Where is Derek?

I so want to do this hiking trail. The overhang from the cliffs look amazing. As long as the harness is solid and secure, I am confident I wont die. Just take a look at the video and see what I mean.

[ Life.Iz.Good ]

A friend of mine is making her own fashion label and asked me to illustrate a few of her designs. I have done three rough drafts and wonder what you guys think? I haven’t decided how to illustrate the faces but I like how the general shape has turned out.

Illustration #1

Illustration #2

Illustration #3

What do you think? I think the hairstyles need work. I like the bold quality of #3 but I like the texture of #1, #2 definitely needs work. As for shape, I like #1 and #3 but #2 looks chubby even though the proportions are very close to the actual picture, what do you think?

[ Life.Iz.Good ]

This is day two of my six week summer vacation. This day started out really miserable but I was on vacation and I am going to have a good time. Checkout the rain during Thailand’s raining season.

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Hi everyone, I am now on Twitter and you can see my tweets on the right sidebar or directly at www.twitter.com/aries_rockstar. Since my Twitter account is also linked to my portfolio site, I will only tweet about art, design and other quirky things in Japan. I wilm leave personal thoughts and rants for this blog.

On another note, as you might have noticed, I have added some extra things to the sidebar. I will use this blog as a live testing ground for new themes, widgets and other things. I am also adding tags to all previous posts which is taking forever but is needed. I have a lot of work ahead of me, next up… Using more AJAX.

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My portfolio site has been looking dated lately, so I decided to up the image a bit. Since, I love WordPress (wp) so much, I am using it as a CMS (content management system) for my portolio site. I am learning about wp themeing and since I am a relative newbie, I decided to use the wp theme, “The UnStandard” by Derek Punsalan <— you have to love that name! ahah. I did little tweeks to the formatting but I intend to make the theme tailored to my sense of style. I do like that this theme breaks from the traditional magazine style layout and opts for a more visual one. A pictures says a thousand words and I would like to add that my work speaks for itself. I am working on adding audio to each portfolio piece, where each piece has a personality and talks about itself. I think its a great idea and you heard it first here. Checkout my new layout and tell me what you think.

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I have been working in vamping up the logos for OKF and FS and here we are:

My OKF logo was recieved very well but the older people making the final decision said that my design was too modern and wanted a more traditional logo that had architectural implications instead of the strong engineering element of my design so I took a shot and tried to keep the intial spirit of my original logo. What do you think?

Here I separated the ‘O’ and the ‘K’ and made the negative space in the center of the ‘O’ look like a vessel in which molten metal is held safely and securely. The angles of the ‘K’ mimic the roofline of the foundry. The line that breaks up the ‘O’ represents the pathway in which the liquid metal reaches the mold. This logo is the static version.

The next version implies pouring of the liquid metal and the angle of approach contours the rooftop theme of the logo.

These two versions play off the double laddle pour that was in the media images of OKF in 1954. The second logo has a cog in the negative space to represent casting engineering parts.

The last version is a new concept. I was thinking, I could reference the name of the foundry more and since the name is O.K. I did a play on words and created a checkmark. The concept here is what if the logo is a quality seal. I put a checkmark to reference that whatever has this mark has passed the high standards of OKF. Maybe I am reaching but you never know. I still feel I can make this logo simplier. What do you think?

As for the FS logo. I tried to combine Japanese Hiragana with the letter ‘F’. I thought of this because the webzine is mainly in Japanese and no one came up with the idea. I have mixed feelings but I gave it a shot. I am getting bored and my logos are looking the same. I need new inspiration and trying to do typography with Kanji was interesting and different but gave me a headache. Anyways, here is what I came up with.

This version’s style is a bit over done but I gave it a shot anyway. Half-tone dots and hand manipulation. Blurring the meaning from Japanese, what the Japanese person sees first and the English, what the English speaker sees first.

The next version is just a clear graphic of the logo. It looks graffiti-esque but this is a street fashion webzine afterall.

I will take a break for a few days because my eyes hurt. Nobody knows how much time I have put into these logos better than my eyes.

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