Refinished Dresser

In June of 2018, I also became a homeowner for the very first time. I've found a lot of enjoyment in organizing and decorating spaces. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and stay-at-home orders, I've had a lot of time to get into home projects that I otherwise would probably be still putting off.

One room I had the chance of improving is the spare bedroom. We had this old dresser, that quite honestly I found to be a bulky eyesore, however, I knew I'd be able to spruce it up in some form at some point. For me, this is always better than spending money on new furniture.

I started by sanding down the shiny wood stain. After cleaning that off, I got out some leftover blue paint that I had used to paint an accent wall in the living room. 

After getting it all painted, I realized it needed new hardware as one of the old drawer pulls was broken and unable to be repaired easily. I went rummaging around for decorative door knobs I had purchased and used in my West Chester apartment. Unfortunately with the new house, I hadn't found a place I could use them. As it turns out, this dresser had a drawer where I could use 3 of the 5 knobs I already had.

The decorative knobs are very colorful with gold accents. Therefore, I wanted to get some new pulls to complement them. Little did I know, polished brass/gold pulls and handles are not the easiest things to come by. I ended up ordering some simple polished brass pulls online to match. The last step was to paint the "key holes" on the bottom two drawers. While they are just decorative, i did not want to pop them off but the color was too dark and worn. I happened to have some gold liquid leaf paint I could easily brush onto the key holes that nearly matched perfectly.

The dresser is now in the spare room, and I could not be happier with how it turned out. Also in the room is a ladder I refinished and painted (I'll post that in the future), and an end table.

The end table is another piece I've had for a while that was a similar brown wood color. However, the piece is not totally made out of wood. It wasn't something I could easily sand well, so I just went and painted it with the same leftover paint. The corners had some imperfections due to wear and tear, but the paint quickly made it look like new. The problem was, as I suspected, the end table material was not easily holding the paint. A few times I easily scratched off the blue paint. Again, I went rummaging through my supplies to find clear Mod Podge. I applied it with a small roller and a brush where the roller couldn't reach. The roller gave it this subtle texture that I end up really liking. Lo and behold, the Mod Podge worked as a perfect clear coat, preventing easy scratches.

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!

LAS Apparel: Women's Wild One Tee

I LOVE apparel design! One of my favorite shirts I have designed for LAS was this Women's Wild One Tee. Like most of my best apparel designs, this one began as a hand drawn sketch.

The goal was to create something feminine for the female archer/hunter. I spent a lot of time finding the right shirt sample-something feminine, flattering for many body types, and also a decent fit since so many women's shirts run small. For the sketch, I went in a floral/bohemian approach.

From there I brought the sketch into Illustrator and converted it to a vector file. It took a decent amount of touch ups and tweaks since the sketch was generally small and rough. I experimented with different colors and potential garments, before ultimately landing on the Anvil Women's Freedom Tee in rose with a white and black design. I added in the "Lancaster Archery Supply" text subtly below the right antler to add some LAS branding without taking away from the overall design feel.

The grey pictured above represents the knocked out pieces. Therefore, this could be screen printed with only black and white ink. The grey above will just be the rose garment color. Using the t-shirt colors is one of my favorite techniques. Not only does it create complexity to the design, but it also allows me to implement an additional color without adding an ink color which then adds cost.

Once we got this design produced, it became available to purchase on the Lancaster Archery website. Our in-house photographer took great photos of the shirt. You can currently purchase this shirt here: https://www.lancasterarchery.com/lancaster-archery-supply-womens-wild-one-tee.html

Lancaster Archery Supply Catalog Side-by-Sides

Below are a few improvements I made to the Lancaster Archery Supply's annual catalog. As mentioned previously, year one (2019-2020) was mostly spent on converting 9,000+ products to paragraph and character styles in InDesign. Year two (2020-2021) was the year I was able to implement more noticeable design changes and updates.

A newly designed introductory/contact page better organized information and made it more appealing to viewers.

Implementing colored swatches to condense the space of each product and create a cleaner look.

Reformatted some sections from 2 columns to 3 columns to optimize space due the the size of the product.

Organizing Broadheads: The simple concept of having all broadheads point the same direction, made quite the visual difference from year to year.

