Archive for the 'Graphic Design' Category



Summer’s Comin’

Saturday, April 7th, 2007 by Richard Nichols

Summer's Comin'

Looking forward to the summer . . . Metro Atlanta has been kinda’ chilly lately. We love the beach and the ocean and wish we could live near there.

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At the Carwash . . .

Thursday, April 5th, 2007 by Richard Nichols

These images were made from a photo of vacuum hoses at the local carwash down the street from our home. The original image was made with my new Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera.

The abstract image above has been run through Alien Skin’s Xenofex’ Classic Mosaic filter.

This second image was enhanced with Flaming Pear’s "boss emboss" filter and then reprocessed with a plugin called Mezzoforce Ice.

This third image is a close up taken from the second image.

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Shiny New Logos for AFREMSO — InitialResponders.org

Thursday, August 31st, 2006 by Richard Nichols

AFREMSO logo rough draft

Recently we began work on a major fund-raising web project involving e-Commerce and CMS (content management systems) for American Fire & Rescue and EMS Organization, Inc, a new nationally-focused non-profit organization. Their mission is to procure funds to bolster the nation’s infrastructure by providing equipment, supplies and training for initial responders to emergency situations throughout the United States.

The logo rough draft on the right was provided to us by Mr. Guy Scull, president and evangelizer for the charitable foundation. It was designed by Lieutenant Matt Holston, the Hazardous Materials Coordinator for the Alpharetta Fire and Emergency Services (AFES) headquartered in Alpharetta, GA. Matt has chosen a traditional fire service symbol, the Maltese Cross which is a "red badge of courage, honor and dedication." He has superiposed it upon the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Star of Life for his composition.

As designers and artwork producers, our job is to interpret and computerize designs like this to create a long lasting identifier that can be re-purposed in many ways. The finished logo works well rendered in black and white as well as color. It can be scaled from small to large while maintaining visual clarity. Though the individual symbols are traditional and well known, we have tried to make this particular arrangement distinctive.

AFREMSO Logo

AFREMSO Logo blue&orange

We wanted this logo to emulate a "shiny red fire engine" but also tried to contrast hard edge strength with a softer "cushion" feeling. EMS technicians often stand right beside and reassure the Fire Services personnel in the initial responder support system. They are there just as much to serve and administer aid to the firemen as they are to serve the original victims of a catastrophe.

By adding depth through embossing and lighting we turned this logo into a medallion. The computer graphics software programs used were Macromedia Freehand, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Photoshop CS2 and Irfanview.

Fire, Rescue and EMS iconography is quite interesting. For centuries, the fireman’s hook and axe have helped him enter buildings, rescue occupants and gain control over fire by depriving it of fuel while trying to hold the fire at a distance. The fireman’s horn was used in early days to sound an alarm, but today is used for ceremonial displays. Some horns had wide mouthpieces and may have served as megaphones. 

AFREMSO Fire Logo detail AFREMSO EMS Logo detail

The fire helmet is a complex and expensive piece of equipment, with ridges for strength and a brim that is usually enlongated and tapered at the back.  Perhaps this keeps debris away from the fireman’s head and allows water to flow backwards and away, keeping the fireman’s back dry and better protected from heat.  Many of today’s fire helmets have large heat-resistant visors and a variety of fittings with built-in illumination and communications systems. 

The EMS Star of Life is the symbol of Emergency Medical Technicians and Care Units. It has six prongs that symbolize the six steps of a rescue mission: Detection, Reporting, Response, On Scene Care, Care in Transit, and Transfer to Definitive Care. While the fire service protects property and people, the EMS mission is directed towards first aid, health and life care. Follow the link above to learn the story of the star. 

One last thing before we go . . .

The number 343 on the fireman’s helmet stands for the 343 brave firefighters and EMS personnel who lost their lives at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 

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EventDrapery.com – Our first e-Commerce Web Project

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 by Richard Nichols

Back during the Easter Season this year we were approached about creating a rental product/service catalog and e-commerce web site for a new unique service company, EventDrapery.com, guided by Marina Miller here in Atlanta. This project required the creation of a searchable database of products, an electronic forms system, a shopping cart, the usual "about us" and "FAQs" modules and many "behind the scenes" pages, documents and web tricks. A sales-oriented website can involve hundreds and even thousands of considerations. This article is a detailed case study designed to let you peer inside one of our more complex projects.

If you haven’t already tried it or want to see it again, click once or twice on the play button in the drapery video above to see the drapery set itself up from scratch. Those clip-joint drapes are actually 12 feet tall. The Macromedia Flash video you see is made up of four kinds of photographic efforts: The flame retardant drapes were shot on location with an 8 mega-pixel Minolta DimageA2 camera. I used four Dynalite 1000x professional photographic strobe units with white umbrellas to evenly light the large area of at least 144 square feet.

