Weapons of Mass Creation Fest 2012 is getting closer and closer!

Well, look at that! Jeff designed some cool badges for the people involved with #wmcfest3 one way or another. Also, look at the cool flyer and poster for the event:

GraphicDesign.com is a leading source of news and information devoted entirely to the graphic design industry. Employers, students, and freelancers come to GraphicDesign.com to read and discuss current news, information, and events in the graphic design industry.

A couple people decided to purchase the domain name GraphicDesign.com and to turn it into something else than a parking page. They’ve invested a lot of time and energy into turning this site into a legitimate resource for students, professionals and enthusiasts. A couple months ago, we were asked by the folks behind the site to be part of their advisory board, alongside people like Von Glitschka. Although we have some experience with the managing side of a design blog through our work on the GoMediaZine, to be in an advisory position rather than having to make the final call is pretty interesting.

We’ve watched the site evolve quite drastically to become what it is today, from content to user interface and experience. And we’re pretty proud to have been able to help guide the GraphicDesign.Com crew to get to where they’re at now.

They got a full press release out detailing all the new features on the freshly redesigned site, but we think the most interesting thing to do is to go on the site and to see the all new goodness for yourselves!

Man, it’s been almost a month since our last blog post about iPad drawings. It’s time to dust off the blog and make a summary of what has been happening in this really nice month of March 2012.

We’re going to WMC Fest 3!

Well, first and foremost, we’ve been invited again to go to Weapons of Mass Creation Fest as part of the designers showcasing work. Saying that we’re pumped doesn’t come even close to cover it. I mean, just look at the speakers and designers list! Having our names close to the likes of NoPattern, Signalnoise, Johnny Cupcake, Ryan Brinkerhoff, The Go Media team, Jon Contino… Oh boy.

From June 8 to 10 (maybe 11), we’ll rock beautiful Cleveland, OH. If you didn’t go last year, here’s a snapshot of what you missed:

Awesome, huh? So stop thinking and go buy that week end pass. You should also consider contributing to the Kickstarter fund, in order to help fund the event.

We’re working with 91.1 The Globe!

We are very pleased to announce that 91.1 The Globe has chosen the studio to handle its rebranding and web presence rethinking.

What’s the Globe?

The Globe is Goshen College‘s own radio station:

As a federally licensed trustee operating in the public interest, the Globe serves the greater Goshen community with a distinctive and professional radio voice. The Globe also serves Goshen College, its owners, by providing a quality on-air product that supports and extends the college’s core values, mission, programs and standards. Within this framework, the Globe provides a dynamic environment in which students learn industry standards of operating, marketing and managing a radio station.

— From the Globe’s website About page

Not only does this project offer us the opportunity to put a very solid, stubborn foot in the door of the radio world, it also allows us to work with the 2011 best college radio station in the nation, and with the 2012 Indiana best college radio station.

Cool, but what does it look like?

Since we like you guys very much, here’s a sneak peek of the new branding:

We’ll soon post a more detailed post about this, along with some of the rejected marks that led the Globe team and us where we’ve ended. You can see a bit more until then if you go through the rebounds of the project on dribbble.

A few more things

We’ve also started to work or kept working on a few more projects.

Early upgrade

We’ve designed and launched (in somewhat of a beta phase) a web application for Early Upgrade.

Early Upgrade is a company that buys and recycles your used and unwanted electronic devices. The web application streamlines the process of one entering a device in the company’s database, enter its condition (from mint to destroyed), knowing how much $$$ you’ll get for it, register some basic contact information, and finally generate a packing slip to send the device.

Mobile optimized version and corporate/multiple devices version are on their way.

Legacy Home Furniture

Legacy Home Furniture is a local Amish furniture shop out of Middlebury.

We are currently working with the owners to refresh their web presence, and make the extensive collection of furniture styles available online.

A major 13 Spade overhaul

As part of a few but decisive changes under the hood here at the Studio, we’ve decided to completely rethink how we manage 13 Spade, our print store. Expect new prints, amazing guests artists, all packaged in a new visual experience. ETA: roughly 3 months. We’ve already got the quotes for the new prints!

And lots more!

We have much more happening. Just watch the Dribbble shots and Tumblr posts to keep up with what’s happening.

What’s this?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a selection of some of my iPad sketches. Most of these were done just for the pleasure of drawing, some others have been done as part of projects, and some others might become prints.

These have been done on an iPad 2, using a Wacom Bamboo Stylus and Sketchbook Pro.

The general identity was created by Andy 2 years ago, based on the famous covers of Penguin books. We decided to keep that, as we liked that approach a lot. From there, here’s what we came up with:

We’ve also developed the design for the programs of each show, as well as the template for the Red Post advertising system we have in town (digital sign advertising).

There are plans in the work to sell some limited editions of these on 13 Spade. Maybe even some signed by the cast. We’ll keep you posted.

