douglaskoke.com

Made some progress on the interior pages of the children's Flash site I've been working on...

I've taken on some contract work lately, to keep my web-design chops up, and it's been a ton of fun. Definitely enjoying this project in particular-- an all-Flash site for a children's church group. Can't wait to animate this one!

Above is my original pitch. The client wasn't in love with the Noah's Ark theme, so we decided to try something with an amusement park motif instead.

Above is my second pass at the design, implementing the amusement park theme for the "Kidz Jam", and some different photographic elements for the other two age-groups.

Above, and below, is the third (and hopefully final) pass at the homepage, with some new illustrations for the "Baby Jam" and "Jungle Jam" sections. The church's in-house graphics department did the animals, and I drew the babies.

I think the project's going to call for quite a bit of animating and compositing in After Effects, which I'm really looking forward to. My friend Tom Benway is partnering with me on this one as well, building an awesome content-management system to plug dynamic content into the Flash. Nice! 

I made something really fun today for a friend in Nagasaki, Japan, who's an even bigger Star Wars geek than I am. :)

My inner dork was overwhelmed with joy making this. Death Stars? Burning X-Wings? Dudes in bad-ass, skull-faced helmets with laser guns and junk? The 8-yr-old in me was loving it. (If you've read my rant on my ridiculous exploits for Make-A-Wish, you know what kind of deep-seated, childhood nerd-dom I'm talkin' about.)

The digital matte painting in the background was made using images of Star Wars model kits, stock photos of aircraft wreckage, buidling demolition, and news stills from Afghanistan. I chopped up all kinds of images of rubble and salvage-yard WWII bombers, threw them all over the place, added a toy X-Wing, digitally weathered it, and then brushed in all the fire and smoke effects. I felt like a jerk for using such morbid source material in a goofy science-fiction graphic... but ya' gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.

All the stormtroopers in the comp are live human beings-- not screen-grabs from the movies. Members of a Star Wars fan organization called the "501st Legion" were nice enough to donate images of themselves wearing armor they built themselves. How awesome is that?!?

More progress...

The koi fish, after some touch-ups on the details.

Craig works diligently , while I demonstrate the linguistic wit of an 8 year old.

Completely high on spray paint fumes, Craig and I start peeling off masking tape.

More peeling, accompanied by some extremely flattering mouth-breathing.

Lettering revealed -- they came out kinda sloppy, so we'll have to clean those up tomorrow. Then it oughtta be wrapped up.

I realize this isn't the sexiest graphic I've ever made, but I was excited about it, because so much of it was created entirely inside Photoshop. Only the money, and the computer are photographic elements -- the rest was all digitally painted. Kinda fun.
 

Shown above is a graphic element from a recent Flash animation I created for Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles. The station's street-team./VIP club is called "Indie Activists", so I decided to go with a bolshevik revolutionary theme, which is always really fun to work with. I had a good time makin' this one.

Here's a background graphic I started designing  for a possible upcoming project at LC.  Can't say anything more about it, but I'm hoping everything comes together, as it seems like it'd be a lot of fun to work on.

Being kind of a political wonk-- and a dyed-in-the-wool liberal -- I had fun mocking up this media player design today for a progressive talk station in Palm Springs, CA.

I've been following the Democratic primary almost every night the last couple weeks, and as a consequence have been overexposed to all the grunge-brushed, distressed election graphics on CNN, so I decided to go in the opposite direction and make the player super slick and glossy. Hopefully the client will dig it.

Tomorrow, I have to build a similar player for another station owned by the same network-- but this time, it's a conservative station, featuring those personalities; comedian Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Riley, Laura Ingraham, etc.

I wonder if they'll let me insert circus music into the background audio. Or have it dispense Oxycontin. ... Hmm ... maybe I can figure out some way for the player to exude the faint smell of sulpher and brimstone. I'll have to work on that.

Working right down to the wire, here's one of the last graphics for the Liquid Compass site, which is slated to launch this weekend, or early next week.

