The Bauer's

I finally got a Cricut vinyl cutter for my birthday last year. I've been wanting a vinyl cutter for a while, mostly for personal projects and more decals for my car and kayak. The Cricut cutter seemed to be the best option for price and material cutting capability. 

One of my first vinyl freelance projects was for a friend who's son was getting married June of 2020. She had purchased 4 glasses and had a vintage candle holder that she wanted to tie all together somehow. The candle holder has been in the family for years and has small green clovers with gold accents. I had the perfect gold and green vinyl and went to work.

Initially designing in Illustrator, I created three different designs with one of my favorite script fonts. I drew a clover similar to the vintage candle holder's clovers to tie it all together. Two glasses have the "Joe & Laura Bauer" with their wedding date with the intent of one of them sitting on the candle holder. Then one glass simply says "Joe" with a clover and one says "Laura" with a clover as well. 

Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, the Bauer wedding had to be postponed from their original date of 6/27/2020. While the vinyl used was permanent, I was able to remove the date with some delicate pealing and some product to remove the adhesive. I cut vinyl for their new date, weeded it and applied it seamlessly.

Congratulations to the Bauer's!

The Helmet Reveal

Here's a quick shot of the painted 6D helmet Dan Bromley will rock tomorrow at Flat Out Friday at the Mama Tried Show. Additional photos to come.

Building Vinyl

Last month I was tasked with a rather fun and typically more rare project to work on. Turn5 was looking to transform a room that would be part of a building solely for video purposes. The primary focus would be employees recording installing parts within the company vehicles. The room I got tasked to transform would be treated as a break room and also as a large meeting room. 

To kick off this project, I went to see the space, take measurements, take a ton of photos and talk to a few key people on specifications and what they would like to see in the space. From there I was brainstorming all sorts of ideas and that whole process was really exciting. There were a few design challenges involved, including the fact that no walls would be painted and that they would remain as is. Currently this room is painted a yellow shade. Also before getting started, I met with the vinyl department to see how any graphics would be implemented and discussed file size options. Once the specs were laid out, I could get to creating.

While I personally do not have a lot of experience with video, it still very much is a creative language, so I wanted to do something that would appeal to the creatives. My other mission was to include automotive and tool imagery since the installers are naturally gear heads. By mashing those two concepts as well as some subtle Turn5 branding I came up with an idea for 4 large panels. These panels would start at the very top of the wall and stretch vertically to the bottom. They would be spaced around the room on two of the walls within the break room. My overall concept was large black and white automotive-related images with video-related vector elements in the Turn5 orange.

I made two of the panel images desaturated stock photos of tools. The other two I used in-house lifestyle photography of installing parts on our company vehicles: one Mustang and one Wrangler. I also desaturated those images and balanced the black & white filters to make all four panels feel like they were cut from the same cloth. I then began to pull vector stock graphics that ranged from sound waves, gauges, timeline elements, rulers and a variety of video and camera-related imagery. 

From there, I got creative with the placement of the vector images on top of the photos. While these panels would have space in between them, one suggestion was to make them look like they were one. For example, if I placed a sound wave element running off the right side of panel one, on panel two it would come in on the left side in a similar placement. This really tied all of the panels together quite nicely. I played with the opacity of the different vector elements until I got something that felt nicely balanced throughout. The final touch to the entire imagery was to add a warm filter over the black and white images so that they would look more natural on the pre-painted yellow walls. Without the warm photo filter applied, the colors competed on the wall color, whereas the filter made it feel much more natural. 

Once I had the files created in Illustrator, I sent them to our in-house vinyl department for that team to work their magic. A few adjustments needed to be made to incorporate safe zones and the like. We ran into a few printing complications with the size and had to adjust. Soon enough they were installed within the room by the vinyl team.