Exquisite Designs

Logo: Paul's Landscaping

2012-02-17T00:57:28Z

I absolutely love doing logos. If you need a new logo, I charge reasonable rates. Send me what you have and I'll send you what I come up with. Here's my latest work:

This is one of the logo images I was sent and started out with. How entertaining is this logo? At first I was like.. eh okay let's see what I can do. As I was thickening the lines and cleaning it up a bit I started having a lot of fun with it. I mean, it's a fantastic logo. I wasn't sure what I was allowed to do so I started out with little color and came up with this.

I liked the font for the snow plowing, it's called Ice Sticks (probably spelled Stix). I continued trying out various things and came up with the following:

This one though, is my absolute favorite (with it's line drawing counterpart)

I also made a banner version featuring different fonts:

Layout: Ascano Photography

2012-02-12T02:13:16Z

I'm so proud to announce that my lovely friend has acquired herself a domain name and we are currently working on getting her site up and running. She will be using the latest version of WordPress in order to do this. While I am a loyal MovableType user I am truly impressed with the latest that WP has to offer.

I've taken a screenshot of the site since the only thing I've really done is set everything up, resize the logo and create a pixel-stretch background, but everything comes together quite well. Don't stop looking here, though, go over there and see what she has to offer (or will soon). Ascano Photography

Miscellaneous: Photoshop Tutorial

2012-02-11T03:13:41Z

Everyone who knows me should know that I absolutely adore Corey Barker over at Planet Photoshop and his tutorials. He makes them easy to follow, even a beginner could do it, because he explains everything as if you are a bit new to photoshop. Anyway, most of the graphics I create are simply following along with his tutorials. With this one I followed the Bourne Legacy Poster tutorial: Link. I hope you have as much fun with it as I did.

Miscellaneous: Worship

2012-01-31T01:00:35Z

First, a little background. A coworkerfriend of mine had this calendar for 2011 and on the opposite side it would have oddball sayings. I think they had to do with keyboards but I am not really sure. The only reason I think it had to do with keyboards is because it had an image of a QWERTY keyboard layout outlined underneath each oddball saying. As soon as I saw this one, I knew I had to have it. I actually have the page from the calendar hanging at work and have taken a photo of it before, as well. This time I decided to make my own image.

The brush used for the eye was found at Aethereality.Net. Enjoy.

Signature: Digital Email Signature - Personal

2012-01-30T23:18:35Z

Usually the type of signatures I make are relevant to forums but today, on a whim, I decided to whip myself up a little Digital Signature for my Gmail account. I like making these things and it's something to show off (just a little anyway). Enjoy!

Layout: Disillusioned meets Zen

2012-01-11T01:44:13Z

This layout was inspired by the 12 months of Zen calendar I had throughout 2011. Every month was a new photo of flowers in a pleasing arrangement with one word, such as Calm or Tranquility or Peace in smooth glowy letters. I absolutely loved that calendar and since I bought it on a whim I'm waiting for another calendar like it, or who knows, perhaps a sarcastic calendar, to present itself.

I tend to be pretty Disillusioned with reality these days. That's why I named the blog Disillusioned all those years ago, that's what I was feeling at the time. Everyone seems to be very full of drama and chaos, overemotional and hypocritical. These emotions affect each and every one of us. If we want to become a united world, we have to become accepting of each other as we are. The hate needs to go away, far far away. Karma can't take care of everything on her own, you know.

Photo used above is copyright of the owner and the font used for 'disillusioned' is Dali.

Logo: Exquisite Designs

2011-11-20T14:40:50Z

Well, I finally took the time to make a logo for myself. Yes, I'm sure it's odd that I don't use the title of the site in the layout, but I really like my ... "campaign" about Turning Away From Light. You don't always have to have brightness and sunshiney moments to market something. You can try to be daring and use dark backgrounds or dark colors. In design, you should be able to see in all forms of light. I prefer the night, the darkness, the starlight shining down from above, the softness of the sunlight reflected from the moon. It turns something you see at high noon on a clear day into a completely different visual experience.

So without further waiting, I give you the new (and only) logo of Exquisite Designs.

And now with a desaturated/inverted version:

Twitter: Ascano Photography

2011-11-12T01:54:29Z

While we have not yet set up a Twitter account for Ascano Photography, we do (ok, ok, I do) want to so that the word about her business can spread wide and far to all the wonderful people in the world. Or at least the county we live in. I enjoy helping my friends realize their dreams with graphics and invoices and letterhead and whatever else I can do for them. I give them a fair price, or I try to make an even trade with the services they provide. So here it is, the first mockup of the background.

Miscellaneous: Invoice - Ascano Photography

2011-11-11T23:20:34Z

Today I added to the logo and flyer created for Ascano Photography by creating her a personalized invoice. This invoice is created in Excel with her own logo and (of course) all her contact information right on it. The great thing about it though is that she can fill it in on the computer or print a few (color or black and white, both will look great) and hand-write them out. She might even be able to have a personalized pad printed out somewhere to put in her bag.

Flyers: Ascano Photography - Final

2011-11-07T02:23:23Z

This is the final front and back high-resolution version of the Ascano Photography flyer. Best work ever. You can find more out about Ascano Photography at: Ascano Photography - Smug Mug and Facebook

Flyers: Ascano Photography

2011-11-01T22:48:14Z

Another for Ascano Photography. These are 5x7 flyers (probably to be printed on cardstock) and mailed out to prospective customers or left places for people to pick them up. These versions are not up to print standards at this time as they are only in 100DPI. Once a final version is created it’ll be in 300DPI for the best possible print quality.

Logos: Ascano Photography

2011-10-20T18:07:40Z

This is the one she went with:

A lovely lady friend of mine has started her own professional photography business and asked me to create a logo for her. I sent her a test one that took about 15 - 20 minutes to make. This was only a test, mind you, as I have a higher version of photoshop available to me at home than I do at the front desk at work. (Since I’m at the front desk I thought I’d take advantage of photoshop being available to me.) What my lovely friend doesn’t know yet is that I plan to play a little more with the logo when I get home. For now, she’s using this one.

Miscellaneous: Love

2011-10-02T18:27:12Z

On Facebook there are these lovely graphics that people post to their walls on all sort of things. One of those things lately that I’ve been seeing have to do with love and relationships. I saw one that I liked but thought it could have used some pizzazz. I was playing around and came up with this:

Twitter: New Disillusioned Background

2011-10-01T00:33:18Z

Oddly enough it only took me about a half an hour to create this fantastic new background for Twitter. I love it and the font I used for disillusioned on the right looks wicked cool. The font used for the word disillusioned is called Dali and I used Calisto MT for the url on the left.

Crooked Photo Straight

2011-09-30T00:43:22Z

A friend of mine went out fishing and caught this fantastic photo of the sunrise while on Lake Erie. Obviously, for whatever reason, it ended up being a little crooked, so I offered to straighten it for him. I couldn’t remember how to do it though, so I went searching through google on how to do it.

This wonderful Aussie did a video tutorial on how to straighten the photo within 5 minutes (and hey he has a fantastic Aussie accent, so who wouldn’t want to listen to this…).

It literally took about 2 minutes once I figured out what I was missing and the trick about using the original image when cropping the straightened image is absolute genius. Now go out there and straighten all those crooked photos!