The time is coming when we say goodbye to this year and move on to the next.  For me this always means holiday items for my clients.  For the past few years I’ve been designing the holiday calendar for C.T. Hsu + Associates, which is their way of reaching out to their clients and presenting their work.  For me, it’s always fun to explore different gradients of colors and how they interact with the different images.

You can view some of the previous calendars on my blog:

• 2009 Calendar
• 2008 Calendar
• 2007 Calendar

Let me put my disclaimer first, this project was done under CT Hsu + Associates where I work part time.  The project was done for the Chinese American Scholars and Professionals Association of Florida, which was an organization  CT Hsu presided over.  The project itself a was re-branding the organization and building the collateral items for their technology conference which ended this past Friday.  Below is an overview of the project and some of the items that were created.

First, we have the logo.  Several months ago I was tasked with recreating their seal.  The only items they had were a crude photocopied logo on some old documents.   After several iterations the final design was approved.  It incorporated both a book and an image of the state, both of which pay homage to the group’s audience.  The blue color complements the metallic gray around the logo as well as the light gold of the book.

The next phase of the project was to develop the overall theme for the conference.  CT had several ideas and he wanted to incorporate several Florida images to help attract people to what we offer.  One of the first items developed was the preliminary program which incorporated the blue of the logo, and started building the standard fonts and graphics that would follow through the project.  From here, the artwork was handed over to the Valencia Community College team who built the save the date and sponsorship brochures before it was passed back to me.

The final phase of the project included making the support items for the conference.  These included the name badges, tote bags, award certificates, podium signs, banners, pop-up displays, gala programs, award trophies and many other items.  NGI provided many of the large format items as well as the printing of the programs.    Overall, it was a significant undertaking in a short amount of time, but with a good schedule everything was able to be completed on-time and the event was a success.  Marisha and I attended the awards gala, which had a nice dinner and some really good entertainment.  And to top it off I was awarded a certificate of appreciation (which I happened to create for myself earlier)!

Although this project was completed a few weeks ago, I just now had the time to take a few photos.  This was a fun project for Limbach Facility Services to highlight their educational experience.  Some of the items, like the notebook paper, I scanned and added to the piece, and others where from stock photo houses.  What makes this project really fun is the use of spot varnishes over the photos to give the appearance they are jumping off the page.  This came out much nicer than expected!  Thanks everyone along the way who helped with this project!

I just came across this on Von Glitschka’s blog Art Backwash, and I had to repost it. All I can say is cheap fonts suck!

I’ve been working on a fun project lately. While I can’t give many details at the moment, I have made some really nice collateral items for the project including this landing page for the website.  I should be able to post more soon!