MARCH 24 2011

Branding for 1UP's Youtube Channel

Sometime this year 1UP started posting original video content on a YouTube channel, as well as hosting it on its own GameVideos.com. We wanted to brand the channel so that it looked more like 1UP, but more importantly, we wanted to get some links in there to try and drive traffic back to the site itself. Unfortunately, YouTube's customization is fairly limited -- it allows for color changes and a custom background and header image, but not much else.

Our resident web production guru figured out that applying imagemap coordinates in the header area would allow us to create clickable links. So, we went old school, and lay coordinates over top of a header image to make it look like a functional navigation in the style of 1UP.com. Voila. We're pretty darn happy with the result.

www.youtube.com/the1upnetwork

MARCH 14 2011

Poster for Disastroid/Big Blue Whale/Die Fistery

So the idea here is that I'll be keeping this page updated with my most recent design projects. This allows me to maintain a more extensive catalogue of stuff (as opposed to the necessarily leaner nature of my portfolio) and also to ramble on about some of the context and approach to each piece of work.

Of course, I need to get my butt in gear and start populating this 'blog', so stay tuned. I'll be filling this in backwards, towards older stuff I'd like to have in here. In any case, to kick it off, here's poster I made for a show we played at Kimo's in SF a few weeks ago. It's the circulatory system of a squirrel! God I love those old scientific etchings.

JAN 21 2011

New Blog Site for Disastroid

Yeah, that old Flash site was cool as hell, and it was in 3D and everything. The problem was that it was a Flash site, which means it was a giant pain in the ass to keep it updated. And nobody but me could do it. And I frequently found myself slacking off.

I created a quick-and-easy blog for the band on Blogspot, in the hopes that we'll all be better about keeping it fresh with new content. With the little bit of artwork I made, it actually looks pretty cool.

You can still play the Disastroids video game if you go all the way down to the bottom!

www.disastroid.blogspot.com

SEPT 17 2010

Feature Art for FFXIII Article

The article was an interview with the composer behind the music of Final Fantasy XIII, Masashi Hamauzu.

This is a good example of the kind of thing I do a lot for 1UP. Sine we're putting out 3-5 features a week, it's tough to find the time to do a complete, original illustration for every article. More often, I'm using some existing game art assets, then creating a composite with other graphic elements. This has a few advantages. For one, it's faster than doing full-blown original art (as fun as that would be.) It also visually differentiates the article from regular coverage of a game, and from other press outlets -- pretty much everyone else just throws a screenshot or an untouched piece of key art up on the story. And it gives 1UP features a signature look: a combination of game art and other (usually vector) elements, with saturated colors and gradients. So even though these composites come out of the necessity of a busy schedule, we're able to use the approach to solidify the 1UP visual "brand".

OCT 28 2009

8-Bit Art for ATB Podcast

Active Time Battle (or ATB) is 1UP's RPG podcast, hosted by (at the time) Kat Bailey and Jeremy Parish. They wanted a image of the two of them as Final Fantasy 4-style sprites, for use in the podcast page header and logo.

The show went on to really become Kat's, and in 2011 she sadly left 1UP, so the future of ATB is unclear. In any case, it was fun to try and create some 8-bit art in the Final Fantasy style, and even more challenging to actually make it look identifiably like some real people. I'm pretty happy with the result.

SEPT 17 2009

No More Heroes 2 'Cover Story'

One of the cooler things I've been able to do while working at 1UP is redesign their approach to "cover stories". These are weeklong exclusive geared towards a particular game or developer, which appear only on the site but are played up to look like magazines. So designing them is somewhere between online design and magazine cover design.

Typically, we receive key art assets from the developer or publisher -- the better the assets are, the easier my job is. (When we get nothing at all, it can be a real challenge coming up with a cover, as it typically requires a lot more illustration.) So the covers tend to fall somewhere between design pieces and illustration pieces for me -- I'm hesitant to put them in my portfolio since I often rely so much on other peoples' key art, but on the other hand, I often mess with the assets a lot and really make them my own.

In this case, the guys making No More Heroes 2 gave us some fantastic character art pieces, layers and all. Here's the character art that they provided for Travis:

But, I decided to mess with the art anyway, gave it a black and white, "photocopied", fragmented look. The idea was to try and create a less-clean, more "punk rock" feel for the cover. It seemed appropriate given the tone of the NMH games, and kept our cover looking different from the coverage other press outlets.