Rock'n Blues Festival by the Lake - 4x6 Flyers

Rock'n Blues Festival by the Lake 4x6 Flyers are headed out to the printed to promote one of the biggest festivals held in Novato Ca.It will held September 26 at Stafford Lake and proceeds will benefit the novato public schools. The amazing B-52's will be playing and Blake Lewis the beat-Box guy from American idol will also be there.

Broken FM Bumper Stickers are here

Pink Broken FM Bumper Sticker

Green Broken FM Bumper Sticker

After much clamouring from the Broken FM fans and especially the DJ's I was able to finally got around to designing the Broken FM bumper stickers. The news about the station is spreading but they felt that a couple of stickers would help their efforts plastered on cars driving around town. They are in such demand right now that 1000 of them will be snatched up in no time.

I must give credit to Leah for coming up with the design for the pink one who has amazing talent and gifting at 16 with no formal training. I took her design idea and just tweaked it a bit to send to Greater Works Printing as a two color job. The originally were going to outsource the job but decided instead to print it in house and saved Broken FM 50% off the original price quote.

This station is definitely a lot of fun to design for because it allows me to explore the grungy side of things. Its a youth radio and they demand edgy, fun and very different so that's what they get.
By the way I like Leahs bumper sticker better, because its easier to read on the road, the big number and the outer glow make a big difference.

NorCal Spirit 11x17 Poster has arrived!!!

The poster for the 1st Annual NorCal SPIRIT concert benefiting Bay Area Christian Youth programs on August 15, 2009 at Stafford Lake Park in Novato, California is finally done and sent to the printer. NorCal SPIRIT is the biggest Christian concert in the North Bay other than Spirit West Coast in Monterey CA.

On the main stage Sanctus Real, Krystal Meyers, L-Rey and Nevertheless will be performing. Donnie Moore Radical Reality will be there as well as Edogg Montana, Jesse Brewster Band and Heather Powers. There will also be a Battle of the Bands featuring local bands that will compete for a chance to open up for Sanctus Real, win cash prize and a 2-Day professional recording session at Laughing Tiger Music Production Studios.

This project was a lot of fun and I got the job through my work for Broken.FM who is promoting the upcoming event on air. The background is a combination of three images found on istock photo which I believe help capture the spiritual essence of this event. The three images are the abstract light background, the floating figure and the city, photoshoped and then imported into Illustrator for the copy treatment. In this case I used a free font called Philosopher Regular that I found on one of my favorite font websites called abstract fonts.

Broken FM Logo

The Broken.FM logo has been one of the funnest and most exciting projects in a very long time. I met Keith and Rynie, the station owners, some time ago...they had a vision to start an alternative christian rock station in Santa Rosa,CA. The Press Democrat recently wrote an article called "Christian Rock Fills Santa Rosa Airwaves" which did a great job of capturing the essence of Broken.FM. I was approached in the early stages to design their logo and I jumped at the opportunity help develop the look and feel of this really amazing station. After many revisions the look for Broken.FM was born and we ended up with the Broken "Screamer", a young boy obviously listening to really loud and edgy music-- an image that is both recognizable and memorable. Keith Leitch said in the article that the station is folks of all ages who enjoy hard-edged music with a positive message. I think this logo captures the essence of what Broken.FM is all about, young, edgy, hard core, loud and fun.

The original logo was created as a banner for the web and then the blog. But I also created the "screamer" as a stand-alone image with the word inside to be used as an identity for Broken.FM's Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter Pages. The idea was to create consistency throughout all the social networks.

Increase traffic by blogging - Art Car Central Redesign

When times are slow it's time to get busy and get ready for the next wave of work. Last December it was painfully slow and I decided that the extra time on my hands was a gift to help me catch up and reorganize my business. So I decided to redesign my art car central blog and take it to the next level. It went from a boring template to a fully customized web site with lots of image buttons, videos, useful links and social network bookmarks on every blog entry. I had a ton of art cars I categorized for easy access, so I broke it all down by medium used, type of vehicle, popular tags, and a few other related categories.

I also designed the banner to reflect my love for typography and the movie marque. Art Car Central is cross between going to the movies and the circus freak show. I do all the non traditional looking art cars and beyond, mutant vehicles, crazy car modifications, and some new ones not yet up. My goal is to allow my readers to have fun exploring all the different categories of art cars for hours. In January my site was listed on Blogs of Note by Blogger, which was a nice way of saying "Good Job" and it sent my stats through the roof.

The lesson learned here is that when you get sense that it's time to move ahead with a project, you better listen to your gut feeling. Because missed opportunities stink and they set you back every time. The upshot of having redesigned the art car central is that, traffic increased, I gained valuable skills and sold advertising on my blog. The best part was that I picked up more work from a big internet company wanting to take their company to the next level.

I believe that every one and every business should have a blog because its one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site through current and relevant information. If your are not blogging, then you're missing out on an amazing online opportunity.

Art Car Central Blog Screen Shot