Southern Miss 2013-14 Men's Basketball Poster

A big shift in the style of my Southern Miss work came with this poster. As you probably notice, this poster is much lighter than my previous work, as the athletic department now shifts to using lighter backgrounds on most all of their work. One of the difficult things about the light background was making the yellow still a usable/noticeable color in the image. Do try and help achieve that, I mixed in some textures and drop shadows, as well some thin black strokes in places to make it pop. Once again, I was playing with the the picture vs. pictures foreground to background, and I again turned to a faded background to help make Coach Tyndall pop off the front of the poster. I was pretty pleased with the outcome, and you can definitely expect many more Southern Miss pieces to have a similar color scheme down the road.

Southern Miss 2013-14 Cheer Poster

It has been a quite busy time for me the past few weeks wrapping up several projects across the board. Above is a poster I recently completed for the Southern Miss cheer squad. It was a challenge making the two pictures not clash with each other, but I believe in the end the faded on the background photo and extra pop of the colors on the front made everything work together. The biggest challenge actually came at the bottom of the poster making sure all 13 sponsor logos made it onto the poster along side the Southern Miss social media info, making sure all of this didn't take away from the poster itself. In the end, I think I found the right balance and the overall look was a success.

UTC Baskeball 2013-14 Schedule Posters

Even though football has barely gotten into full gear, I've been hard at work cranking several designs promoting the upcoming college basketball season. Two of them that I recently wrapped up are the posters pictured above for UT-Chattanooga's men's and women's basketball teams. Each one presented it's own unique challenges.

The women's poster gave me the challenge of trying to fit 16 players and a new head coach onto the poster, while highlighting the new coach and 6 seniors. To achieve this, I made the 10 background players smaller and put a bit of a color overlay on them to try and establish as much depth as I could between the two levels of players with the amount of space I had to work with.  I then tweaked the photos of the 6 seniors and head coach to be a little brighter with a higher contrast as well. I then put a little spotlight behind them to help them pop off the page a little bit.

The men's poster probably posed the greatest challenge I've ever had in putting together a schedule poster. The team's theme for the season is "Chaos" and so they wanted a chaotic background going on around their players, while focusing on the three in front and their new head coach as well. To give me the ability to create a couple levels of chaos, I created a little depth by laying out the players in 3 rows with the players in the back 2 rows being smaller than the front. I then went through several dozen fractal brushes, blending, resizing, and mixing their shapes to create the web of light basically exploding throughout the poster. In the end, I came out with the exact look they were hoping for and I was very pleased as well at tackling this challenge with such success.

Both posters were a blast to work on, and here's hoping both teams go on to successful seasons!

Southern Miss Can-Am Commander Contest Advertisements

It has been a little while since I have posted to the ol' blog, so I have a little catching up to do. Above are a couple graphics I wrapped up last week for the Southern Miss Eagle Club. They are raffling off a Can-Am Commander X and needed both an email graphic (top image) and a standard 8.5x11 print ad to promote the contest. Because of the two different sizes, I ended up having to make the ad work as both a landscape and portrait layout. I kept the layout of the information similar so that it could transition easily from one to the other. In the end, I was happy with the outcome of both ads, especially getting to work a little outside of the usual USM color scheme and incorporating some earthly textures into the background.

Southern Miss 2013 Soccer Poster

In the rush of college football getting underway, you might have missed that college soccer is in full swing as well. With that in mind, I am posting my design for Southern Miss' 2013 poster.

I'm trying to develop a consistent feel across the posters I am working on for them this year. The yellow bars and marble look of "SOCCER" echo my same treatments on the volleyball poster I created for the Golden Eagles as well. I did mix up the design of the bars on the bottom as well as a couple other treatments on this poster so that, while relating to the volleyball poster and other subsequent posters, it still has its own personality. Be on the lookout for more posters down the road.

It's Time for a #TNSTitleRun - Knoxville News Sentinel Ad

This past Monday, the Smokies clinched the Southern League North Division 2nd Half Championship. The team is now playoff bound and will be kicking off a series against the 1st Half Champion Birmingham Barons down in Alabama starting on Thursday, September 5th. Their first game back by the mountains will be on Saturday, September 7th, and we are heavily promoting that matchup. We were able to get an ad in the Knoxville News Sentinel to help us promote the matchup.

Having been in football mode while the team has been on their playoff push, the idea of the hats facing off, much like a helmet matchup graphic in football, popped into my head. I then went with a simple rundown of the possible playoff dates echoing a boxing tale-of-the-tape. Overall, I believe the ad turned out very well and I hope to see plenty of fans out supporting the Smokies on Saturday!

Southern Miss Gameday Central 3D Helmets

As of yesterday, the 2013 college football season is well underway. However, the season doesn't kick off for the Golden Eagles until Saturday night. With that being said, you can head over to their Gameday Central site to see all their matchups this season using the helmets I created (at this point I need to give a shot out to sportslogos.net member davidson for his 3D helmet templates found here). I have never really worked with truly 3D looking objects, so this project was a fun experiment that had some awesome results. Check them out!