May 3, 2004

Pony Up

There comes a time in every young artist’s life when they create something that redefines them. Something that is the culmination of all their current knowledge put to practice and brings them up a notch or two on the food chain. When you create it, you know you have done something good… mainly because you notice, and more importantly, others notice.

One of the big ones for me happened a few years ago with a website called YouCanDealWithIt.com. The opportunity to redesign this site turned everything around for me at my last job because I proved to myself and everyone that I could in fact use Flash and HTML (though it was only with the unbridled support of Dreamweaver… this was before I saw the light). What’s more, it was the first site I got to take from start to finish, concept through to implementation. After this site, I became the designated “web guy”… which, in most circles outside of an agency, translates to “never dateless”. I have since left that job, and though the client has made some little tweaks here and there, the site remains pretty well intact. I have learned a lot since designing it, but still must recognize it as a major milestone in my design development.

Now, I put this task out to you, dear readers. Show me what you have created in your professional artistic career that made you feel like (or become) the new hot shit. Maybe it was a website, an illustration, or an article. Anything at all! The only real requirements being that it’s from your paid, professional career, and you must tell me why this item has made a difference to you. Post here what you have done (URLs to the work will do nicely) so that we can all reminisce with you.

The time has come to pony up and show me what you’ve done. If enough people share, perhaps this will become a regular feature.

Commentary (6):

1. Danny Cohen says… may 3, 2004 | 8:05 am

perhaps when I was fooling around and made A Form of the Times. I felt pretty good about myself then. I liked it, and how it turned out.

2. Todd says… may 3, 2004 | 9:29 am

A couple of years ago, through a friend of a friend, I was asked to design a movie poster for an independent film that was made in the Scranton area. The catch was that I only had a week to design it (think a 27” x 40” Photoshop image, the file was huge) and get at least 4 printed for the premiere.

It turned out to be the project that I’m most proud of. Besides getting it done fairly quickly, I was excited to be part of a film production (no matter how small it was) and designing a movie poster was something I always wanted to do.

Here it is if you want to take a look: The Ticking Man

3. Matli says… may 4, 2004 | 1:36 pm

At the end of 2003 I was contracted to do a photography site for a photographer out of Illinois. I had done a photography site before even though I wasn’t completely happy with the end result of this first photo site I felt confident that I could do a pretty good job with turning this one out in a timely manner and still connect with the artists vision.

I found out that an end result has alot to do with the client and what there passion is for his or her own work.

You tell me if I made it work out for VWC Photography

4. Kevin says… may 4, 2004 | 1:51 pm

I’d have to say that Reindeer on the Run was the real door-opening project for me. Working on it forced me to developed an illustration style for flash, and encouraged me to learn much more elaborate coding techniques than I ever would have tried on my own. All in all, it consisted of an email, nine room animations, and a great deal of back-end integration.

When I look at it now, I wince at some of the sloppiness, but I was very happy for what we created on such a large scale (and 2 month timeline).

5. Josh Williams says… may 5, 2004 | 2:53 pm

Alright, here comes a blast from the past… Back when I was in highschool, I did a book cover and some interior illustrations for a friend of mine who had written a book.

Back in 1997, this was hot stuff… ; )

Internet Family Fun by Joel Comm. As cheesy as this now is, I thought is was pretty darn sweet at the time… I was paid $1,000 by the publisher, and I was overcome with delusions of granduer at all the cash I would rake in with my design career.

Still waiting for that boat to come, but I certainly can’t complain about doing something I love to do.

6. Paul says… may 6, 2004 | 11:09 pm

Worked alongside graphic designers rebuilding Whitiriea Polytech web site. Got major headaches from:

1. sitting for HOURS with said designers adjusting things ‘just another pixel higher’

2. implementing valid css tabless layout for photoshop visuals designed with tabled layout in mind.

It was the first site that I built that taught me that things can look good and still (mostly) validate. It was here that CSS and I became the good friends that we still are today.…sigh

The only downside is the large bg images - if I could (get paid to) redo it - they would be first to go.