Continuing my contributions to the poster microsite collection for GSD&M’s 40th anniversary, I illustrated two posters that are being released today.
Poster #27 – The Good to Great Client Event. The agency had Jim Collins come speak to clients, colleagues, and employees about the future of the business, so I wanted to emphasize the purpose of the gathering with a big, bold typographic treatment that would communicate greatness – aspirational diagonal angle included.
Here are some of the original sketches for #27:
#25 – Our Friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton. I decided to illustrate silhouettes of the former president, first lady, and two of the GSD&M founders. Their relationships started around the ’72 McGovern presidential campaign here in Austin, so I created a frame wall of memorabilia surrounding the time they spent together at the beginning of what is now a long, enduring friendship.
Recently, fires devastated Bastrop and other areas in central Texas. During the fires, I was glued to weather satellites and news channels as I tried to send over information to my mother-in-law who lives in the Bastrop area. Fortunately, her neighborhood were spared, but the overall devastation in the area (and other places in Texas) was alarming. I knew that I wanted to help in some capacity.
Local design agency AIRSHP put together a charity microsite that is selling designer shirts to raise relief for the victims of the fires. I contacted them and was able to contribute a design titled “Bootstraps” for the second batch release of shirts, which is happening today!
Order one now here!
Last meet-up, the kind gentlemen of Paravel asked me to plan the next ATX dribble meet-up by throwing up a shot. So… here it is!
The next official ATX DRIBBBLE MEETUP will be Thursday, September 29, 2011 @ 5:00PM at the Ginger Man.
I’m still hoping Dave will bring a small pink basketball to the occasion, so we can stupidly toss it at each other. Come on, Rupert. Make it happen.
There will be an undetermined number of free pitchers of tasty, seasonal beer purchased by me, courtesy of the recent release of Prova.
If you’re part of the Austin design community on Dribbble, I’d love to meet you and buy you a beer. Let us know if you’re planning to attend in the comments on the Dribble shot here.
UPDATE (Wed, Sept 21) – Thanks to some extra work by Phil Coffman, this Dribbble meet-up has joined forces with another pre-planned happy hour by the folks over at 5by5 Network. Check out the updated details here.
Here is the first poster I designed in the GSD&M 40th poster series, #33 – Over 1,000 Awards. I created a grid of icons that represent prominent awards the agency has won and anchored a vintage channel letter of the number one in the center as a self-proclamation of the agency’s success and legacy.
And, here’s the original sketch:
For GSD&M’s 40th anniversary celebration, the group creative directors tasked the design and creative teams with illustrating posters of “the 40 best things that we ever did.” To display this collection, I designed an interactive gallery microsite that uses responsive techniques to serve up the posters properly across desktop browsers, iPads, iPhones and the like. The development was done in-house by the talented Joel Parr, and the logo was designed by Simon Walker.
We used responsive techniques to display the gallery properly across the iPad and iPhone browsers, creating a seamless experience.
The home page is a gallery of thumbnails that have been cropped in interesting ways to encourage users to click into the details pages to see the entire posters; we used CSS3 to add a nice rollover effect. The posters are planned to release for 40 days leading up to the actual celebration date.
Detail pages allow users to move through the posters with an easy sub-navigation, and share their favorites on Facebook or Twitter.
I’m excited to announce today that Prova, my first typeface, is available for purchase here. I poured a lot of time, energy, and passion into this typeface, and learned so much so quickly. Now, it’s time for a proper nap.
The word PROVA means “test” in Italian and “proof” in Portuguese. It was chosen to commemorate this release as the first of many typefaces I hope to design. PROVA started from tight sketches and evolved into a full, international character set. The primary intention was to produce friendly, condensed letterforms that contained the occassional charming quirk, but function as a hand-drawn workhorse display font that could compliment illustration and interactive work.
Special thanks to my wife, who supported and encouraged me through one too many nights of tedious kerning and tweaking.
I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed creating it. If you make any work using Prova, please rebound the Dribbble release shot or send me a message so I can review your submission for possibly inclusion on the typeface release page. Cheers!
