This is an assignment overview for my digital Illustration class. We emphasize the use of multiple applications as tools to achieve singular results. This assignment is a lead-in for our next assignment; creating
gaming textures!

After TV commercials, billboards, handbills, lawn signs, newspaper ads, and a website, I am now creating postcards for the final push towards election day. Here are the set of the final four. I have really enjoyed this years election. It has been a lot of fun and of course Mike is a great guy. I really ought to put together a self promo sheet documenting all the integrated campaign materials.

I’ve created a new website for Mike Kennedy’s campaign for CdA city council. I do a fair amount of work with Mike at Intermax Networks and I have known him for many years. The graphics which include yard signs, hand bills, this web site, a 60 sec video spot (commercial) and other collateral. We are also talking about a billboard and voter registration cards. Anyway, it is good work for a great guy who lets me have the creative freedom to incorporate my ideas into his overall campaign strategy.

I’ve been working on this for the last few weeks and I just came from the meeting where I presented my ideas. They loved the logo and the site I put together for them. It is always good to walk out of a meeting with positive feedback. Normally I charge $2,000 for a logo, logotype, ID kit. For web pages, depending on the type of site I normally get between $2,500 and $3,000. This was a special situation so I deferred my normal fees (I did not bother to tell them how much I charge.) and sunk myself into the joy of the work. This probably sounds a bit silly, but there is a lot to be said for doing the “work” out of a sense of fun and love and feeling empowered by the ability to call your own shots because of it. I certainly would have made as many changes and alterations as might have been necessary, but they loved what I came up with, no changes, and this by itself is very satisfying.

Here is the link to the site : Bitterroot Mountain, LLC.

Students sometimes fret over the complexity of PhotoShop and how overwhelming the breadth and depth of the program can be. Certainly it is the “Queen Mary” of applications. But the power of the program does not overshadow how useful it can be for very small, in-and-out jobs. In this sense, The Queen Mary becomes a sporty little power boat. For example, I have a client for whom I am building a corporate blog. I use WordPress for blogs 99% of the time because of the widget, plugin, and theme support from a very active open source community. This means I can block out a site quickly using a theme and then leverage PhotoShop and CSSedit to change graphics and styles to match whatever look and feel I am going for.

This particular header piece uses pictures from iStockphoto and combines them into a composite with very little done to them other than some simple masking, and basic changes in layer properties. In and out in 30 minutes, and that includes the time spent looking for photos. I love this program!

This has been an awful test of my patience, but I have stumbled across a third party direction on how to fix my WP 2.5 problem. The generic and almost useless direction from WP forums was to reinstall all the files and make sure that they were copied correctly. I did this three times (there are hundreds of files) and found nothing. A blogger then wrote to check on the “wp-includes/media.php and wp-settings.php” and make sure they are intact (re-upload them). I did check on them and sure enough there were partial files there in the directory when compared to the original files. (You can deduce this by comparing file sizes, in this case 10k vs 16k). I immediately re-uploaded these files and cleared the cache and restarted the browser and all seems to be well.

So the bottom line is; Yes the forum support was right. Make sure the files were uploaded correctly and all is well. However, why did I have to dig off some third party site to focus on these particular files? Or is this just me protecting my ego? Anyway. it seems to work.

Here is the link to the FAQ that answered the question.