Playing on the company's new branding intitiative, "Radio Anywhere You Want", this scene depicts Japanese lanterns featuring some of our clients' logos.

I was trying to think of a cool way to illustrate "media player developement" for a section of our website today, and came up with the idea of some sort of high-tech testing lab... it needs a lot of work, but I think it's a fun concept...

The blue "fueling chambers" are constructed from pieces of various aquarium filters, a video camera, a drill press, a S.C.U.B.A. tank, and a protype for an ultra-modern wheelchair that I doctored in Photoshop.

I finally found a practical application for an idea for floating islands that I've been messing around with for about a year ... in this graphic, the islands are supposed to represent the personalities-- or portion of them -- of the various employees at Liquid Compass.

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Here's a graphic I made today for Custom Channels, a partnering company who puts together highly individual, boutique music programming to create niche-specific radio stations.

Came up with this goofy idea today to illustrate "Ad Trafficking" -- a service we offer to help Radio clients to schedule their commercials. Anyway, the idea was to make a city composited from areas all around the world, and then have a crossing guard help little products get safely across the street.

It needs some tweaking, but I think the concept came across really nicely.

More graphics for the new LC site... this one's for the "Partners" section; hence, the "building bridges" metaphor.

Started making another matte painting for work today, and decided to illustrate the process a bit, saving snapshots as I went...

Started off with a couple of reference images-- the sky, and the distant mountains, as two separate pieces. Matched the color a bit, and drew in the shape I wanted for the hills in the middle distance.

Next, I found a snapshot I took in Maui that I though would sit in nicely for the South American jungle, and cropped and smudged it to fit. Also added some pretty extreme color control with a top-layer overlay.

Next, I plopped in a stock photo of a Mayan Temple, colored it, and duplicated it. Added a dark hill in the background to add some contrast and depth later.

Did a bit more coloring and lighting to the main Ziggurats to help them match better.  Then, I chopped up a bunch of photos of the Chichen Itza in Mexico and played with their arrangement to build out the ruins. Did the same thing to get the tropical plants in the foreground-- just cut out a bunch of plant images I had lying around. Blended everything into the scene.

I thought the ruins needed some cool statuary, so I fished around for some images of Mayan idols. The only license-free image I could find was a little 12" thing that sits in your garden, so I did a lot of weathering with brushes, and painted in all the overgrowth, to give them a sense of age and scale. Next, I painted the pathway, and the little plants around its edges. Also added the obligatory loudspeakers, since the website's theme is "Radio Anywhere".

The photo wasn't feeling mysterious and secretive enough to me,  so I painted in some grass and palm trees into the foreground, to limit the camera's view a bit, and add a sense of revelation. Then I added some birds and a radio tower in that far distance, to help reinforce the scale of the ruins. Lastly, I painted in some mist to give the scene a bit of movement, and play up the mystery a bit more.  Viola.

I've really gotten into making these little digital matte paintings for our new website at work.

It's probably the control-freak in me, but I've discovered something completely gratifying about trying to create a big, expansive environment straight from my imagination. I don't know why, but the process has felt incredibly theraputic and calming. I definitely hope I get to do more of these in the future.

Another screwy graphic for the new Liquid Compass site:

I need to clean it up quite a bit-- fix some perspective, adjust a lot of lighting, add some effects -- but I think this one will end up looking kinda cool.

Here's a graphic I put together to illustrate a reporting tool that simplifies and tracks RIAA royalty data for radio stations.

I took my inspiration from a lot of the visuals in Terry Gilliam films, like Twelve Monkeys and Brazil. I've always loved his whacked-out depictions of bureaucracy at it's most absurd,  so I tried to instill some of that surreal quality here. Ironically, I had to sanitize the concept quite a bit since this is going to end up on a corporate website-- it would have been fun to go balls-to-the-wall with the ridiculousness, like Gilliam's "The Crimson Permanent Insurance" opener of Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life. Oh well.

