Watchman University

Dianne Yanovick is one of the smartest women I know in the strategic marketing/branding field. When I work with her, I feel like a child learning at the feet of the master.

She recently asked me to help her with a sub-brand identity for a client of hers. We needed to keep an element of the original logo in the new mark. After a lot of exploration, the best idea (shown below the original mark) was actually her idea... and I was able to bring it to life.

Hush Hush... again

Here's an illustration I finished recently. That's all the information I can share with you. There are secret agents standing behind me now as I type this post to make sure I don't leak any mission critical info. (:

Bar-b-cue Cook off

Deep Down, Inc. manufactures subsea equipment and services for the oil and gas industry. Every year at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, there is a barbecue cook off party. Deep Down wanted to create a logo for their team. I guess Texans take their barbecue seriously. (:

A new client, W3 Advertising out of Stafford, Texas, asked me to supply the design.

Here's the winning selection I created for them.

Letterpress

Any opportunity I get, I try to use Studio on Fire (letterpress and design studio in Minneapolis) to letterpress stationery. It's old school technique and yet so very cool. Here's a calling card I recently designed for Love's Garden, a Christian ministry in Israel. They will love handing these things out.

p.s. be sure to click on the photo for a much better view.

Final Product

A while back I showed you my early progress on this annual report cover. Here's the final product along with a couple of the interior images. This project was an epic battle. I told Scott Di Girolamo from Design Center that if we ever survived this, I would buy him a beer. We celebrated this week over lunch at the Lexington in St. Paul.

New Bible

A while back, I was asked to design the layout for a new kind of illustrated Bible to be published by Zondervan. The idea was similar to the now famous St. John's Bible, but with more of a fantasy art flavor. I used already existing samples of the artists' work for the mock layout, but all new art would be commissioned... if you notice the level of detail in these images, the idea of illustrating the whole Bible is staggering. My part was to create a layout that would be flexible to accommodate multiple compositions but yet still carry a strong visual theme from book to book. Be sure to click on each image for a larger view since there are a lot of nice details.

AIGA Design Award

It is sad to say that I've been in the design field for over 20 years and only last year joined AIGA. So, for the first year ever, I entered the annual design competition. Minneapolis is a hotbed for some of the best design firms in the nation... so I was very pleased to find out my stationery system won an award.