The Present

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New mixtape that is getting released today. Someone, who shall remain nameless, was originally going to design this for the studio but never got around to it. We had the release of The Future mixtape cd last week, and hope to have The Past come out next week (Houston?..).

I wanted to make the cd look like a current trend that I’d joked about before for the Coop logo. Kind of poking fun at it and not doing it that well to play up the ridiculousness of it all. Oddly enough, some in the studio who have seen it have not gotten the joke…

Addendum:

I wanted to add a couple more images of the final comped up sleeve.

Now, Voyager…

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This poem is one of my sister’s favorites. The Untold Want by Walt Whitman.

“The untold want, by life and land we’re granted,
Now Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

The 1942 Movie, Now, Voyager is excellent as well. (Although, this poster is not meant to partner the film.)

My sister said it felt like a circus poster. (Gasp!) I tweaked several things but it never felt that way to me. It definitely feels nautical. Yes?

Story Design

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For the past 4 months, I have been meeting weekly with four of my friends and my wife to develop a screenplay. That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but it has been a really great process. Three members of our group have screenwriting experience, so the rest of us are playing catch-up.

It has been fascinating to learn about the elements that make up a good story.  Dan Harmon, the creator of NBC’s Community, has written pretty extensively about these elements. Here are the basics:

  1. A character is in a zone of comfort,
  2. But they want something.
  3. They enter an unfamiliar situation,
  4. Adapt to it,
  5. Get what they wanted,
  6. Pay a heavy price for it,
  7. Then return to their familiar situation,
  8. Having changed.

I really like that this is not a prescriptive method that tells you how to hit certain “beats” to manipulate an audience into liking your movie. These are universal story elements that you will find in everything from the great American novel to 3-minute stories at The Moth. They follow a circular pattern that basically symbolizes death and rebirth.  Each element is also linked to the element on the opposite side of the circle.

Now for some graphic design.  I basically just cleaned up Dan Harmon’s graphic to make it a little less ugly.

I was really skeptical of this theory, because I hate formulaic plot-lines. My favorite movies have tons of unexpected twists and sometimes leave me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. But every good movie follows this pattern. Great movies create separate story circles for each character and layer them in surprising ways.

Late last night I decided to map out the movie, “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Not only did it follow the pattern perfectly, but Wes Anderson even inserts scene headings like “Mr. Fox has a plan” to indicate key events in the story.  On paper that sounds like a terrible idea, but it works so well.   If you haven’t seen the movie, the following graphic contains spoilers.

It would be interesting to correlate these events with the timeline of the movie to get a better sense of pacing. Next week I’d like to make an infographic about Fantastic Mr. Fox as a case study. What are some elements you’d like to see? Color and illustration for sure, but what else? Should I make icons to represent the elements? Should I make circles for other key characters?

More Cars

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It’s been a busy week, but I managed to fill a few pages with more car drawings for iStock. I’ll get these finished up and uploaded later this week.

Identity Crisis

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I am attempting a full-fledged freelance career and therefore need to make an impression. Micah inspired me to design my business identity (I won’t say redesign because I’ve never had a strong identity to begin with). I am starting with my website.

As I’ve shown my work around I’ve gathered from my responses that my current work is too disparate to show all together. I am, therefor, attempting to separate my images into different portfolios so that one would click into one and view similar work together. Currently my site just shows my work by project (below).

Below are my rough design iterations of my future website.

Questions for you:

1. Should I include so many portfolios or should I simplify my website to just one or two offerings? Or maybe create separate websites?

2. Joshua Fronk, Josh Fronk, J. Fronk, or maybe just Fronk? Studio or no Studio?

3. Do you like the icons looking generic-ish or should I try to infuse a more personal style? That goes for the website all together.

4. Which is your favorite? What’s working? What’s not?

Thanks everyone.

the Hei Road

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I’ve been getting way ahead of myself thinking about the future of my infant company. Currently I am just a guy with a couple of clients and an iOS app on the horizon. However, in time I would like to evolve the Hei Design Co. into something meatier. Eventually I want a team of around 10-15 people who love their jobs and are excited to come to work. Part of this will be choosing the perfect partner(s) and hiring the right people. The other part will be setting up an amazing company personality and culture. To that end I have have been thinking of my company rules. Here are a few.



