Art for your Lifestyle

Pioneer Log Homes has contracted me to create the backgrounds and landscaping for their log home rendering. The images I create will go on their website to show perspective buyers what their designs look like in situ. The contract is a lot of fun because it is a blend of technical and creative which I love.

An example of a design they gave me:
This is what I did with it:

Here is the photo I used for the background:

Cutting and pasting images sounds easy, but this process is a lot more time consuming than you might think. It involves cutting around branches and leaves pixel by pixel:

As well as creating the background, I put objects in the foreground so the house looks like it is part of the landscape, such as the trees I added on the left. I colour corrected them to match the overall hues of the picture. I then add human touches like flowerbeds to make it more homey and reflections in the windows to show the sky and surrounding landscape.

Finally I add texture to the ends of the logs to make them more realistic. On the left is the before picture. In the middle is a version I use if the house is farther away and the one on the right is what I do if the house is closer up and I need more detail:
My renderings will be uploaded to their new website which they are launching in September. They will add more as they are completed.

I customized a wordpress blog for a client and his new website is up and running at crossfitokanagan.com.

To make the blog I downloaded wordpress from wordpres.org and I installed it on my server space. The advantage of doing this is that all the photos posted to the blog will be saved in a folder on the hosting space and not in no-man-blog-land. If my client ever wishes to move his hosting or get a new blog he will not have to re-upload all of his photos.
It was a lot of work getting the blog to run properly since there were some glitches with the new release of wordpress 2.5. After long hours of searching on help forums and blogs, I found out that a snippet of code needed to be added to an .htaccess file on my server so that the blog would use php5. Now everything is working great!

In my Digital Image and Video compositing class at the Centre for Arts and Technology we made a video for an ipod commercial. Our creative director came up with the concept and then it was up to us to conceptualize it. I spent about 100 hours on this project and that is not including the hours that my project partner Amanda put in or the hours of our actors, filmers, and sound engineer. A big thanks to everyone who helped us with this project!

We made our ipod commercial last year before the new touchscreens came out. You can see our version of what we thought their first commercial might look like:

My new digital media design portfolio website

is officially launched at www.kendragraphics.com.

My graphic design website is dedicated to my digital portfolio including illustrations, web design and development, and motion graphics. If you would like to see my watercolour paintings, please visit my kendraart website.

If you are interested in my design or consulting services, have a look at my services page to see what I can do for you or your business. I look forward to working with you.

The Life and Arts Festival in Kelowna, BC, is an amazing cultural event with street performers, art shows, workshops, music, drums, lanterns and fireshows.

On May 13th, I attended two design seminars in the ‘Design for Life’ exhibit. In the first presentation, designer Phred Martin spoke about the evolution of a design project. He stressed that design is not all about the creator; design stems from the client and in order to acheive the best results it is important to research your client’s interests, goals, and their target market. It is important to really know what the client wants, and then to interpret their needs, make a decision and get going on it!

One of the ideas that stood out in my mind was when Phred said that “excellence is great”, but “perfection is ugly”. He said that in his work sometimes he strives not to make his designs perfect. Perfection can be cold and boring, whereas imperfection can be interesting and unique.

In the end, perfectionism will also cost you more money and eat away at your bottom line. Unless your clients want to pay for your extra time, you need to be able to wrap up a project confidently and be happy with your work.

Don’t overwork design to hardened perfection; walk away while it is still alive and fresh.

From my experience with watercolours, sometimes the best thing you can do for a painting is to put down your brush. It’s when you keep working on a painting too long that you mess it up. With design there must be a parallel.

Furniture designer Judson Beaumont said he looks beyond the obvious to keep his work fresh. He said you have to be able to take critism, but don’t listen to people when they say “you can’t do that” or “it’s not done that way”. He said comments like that make him just go ahead and prove them wrong. He said you should take chances with design and challenge yourself to try new things.

The panelists also talked about clarity of expression and how good design means that even if it is bare bones, you don’t feel deprived. Someone mentioned that “the more you know, the less you need.”

Many businesses want to put everything about their business in every advertisement, even if it is a 2 inch ad. By researching your client’s needs and being familiar with compositional strengths, a good designer can say a lot more with less. Done well, simplicity always gives a stronger message than clutter.

The speakers also talked about social responsibility and the impact of design on the environment and on society. It is important for all designers to look at their work from a global perspective. It is so easy to get enmeshed in your work. Take some time to pull back and see the whole picture.

In the end, the most inspiring part of the festival for me was the lantern display in the Island Park. Jars covered in tissue paper by elementary school students from all around Kelowna were lit with tea lights, and they were set about to adorn a gazebo and the path up to it. Glowing in their simplicity, colourful and bright, they lit up the night in their imperfect beauty.

I am designing the portfolio pages for my website and I need to decide how to arrange the layout. There are so many different ways to present a portfolio page; some are fashionable and some are functional. Personally, I prefer function over fashion, but I want my site to look good too.

When you visit portfolio websites, what kind of layout do you prefer? Do you like big or little thumbnails? Do you like slideshow style views or do you prefer to see everything at once? Do you like it when a detailed image opens in a new window or in the same window? These are the kinds of questions I have been asking myself.

So far I have come up with a few different designs. Now all I need to do is narrow it down. Here are some rough drafts of layouts I could use…

Click here to vote in my survey, or just click on the word ‘comments’ below to send me your thoughts.

So, I’m putting the question to you. If you could control the layout of a portfolio page, what would be your must haves? What are your pet peeves? I would love to get some feedback from you on what you would like to see in a portfolio website.

It is so fun having a new space to express myself in. I really liked the blog template I chose (it was green) but I wanted to give this page a look and feel that would go with my websites.

I am so excited that I figured out how to put my butterfly over this layout at the top of the page. I am finally starting to understand divisions (in html). Notice how the butterfly (the one at the top of the page, not this one) is overlapping different areas, and it moves independently of the layout when you shrink or expand your window?
That is what a div can do for you!

I am so happy that I went to design school because I would not have known where to begin to change the colours and background images in this site. I guess I like having control over things like that… it makes it more personal and creative.