Current projects

Winter break has begun. In fact it began last night with a midnight showing of The Hobbit.

So with that comes a break from design classes and from my job at the paper. While my job at FBC is keeping me plenty busy with a new website launch on the 2nd of January and a new bulletin format launch on the 6th, I have decided to work on some self-motivated projects that are just for my own benefit in growing in my design. I never want to get comfortable with my skills, my style, my creativity, my ideas, I always want to push myself to get better.

Now I don’t want to copy Paula Scher’s Map projects, which she did as her own side project, (seen to the left.) But I have been inspired by her maps project, and I want to do something that is similar in the way that she spends so much time just doing it for the enjoyment of it and the results are hectic, organic, and unorganized, yet beautiful. I have some ideas, so I may be posting things as I go along

As I mentioned, I am currently working on a new website for FBC which will launch on the 2nd. This project has been a huge one. We began back in August, and it has taught me a lot. Developing websites with large amounts of information, interaction, security needs, etc. is way different than my usual few pages of static information written in HTML and CSS. I built the site with wordpress, and there is honestly no way I could have done it for the same low price without wordpress, but whenever you build something using a template of sorts, you end up having to settle on certain things. For example, I have found a great calendar plugin for the site, and it’s exactly what I wanted, but the file downloading plugin on the other hand works, but is hideously ugly, so I have had to do some serious work arounds to make it acceptable, and I hope continue to improving it.

I also just accepted a freelance job doing a website for a local lawyer. I didn’t think that there were any good law websites out there, but after some research there actually are, and after meeting with one of the employees at the law firm I think we have a good art direction idea of where this website is going.

Last blurb is on a flyer I just did at FBC. For our Christmas Eve service, we do a candle light service, after being showed a quick draft of the flyer an idea popped in to my head for something entirely different. So I asked Caryl if I could take it from there. Rather than having text and image, I have learned it is best to turn text into image. I used the title and invitation text as the candle. I think it turned out pretty well.