douglaskoke.com - design - new!

Plum Creek Children's Ministries -- Pt. III

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:44:31 UTC

Took this site live last week. Turned out really nice, I think. Many thanks to Tom Benway for setting up the CMS backend.

Joomla Mania - Pt. II

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 08:39:28 UTC

The first of a few branding concepts I'm making for a company that sells Joomla themes and template sites.

Plum Creek Children's Ministries -- Pt. II

Sun, 2 Aug 2009 23:29:53 UTC

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

Plum Creek Children's Ministries

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:40:30 UTC

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!

Joomla Mania

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:19:16 UTC

My buddy Tom Benway and I have been cranking out a bunch of Joomla Template sites for a client of his, recently. It's been nice to brush up on my corporate design and layout skills again. Good stuff.

Nerdery!

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:19:39 UTC

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?!?

LC Website Updates - Dec 2008

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:47:07 UTC

Our website at work needed something new, so I added these graphics this week. The top image illustrates a product we offer that handles trafficking for synched-audio banner advertisements, and the bottom one represents the reach of streaming radio.

LC Door Mural - Pt. III

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:37:57 UTC

The finished product.

Ironically, all the "paint splatters" were masked off and sprayed using a stencil. You can see my boss, Zack, in the bottom left corner, barely conscious from the paint fumes, but still making sales calls. Then again, the guy trained for chemical warfare in the Marine Corps, so there you go.

A couple more shots of the completed painting. The lettering is still a little too "handmade" for my tastes, but all in all, I'm really proud of how it turned out. Neither mural would've come out half as nice without the help of my pal, Craig Patterson-- the dude is insanely good at everything he does, including mural painting, apparently. Thanks, Craig!

LC Door Mural - Pt. II

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:17:07 UTC

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.

LC Door Mural - Pt. I

Tue, 9 Dec 2008 23:02:06 UTC

Started painting the second mural at work yesterday -- this time, it's a small koi on my CEO's office door. It's going about a hundred times faster than the last one, which kinda surprised me. I guess I'm getting the hang of it. Here's how it looks so far.