The client’s briefing:

Brief Summary:
Redoing my branding, need a logo that is simple, clean, modern, cutting-edge, fresh. Looking for something to communicate an artistic, upscale identity.

Wants:
My color scheme is black, white, green (hex #4c6429), and I sometimes use copper in my marketing materials. Colors should be used as accent colors only, not be overpowering
Much of the time the logo will be in black and white, without color… needs to function with both (could I get the same design in BW as well?
Simple line art graphical element that I can incorporate by itself
Should be a vector graphic

Don’t Wants:
3D effects
Camera or film-strip graphics
Anything that even remotely resembles clip art
Strictly wedding-oriented logo (I’m trying to appeal to family/child/senior portrait clients too)
Sappy sentimentality
Anything too corporate

Following the result I delivered to the client:

The client was happy with the results, all I care about.

I have just finished another toon. Thank you François for having me toon you.

Do you want to be tooned by me? Feel free to check out my service at iToonU

Briefing fron the client:

We need a custom designed mascot for our PDA (Personal digital assistant) hardware and sofware company.
The final product needs to be available for web (RGB) and print (CMYK) use.
The mascot should reflect our PDA business maybe a PDA in mascot appearance.

This was an interesting job. Creating mascots is always challenging because you actually have to come up with something from scratch, to avoid copyright issues down the line. At least thats how I do it. I submitted a sketch and the client seem to have liked it right off the bat.
Working with a vector program seemed naturally to me, since it needed to be available in various sizes for the web and print. I went to work and created a vector from my sketch within Adobe Illustrator.
Following the result I came up with for this project:

The client was very happy, all I care about. I ended up doing the whole ad campaign for the client which was awesome. It included the Web images, flash animations, banners, regular and oversized prints, T-Shirts, etc.

I have just finished another toon. Thank you Frank for having me toon you.

Do you want to be tooned by me? Feel free to check out my service at iToonU

Briefing from the client:

Description:

We need a set of square-shaped icons representing different metrics such as age, gender, income etc (see below). The icons will be postage-stamp size on the page (1/2 inch square).

An icon for each of the following:

Dollar Sign
Sales Lead (silhouette of head/shoulders)
Sales Lead Management (variation of sales lead for example)
Age (birthday cake for example)
Gender (male/female)
Marital Status
Business Owner
Education
Mail Order buyers
Home
Time (clock)
Income
Discretionary Spending Index (how much $ one has to spend)
Number of Children (or just children)
The icons should be scalable vector images. And should be delivered as layered psd files or equivalent. Thanks!

Don’t wants:

Glossy
Words
Several colors - stick to 1-2 colors
Flashy colors - keep simple, clear, clean
Photographs

The following is what I came up with.
The image has been resized to fit the dimensions of this blog.

The client was happy, all I care about.

Sometime I take on projects that are so funny I can not say no to them. In this case it was for an iPhone Application.
Briefing:

We need some designs to go with our new iPhone/iPod Touch application, Babe-O-Meter. I need one girl in plain Jane look and in hot Jane look. Incorporate a hammer strength as known from fairgrounds. The hammer strength is showing the hot stage of the person playing the game. We also need an animation that goes hand in hand with the hammer strength measure units (0 - 100). The better the player is the more will be seen from hot jane. We will also need iPhone compatible 512x512 screenshot and 57x57 icon.

Now that sounds pretty interesting ;) ...
I started working on the idea. Plain Jane and hot Jane being the same character I had to make sure their body features match up 100%. So I started with the hot Jane character. I found some promising stock art and send it to the client. One version came back with the words: ‘This one seems fine it just isn’t hot enough’. So I took that character and used it as reference model. I changed the character so much that in the end there were not many similarities left. I completely changed the face, added legs that where not part of the stock art changed posture, haros, added shoes, etc. I sent it off to the client and the result received the hotness approval from the client :). Based on that character I designed the plain Jane version. I took away cool accessories, put her in a brown turtle neck pullover ( turtle necks are cool :) ), some plain skirt and shoes. Also removed the make up and there she was, plain Jane. Following is what I came up with:

Next I designed the strength hammer attraction which included measures correlating to the hotness factor of the player. The client also needed a loading screen to kill time while loading images. The challenge was to not show too much from the hot girl since that is the purpose of the game to uncover the hot Jane. Following the result I came up with.

Another graphic to launch the game was needed and the following the what I came up with:

The two final pieces were the iPhone icon and the 512x512 pixel screenshot. Following what I came up with (the 512x512 pixel screenshot has been resized to fit this blog):

This was really a fun project.
All has been finished to the complete satisfaction of the client, all I care about.

I have just finished another toon. Thank you Nils for having me toon you.

