Evening Rose Sketch

Women Who Ride

I've had this vision in my head of a sticker design to represent women riders. The original photograph came from mrsjjfive's collection, a photo of flat tracker Morgan Monroe. With Morgan joining the Throttle Down Speed Co. team, the image would fit perfectly to not only represent her, but also women riders in general. 

The other evening I attempted to sketch the vision that I've carried for a few weeks, maybe even a couple months now. I took pencil to Rives BFK, took a photo of the sketch, tossed it in Illustrator and vectorize it. The graphite on the textured paper just didn't translate when I did a quick Illustrator image trace, and I was quite unsatisfied with the image. Tonight I took a second attempt-this time micron on Rives. I did most of it in a 02 micron, added detail with a 005 and then filled in the larger areas with a thick Sharpie. Already I was liking the overall image.

From there I tossed the image into Photoshop, added a Black & White filter as well as a Curves layer to make the black and white very prominent and to minimize the middle gray tones. I saved that out and tossed it into Illustrator to do a quick image trace. Since it was hand drawn the line work from the image trace was naturally imperfect. While I like the hand drawn look, I wanted to smooth out some of the line work to make the overall image more clear. Smoothing out the lines would also benefit future vinyl cuts.

To complete the image I added a black background and a thick white stroke around the entire graphic to make the woman rider really pop. Below is the transition from ink on paper to the final vector art. Stay tuned to see future applications and potential sticker and vinyl prints!

Vector Transition

I've been working on a project that includes some vector work and I thought the transition from the photo to vector was visually interesting. See it below.

Doodle Turned Into Vector

Last evening I had a spike in creativity and felt the need to create some handwritten typography and toss it over one of my new photos from the trip to Austin. Below is one of the doodles I made last night and its transition from a sketch to vector to photograph.

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.