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Portfolio: OCFAMILY TV Logo Design

Luke Hodsdon — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:01:54 +0000

Title: OCFAMILY TV Logo Design

Client: Churm Media, in association with OC Family Magazine

Program(s) Used: Illustrator CS2

Time Span: 2 hours Conceptual. 2 hours design.

About: ocfamily.com needed a logo design for their new video feature in which anyone can upload videos of their children. The idea was to make them a TV star, on the web.

Designer Notes: I really wanted to add an element of freshness to this logo. In the end the company decided to take a darker direction and make everything black based.

I’m Speechlessly Amazed – FLARToolKit Augmented Reality

Luke Hodsdon — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:38:25 +0000

I’m really not sure that there’s words that describe my first reaction to this Augmented Reality other than “ahh-buhhhh?”

I’ll be damned if i didn’t call everyone in the office within yelling range over to my cubicle to watch the fascination, and with reactions pretty much the same all the way across the board, it seems as if this technology is going to be turning all KINDS of heads in the near future!!

To see for yourself make sure you have a webcam and a printer. Ohh, and a preparedness to be AMAZED! Go to GE’s website and follow their instructions. If you don’t have a webcam or printer, click through to watch the video i’ve posted.

After doing some digging i found out the technology is called FLARToolKit. (More info here)

Thanks Creative Bits for the info!

Video of this phenomenal technology after the jump.

Thank you economy! and Time Warner! 1¢ Movies!

Luke Hodsdon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:31:52 +0000

Any of you Southern California residents out there that may have taken a nice roundhouse kick to the left temple may appreciate this little slab of cold steak to nurse that wound! Time Warner Cable is offering 1¢ Movies on demand from a pretty decent selection of 30 movies through their On Demand service. Being a So Cal resident myself… and being a poor artist… i salute you Time Warner. We may have had our feuds in the past, like that one time when you locked up on my and fast forwarded my DVR all the way to the end of my show while i got a nice 2x speed, soundless viewing of Top Chef (and again during 24), but this totally wipes the slate clean. Thanks!

The service seems to be only on Valentine’s Day, but what else are you doing in So Cal? I mean, you could go to Morton’s Steakhouse any old night, right? Pfshhh.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “But, Luke, why are you promoting Time Warner Cable? That doesn’t have anything to do with design!” to which i would reply “You’re right, especially judging by that landing page, yuck! but, this is pure MARKETING genius.” Here’s a company that realizes that most of it’s viewers will be out of the house, or not watching television, so they give them a great incentive to keep the viewership high in the times when they predict it being low. All my speculation of course, but that’s why I’m featuring this, my dirty little secret is that i am in love with marketing.

Click here for details from the mouth of the horse itself.

Thank you @ADramaticMommy via Twitter for the tip!

Quiksilver hosts All 80s All Day Vert Challenge

Luke Hodsdon — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:45:50 +0000

Quiksilver, a Huntington Beach-based lifestyle and apparel brand, held a flashback to the 80s contest on Saturday, Dec. 6, in conjunction with Tony Hawk and his newest business venture, shredordie.com, a Web site where everyone from top athletes to everyday users can post their favorite sports clips.

Launched in October 2007, the site had very little press coverage – until now, that is. The All 80s All Day Vert Challenge, held at Quiksilver’s headquarters, featured 21 well-known skaters of the 80s, such as Huntington Beach native Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero and Bucky Lasek. These skateboarders – now successful business people – were decked out from head to toe in 80s garb.

Hawk flashed back to his roots with his blue shirt – worn in the 1987 skate film “The Search for Animal Chin” — highlighted hair and, of course, his bright pink skate deck, which he got out of storage specifically for the daylong challenge. Hosoi outfitted himself in spandex pants and a cutoff T-shirt, finishing off the ensemble with a wig. Pink highlights, ripped denim and high tops were some of the other flashy fashions worn during the event.

But the skaters weren’t the only ones who dressed up. More than 800 people attended – and they were required to don clothing popular during that time period. Side ponytails, bright pink high heels and hoop earrings were in abundance – and that’s just the girls! Guys wore torn T-shirts, big hair, suspenders – the works.

Amidst all the 80s mayhem, a skate competition ensued. The 80s-style vert ramp and skate decks proved to be a challenge for the skaters, but they were determined to skate to the best of their abilities.

“We gotta ride the real deal here,” says Hawk. And they certainly did. With 80s punk bands like The Ramones and The Clash playing in the background, the skaters competed in three challenges: Vert Challenge, Big Air Session and Jam Session.

Cash prizes were awarded to the first through 11th place winners, and Hawk took home the first place prize of $1,980, which he distributed amongst the skaters who didn’t place. Other awards include the Overall 80s, which went to Hosoi, and the Big Air, which went to Bucky Lasek.

The only video allowed at the event was from shredordie.com, which will release it, relying on the viral lure of Internet video to get the word out about the site’s features to action-sports buffs.