Hello there. We wanted to write a quick post about what’s going on at Studio Ace of Spade (and to show you that we’re not slacking). So here’s what’s happening, in no particular order:

• We’re working on the Early Upgrade web app. More about this soon!
• We unveiled new prints for 13 Spade, Cold tone and Warm tone. We’re also working on expanding the line with other prints from us and others.
• We’re working on the branding (and web presence) of a law firm, Comerford and Dougherty. Watch the progress of the project on Dribbble.
• We made a new year’s print and released some freebies
• After the success of our 2 first posts for Smashing Magazine (about textures in web design and business processes applied to low budget projects), we’re working hard on our 3rd post. It’ll focus on how to pick up on clients red flags, and some ideas on how to deal with them
• We’re almost ready to unveil the full series of posters we did for New World Arts, after unveiling the illustrations late last year
• We’re (slowly) working on the branding for Kansas Bible Company
• And much more that we can’t even talk about!

Cool list, but what does all of this look like?

You should go check it out, and admire the rest of the images selected for that day as well.

Let me apologize in advance for the length of the story behind the poster, but these have been long in the making.

I’ve been playing guitar for a little over 8 years now (and I’ve become really skilled… or not). Right when I started playing guitar, I also started to be passionate about the gear my favorite guitar players were using. That’s when I learned about tube amplifiers and solid state amplifier. Right after that, I learned about their price, and ended up buying a solid state Marshall amp, and focusing on buying a cool guitar instead.

The year after starting to learn guitar, I also started to study industrial and product design. This is probably what educated me to appreciate the beauty of objects sometimes designed solely for industrial purposes: big industrial fans, factories, product building chains (think about car factories), computer chips, etc.

That’s also the year when I started to discover the beauty of grunge music: Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, etc. Nirvana naturally led me to Foo Fighters, even if it was late. The Foo Fighters ended up leading me to this release, which cover has been designed by the immensely talented folks at Invisible Creature. I put my hands on this album when it came out, and forgot about it for a while.

Then, last year, as we geared up to get the 13 Spade collection ready,  I saw that cover art again. And then I came across the image below:

And then, I found the National Valve Museum. Which has stuff like this on file:

Being a sucker for vintage stuff like this, and because the strange complexity of their inner filaments and components combined with the tiny scale, I decided I absolutely needed to do a tube based poster. I reached out to Allan, who’s the man behind the impressive, massive and meticulously organized collection at the National Valve Museum in order to get reference photos, which he kindly provided.

Then, I set out to try to conceptualize something… and failed. Then work and life happened, and we moved on to other concepts for the 13 Spade first series of posters.

A few weeks ago, the holidays were giving me the perfect excuse to do some more “personal” work again (especially since Project 52 was on hold). So I started drawing again. My first intention was to draw/trace the tube, and then to ink it digitally.

The drawing:

The digital inking attempt:

This one obviously failed because my drawing was way too crude (on this topic, I’d recommend reading Von Glitschka’s Vector Basic Training! More about this soon). I made a second attempt:

I deem this 2nd attempt as failed as well. I don’t know why, but this just wasn’t hitting home. So I decided to scrap this altogether and to use another technique I’ve learned on the GoMediaZine to digitize and vectorize the tube, starting from the picture Allen provided for me:

The result was much more satisfying to me:

Not only was it closer to what I was envisioning in terms of details (even the sweet vintage type and logos made it), it was also much cleaner in a way. After further refinements (and a halftone treatment) and the selection of my color palette, I was finally ready to start my texture magic.

Once Warm tone was done, I decided that a sister print pointing out the difference between tube sound and transistor (solid state) sound was in order. And that’s how the diptych is born. The awesome Homestead font by Luke Lisi was just a perfect fit, even though I was hesitating at some point for the Cold tone type treatment. You can follow the steps of my progression through the design process starting at this Dribbble shot and by following the rebound stream.

A special thank you to…

I would like to take the time to thank Allan Wyatte, the man behind the National Valve Museum.

Without his willingness to share the high resolution EL34 picture for free, this crazy idea would have never happened. Or at least, the result wouldn’t have been the same. His efforts to build the Museum are just incredible, and he’s done an amazing job at collecting, photographing and sorting all of these references. And since we donated some money and purchased the Museum’s DVD, maybe there’ll be other tube themed prints, who knows…

The prints

Cold tone

Warm tone

Thanks for following this in its entirety! We’ll let you know as soon as these are added to the shop (requests/willingness to pre-order could speed up the process).

By the time you’re reading this, it should be January 1st, 2012. The whole team here would like to wish you a happy new year, and all the best for your endeavors in this fresh set of 365 days (that is if the Mayan calendar thing isn’t true) that’s ahead of us.

Announcements

Here at the Studio, we decided to kick off the new year right by making a few announcements:

• We’re doing a “Kicking off the Year of the Apocalypse by cleaning out the inventory” sale on 13 Spade! It’ll happen for a limited time only, and it’s the perfect spot to get these late holidays gifts. Please remember that this first run is the only one we’ll do on canvas, and there were only 10 prints of each. And there might be a little surprise hidden along with the first, let’s say, 10 orders.  Finally, the inventory has already taken a good toll during 2011.
• We created a small poster bundle, combining the prints “Air traveling” and “Broadcasting” in a diptych. It’s (almost) 2 prints for the price of 1!
• New prints to launch soon! Here are some sneak peeks (that you might have already seen if you followed our Tumblr and Dribbble shots closely these days):

Also, beyond that, we’ve got a couple truckloads of work in the pipes for January and February. Some really exciting projects, that we can’t wait to share with you.

