A little bit of exposure..

I have recently began my internship with Epidemik Coalition, a branding and design studio here in Atlanta. Made up of Portfolio Center alumni, I will be spending the remainder of the quarter redesigning their website. This opportunity came about after I had a class with one of the founders, Larry. The class was called Entertainment Design. It is basically a dream class of any designer who loves music. We focused on the rebrand and design of an assigned music artist's album cover, single cover, tour poster and merchandise items. I was assigned The Deftones, and wanted to take a risk. I wanted to take what was just a typical heavy radio-rock band and push them towards a different direction, or "experiment" if you will. I decided, after finding 2 acoustic version songs, to create an acoustic album and tour. Being a band known for their experimentation of different sounds, I decided to call the album The Acoustic Experiment. The idea is to carry you through the process of their recording, and that their hard personality still flows even if it isn't out of distorted half-stacks. The album carries the image of a solid clean acoustic guitar, which once you reach the inside the viewer would find the guitar in shambles, representing the starting element (clean acoustic) to finished result after music was made (smashed to pieces.) I was really excited about this album and look forward to tweaking it for the future to pop it into my final portfolio. Here is an image of the finished piece. The inside also carries a set of collector guitar picks with gold deftones logo, The Acoustic Experiment title, and a guitar logo I designed. Check it out:



I also was carried onto the Epidemik website currently. Here is a screen shot of it, or feel free to look it up on the site, EpidemikCoalition.com.

Skylines

I love skylines of all cities. I found this video. Figured I'd share.

Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

On its way.

Be on the look out in the upcoming months.

Updated Schedule

So I figured I would give the rundown on what I am doing these days. I am starting my 6th quarter, which basically means I'm on the home stretch of being finished with the Portfolio Center design program. I CAN NOT BELIEVE IT! It feels like I just started, yet it feels like I've been here 10 years. Here is my current schedule as well as a little blip about what I'll be doing in each class or job:

Monday: 12-1:30 Peachtree Street Photography Book - My friend Erin and I, the same person I worked on the Fernbank photography exhibit with, have been requested to direct another photo project through the school. This time a little bigger of a deal. All photographers are assigned to the class, 17, and will be documenting the famous street of Peachtree in Atlanta, the main vein of the city. Erin and I will be heading up the design and writing portion of the book, as well as defining the conceptual direction and overseeing the project all in all. I am pumped and honored to be working on what could potentially be one of the coolest projects produced by a Portfolio Center team. We set up a "war room" in the photo studio, where basically people can write notes and thoughts on the walls, and pin up pictures, spreads, timelines, dates, emails, notes, etc. Pretty cool.

Wednesdays:
- 8a-12p Message and Content class - basically we are learning semiotics, the study of signs. Information design is so relevant in my industry, and we will be developing different projects in which we will place into real environments and study people's reactions to our pieces, as well as a developing a mapping assignment of ourselves.

- 1p-5p Modernism and Design History - this is the macdaddy class of Portfolio Center. Many students come to the school just for this class. Taught by Hank Richardson, the former president and design head of the school, we are studying major art movements in history which our projects will be based on. Here are the assignments I will be developing:
• a chair based on the connection between the psychadelic movement and a personal story of mine (some picture examples of other student chairs below)
• a written narrative/book based on International Style and the discussion of process being more important than outcome.
• wine bottle set for Robert Mondavi (vineyard based in Napa Valley, CA) which will be designed with the Swiss International Style, also known as the International Typographic Style
• a gift for a current designer/artist based on a personal interview we will undergo. I will be doing Rick Valicenti, based in Chicago.

- 6p-10p Packaging 2 - rebranding a company through structure and product design. For my first assignment, I will be doing TAG body spray. The second product assignment will be in the second half of the quarter.

I also will be interning for Epidemik Coalition for the next 6 weeks. Epidemik is a branding and web development studio based here in Atlanta. They are a group of former Portfolio Center students who are now recruiting business left and right. I will be redesigning their company's website over my internship time span. It is so awesome to have this opportunity to design something that will actually get launched live after 6 weeks. Check out their current site, as well as their clothing line, Process.
epidemikcoalition.com, wearetheprocess.com.

That's all for now. As you see I will be a busy fella over the next 3 months, but I am READY!!!

Museum of Design Atlanta work

I took an environmental design class this past quarter. Some of the images of the scaled model are in an older post. Here is a 3d animated walk through of my exhibit, which I created through a 3D rendering program. Check out the video clip.

New Year, New Opportunities

I love New Years. People ask me what my favorite holiday was, and at one point in my life, Christmas would have definitely been the first thing to pop in my head. These days, that isn't really the case. Sure, I love Christmas and everything that its about, but there is something about New Years that seems to hold a greater value to me at this point in my life. People celebrate all other holidays that occur during the year differently. Whether it be Valentine's Day, and a couple goes out to the typical dinner and movie, or they do the anti-valentine date and decide to not support it at all. Or Christmas. With many celebrating Christmas day, or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or decide against it all together. But New Years. New Years is for everyone. It doesn't discriminate. It's one of those holidays that doesn't have a grounding in some type of emotion such as Valentines, or based on a historic event such as July 4th. It's everyone counting down another year that they have spent as an individual in this world. It's especially important to me now because as each year goes by, the more I change and my life changes. I am now entering my last 9 months of graduate school which will close the educational chapter of my life for good. This time next year, I have no clue where I will be. Does it make me nervous or anxious, sure. But the excitement of the unknown and the adventure at hand is much greater. We go through really great, memorable times during each year, while at the same time, we endure dramatic life-changing events. Sometimes you feel like you made the right decisions that led you to where you are, and sometimes you make wrong choices, that again, leads you to where you are. New Years is another chance for everyone. It's a clean slate. What can you do differently this year to make it great based on lessons you have learned in the past years? Don't ever step into a new year with regrets or fear, but with the mindset that it will be the best yet. If it doesn't turn out how you like, well, it's only 12 months until you get another shot. Cheers!

I don't just photoshop...

One of my biggest assignments of the quarter and definitely one of my biggest challenges so far was my project for Environmental Design. Being assigned the architect, Louis Kahn, I was to create a concept for an 8'x8' mobile exhibit that could be disassembled and moved frequently. Naturally we weren't required to build the actual exhibit, but a scaled model set at 2"=1'. I decided, due to Louis' life being quite tragic and depressing, to focus more on the style he used, which was International (modern). The space is more about volume than mass, meaning big solid walls with little ornamentation. I also wanted to include representations of Kahn's water garden design from Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The side windows are representations of illuminated water gardens filtering down each side of the exhibit. The back wall is a translucent glass panel with a bitmapped image of Kahn himself pondering, which I felt encapsulated the entire idea of the exhibit. All of his work came from his thought. As you begin to enter the exhibit, you will also notice his name engraved into the front two panels, which in the model I hand-cut with a utility knife. This model itself, along with a real-size panel from the exhibit which is backlit from a light box I built, and the drawing set book will be going into Museum of Design Atlanta on January 4th for 2 weeks. Its been quite amazing to work on something like this that was completely out of my realm and took me out of my Adobe programs, Apple computer comfort zone. Here are some images that one of the photographers from school did for me. Check them out: