IvanEwert.com

Sweet fancy everything.

Not only did I complete all my tasks, I did it in a lot less time than I expected.

I saw Benedict’s Friday night for dinner, and set up the meeting for 2 PM today. I was worried about that, in retrospect, it’s perfect. I can get even more taken care of in that direction by meeting today instead of later in the week.

The MCCC site was a good three hours’ work on Saturday morning, but man, it was worthwhile. Lots of WordPress noodling that will help with a number of other sites and opens a lot of possibilities.

The Raue Center took two hours Sunday morning, with a bit still left to do – but the tools I need to complete that are back at the office, so they’ll have to wait until Monday end of day. The part I thought would be trickiest was actually the easiest with a simple Google search. Funny how often that happens.

Glorious Hands was done already, just needed polishing and submittal. That was settled in a half hour this morning, while Solstice took an hour in the afternoon to complete and refine. I’ll still need to edit it, of course, but it’s far ahead of where I would be otherwise.

The Triskele Moon poster was the most difficult. I wrestled for two hours yesterday but nothing was working right. This morning after the Raue work it took just an hour and a half to go from concept to completion, with L giving her thumbs up around lunchtime today.

So … wow. What a great weekend.

Now for the hard part, following through and reaping my reward to myself.

So okay. I’m desperately unmotivated right now, partly because I know how much crap I have sitting around that really needs to get done. The long-term planning thing is not so much my bag.

I’m going to appeal to my basest, most childike nature.

By Sunday night, if I have:

1. Completed the MCCC work for pro-choice site work (edit: done!),
2. Completed the Raue Center work for theatre site work (edit: holy crap, essentially done!),
3. Set up my meeting with Benedict’s for restaurant site work (edit: done!),
4. Done final edits and submitted the short story, Glorious Hands (edit: done!),
5. Completed the drafts for May’s Solstice story (edit: done!), and
6. Finished the poster designs for Triskele Moon Studio’s mother’s day show (edit: done!),…

Then I get this and I don’t let myself talk myself out of it the way I always do when I try to buy myself something fun that is not food or alcohol-based.

Which basically means if you see me fucking around on Facebook, for the love of god, slap me.

The new poster is ready to go! We’re running a little behind, between the site launch and some question in the artist’s mind about whether a Spring Show was a good idea this time around … but with a little sweat and re-creation this morning, I’ve got it ready to go. This design uses the background from Shlomit Wolf, a wonderful artist in Jerusalem. As always, I’ve used his background to overlay the information and photo necessary.

With this one, I felt it was time to break away from the three-image design and put up a single striking image. This was necessary given the amount of detail at the bottom of the illustration, and the amount of block-text taking the right-hand upper quadrant. The greens pop even more nicely on the actual posters.

Triskele Moon Studios - Spring Show 2010

One of the things I’ve noticed in Canada is a surprising – to me – amount of nationalism. This isn’t necessarily obvious in speaking with people, but it is when you look around at some of the cherished institutions of the United States which have crept into Canadian culture like Canuckudzu.

I am referring, of course, to fast food.

Canada is not alone in its alteration of the McDonald’s logo, according to logoblink.com, but it’s the first time I’ve noticed it personally. Their ads have also included the phrase “c’est ca que j’m,” which is Canadian French for “I’m lovin’ it.”

I’ve also seen on television that the Taco Bell logo has a silver maple leaf appearing, apostrophe-like, alongside the “Think Outside the Bun” tagline on their late night commercials. I haven’t been able to find photographic proof of that, though, and as I’m flying out tonight it looks unlikely that I will.

It doesn’t bother me in the least – in fact, I rather enjoy seeing how local culture influences corporate culture. However, I’ve got a feeling that slapping a white star or red stripes over a Tim Horton’s logo in Detroit would result in considerably different press from designers and Canadians alike.

Many of you know that on September 23, red dust enveloped parts of Australia in the worst dust storm that continent has seen in nearly a century. You probably saw photos on news site, Flickr or in other digital media.

However, did you know there’s a magazine already available, two days later; which has collected them in print form?

Strange Light is now available through MagCloud, a service of Hewlett-Packard. Self-described as a “virtual magazine newsstand in the cloud,” MagCloud seems geared toward niche publishers, self-aggrandizement and fringe interests – but with Strange Light, I can see something else beginning to grow under their aegis.

The return to a tangible archival system seems delicious when you see these photos fully printed, something I’m loathe to admit as an environmentalist but forced to as an artist. The tactile addition to the artwork pulls me in, makes the oranges and reds seem far more real and alive.