Freebies!

We also decided to jump start the year by giving away some texture freebies.

The first batch is a series of scan of a Polaroid picture that turned out completely wrong (film expired for way too long). We scanned it in its original state, but we also wanted to know what what inside of it.

The second series is a couple scans from a piece of heavy paper/cardstock.

These scans are high resolution scans (600 to 2400 dpi), and should be fit for any design projects, from print to web. That high resolution means that it’s going to be 2 long downloads, and 2 big Zip archives. The first archive is named “saos-2012-kickoff-freebie-pack-2012.01-polaroid.zip” and weighs 87+ Mb, the second one is named “saos-2012-kickoff-freebie-pack-2012.01-heavy-paper-full-resolution.zip” and weighs 328 Mb! Just click on the links to start the downloads.

We choose to use a Creative Commons license to release them:

This work by Studio Ace of Spade is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

That means that you can use them in commercial and personal projects, with or without attribution (although sourcing them would be nice). What’s forbidden is for you to sell them or to claim you’ve created them. Feel free to share what you did with them!

Also, something tells me freebies like these might become a regular thing over at a certain blog that we’re the editors for, but shhht. Stay tuned for more!

2011 is (almost) dead, long live 2012! Well, the year is coming to an end, and it has been an incredible one for Studio Ace of Spade. It has seen, in no particular order:

• Our first full year in business, and the one year anniversary of our collaboration
• A clear increase in the volume of inquiries from potential clients
• Truckloads of amazing projects coming through our doors
• Some great long-term collaborations started with our clients
• The Studio being published twice on Smashing Magazine (“career goal” achieved!)
• The Studio taking over as editors for the GoMediaZine
• The Studio being published as tutorial authors on the GoMediaZine (“career goal” achieved!)
• The Studio being awarded a grant by the Goshen College Business Department
• Our first exhibit at a design festival (Weapons of Mass Creation Fest 2011)
• The opening of our online store 13 Spade
• An almost successful attempt to start a weekly project (Project 52)
• And much more!

2011 project highlights

• 13 Spade
  13 Spade is our very own online store, where you can find some of the posters we design in our spare time but also some other talented artists’ creations.

• Kelly Jae’s Café
  Kelly Jae’s Café is restaurant located on the main drag in downtown Goshen, Indiana that serves unique and delicious foods. With a unique dining experience, Kelly Jae’s can serve as a casual or formal meeting place.

• Menno Tea
  Menno Tea began as a small, on-campus business venture started by Hans Weaver and Niles Graber Miller, both underclassmen at Goshen College. As their distribution area increased, Menno Tea came to us looking for a new design for their bottle as well as a facelift for their website.

• Fletcher Drive
  Fletcher Drive is a web comedy series started by Paddy Connor and Robert Dierx. It’s characters are in and out of touch with reality, and its creators were looking for a brand and web presence which were simple and memorable.

• Writing for Smashing Magazine
  The Studio wrote 2 articles for Smashing Magazine in 2011, and we hope to get at least 3 times as much out in 2012. We wrote about the use of textures in webdesign and about cost-cutting business processes.

• Writing for the GoMediaZine
  We finally got a stab at writing a much requested tutorial about how we use textures in our poster work. The icing on the cake is that we got it published on the GoMediaZine, which has been one of our objectives for a while.

• The Lost & Taken poster
  In the past couple years, there has been a renewed interest in textures in design. It’s gone beyond being a trend, and has been a wonderful tool in the designers and artists toolbox to add visual depth and interest to a project (…). The next step for a designer is to constitute an arsenal of textures, in order to expand the options at his/her hands. (..) After the years, it’s clear to us here at the Studio that in terms of texture resources available online, Lost and Taken has been the most helpful website in this endeavor.

• Kansas Bible Company
  The Kansas Bible Company is a band started by a bunch of our college friends. They asked us to create a poster for their first gig back in the area since they moved to Nashville, TN. We currently have more in the works for them…

• David Culp & Co.
  David Culp & Co. LLP is a full-service firm with collective experiences in all forms of taxation, as well as for profit and not-for-profit accounting, compilation, attestation, and business planning and consulting services. They came to the Studio needing a new website.

What the hell happened to Project 52?

Project 52 was and still is a dear project to us. The concept is quite simple:  for every week of 2011, we would release a quote based poster (see ALAD by Luke Beard for inspiration). We were on the right tracks, and managed to complete 26 installments (the good in math people will notice that’s half of what we planned for).

At first, a failure of one of our trusted computer slowed down our client work so much that we had to catch up on it in priority. The project got put on hold. What happened on top of it is that we got a lot of client work coming in at once. This made us shelve the project for so long it was impossible to catch up before the end of the year. And so, this is how the 2011 Project 52 became Project 26.

The goal for 2012 is to finish that project (we have 2 series of preselected movies and songs already ready!).

Some conclusion notes

2011: awesome year. 2012, hold tight, as we’re planning to go above and beyond!