Quiksilver also debuted some of its Spring 2009 collection – with an 80s theme, of course. The brightly colored, printed and patterned vintage fashions were on display in the company’s expansive headquarters. The vintage outfits will be available in January.

Preview Video and photos after the jump.

All photogrpahy is copyright Luke Hodsdon @ ninethreestudio

Written by Kristen Schott @ ninethreestudio

Please contact Luke Hodsdon or Kristen Schott @ ninethreestudio if you would like to use any of this material. Thank you.

For more videos on the event visit shredordie.com.

Best idea ever: The HOW TIE™

Luke Hodsdon — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:39:14 +0000

HOW TIE™
instructions included

Job Interview? Briss? Court Appearance? Yes, a necktie is definitely called for, and not a clip-on! No problem…relax, take a deep breath, remember your days in the boy scouts, and study the oh-so-easy knot-tying instructions printed right on Fred’s handy How Tie.

Thanks Design You Trust for the link. (How Fresh and Creative Ideas Rules the World)
Follow through to see other ideas too, this one was just my favorite.

Guest post to win a free Apple MacBook Air?!!

Luke Hodsdon — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:17:17 +0000

Right now Smashing Magazine is holding a contest to it’s readers with a grand prize of a free Apple MacBook Air. All you have to do it write intriguing, original guest posts for them. The requirements are fairly short, 400-1200 characters.

Please follow the jump to see the entry from Smashing Magazine.

As you may know, we are looking for motivated, talented and professional guest authors. And we are paying each author $100-300 per post — depending on the quality of the delivered article. If you think that you are one of them contact us — we want you, we need you, we can’t live without you and we would really be happy to have you in our Smashing team.

And to spark your interest for writing we’ve decided to announce a guest author contest — write a small guest article for Smashing Magazine and win one of dozens of attractive prizes waiting for you.

Awards

Best guest articles will be published on Smashing Magazine with the link to the author’s site. The best guest post will be determined by the editorial team and will be awarded with Apple MacBook Air, a compact, ultrathin 13.3? laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive) released by Apple few months ago.

Apart from that the places 2-5 will be awarded with attractive designer laptop sleeves and bags. And the places 6-10 will be awarded with design and web-development related books. We also have a pretty nice special price for the most unusual guest post. However, we are not revealing it yet.

What are we looking for?

The main idea behind the contest is not to get as many guest articles as possible, but to find talented guest authors who will want to work with us after the contest and get properly paid for their work. If you would like to write for us beyond the contest — drop us a line, we’ll figure something out.

So what are we looking for and what are we expecting? As a guest author you have two options to choose from.

Authors who have something to say…
We are looking for a short discussion article which would manage to spark a conversation in the comments and involve many readers of our magazine in a discussion. Your article should meet the following guidelines:

it should have between 450 and 1200 characters,
it may be controversial and too subjective, but it should not be boring,
it may present some idea, approach or remark about recent developments, but you need to argue well and explain your position properlym,
it should have a valid HTML-markup.
In this case we are interested in guest authors who have original ideas and a good writing style (please read it again: original ideas are important). We will select best discussion articles and publish them in the magazine.

Here are some examples (please don’t use them for your discussion articles):

designers should work with at least 3 displays at the same time,
reasons why I hate becoming a designer,
arguments why Fireworks is much better than Photoshop.
one can actually live without Google (how?).
…and authors who have something to show.

Alternatively, you can submit a top-10-list instead of a discussion article. We are looking for the masters of lists (if your name is Yoda, consider you already got some bonus-points). We expect useful and beautiful top-10-lists. Your top-10-list should meet the following guidelines:

an exciting and eye-catching headline,
a quick yet attractive introduction (usually 2-4 sentences),
10 list items with a brief description (usually 1-2 sentences) and with links if necessary,
at least 2 images or screenshots (if it is impossible to make screenshots or find images for your topic ignore this condition),
it should have a valid HTML-markup.
In this case we are interested in authors who are original, possess knowledge and experience and have some good sources to find images, links etc. We will select best discussion articles and publish them in the magazine.

Here are some examples (please don’t use them for your top-10-lists):

top 10 most beautiful wallpapers with ladybugs,
top 10 best WordPress-themes with yellow background,
top 10 best tricks to search on Del.icio.us,
top 10 best GIMP-tutorials.
Restrictions and Rules

Please follow the following guidelines when sending your articles:

all files should be packed in a .zip and include all images which occur in the article,
an archive with an article written by John Doe should be titled john-doe.zip,
you can submit at most 3 articles (at all, e.g. 2 top-10-lists and 1 discussion article or vice versa),
you should be the writer of the article you submit,
send the article to Sven Lennartz using the following e-mail:
sven@[Smashing Magazine domain].
Deadline

5th of August 2008.