Finally got around to working on some stuff for my personal portfolio, Site 07. I have a new layout in the works, but experience has taught me not to shoot my mouth off about it until it's done and live. I did put together some graphics that I'm feelin' good about though, including this one, which I'm using as a temporary splash screen.  Apparently, I'm diggin' swirls and little glowing things lately. :)

Below is the same concept, modified and repurposed for Liquid Compass.

More graphics for work; again, reiterating the theme of bringing music worldwide-- in this case, Sting rockin' out on the Great Wall of China.

I'm pretty excited about  this graphic for our upcoming website at work... hopefully I'll have time to dump it into After Effects and geek-out on some motion...

Just a fun little graphic I made at work today for our new website. The image below shows how it will appear within the context of the site.

This is an illustration I'm working on for our new website at work-- with this particular piece, the idea was to combine the concept of growth, with the auditory nature of the services we provide.

So far, the graphic elements have been really fun to put together-- thematically, I'm really trying to push the idea of bringing music to even the most remote location, so I'm going to end up making a lot of weird audio-sculputures like this, to be placed  in really unlikely environments. I think it'll be cool...

Here's a layout sketch I'll be pitching to a client in The Bahamas. It was about 19 degrees outside today, so it was really nice to work with images from the Caribbean this afternoon. Definitely made me want to go some place tropical again.

Although I love my job, it's not without its disappointments.  I was really pleased with the layout sketch shown below, but it turned out the client just wasn't feelin' it--and were fairly indelicate about saying so. I was pretty bummed-out by their reaction, to be honest. Back to the drawing board, I guess...

It's time again for the annual re-design of our website at work. Hooray. Here's the first of several layout sketches I'll be pitching later this week. This one's, ummm.... very.. orange.

Here's a graphic I threw together for my buddy, Mark, who works as a programmer for the city of Denver. He needed something to spruce up an internal web-application for the city's Family Crisis Center , so I busted out some quick photoshoppery for him tonight.

I've done my first official dirty work for "The Man" now, I guess. Sweet.

With the first snowfall of the year this weekend, I decided I had to face the fact that winter is here. Yuck. So, down went the fall theme I had up. Bye bye.

Can't say a whole lot about this one, other than it's been a lot of fun so far, and I'm excited to see the finished product.

I had to put together a print ad for Radio Magazine today, and was instructed to come up with a "creative coporate" look to pitch some of our new products at work. Here's what I came up with.

Above is a portion of a blast email I designed for a sports station in Houston, Texas. The theme of the event they were promoting was "Juego Palooza", so I thought it would be fun to make everything look like a Mexican bullfighting poster.  

For those of you who missed the "Halloween Edition" of the Blawg, here's some of the graphics I put together:

This is pretty friggin' cool-- I got to design a media player for Indie 103.1's one-off reunion show for legendary punk rockers, THE SEX PISTOLS! Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones gave creative approval to something I made! How bad-ass is that?

I don't want to show the whole player until it launches, but I was thoroughly hyped that those guys gave my work the thumbs-up. Definitely something I'm proud of.

These are some preliminary animation boards I made today for a client at Liquid Compass. They haven't signed off on it yet, so I can't give details, but I have to say, I didn't mind having to look at photos of KT Tunstall all afternoon. Not bad.

We've started to develop a series of nex-gen media players at Liquid Compass, using Microsoft's new Sliverlight application. We'll be one of the first companies to partner with MS on the streaming front, so we're pretty stoked about it. Most of the technical stuff is way over my head, but I'm told that I'll be able to use much more detailed, nuanced designs in our players, so I'm excited about it too. Shown here are some early sketches of our first Silverlight player.

Okay, I know this splash screen is cheesy as hell, but for whatever reason, it was completely fun to make. To me, it looks like the Mountain Dew version of  a bad poster for some horrible 1970's blacksploitation film. And God help me, I like it.

See it in all it's tacky splendor:  www.soul1063radio.com

Just put together this digital matte painting as part of a media player I designed for Energy 92.7 FM in San Francisco-- the station is having a contest giving away cruise-ship tickets from New York to London, and so I put together this composite to use as a background.