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Smalling Studios just finished designing this business card for Awaken with Love.  The colors are warm and inviting and invoke the positive feelings that should be associated with holistic therapy.  The website is now in the final phases of testing and will be launched shortly.

This postcard was designed for Roman Packaging, a company that specializes in creating custom packaging solutions. Normally I don’t show off smaller projects like this, but once I saw the final printed piece I knew I had to share.  It’s an over-sized 9″ x 6″ postcard, with a bright red that grabs the viewer’s attention and demands them to view the piece.  It’s being used as a select mailer to their industry groups, and as a hand out at their trade show appearances.

Check them out, the new business cards are finished for the studio.  I went all out this time and printed them on a 16pt card stock with a “soft-touch” aqueous coating and rounded the corners.  The next step is starting an email campaign and building the client base.

The Cultural Tools of IIF is an initiative formed by Limbach Facility Services to help drive home how important safety is to the company and their workers.  The piece showcases the six tools of IIF, and how Limbach has incorporated them into their corporate culture.  The brochure features several interesting details including an embossed/debossed logo on a textured paper as well as a translucent columned paper for the inside.  Both of these give the brochure a rich, tactile feel connecting the viewer to the design.

I recently finished a brochure design for Springwater Homes, a custom home builder located in Brevard County, Florida.  The design is based off of an existing brochure and incorporates some of their latest homes as well as their commitment to green building and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Builders Challenge program.   The final brochure was printed on glossy paper with a soft-touch aqueous coating to provide a nice tactile experience to the reader.

It’s now official, my website has been officially upgraded from version 2.0 to version 3.0.  The entire site has been built from the ground up to work with the WordPress platform making it easier to update and maintain. Also, new work has been added to better show my skills and the level of work a client should expect.  Be sure to check out the latest news where I’ll be keeping posts about all the latest projects I’ve been working on.

Sorry if you’re having problems accessing or finding items on my website. This weekend I decided it was time to re-evaluate the website and take it to the next level. I’ve formally adopted WordPress as my CMS for the new site and built a new template to display my entire site. While I couldn’t finish the entire site this weekend, I was able to get the posts up and running and start designing the portfolio pages. Within the next week I should have the site finished up and ready to show it off.

Also, as a side note, Marisha and I went to see Gabriel Inglesias at the Hard Rock Live in Universal.  We had a great time, and a lot of good laughs with his Fluffy Shop Tour.  If you get a chance, check him out.

The time is coming when we say goodbye to this year and move on to the next.  For me this always means holiday items for my clients.  For the past few years I’ve been designing the holiday calendar for C.T. Hsu + Associates, which is their way of reaching out to their clients and presenting their work.  For me, it’s always fun to explore different gradients of colors and how they interact with the different images.

You can view some of the previous calendars on my blog:

• 2009 Calendar
• 2008 Calendar
• 2007 Calendar

If you’d like to design your own calendar, here’s the template files for Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator

• 2010 Monthly Calendar Template – INDD File (InDesign CS 4)
• 2010 Monthly Calendar Template – INX File (InDesign Exchange File – all versions)
• 2010 Yearly Calendar Template – Illustrator File

Let me put my disclaimer first, this project was done under CT Hsu + Associates where I work part time.  The project was done for the Chinese American Scholars and Professionals Association of Florida, which was an organization  CT Hsu presided over.  The project itself a was re-branding the organization and building the collateral items for their technology conference which ended this past Friday.  Below is an overview of the project and some of the items that were created.

First, we have the logo.  Several months ago I was tasked with recreating their seal.  The only items they had were a crude photocopied logo on some old documents.   After several iterations the final design was approved.  It incorporated both a book and an image of the state, both of which pay homage to the group’s audience.  The blue color complements the metallic gray around the logo as well as the light gold of the book.

The next phase of the project was to develop the overall theme for the conference.  CT had several ideas and he wanted to incorporate several Florida images to help attract people to what we offer.  One of the first items developed was the preliminary program which incorporated the blue of the logo, and started building the standard fonts and graphics that would follow through the project.  From here, the artwork was handed over to the Valencia Community College team who built the save the date and sponsorship brochures before it was passed back to me.

The final phase of the project included making the support items for the conference.  These included the name badges, tote bags, award certificates, podium signs, banners, pop-up displays, gala programs, award trophies and many other items.  NGI provided many of the large format items as well as the printing of the programs.    Overall, it was a significant undertaking in a short amount of time, but with a good schedule everything was able to be completed on-time and the event was a success.  Marisha and I attended the awards gala, which had a nice dinner and some really good entertainment.  And to top it off I was awarded a certificate of appreciation (which I happened to create for myself earlier)!

Although this project was completed a few weeks ago, I just now had the time to take a few photos.  This was a fun project for Limbach Facility Services to highlight their educational experience.  Some of the items, like the notebook paper, I scanned and added to the piece, and others where from stock photo houses.  What makes this project really fun is the use of spot varnishes over the photos to give the appearance they are jumping off the page.  This came out much nicer than expected!  Thanks everyone along the way who helped with this project!