It’s a trick of editing, of course, that made this hit me. Someone had the bright idea to collect what they thought to be the best representations of a moment in time, not only online but into a format that could, in theory, be handed down through generations. If you lived through the dust storm, I imagine that would have some appeal – and other savvy editors could easily capture other moments in time.

For example, Teabagger: The Magazine. If anyone does it, they owe me 50% of the profits.

(Incidentally, I first found MagCloud through Constellation Magazine, which is now publishing its Libra/Scorpio issue and is still well worth checking out, if you’re at all astrologically inclined.)

I’ve fallen off the update wagon again, which is a pisser, to be honest. At least I have some good stuff to share today!

My friend Susan Sieber is an accomplished artist who specializes in hand-painting silk: she works with scarves, bags, banners and the like, and does a wonderful job with them. She’s also talented in drawing, but like any good artist, she continues to learn new techniques and skills.

Last weekend she asked for volunteers to pose for a project, and the divine Miss L and I agreed to do so. She took the photographs and sketched them out, one as a foreground character, one as background. I love the way it turned out!

Ivan and L hold court at Dawn's.

Susan’s usual style is more manga-oriented, and her comics gallery – including the very endearing Far Shores – can be found at her DeviantArt pages.

As I did with the Holiday show, I thought it would be interesting to go through the flyer created for Triskele Moon Studios’ Valentine’s Day show – taking place on February 6 & 7 at Evolve, 54 N. Williams Street in Crystal Lake, IL.

I started at Stock.Xchng, my favorite place to trawl for high-quality, royalty-free graphics. There are some immensely talented people posting their work on that site for the sheer joy of sharing and seeing their work used, and when I came across Flavio Takemoto’s Romantic Heart series I knew I had a strong contender for the flyer’s background. I looked a bit longer but in the end, I went with the Romantic Heart.

What attracted me to it – the full, rounded curves of his heart, the glassily reflective quality of the heart, the eye-popping light treatments and the innovative overlays of the spiral arabesques behind the heart. I knew it would catch the eye of anyone walking by just as effectively as it caught my own in the surfing process.

Once I’d trimmed it to the 8.5 x 11 format, I started adding in the necessary information. First comes the studio name, which I played around with in the lower left-hand corner – but decided that while it balanced things out nicely with the heart, it downplayed the important information too much. Moving it to the upper left and adding in “Jewelry Event” as blocktext, I sized the words to match the size of the heart.

Leanne’s tagline for Triskele Moon Studios is “Everyone deserves to be adorned,” and the Adore / Adorn legend hit me while I was pushing pixels. I dropped it into the lower left, matching the size of the arabesques around the heart for balance. Next I dropped in the Triskele symbol over the heart – that caused a lot of work in the end, as Leanne and I went back and forth on whether it were better to really call the symbol out or leave it more subtle. In the end, my viewpoint won out, and we kept it as a shade rather than another focal point.

I knew I wanted to put the date and location on a single line near the center this time around, but that required a smaller font size than I’d typically use. After playing around with layer effects and color choices, I settled on a white bar set to Overlay around the letters – this turned the background into the lovely pinks seen elsewhere in the poster, while allowing the raylines to come through and drawing attention to the comparatively brighter area where the main information is located. The text itself was aligned to run from the left edge of the Studio name to the right edge of the Adore / Adorn tagline.

Next came the selection of jewelry photos. I knew I wanted to use the ‘fabric windowpane’ necklace, to let the cool blues and deep black contrast with the vibrant reds. The central ‘pumpkin vine’ bracelet was chosen both for its vertical alignment and the brightness of the copper and dichroic glass piece at its center. Finally, the honeyed hue of the stone in the last photo provided a chance to show off the intricate silverwork Triskele Moon Studios is so well known for.

The photos on their own just weren’t cutting it, though. Each of the symbols you see behind the pictures came from the Adobe Illustrator Symbol Library, and consists of two layers on top of one another, both set to a white fill and Overlay so they really pop against the darker colors surrounding them and the black background of the photos themselves.

When Leanne looked it over, her only comments were around the text and the triskele, as I mentioned above. With the text, she felt that the columnar nature of the text I’d originally designed left too much centerspace unfilled and made the text difficult to read. She also preferred “Show” to “Event,” so I switched words and kept them on a single line set a bit apart from the main logo. I increased the font sizes to help with legibility as well.

Overall, I’m pleased. It’s been on my to-do list all week, but today I was able to sit down and knock it out in about three hours’ time (with a short break for some fantastic leftover fettucine diablo from Cucina Bella and a few minutes of the NFL Playoffs) and print off the five signs we need for our good friends at Evolve, Le Petit Marche, La Bellissima, Benedict’s La Strata and, of course, the local Starbucks.

It’s the holiday season in downtown Crystal Lake, which naturally translates into a bit more demand among the local merchants. I’ve been lucky enough to include my wife among these clients, and we spent some time yesterday working out the flyer below (Click the image for a larger version).

Now, full disclosure insists that the central image isn’t mine. It’s from a wonderful artist named Lynne Lancaster from the U.K, and it was found as one of her Stock Xchange uploads. L loved the bright richness of the blues, the fading snowflakes, and the crisp elegance of the tree’s spirals – a favorite symbol of hers, obviously.

I took the image and made a few adjustments: placing the triskele symbol of the studios in the large snowflake on the upper right, and fading it out with a gradient and color designed to mimic that of the background image. I also added some white triskeles to the tree, which were eventually removed – they really were overdoing it a bit, and crowding the elegance of the original design.

Placement of the text came next. I played around with using the whitespace at the bottom, but that really didn’t call any attention to the logo or show dates, which is why we’re designing the flyers in the first place. Using the same font size for the announcement and logo alike worked out well this time around, since we’re looking at three lines and three lines, and stacking them alongside the tree turned out to balance the left-right aspect of the flyer nicely.

Below, I listed the locations and dates of the show. We struggled with two things here: Firstly, do we name the town, and secondly, do we list the times? The town was an easy refusal – these flyers are only going up on Williams Street businesses, at the client’s preference, so there’s no need to throw in an extra line for that information. Honestly, we’re talking about a two-block radius of saturation.

The times were more difficult to agree on. Evolve is open different hours on Saturday and Sunday, meaning we have to list two different times or just list the Sunday hours and accept that you won’t get early risers on Saturday. In the end, we agreed to list the phone numbers for the stores, and allow people to call in to get the times. I’m interested to see how that decision pans out in the end as far as customer turnout goes.

The white area at the bottom was still too large for me to be comfortable with. Adding the quote from L’s artist’s statement underneath the tree helped quite a bit, but now we had the Sahara Blanc in the left bottom … and a page laid out entirely in white and shades of blue.

The photos of the jewelry was an easy choice, but choosing the images? That took longer than any other aspect of the design. Eventually we settled on the newer pair of earrings (in copper), the “Create Peace” necklace in fine silver, and the “Shaman’s Necklace” to display the new holiday fiber work she’s begun to focus on. Doing this lets us focus on two new and one older piece, while giving the central image an ink-black background that immediately draws the eye toward the show dates.

I printed them up on HP Glossy Photo Paper, which really popped the blues and the photos! It looks completely different than it does on the screen – deeper, more vibrant, and completely eye-catching. We gave them to the stores yesterday and got a fantastic response all around – in fact, Le Petit Marche asked for more than one, so she could display it in several places. Dawn, the owner, is a wonderful woman and I’m happy to have her in our corner.

The merchants of downtown Crystal Lake have been working on a promotion for some time now called Second Thursday. On the second Thursday of every month, the participating stores stay open late and make special offers or discounts available to their nighthawk patrons.

Originally I had been asked to create a new poster every month for the merchants to display, but the logistics of that turned out to be unwieldy for the merchants. I understand that – keeping things simple is always a better choice, in my opinion.

At any rate, the final decision was to create a single oversized poster that could be used for the entire year. The image to the left was our final decision – the focal point being an unusual clock which stands at the heart of downtown. I vectorized the image with the invaluable help of VectorMagic, then added the tree roots below to reinforce the sense of deep belonging and community which exemplifies so many of our stores.

Originally, the images were far too centered. Pushing things around created the kind of tension that I think is crucial to grabbing and keeping people’s attention.

The roots alone seemed a bit sparse, so I reflected the clock from the base to draw the eye all the way down toward the bottom of the page. The light blue curve was added both to balance the clock proper and to direct the eye toward the 2nd Thursday logo – done in bright red to pop from the midnight hues of the poster itself.

We decided to keep the information spare, both to increase the longevity of the poster’s usefulness and to draw the curious into a conversation with the merchants and storekeepers. We believe this will increase the sense of community, and create the impression of a “secret club” of those in the know. I even had the idea of printing up buttons for people’s jackets or lapels bearing the logo – but I think we’re going to wait to see how well the promotion goes over for a few months first.

Right now, the poster is legal-pad sized. Everyone seems to feel this will enable the merchants to post the image somewhere prominent without overwhelming the other material they need to present to their customers.

Overall, I’m pleased with it. As always, feel free to let me know what you think.