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Flames on a Train

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 by Richard Nichols

External Combustion Engine

  • Similar visceral effects to "Snakes on a Plane" but with a stronger deadline
  • External Combustion Engine
  • On-line training gone awry
  • More powerful than a locomotive
  • Illustrated scene from a recent nightmare
  • Close encounters of the worst kind

This illustration is the result of some experiments I conducted with plugins in Photoshop.?We have an?on-going web project with American Fire & Rescue and EMS Organization. This led me to find ways to illustrate controlled fire and smoke in images specific to situations that might require initial responders such as firemen, rescue and emergency medical technicians.

In this image I used 7 layers– one for the kudzu beneath the trestle, one for the trestle, buildings and skyline, one for the sky, one for the train, one for the flames, one for the hazy motion trail above the train to simulate heated smoke, and one for the white wisps of smoke hovering on the train’s roof.

The kudzu was treated with a detail-enhancement filter to bring out the individual leaves. The trestle, buildings and skyline were distorted with a colorizer to break up the color pixels into posterized speckles. The sky was selected and re-created in Kai’s PowerTools 6 Sky Effects.This photo was actually taken a gray day– it rained while we were standing in front of this scene. I separated the train from the rest of the image and posterized it to enhance the colors, then duplicated it three times. The stacked layers were each run through one of three filters– fire, motion blur, and then smoke.

This cartoon-like image does not depict any particular transport or location, nor is it meant to look real. It is for image-effect studies to show our illustration capabilties in simulating a variety of conditions and environments using digital photography and image manipulation tools. Any resemblence to reality is purely coincidental, although this has been a hot summer. Given the choice of realities and circumstances I would opt for snakes on a plane.

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An 80 ft. wide x 14 ft. tall Mural for Microsoft’s MGX2006

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 by Richard Nichols

Microsoft Global Exchange Mural

Together, Norma and I created this huge mural for Microsoft last month, for their Global Business Exchange tradeshow held for 15,000 attendees from all over the world in Orlando?during late?July. If you would like to see the people up close and personal, click on the mural and it will open into a panoramic window in our gallery section. To give you an idea of the scale of the final piece, the lettering is over 7 feet high.

MGX2006?is an internal Microsoft global sales and software evangelist conference. The theme this year for Microsoft was and is “People_Ready!” Microsoft is preparing its?employees and associates?to embrace the next 12 years of business life in the computer field by trying to create and support software that empowers “people-ready” businesses.

Successful businesses succeed based upon the quality and performance of their people. Successful businesses make a practice of trying to hire the very best, the very brightest in all jobs inside their companies. The best businesses work very hard to facilitate their peoples’ success.

–?Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, in a speech before the MGX 2006 audience

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How We Create Professional Artwork from Digital Photos– Four Free Basic Photoshop Video Lessons From ArtonDisk

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 by Richard Nichols

Your photographs can quickly evolve into drawings and paintings if you learn the basics of using image-editing software, filters (plug-ins) and image layers.? In this weblog article I combine video tutorials and images to show you a few of our preferred methods of producing photo illustrations and sketches from digital pictures.

These four web-based Flash lessons are not about complicated procedures.? My goal for this first attempt is to get people who are vaguely familiar with image editing “off the ground” and into the fascinating world of crafting expressive illustrations using Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.? Experienced Photoshop users might enjoy seeing how we work, even if they left us behind years ago.

You will need to have your speakers turned on.? Your web browser might need its Flashplayer capabilities updated to version 9 — your computer will let you know if there is an issue.? Because this is “streaming media,” please allow time for the lessons to load (usually 10 to 45 seconds) after you click the links in order for them to begin playing. We used Camtasia Studio 3.1 screen recording software published by Techsmith to create these lessons.

The webcasts are indexed so you can watch small parts, then come back later to pick up where you left off.? Let’s start at the beginning:

    

1. Backgrounds & Making Selections 34:56

2. Using Photoshop Layers 24:17

    

3. Mending Defects & Using Plugins 17:16

4. Resources, PhotoBlogs & OnLine Training 21:35

Lesson 4 ends with an 85 image slideshow of illustrations we have made using the methods we describe here.? I have tried to keep these first screencasts uncomplicated because we need a foundation to build upon.? There’s no better place than here, and no better time than now.

I cover some useful procedures and secrets that I use every day in my work.? Photoshop isn’t difficult to learn but it has so many options that an aspiring digital image maker may easily feel overwhelmed.? You should find a simple system that works and stick with it.? Don’t try to learn everything, just focus on the tools and commands you need to achieve your desire.

Please bear with me because these are my very first screencast tutorials.? Any constructive feedback you wish to give by leaving your comments will be appreciated. Please report any technical issues you encounter.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn how to do it well.
— Steve Brown

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