I just received word that a logo I created for the NTU will be published in LogoLounge book 8. This is a juried competition featuring hundreds of thousands of logos. This makes the fourth logo I’ve designed to make it into their collection of books. Below is the chosen logo which was used as temporary tattoos.
The books will be published, and available for purchase, in the spring of 2014.
Zuca makes really cool luggage. A favorite of makeup artists for years, they have drawers and a sturdy exoskeleton you can sit on. They wanted to expand their market and reach high end business travelers. I was contacted by the Los Angeles based ad agency they had hired, to create an illustration to be used in an ad. The logo I had created for the mechanics (Paul Revere on horseback) had caught the agency’s attention, and it was the style they wanted to follow. My instructions were to mimick the evolution chart, and in each stage have the traveler experiencing some form of pain and suffering due to their luggage. They envisioned two different concepts, one that followed the traditional horizontal chart, and another that was more dimensional.
Once the sketches had been approved, I finalized the silhouettes in Illustrator.
Here’s a couple close ups of some of the stages.
And here’s a look at the final ad.
© 2013 Zuca and Thoburn Design & Illustration
The first pet I ever owned was a cat. I found him in a dumpster behind our local Little Caesars pizza place. After he died I went out to get another and ended up with four. I love cats! I think they’re great, and back in 2009 they served as the inspiration of a personal portfolio website I launched called “CuriosityKillz.com”. It was originally intended to be a portfolio site that featured 9 different humorous illustrations of cats doing something curious moments before they’re deaths. It sounds worse than it really was. There was a monster in the closet, and a cat pressing a self destruct button on a the space station, really far fetched, silly illustrations. Still, there were those who found absolutely no humor in it whatsoever, including the anonymous poster who threatened me with physical harm and death (no, I’m not kidding). If you’re interested you can read my original post about the site here.
The site sat dormant for two years dying a slow death (pun absolutely intended). Recently, I was persuaded to enter an international comic strip competition. I was interested, but had no idea what I could use as my subject matter. Then it hit me, Curiosity Killz would be perfect. I decided to completely scrap all of the original illustrations and change the entire concept. Rather than create single panel full colored artwork, I’d turn it into a 3 panel comic that followed the same theme for every single comic. Cat’s sees something curious, that curiosity gets the best of him, cat dies. The original site featured a smoking cat and this would serve as my first comic.
Before long I had come up with over 50 ideas (and was still writing down more on the backs of each comic). It is my intention to publish all of these comics, as often as I can get them done, to the newly redesigned CuriosityKillz website. So go check it out and be sure to bookmark it so you can check out the latest comic.
As for the competition, it starts on Monday February 11th and can be found here.
Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks for all your support in 2012. I couldn’t do what I love without every one of you.
I received a call from an ad agency in Dallas asking me if I’d be interested in taking on a logo project. After I agreed, they informed me that I was one of a couple different artists selected to work on a new logo for Borden. Borden, founded in 1857, is one of the top ten largest companies in America. They were considering updating their logo and were especially interested in my silhouette style logos, specifically, the Mechanics Program. Elsie, the company’s mascot has been through numerous revisions over the years.
The first thing I set out to do was simplify Elsie’s face. I tried two completely new ideas, opting for a head-on view and a third based off their current three-quarter view.
They felt the first two deviated too far from the original, whereas the third version was closer to what they were looking for. I added in some very simple daisies, and experimented with how it would work reversed on a solid background.
With the head completed, I moved on to Elsie’s body. As you can see from the samples through the years, Elsis’s never had a full body. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to experiment with the idea of giving her one. So I played around with several different poses.
All were very well-received, but they were only interested in proceeding with the fourth, less anamorphic sample. This time they wanted it even simpler. They instructed me to completely strip the details in the face, and all the shading. I provided one final sample before the project came to a halt (the colors were randomly chosen to show contrast).
The client ultimately rejected the idea to revise their logo, and decided to stay with their current one. If you’re interested, Chris Whetzel (another artist selected to work on this project), has a similar blog post on his creative process. I really loved his interpretation, it’s a very nice update.
The Young Americans for Liberty publish a magazine titled “Young American Revolution”. For their March issue, they asked me to create a cover illustration for an article titled “More than Just Nope” about the hard road ahead for limited government, and the dilemma facing the Republican party. They wanted a fork in a road with one direction heading towards debt and destruction, while the other road headed towards peace and prosperity. Armed with this information, I sketched out a couple different thumbnail options.
The client liked the second option best, feeling that it put the subject more front-and-center. Since the sketch was fairly small, it needed to be redrawn.
I made some minor adjustments from the original thumbnail, like widening the fork in the road, and moving the signs from behind the guy to his left and right. I was really unhappy with the guy I had drawn for a number of reasons (help, I’m falling over), so I decided to completely redraw him by modeling him after the organizations Executive Director. Several of the elements, like the buzzard and tank, were drawn separately and added in later.
I brought each of these sketches into Illustrator and began to create the final cover (below).
Here’s a look with mast head and article titles in place:
And here’s a look at the final printed magazine:
