend Dove. She’ll be singing jazz and classical stuff with piano accompaniment. Nice simple poster for the show. Enjoy.

As usual I haven’t updated my blog in a terribly long time. It’s been a busy year so far. Between racing, work and random side work, I’ve been very busy. Unlike this time last year though, it’s a good kind of busy. Work hasn’t been interfering with my riding as much, and I’ve had a good start to my racing season. I upgraded to a Cat 4 this year and have already gotten 5 points towards a 3 upgrade. That’s a pretty big improvement on last year.

I’ve been doing a ton of poster/side work this year. The majority of the posters have been for the bike team’s fund raising events but I also had an opportunity to participate in the CREHAITIVE RE/VISION Poster show to benefit victims of the earthquake in Haiti. I’m also working on an identity package for my moms catering company and an iphone application for Fat Heads.

I realized that my site is linked on the Steeltown Anthem website and thought it would only be right to get some more current work posted for any stray surfers that happen to stumble my way.

I’ll be entering some work in the Steeltown Stock poster show that being hosted by Steeltown Anthem at C-SPACE COLLECTIVE. I haven’t decided what to put in the show yet, but I should have that figured out within a week. Stay tuned for more details!

Despite my efforts, I’ve fallen pretty far behind on this whole blogging thing. Which doesn’t really mean much to anyone other than myself so I don’t feel particularly bad about it. That being said, I actually have some new stuff to post so I figured that the time I’m spending sitting around at my moms house for the holidays is a perfect time to offer an update. The last part of the year has been filled with some fun projects and some great successes that will come to fruition in 2010. So, lets recap…

Geoff Roast
My most recent poster was a great project. The wife of everyones favorite Fat Heads manager commissioned me to do the invitation for said managers surprise birthday party. She wanted to do a Roast style party and I thought it would be appropriately obnoxious to do a caricature of Geoff. Anyone who knows him knows that he is quite a character so I had a lot to work with.

Iron City Bikes
I also recently decided to finally help out Bob with the bike shops website. With the help of Jacob’s web hosting skills and a little bit of love from Wordpress we were able to get the site up and running in just a few days. There’s still a bit of work to be done with it but they are just happy to have an updated site to help drive business. Take a look here.

Iron City Bikes Racing
I’ve also been hard at work trying to finalize all of the sponsorship contracts and jersey order for the 2010 season. Our latest sponsor deal to be worked out is with Magic Hat Brewery. They’ve come on board as our main beer sponsor/provider. We’ll be getting beer from them throughout the year to use in our fundraising events to help generate revenue.

Snowed In Black and Gold Sprints
Speaking of the race team and fund raising, the team and I are hard at work organizing our first event of the season. We’re going to be throwing another roller racing party at Over The Bar in January. I’m working on finalizing the poster for the event that will be printed by Commonwealth Press next week. There will be more information on the team site soon.  Here’s a little sneak peak of the poster:

I have some other projects brewing in the new year and maybe I’ll try and post updates about them. Keep an eye out for the printing of the Snowed In posters in the next week or two.

If you’ve looked any of my work, you know that I am a fan of doing gig posters. Most of the posters that I do are set up with screen printing in mind. Unfortunately, I don’t often (or ever) have the opportunity to actually get them screen printed.

My latest project gave me enough lead time that I was able to call in a favor to my friends at Commonwealth Press. My good friend Dove is the lead signer of the band Pancake. They have a show coming up and she asked me if I’d be interested in doing a flyer. I (almost) always jump at the opportunity to create a poster for local shows and since I already had an idea floating around in my head, I accepted.

It’s an interesting challenge going from faux screen printed posters to the real deal. It’s not a terribly forgiving medium and choosing the design style requires a bit of thought. While complex designs are achievable, you have to keep the interaction of the colors in mind when designing. Dan from Commonwealth had given me some advice in the past so I had a decent idea of the design mistakes I should avoid. Upon sending the files over, Dan didn’t see any problems getting the art to reproduce. I have to thank a production specialist at work, Linda Twining, for hunting down enough paper to print the job. We printed on Cougar uncoated 80# cover. The paper took the ink fairly well with minimal warping.

We printed a run of 50 that I will be signing and numbering tonight. If anyone is interesting in purchasing a poster, let me know. I’ll be trying to figure out a way to set up a paypal link in order to figure out payment. How does $10 sound?

Here are pictures of the process, and the final printed piece.

Thanks to Dan Rugh of Commonwealth Press for spending his evening getting these printed. If you ever need t-shirts printed, this is only place. Call them, or else!  This also wouldn’t have been printed without the help of my wonderful girlfriend Sarah who saved the day when we ran out of red ink. She happened to have had the exact color that we needed, and was nice enough to run home to grab it.  Finally, I have to thank Pancake for the opportunity to make this poster real. I hope you guys dig it as much as I do.

The finished product.

As I promised myself, I’ve been trying to keep up on this whole blog thing. So far I think I’ve held up my end of the bargain, three new posts already! I’ve been thinking about what to write lately more than I’ve been doing any actual writing, but I guess it’s the thought that counts, right? As I evolve this space I’m trying to figure out how I can better utilize my web presence. I’ve even dedicated myself to learning HTML and CSS. And not just the lame limp-along-in-Dreamweaver HTML, but actually figuring out the proper grammar and knowing how to create and cust0mize functional websites.

I discovered a pretty good tutorial site at www.w3schools.com that I’ve found to be easy to follow. The best part about the tutorials is that they include a lot of try-it-yourself sections that, as I’ve learned more attributes and style references, have been really helpful in testing out my skills. The end goal is that I’ll be able to use my main url as a portfolio site, instead of relying on space on the blog to get my work out there. Of course, I will also be using those skills to spruce up the blog too. I’ve recently added some new stuff to the headers, as well as adding some work and a little back story to the design section. See my work. You’ll notice that I don’t have any web work in my portfolio. I’m currently working on a few web projects, but the truth is that I love designing for print, and I don’t think that will ever change.

I also recently logged back into my flickr account. My account had been dormant since sometime in 2005, and the lack of photos definitely shows it. I have well over 4,000 photos in my library so maybe i’ll get around to posting some of the archives in the near future. I’ve also realized that it’s a great place to host images for the blog posts that won’t take up space on my web server. For those of you who might actually read this blog, I hope you enjoy the current and upcoming updates.

GO PENS!!!!

My new Hackintosh with bag and iPhone

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently got a Dell Mini9. I wasn’t really in the market for a new computer, but once i found out that it’s the only netbook (9″ screen, 2.2 lbs) that will flawlessly run OS X, for around $350, I was sold. The reality is that most of the time that i drag around my 5.5 lb, 15″ macbook pro, all i was using it for was email/web surfing. That’s exactly what netbooks are for!If you’re interested in getting one of these sweet macbook minis for yourself, check out dell.com for the machine and more importantly, www.mydellmini.com to learn how to make it a Hackintosh. The dell mini forum members are an invaluable source of talent and knowledge that have allowed many people to enjoy their own hacked mini9s. So far, things have been running very well. All the hardware works flawlessly, and the OS runs quite snappy. I also found an ebay seller, MoApples, that makes custom cut vinyl stickers so my white mini lid now has a silver Apple sticker on it. Needless to say, it draws a bit of mystique. I also got a custom made carrying case from another forum member, psyopper. That should arrive tomorrow, then my mini set up will be complete. I’ll post pictures once my case arrives so stay tuned.

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