Lancaster Archery Supply

It has only been forever since I've posted any design or creative work. To get up to speed-in November of 2018 I landed a new job as a Senior Graphic Designer at Lancaster Archery Supply (LAS). My number one duty is to produce their annual Lancaster Archery Archer's Wishbook, a now 500+ page publication. I am the sole designer for this project, working directly with Purchasing and the President of the company. The bulk of my production begins around February 1st. I then send off the publication to the print vendor around the beginning of May, so the catalog hits homes by the first week of June. 

Since being at Lancaster Archery, I have produced two annual catalogs. In the first year I spent most of my time learning the previous processes, improving some of those processes that I could implement in a tight timeline and essentially make sure I got the catalog completed. Design upgrades were limited, but I made a solid list for the following year.

Some critical improvements I made in the first year was converting every single product (over 9,000) to paragraph and character styles in InDesign. I knew this would be a timely task to do while working through the general production of the catalog, but it was essential to clean up the book and get it where it needs to be organizationally. I worked over 150 hours between Feb-May outside of the normal 8-5 to get this hefty task completed, and it was a huge relief when all styles had been converted. 

The other critical improvement I implemented was the Dealer Price List. The price list for the 2019-2020 catalog consisted of over 9,200 rows and 7 columns that spanned throughout the 56 page insert. Unfortunately, this information was never properly placed in a chart within InDesign. The original process consisted of pasting this info, formatting the type, and then tabbing nearly every row to have the columns align properly. There was no way I was tabbing 9,200 rows manually, so I sought out a solution. Initially I just placed the spreadsheet information in a table and implemented table styles. However, when changes needed to be made I needed to carefully update specific rows or the entire table, which caused problems with my computer and speed. I then discovered WordsFlow, an InDesign plugin that links Excel files (and other programs), so that when the Excel spreadsheet file is updated, I can update the InDesign table in a click of a button (and of course a lot of computer updating time). The WordsFlow Pro trial allowed me to also keep the styling of the table following an update, so we now use that moving forward.

With those two (large) improvements now in place, I knew upcoming years would be much more manageable and less time consuming throughout the production months. This would open the door for some new designs and also time for me to continue to design billboards and digital and print ads for LAS.

Catalog year two (2020-2021) was as predicted much more efficiently produced. With a year under my belt, I was able to better gather print vendor estimates, prep and schedule for the upcoming year, meet with stakeholders and hit the ground running during the production months. I still had to work about 50 hours outside of my normal schedule, but felt extremely accomplished to have cut that down to 1/3 of the time. The company was very impressed with my work ethic and production, and I was rewarded by winning the very first Employee of the Quarter for Q1 of 2020. 

Catalog year three (2021-2022) production will be coming around the corner shortly, and I am already starting to prepare. My goals this year are to continue to improve processes, better prepare throughout the year to ultimately further cut down the time I have to spend outside my normal hours. One component of catalog that I do receive assistance on is the front cover design. The past two years I have been so limited on time that the Senior Creative Designer pulls together a front cover design. I hope in year three to have the time to design something, as the cover creative is what everyone sees first. The cover is the main creative spot, whereas all of the content is primarily production-based. To be able to design and produce 100% of the 500+ printed piece is certainly the ultimate goal.

At some point I'll show side by sides of the improvements from year to year more in detail. For now, below is the 2020-2021 catalog cover and spread composite.

AmericanTrucks Halloween Sale

F-150 has been a booming business over the last year, so there has been a lot of focus on creating quality lifestyle imagery for marketing campaigns. This year for a Halloween email campaign, I began concepting with this inspirational image:

The tone and coloring of this image was the type of feel I wanted to capture in this marketing campaign. 

To begin building this out, I started with an in-house lifestyle photo of a 2009-2014 F-150 that had good base lighting.

I brought this image into Photoshop and manipulated the color to pull out dark green tones in Camera Raw. Adjusting the contrast, exposure and clarity was necessary to get close to the original concept. I added some lens flares around the lights and added texture to the ground and background to complete the composite.

Once I had the 2009-2014 composite complete, I used it as a backplate image to render the 2015-2019 F-150 in Keyshot. Below is the raw render and clown pass exported from Keyshot after applying a dark HDRI map and adjusting the camera.

I brought everything into Photoshop to work on the 2015-2019 composite. Some retouching needed to be done to remove the 2009-2014 F-150 from the original image. Using the clown pass I retouched the 2015-2019 F-150 to fit the scene with the lighting, colors and textures.

Once I got these two body style composites complete, I focused on the typography of the email marketing campaign. I wanted type that was textured and fit in well with the scene to work well for the Halloween theme.

AmericanMuscle Holiday Gift Garage

It's been a while, to say the least. Most of the summer was consumed of designing for the AmericanMuscle Mustang Show, traveling here and there and moving to a new spot. I'd like to pick back up where I am currently, and then hopefully backtrack to share some of the show graphics.

Every year the holiday promotions seem to get bigger and more involved. This year, the company has introduced zmags, an outlet for the graphic designers to create custom landing pages without having to utilize our busy e-commerce developers. I worked on the AmericanMuscle Holiday Gift Garage campaign that included a zmags landing page, on-site graphics, email graphics, display adwords, social graphics and catalog covers and inserts.

I started with a really awesome in-house photo of our 2015 Mustang in the snow. I made a few adjustments in Camera Raw to boost the image quickly.

I wanted the overall campaign to have an icy winter feel to it, so I began by color changing the car to Grabber Blue and building out the background for the catalog cover. The build out is a bit rough, but worked with the layout I had.

I also needed to cut out the car for the web graphics I intended to use. Additionally, I wanted to render out the other car generations from Keyshot, so I removed the car from the scene in Photoshop so the other cars would lay over top. I kept the original wheels and shadow to get the placement of the new cars in their accurately. Below is the back plate I used for the renders.

I added cars into Keyshot and added additional aftermarket parts to them that were built in-house. Below is the 2014 Mustang with added mods that was placed in the scene, color changed and with an HDRI map applied and edited to look closely to the original 2015. 

I repeated this process for the other four Mustang generation cars. While those were rendering, I focused on the layout of the custom zmags landing page. 

I started off with a rough concept for both desktop and mobile. I wanted to combine lifestyle imagery and product imagery throughout the layout while working with the categories selected by the Marketing Department. Without having all of the finalized product sku's and images, I came up with the below version for desktop.

Through a few rounds of revisions, it landed closely to the above design and was then made generationally. I used the rendered cars at the top of this and then a mix of in-house lifestyle photography and product photography. I incorporated sliders into a few categories as well as off-car product photography to give the layout dimension and variety. Throughout the entire layout, I placed a vector geometric pattern that symbolized wrapping paper. Overall the goal was to have a winter feel with holiday hints carried throughout. Below is a closeup of a section with the "wrapping paper" pattern darkened to more easily see the design.

Note: the above image was pulled from Fox Racing and was the design inspiration and direction for the Holiday Gift Certificate Promotion I'll show later. I also incorporated these vector elements in the campaigns logo I was working on simultaneously.

"Holiday Gift Garage - The Perfect Presents" was the marketing copy for this entire package. Similarly to last year, I designed a logo to be used throughout the campaign to be included in web graphics and on the catalog covers. I used the above vector pattern within the logo I designed and created a version to be used on white and on black.

I also needed a version with slightly different copy to be used in display ads and Facebook social graphics.

Before sending all of the above into the proofing system, I did a quick mock of the AmericanMuscle catalog cover for the 2015-2017 generation. The layout of the copy was later revised, but the overall imagery and concept was approved.

Once the above was approved, I made some tweaks per request and began making the additional site, email, display and social graphics while building out the zmags landing page. I did the full package for the '15-'17 generation first before duplicating and creating the others. Below is the final 2010-2014 generation homepage hero.

When the customer clicks on Shop Gifts, they are taken to the zmags landing page. Below is the 2015-2017 landing page I had designed and built via the Creator.

While the campaign is still live on AmericanMuscle.com, you can view and interact with the landing page here. The final catalog cover design for that same generation is below. As you can see I incorporated the vector elements on the front and back cover as I had throughout the landing page.

The catalogs arrived in customers' mailboxes this month and also featured an insert that included products within the Holiday Gift Garage. Below is the 4-page insert design. 

Many other graphics were built to promote this campaign on the various channels. Below includes email graphics and display ads.