So I haven't had time to dedicate to this blog for a long time. Something about working all the time on other people's projects takes away from the drive and desire to work on your own. I've gotten a lot done in the last year, and had some big struggles and failures as well; blogging about them all hasn't been my highest priority so much as making it through them.

As it is I'm joining an organization that retrofits cruise liners (or, presently, a Danish Rail Ferry) into hospitals and then sails to West Africa to give away as much surgery as they can. It's a ministry called Mercy Ships and that's where I'm headed. I'll still be available for some project work if you're interested, but you'll only be able to reach me by email at this point.

 

I haven't updated this site in a long time, so I'll try to get my portfolio back up to speed. In all honesty I'd love to simplify the whole thing and put up a completely new version, but I'm closing the doors of Blue Swan Design at this point in time and I'm not sure they'll ever reopen.

 

You can follow my adventures at my new site, jay on a boat, however. You can also support me financially if you like as I'll be working on the ship in a completely voluntary capacity and need to raise my salary. Ships don't operate on their own it turns out.

 

Thanks to my clients for providing the work that challenged and grew me over the last year and a half, to HostGator for being a great host, and to Joomla! and Wordpress for making life more fun. Thanks to Jeff and Noob for being great technical aides at the most necessary of moments, and to Kaarin and the rest of my family for your support in the trying times. To my friends, partners, and acquaintences. It's been a fun ride.

 

Time for a new adventure.

I actually enjoy it now... tweeting. It's ridiculous. You can follow me on twitter now if you like. Below is the avatar that I designed just for Twitter. I almost feel ashamed =)

 

 

 

As for me, life is really busy. We had to move into a new house over the weekend (it's pretty dang awesome) and are of course without internet for a week. This does not help me get work done from home in the slightest.

 

Long nights in coffee shops await me yet again...

I've obviously managed to keep from writing anything in a long time, largely due to the fact that I'm too busy. I took this job editing photos for a company in Spokane that, while temporary, is currently full time, and it's been eye opening.

 

One reason it's eye opening is that it reminds me regularly that I prefer being my own boss. It's also encouraging to work for a company that's run by kind, competent people. I've had some rough jobs (as I'm sure we all have) before in companies run by complete goobers.

 

I'm also in the process of trying to either find a way to fill my house with roommates, or find a new house for the few of us left. It's a 9 bedroom, so it's quite a project.

 

I do have a few fun logo projects under way currently, and I finished my work with Grace Christian Fellowship as well. Below are a magnet and a handout that I made for them recently.

 

 

 

 

I'll also be making a video for the Spokane Shock here soon which should be a fun project. I'll be sure to post it here when it's done. Until then I guess I'll keep plugging away and hopefully be back on top of things in a month or two.  Drive fast and take chances!

So I finally managed it, Blue Swan Design v3 is up and running. Of course this last week our internet went down, so I spent most of my time sitting in the Service Station (a local coffee joint) working as best I could. It's amazing how much a change of environment can really throw you for a loop, concentration was a problem.

 

The new site has a few glitches to work out, thus the "under construction" bit in the logo,  but I'm really happy with it regardless. I'll keep playing with some of the displays but for the most part the layout and major graphics are all done.

 

I've also been a bit too busy to post anything lately, between needing ct scans for jet ski incidents and helping photograph the national conference championship game in Spokane for Arena Football I've been pretty busy. I'll post some of those photos here soon.

 

Anyways, hope you like the new site as much as I do.

Working on a graphic design project for my friends' church. They're in need of some promotional stuff for their college ministry and I'm working on some posters as well as their logo. Here's what I've got so far; I like it personally.

 

 

 

My sister's buddy, Cliff from photography school made a cool stop motion video with his camera and posted it on his flickr page. I thought I'd share it since it's pretty cool.

 

 

In working on the devEdge website, which will be up as soon as their owner returns from a trip to Africa, I figured I should make some boxes for their software. The thing is that distributed online software doesn't exactly have its own visual representation. It used to be that software came in shrink wrapped, pretty little boxes.

 

Now thanks to online distribution services like Steam your video games and development tools and word processors all come in streams of data that you can't and will never see. People don't like that when they're buying something, they want to know that what they're spending their money on is substantive. At least that's what I'm told... or what I figure. I can't tell or figure where I came up with this, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.

 

Either way you can't argue with results, and after playing around with some ideas this was a base design I came up with for their Blackberry software. It'll probably undergo some revisions, and I may make a more real-to-life Blackberry for the cover, but until then I'm pretty happy with my little box.

 

 

 

 

The Java development tools box looks pretty sweet too... I guess I'll show you that as well since we're on the subject.

 

 

There's a lot more you can do with this, I'm looking forward to playing with some ideas. 

 

Icons, the little pictures that are meant to represent a particular function, application, or simply give a graphical representation of anything you want in general are pretty important. I'm working on implementing them in more of my work, but they take time and (especially if you want some unique and attractive ones) a lot of effort.

 

I decided to scour the interwebz for a good tutorial to give me some inspiration and found one. Here's the result.

 

I know I'm currently on v3 of the website but I'm already wanting to get back to the darker feel that I used to have... I have enough problems to work through without wanting to redo my website again but... well it's impossible to settle on mediocrity and it feels like I can do so much better. It's so much easier to make something satisfying for other people; I guess I'm weird.

 

Either way I'm working on capturing the original logo design that was in my head. Kind of late after printing off 250 business cards, but I may revise it in the future. Either way you can enjoy what I have for now and maybe someday you'll be pleasantly surprised to find it has taken its place at the top of your screen.

 

In a way I guess that's the fun of designing, you can always re-invent yourself. It'll happen someday =)

 

In the meantime I'm dreaming of Paris and wishing I was there right now... man I miss it.

My sister took some promotional photos of a magician named Drew Worsham recently, she ended up with some sweet shots. Anyways I was playing with light effects in Photoshop and of course wound up using some of her photos, I thought it turned out well.

 

You can see the original on flickr.