December 30, 2015

The OG Motorcycle Helmet

Painting is crazy important to me these days. I grew up a painter-mainly acrylics and watercolors, and thought I'd go to college to be a painting major. I'm glad my mind shifted to design for my education, however, I did manage to pick up my paintbrushes again about a year ago. One way I got into it was through this motorcycle helmet below. This was painted with white One Shot enamel on a friend's vintage helmet. The theme, if it is not already apparent, is bandana print. I'm really happy with how the piece came out, and I look forward to future helmet painting gigs through Throttle Down Speed Co.




December 29, 2015

Catalog Design Transition

I find that one of the most interesting things to look at is the comparison of similar designs throughout the year. Overtime, designers are able to critique their own work, receive feedback by others, use data to drive design, and overall make better and smarter design choices that look and function better than the previous. Below shows just that. This is the evolution of a small category within the AmericanMuscle catalog: Vinyl Decals & Graphics that is within the Exterior section. The design shown first is not my own, but rather a former design by one of my design teammates at AM. At this time, we were experimenting with backgrounds and the Merchandising team was choosing a lot of products per spread since there are so many vinyl finishes. A designer created the "key" of several design colors, which was my launching point to creating "swatches" in 2014. Initially the key provided information, however, did not necessarily function throughout the design. Therefore, I introduced swatches as you can see below in 2014, and modified them to a more sleek design in 2015 which moved the slices to a horizontal orientation. The swatches eliminated the charts almost entirely, which was one of the tasks I had taken on. Also in 2015, I brought back the usage of lifestyle photography to show the vinyl in real life situations, rather than solely clipped out product shots. The key was also simplified. Overall, this layout has remained quite similar with some increase in swatch height and font size for 2016. I believe this layout design has come a long way from where it started, and accomplishes more within the space provided.









December 28, 2015

Print catalog design is a large portion of design work that I do at AmericanMuscle. Within our catalog we include several pages of editorial content. In the past I have designed many Customer Spotlight articles such as the one below. This one in particular includes photos from the Mustang owner and copy by our in house writer. The layout and Customer Spotlight logo were both designed by myself. This article can be viewed in the 2015 AmericanMuscle Holiday Catalog. To receive the current print catalog, complete the form here.

December 27, 2015

XT Apparel

On the topic of apparel, below is the collection I have designed for ExtremeTerrain.com this past year. The pieces include t-shirts, tank tops, sweatshirts, hats and beanies for both men and women. View them here: extremeterrain.com/wrangler-jeep-gifts-apparel.html

T-shirts, Tank Tops & Sweatshirts














Hats & Beanies






AmericanMuscle T-shirt

This is the most recent apparel design I have designed for AmericanMuscle.com. It's a 3-color vector "splatter" design using the AM logo on a polyblend. See it on site now at americanmuscle.com/wet-track-tshirt.html. Photo taken by Justin Mondschein.

December 21, 2015

The Gift Garage on ExtremeTerrain.com was another project I had this holiday season. I selected the variety of lifestyle images from our in-house photography collection to represent each category of products that Merchandising provided. The main graphic was also used as a catalog cover for our 2015 Holiday drop. The site "holidization" in the header and footer (tire tracks in snow and snowflakes) was also designed by me the prior year.

December 18, 2015

2 Wheel Soulmate

3 months ago I was sitting in the ER getting my shoulder popped back into place after picking myself off of the hood of a car from crashing my '74 CB360. That night my CB and I became blood brothers. Today I'd say I'd 95% healed, the exception being my scar from those 20 stitches. I'm incredibly grateful for the helmet that kept my head intact as well as all of the people that were with me during and after the accident. Not to worry, my motorcycle is still the love of my life and this drawing proves it. Micron pen, sharpie, graphite and compressed & vine charcoal on Rives BFK with post digital typeface added - 18x24 - CB360 wheel & traditional style roses & leaves

December 08, 2015

Back At It

I am well overdue for a blog post, my apologies. The goal is to better document my creative work while it happens, so this is the time to reboot the creative posts.  Below is a screenshot of the current 2010-2014 landing page of AmericanMuscle.com.  I have designed the Holiday Sale hero graphic (Photoshop composite using a KeyShot 3D render and a photo as the back plate), the Free 2016 Calendar graphic underneath that (photograph from our photography dept.), and while I did not create the Get a Free Gift graphic, I designed the t-shirt that is available for purchase here.