Zoom Zoom, and no, I don't mean Mozda.

I have recently been turned onto a British car show called Top Gear by my boyfriend. Its awesome. It brings out my love for zoom zooms, competition, and good wit. It definitely has me eying up cars again.
One of the cars they reviewed on an episode was the Audi R8, and man, is she pretty. I love an Audi to begin with. Sleek, smooth styling in a sophisticated way. The R8 is wicked. Just curvy and powerful. One can dream, right?
Here's what came of the Audi R8 review and a photoshop tutorial.

Public Enemies

I was killing time the the other afternoon before the weekly family get together and was feeling inspiration from propaganda war time posters (I had also dyed my hair a darker color and was feeling rather stealthy - so that may have something to do with my inspiration). There are have been a lot of comics being made into animated movies. With the upcoming fall 2009 release of one of my favorites, I combined inspirations.

Mix a little of column A with a little of column B and this is what you get in the mind of a Kita. Superman Batman Public Enemies. I really wanted to make them look even more menacing with something written about how anti whatever they are, but words were not on my side yesterday. I'll probably continue to tweak it in the future.

I have a meeting soon with to go over two prospective sites and finally line that all up. One I have a better feeling for now that I have a little more Wordpress designing under my belt. I think it will be the most convenient way for the client to update the information she needs to keep fresh. I am pretty sure I will be the one doing the updating still though.

The other site is pretty basic. Just something to showcase the clients work to prospective clients for himself and get a little more attention for his business. I expect to have both sites up and running in two weeks. Both projects wont take that long at all from the design and coding side. It's more the words that go on the site and the images on the site that will be taking up a large chunk of time. I try to be uber helpful with my clients as a lot of them really just want a website without the hassle of anything. Unfortunately, I often do not posses the knowledge needed to just write a stunning bio and info page for them. I will often times help flush things out though, once we have a basic outline of text.

For these sites, I will need to help get some photographs as well. The material isn't necessarily the easiest thing to photograph though. In one case it will be buildings, in which you want to highlight the craftsmanship, and the other is glass, which produces one heck of a glare. We'll figure it out and get it up and running as quick as possible though! :)

Can we fix it? Yes we can!

I have recently been assigned the project of creating a website for a commercial and residential building company. The individual had no preset ideas, no graphic, no logo, no color scheme, and doesn't even enjoy writing a bio page, leaving me, the designer and programmer, with a big blank slate.

Normally, the idea of a blank slate would excite me to no end as I could pretty much create anything and the client would love it. In this case, I really had to tame my normal flow, not use the feeling the individual gave me, and design a site built only for the individuals he would be sending to it and the opinion I wanted them to get when viewing it.

The person who the site is for has tons of character, is vocal, fun and entertaining. Immediately, I see a rugged grainy design with warm tones, even oranges and things to really make it pop. The business is commercial and residential contracting/building and design. I tend to think people don't want to associate rugged grunge design with who they pick when they are choosing someone for their new very expensive offices or custom home. Simple elegance comes to mind - which bores the heck out of me as an individual.

So I sat in my chair, staring at the blank framework trying to think of neutral colors and normal fonts, hoping for some for of inspiration to make this site personal again.

The final presentation for the client is simple (which is something I wanted from the get go) in a monochromatic color scheme of charcoals, that I feel gets the job done. I still feel it lacks the large amount of personal character that I love to include into all of my work for people, but maybe I'll get it there with some more tweaking. I promise, the Bob the Builder is just a placeholder. I wouldn't really post that.....
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Photoshop down time!

The other morning I had some time to kill so I went to my fav tutorial site that I like to use to keep myself on my toes and tweaked my way through an idea they had put out there. I love me some photoshop.