From Houdini to Higher

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As an exercise in typography, I took a stylish H from and old, hand-lettered Houdini poster and created the rest of the letters in the quote to match.

When the words and lockup were complete it took a while to figure out how to fill the rest of the space—the shape this quote takes on is awkward. But I think this  space age-esque illustration is working. Then, after reading about all your addictions to “the grain” I decided to try it as it reflects the shading style of illustrations in that age.

As a side note, this last week I went through some hoopla with someone using one of my images illegally. Things have been taken care of, but naturally the experience has made me more cautious. I hate putting copyrights on my images—but there it is. Maybe I’ll loosen up again as time goes on. (sigh) Food for thought.

Paper or Plastic

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So my sister in law had a birthday this week. There were two things she wanted for her birthday (she’s a Junior in high school):

1. A logo
2. A poster

So as the dutiful big brother (Jenn, my wife, is her eldest sister) I gave her what she wanted. Her initials are HH, so it gave me a chance to explore different directions with just using an H in multiple ways, overlapping, knocking-out, etc. There are a few directions that I was pursuing, two that I took to a more final state, and then the final one that was selected by a distinguished panel of judges. Okay it was my mother-in-law, Jenn, and another sister. Under their discerning eye, we settled on the thinner stroked overlapping HH in a mossy green/mustard yellow combination (top left).

For her poster, I had a couple of ideas. I couldn’t settle on which one I wanted to do more so I did them both. One being straight text, it was rather quick to plow through. The other took a bit more time, as I had to create a factory and gears. Both posters are 18″ x 24″ and are taking up a very large amount of real estate on her bedroom wall.

Jenn’s sister is in high school. So the copy isn’t meant to be really high brow. Just meant to convey the message that you don’t have to be like everyone else. Just be yourself. And being smart is pretty damn awesome. Let me know what you think.

mousepaths

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I’m sure some of you saw this javascript mouse tracking art generator mousepaths from a while back, but I just came across these images again and was reminded what a cool concept this was. It’s a great way to make art while doing something else. The size of the circle is proportionate to how long your mouse remains idle.

I can’t remember the time lapse here, but these were my mouse paths while designing/emailing/etc.:

California Modern (continued)

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I worked a bit on refining the Richard Neutra and Julius Shulman graphics for my California Modern series, but I’ve been crazy busy at work (more on that later). Last time I shared this project I got some really great feedback. I tried to make changes accordingly, but there’s still a gap in knowing what looks wrong and knowing how to fix it.

old version for reference

old version for reference

John asked if I was going for a geometric look or an organic look. It really made me reevaluate the effect I’m trying to achieve. I don’t know if I’m capable of achieving an accurate likeness if I were to go 100% geometric. Without color or shading, it would be pretty hard to differentiate one old white guy from another (not all of them will have as prominent features as Neutra). Alternately, going 100% organic would mean just tracing heads and that’s not very appealing.

I don’t think John was saying that it had to be all or nothing, but I realized that I just wasn’t being consistent. Most of the shapes originated from circles, racetracks or rectangles, but I left some intact and broke up others. I decided to just break them all up at least a little. There were also some organic lines that could be simplified using geometric components.

The other valid point was that there was some weirdness where enclosed shapes interact with free lines.  I still don’t know how to fix that, but the criticism is valid. If I connected the wrinkle lines so they aren’t free, they’d would cease to look like wrinkles. Should I break up some of the enclosed shapes?

I also tried to thin out some of the lines in Neutra’s house, so hopefully that helps a tiny bit with consistency of weight. I started working on Ray and Charles Eames, but I’m not far enough along to share.

In other news, I work for a subsidiary of Hasbro toys and we just launched a new brand called Kaijudo.  There’s a tv show, card game, toys, video games, and more. I’m the in-house graphic designer for the website, and it has been fun working with animators, package designers, game designers, producers and copy writers.  I watched a sneak peek of the first few episodes of the TV show with my kids, and I instantly became the coolest dad in the world. Here’s hoping that it will be wildly successful! 

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