In December, John and Hank Green asked me to put together some designs for the 2012 Tour de Nerdfighting. I knew that I wanted the designs to reference the 2008 Tour de Nerdfighting map, which was one of the first things I designed for John and Hank. So first I got to work on the t-shirt design, which actually ended up being the cover of the exclusive tour CD.
(Click to see larger)
After the map was finished, I got to work on the poster. Right around that time, I had just read the book Sterographics: Graphics in New Dimensions, which inspired me to use photography and real world elements, rather than doing the whole thing digitally. I decided to gather up all the nerdfighter memorabilia I’ve collected over the years to make just a big colorful explosion of awesome. I cut the map outline out of a cereal box and painted black, while the red 2012 is made from paper which I then painted. You can see a behind the scenes look at the photoshoot in this video (starting at 1:40):
We took a ton of photos from all different angles. This was literally just set up on an IKEA table in my bedroom – design doesn’t have to be fancy and expensive!
After I chose the photo I wanted, I printed it out at full size and penciled in all of the city names and the title (doing a test version first to make sure the concept wouldn’t look completely awful). After trying way too many types of black markers to find one that didn’t bleed on the paper, I inked the whole thing, scanned it in, and composited it in Photoshop. As you can see from the photo of the title, I ended up changing it around in Photoshop a bit, in order to make the poster feel cleaner and more balanced.
(Test drawing, done on a letter-size printout of the photo)
I hope you guys like the poster and CD, and managed to grab a copy from the merch table if you went to any of the tour stops. You can also check out my video from the Redwood City tour stop at the end of this post. It was a fantastic night and I’m so happy to be part of such an awesome community!
A few months ago, I got an email asking if I wanted to design the first official t-shirt for Elmify. Seeing as how her channel is one of my absolute favorites on YouTube, I could not pass this up.
We went through a bunch of different designs and color combinations before settling on the final one, a typographic imagining of her famous No! FRODO! video clip.
I also wanted to make a handwritten logo for her name, which meant writing her name over and over in my sketchbook until it came out right. Anyone who looks through it will probably think I have the biggest elementary school crush on her.
This is the final design we settled on, which is now available for purchase on dftba.com. You can see more photos of it below as well as the video Elmify made when it was released. Thanks for reading!
Wow, it sure has been a while since I updated this blog. My apologies, but I’ll try to update more regularly now that I’m pretty settled into my new job at YouTube and can start doing freelance work again.
When John Green asked me to design a “This Machine Kills Fascists” laptop decal, I of course said yes. John didn’t give much design direction (besides not making it look like Woody Guthrie’s guitar), so I tried out several different typographic styles before we settled on the final one.
I thought the typography treatment in this concept was interesting, but as it took up the entire front of the laptop, it wouldn’t have been very flexible for different sized computers.
I had fun playing with depth and unreadability, but ultimately this design probably wouldn’t have worked very well as a decal.
Speaking of unreadability, I liked the idea of abstracting the letterforms so much that they just look like an abstract pattern until you really try to decipher it and realize what it says.
I did a couple different concepts using warning labels, which was the idea we ended up going with.
It figures that after doing all these explorations, the one that ended up being produced was the first one I designed, which had taken all of 20 minutes to make. However, I think its success really comes from the simplicity. It is understated and small enough to be usable on laptops of any size or color, and it gets the message across without feeling too self-important.
It made me so happy to see that Wil Wheaton had reblogged the decal on Tumblr. I wonder if he bought one!
This laptop decal can be ordered from DFTBA in either black or white. I hope you guys like it!
A couple of months ago Hank Green emailed me with an idea he had come up with for glasses which would reverse the 3D effect of 3D movies seen in movie theaters. Hank wanted to produce and sell the glasses, which would mostly be targeted to people who get headaches from 3D movies but don’t want to be left out when their friends go to see them. Hank asked me to design the logo and website for the glasses, so that they could easily be sold online.
While the various elements on the site have shifted slightly from my original design, the visual language of the website is still consistent with what I made. Since the glasses are meant to appeal to a large variety of demographics, we wanted to keep the site design fairly neutral, without seeming to target any one group of people. I tried to make the details on the site interesting, but it was important that the design not distract from the Buy Now button or the important information about what the glasses do.
While this isn’t my favorite design solution I’ve ever come up with, I’m so happy that the glasses have been as popular as they are. I do wish I had had more time to explore more symbolic versions of the logo rather than a straight typographic version, or experiment with more creative layouts in the site. However, it seems like the glasses have had a great reception from the internet community. They’ve been covered on dvice, Gizmodo, and NPR, among other sites. If you would like to buy the glasses, head on over to 2D-glasses.com or the new Amazon page!
A couple months ago, Mike Lombardo asked me to design the poster for the tour he was going on with Driftless Pony Club, WheezyWaiter’s band. The trouble was that he didn’t give me any guidelines beyond that it needed to say both of their band names and Spring Tour 2011. As I’m sure you other creative people can relate to, the hardest way to spark creativity is to not have any restrictions.
Nonetheless, I got to work, and went through three completely different poster design concepts without really being happy with any of them. It was getting close to when Mike needed the files for printing, so I was about to send him the latest incarnation (I literally had the file attached in an email), when I decided to take a shower, during which I came up with the idea you see above.
I had the idea to try to make the poster interactive, by literally making the band names into a maze. I began building a grid in Illustrator, from which I designed the first couple letters. After making the first “D”, I decided to keep everything else to straight lines, but I like that the one curved letter breaks up the grid in two different places. I only designed the letters I would need for the band names, but I made the maze inside each repeated letter different. After the hugely time-staking process of designing the workable maze with a single solution, and getting every single box to line up correctly, I decided that I liked having the red line solution as a graphic element to the poster. I wasn’t sure how many people would actually sit down to try to solve it, and the red line just brought a bit of visual interest to the design that was missing before.
A big issue we came across was the colors. I probably tried every color combination I could, before deciding on gray and red. The trouble was that as the maze color got darker, the contrast between it and the white paper was just difficult to look at. I wanted to use a light blue to reference WheezyWaiter’s video color scheme, but then it began to invoke Greek imagery, which just felt awkward.
I wish I had had more time to refine the concept once I decided on it. I’d love to do a series of posters that become interactive like this, but experiment with more visual styles and mediums. What if the red answer line went through every wrong path before it finally found the right way out? Or what if I did a typography-inspired connect-the-dots poster? Someone tell Mike and Craig to go on tour again so I can actually make these ideas a reality!
I was able to make it to the show in Hamden, CT a couple weeks ago, and it was really fun to see my poster on the merch table and see all the bands sign it (and see Craig practically make out with it for a photo op). Their performances were great too, so be sure to go check out their music if you’re not familiar with it! Mike LombardoDPC
