My friends over at chillingo contacted me to cook up a 300x100 Adobe Flash animation, 300x100 gif animation of the Adobe Flash animation and a 728x90 JPG banner.

Briefing:

Some ideas/phrases I want to convey:
Chillingo
Developing for iphone?
Publish through Chillingo
Want to maximise sales?
The most successful publisher ---- maybe follow with a flash-up image of Zen Bound and iDracula (like blipverts)

Since it was about iPhone i thought about integrating user interface elements of the iPhone. Since the space was quite limited I decided to go with the top bar of the iPhone user interface, which shows the carrier, time and battery status. Instead of the carrier I choose the company name chillingo. I replaced the time with the chillingo slogan, Innovate, Publish, Play.
Since this was a longer animation, I thought about integrating something that would show the current status of the animation. I choose the battery meter for the flash animation to reflect the status of the animation. I wanted to give it a nice dynamic by increasing the overall speed of the animation. All elements have been created from scratch.
Following the result of the Adobe Flash animation:





This animation turned out larger than I thought. It ended up being 148kb, too much for my taste. So I was working on the same animation and skipping the screenshot part which resulted in the following light weight version of 52kb:





After that I was working on the GIF animation which is shown below:



The final piece was a static 728x90 JPG version and no animation. The result below has been made smaller to match the dimensions of this blog:



My friends at chillingo were happy, all I care about.

Briefing:

Create a logo for Pixel Heist
Create a business card for Pixel Heist

For me as a designer it is always a challenge to create something for myself. I personally do not like designing for myself and usually pass on projects for myself to fellow designers. The reason is simple. The self criticism and try to create the perfect design for myself is at best impossible. Over the years I recognized the following symptoms when designing something for myself:

Very rarely am I 100% happy with the result.
Just when I though I was finished with a design I keep changing things around.
I spend way too much time on any given design.

This time I tried to come up with a logo and a business card for myself. I was close to passing it on to a fellow designer but I decided to just give it a shot.
An effective logo is a simple logo. That is my experience and that is how I approached the process. I tried to not spend too much time and avoid continuously changing things around. I fixed up a few sketches:



The idea was to integrate a pixel into the logo. Also some interaction of that pixel with the font itself. I am not a friend of taking the easy way of putting the object, in this case the pixel, as the dot of an i. In my eyes this is a valid practice but quite overused in logos. Even though I tried it within the sketching process, I actually took it a bit further and replaced the i completely with an object. I tried to add the scientific background I posses and been drilled with before entering the world of design. So a little lab gadget with a pixel coming out of it. I tried many variations and wanted to integrate something like an eye within the pixel. Building a relation between pixel and the eye. Sketching for quite some time I was happy with the lettering and the object hovering above the X.

I went into Adobe Illustrator and started to transfer my ideas into the digital vector world.

I played around with fonts and I was NOT happy with any of them. As a designer I accumulation/acquired a virtually infinite amount of fonts over the years.
So the decision was clear, I am going to create my own font. This is a very time consuming process but well worth the time investment if I can reach the desired vision I had for the logo.
I tried to integrate an eye within the pixel but it turned out to be not as effective as I thought. Still keeping the idea in mind I came up with the following result:



As shown above I decided to go with black and red as the primary colors, which I personally find quite powerful.

At this point I finished the design/creation of the logo. Now it is time for the business card part. For the text information on the business card (other than the logo) I used a standard font. To loosen it up a bit I used round background elements following the black and red color scheme. Following the final result I sent off to the printer:



UPDATE: 03/10/2009

I picked up the business card from the printer today I am surprisingly pleased with the design for myself :) ..



If you would like me to design your logo, business card, etc. feel free to fill out a contact form and let's talk.