Do you want to be tooned by me? Feel free to check out my service at iToonU

First off, I can count on one thing in my life, and that is bad luck. I could write a book. Murphy’s law strikes every single day at least once and I am not clumsy or anything of that sort.
I started using Time Machine to back up my 1TB (terabyte) system disk. Currently it occupies 460GB. So I thought I should get at least one backup with a few days on my 1 TB external hard drive of same make, model and size. Unfortunately it needed more than just one 1TB.
I ended up excluding certain large folders from Time Machine. So I got it to start, finally. I had it run through the night and as I checked the following morning I got the following Time Machine Error Message:

I figured to efficiently use Time Machine with a 1TB system drive, I would need at least 2 1/2 TB if not more. This is turning out to be somewhat of a more involved issue. I have to look for an external hard drive solution that gives me the amount of space I need.
In the meantime I will be utilizing SuperDuper! for my backup purposes. I can schedule it and do what I need and it is a complete clone of the system hard drive, bootable and all. I can add a schedule where it just updates the changed files. The only difference is that I can not go back in time, which is quite a nice feature. Until I have an external hard drive solution that covers 2 1/2 or more TB I have to work with SuperDuper!.

I have just finished another toon. Thank you Erich for having me toon you.

Do you want to be tooned by me? Feel free to check out my service at iToonU

I have my Mac Pro now for over a year and have not attempted to install my copy of Windows XP Pro (32 bit) under Boot Camp. There was no need for since Parallels Desktop and VM Ware Fusion are awesome replacements with the advantage to run Mac OS X and Windows at the same time. Boot Camp will not allow Mac OS X to run at the same time. The benefit on the other hand is that if you use Boot Camp you get native support of Windows and FULL SPEED. Parallels and VM Ware Fusion can really slow you down at times.
Today I decided to do this. Following a quick explanation on what I did in order to get Windows XP Pro running natively on a Boot Camp partition.
First off make sure you have a full copy of Windows XP Pro with integrated SP2 (Service Pack 2), an update alone will not work. Also have the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Install CD ready since it contains drivers.
Also if you are like me and write your CD keys on the CD because you are prone to loose the key otherwise make sure to write down the key before you put in the Windows install CD into your CD Rom. You will not be able to eject the CD during the installation process because the eject CD key on your Mac keyboard will NOT work. I started the Boot Camp Assistant which is by default in the 'Utilities' folder within your 'Applications' folder. I opted to dedicate an entire 500GB hard drive in my Mac Pro to the Boot Camp partition.
I selected the option 'Create or remove Windows partition'. After that I selected the dedicated hard drive and chose the option 'Erase disk and create single partition for Windows'. If you do only show one hard drive you should select the option 'Create a second partition for Windows'.
To my surprise Boot Camp only showed internal hard drives to select from. I thought my external SATA hard drive (connected through eSATA) would show up or even the FireWire Hard Drive, but they didn't. So I had to place the hard drive in one of the bays of my Mac Pro, to show up as selectable hard drive.
I followed the on screen instructions, put in the Windows XP Pro install CD and restarted the Mac Pro.
The Mac started booting right off the Windows XP install CD and the Windows installer started up. I faced a problem when selecting the proper partition. I just had way too many partitions displayed for every single hard drive built into my Mac Pro and attached hard drives. I decided to shut down the Mac unplug all external hard drives and pull out the remaining internal hard drives that are not needed for the Boot Camp installation. No need to risk formatting the wrong hard drive just to install WIndows XP if you know what I mean.
I restarted the Mac and the installer started up again. Now it was clear which partition to select for the Windows installation. Select the partition you would like to install Windows XP on and select the full format option! Do not use the option quick format since this will cause problems later on. At this point I almost #### a brick. Formatting the 500GB hard drive took a whooping 2 1/2 hours. So make sure if you do plan on dedicating a large amount of hard drive space for your Windows Installation to get a large coffee as well. After finishing the hard drive formatting the Mac rebooted.
At this point if you do have a Mac OS Boot partition still online make sure to push the 'Option' key of your keyboard during boot up to select the Boot Camp partition, so you can finalize the Windows installation.
Once Windows finished the installation process I put in the Mac OS X Leopard Install DVD and it auto started the driver setup. Let it do its thing and reboot Windows.
At this point you successfully finished the installation of Boot Camp with Windows XP Pro. Unfortunately I still had 2 hardware device alerts within the hardware manager of Windows XP. It showed a missing graphic card driver and a missing eSATA card driver.
In my Mac Pro I have two graphic cards installed. One nVidia GeForce 7300 GT for which the driver were installed and one nVidia GeForce 8800 GT for which the driver have not been installed. This was expectable since the graphic card was newer than the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Install DVD. I went to the nVidia Website and downloaded the missing driver. I selected the GeForce 8 series driver. The installation went without any problems. To my surprise both graphic cards were running just fine under Boot Camp and I am able to use all 3 of my monitors. The other missing driver I got off of the eSATA card manufacturers installation CD. All is fine now and I will continue to explore Boot Camp's native Windows XP Pro installation later.
One thing I am not sure about is why Windows XP Pro only shows 2 GB of my 16GB total installed in my Mac Pro. I know Windows XP Pro 32 bit has a 3-4 GB memory limit but it should display more than just 2 GB of ram.