Winners

Best discussion articles and top-10-lists will be published on Smashing Magazine. We will carefully observe the reaction of our reader in our comments. Depending on the number and quality of the comments we will assign some score to every article. Once the scores are assigned we will announce the articles with the highest score and award their authors with prizes and awards.

Get creative, folks. And good luck!

Visit Smashing Magazine to Guest post and enter to win the Apple MacBook Air!

Great ad from Vespa

Luke Hodsdon — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:47:46 +0000

I saw this ad on Dark Roasted Blend and couldn’t resist re-showing it to the world. For anyone who’s ever sat in traffic, this ad makes perfect sense! (I’d know, I live in Orange County, CA)

Play Balloonacy!

Luke Hodsdon — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:30:26 +0000

»ANNOUNCEMENT TO ALL BALLOONANCY PARTICIPANTS: I’m going to be frequently checking my page, if your balloon happens to be on my page at the time i’m checking i’ll be sure to give you a 5x boost! Good luck, and good race!

STRIKE in Orange County premier opening

Luke Hodsdon — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:33:16 +0000

Hey look! It’s a me (the man) and a Kristen (the occasional woman) behind the ninethreestudio posts! ~~The man, and sometimes the occasional woman, behind these lovely blog posts.~~ (EDIT: After re-reading this, i realized this almost made it sound like i was an occasional woman. It made me laugh, so i decided to leave it in to show you just how my hamster-on-a-wheel brain works, enjoy.) Where you ask? Ohh, in a photo booth…. okay, okay. STRIKE bowling alley in Orange County had some hoopla event grand opening thing hosted by Lauren Conrad. Yadda Yadda Yadda. Lots of people, free food, booze and bowling… ho hum ho hum…. and now the good stuff. Justice, from American Gladiators… yeah, he was there. I’m not the shortest guys in the world, and he still towered over me. I got all giddy and told Kristen, “Look, there’s that huge dude from American Gladiators!”, then the glaze over of uninterest, but i didn’t let it phase me. haha.

70 unique business card designs

Luke Hodsdon — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:35:00 +0000

Here’s a collection of 70 of the coolest, most unique business cards i’ve ever seen. Thanks Francesco Mugnai and Justin at Big Head Design for passing around the wealth of this list!!

66 more cards after the jump. it’s a big post, i had to split them to the single page, haha!

Portfolio: 2008 Hot 25 Logo Designs

Luke Hodsdon — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 06:45:39 +0000

Title: OC METRO BUSINESS Hot 25 2008 Logo Design

Client: Churm Media, in association with OC METRO BUSINESS

Program(s) Used: Illustrator

Time Span: 10 hours (Concept, client revisions, completion)

About: Every year OC METRO BUSINESS host it’s annual Hot 25 Event. the event honors hottest 25 people of Orange County, not a beauty contest. This includes entrepreneurs, business executives, managers, or just anyone in general making huge waves in Orange County. Every year the event is themed, and has to do with the new directions that OC METRO BUSINESS is going. This year the event, and the company, is completely rebranding itself as a web and digital entity, hence the theme “Hot Goes Digital”. The client’s idea was to show how OC METRO BUSINESS is moving into the 2.0, very web friendly.

Designer Notes: My original concept for this logo was to incorporate the feel of web 2.0. Very glossy, colorful, reflections, clean, simple and sleek all into one logo. After showing a first round of designs and color combinations the client didn’t want to stray from it’s branding and the logos went through a revision and font change. The end result is what you see above and a bit different that the original concept, but what the client wants, the client gets.

Design then and now: Playboy covers

Luke Hodsdon — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:46:22 +0000

Through a little bit of link surfing I came across a page called Xpozio and tripped onto these above Playboy magazine covers. I thought it was so interesting to see how our culture has changed so much in just a short 50 years. The old covers at their time were probably considered risque and exposing, but compared to the covers of the 2000′s they seem like a child’s paint by numbers!

Working as an Art Director for Churm Media and designing covers for OC Family magazine and IE Family magazine it’s part of my job to stay up to date and current with magazine design, so when i see something as extraordinary as this national magazine undergo such huge changes it makes me take a look back at the short 10 years that Churm Media’s Family publications have been around and how much they’ve grown and evolved (to come in a later post, it’s on my to do list)

Cheap and great Tatebanko paper diorama kits

Luke Hodsdon — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:56:05 +0000

For only $9.95 each, these dioramas take me back to 3rd grade. Granted, mine usually consisted of old G.I.Joes whos mid-section rubber band had broken and then found their way under my brothers wood burning kit… a little read paint, some dirt (which we were NEVER short of in The Antelope Valley), twigs, grass and a bit of hot glue gun. BHAM! instant battlefield! Needless to say, i was a sheltered, bored little child. there’s nothing to do in the desert when it’s 117º outside and the wind is blowing dust devils into your mouth! Ohh how that brings me back to the middle school playground where half of our lunch would be chewing through the rocks that just blew into our faces… mother earth’s all natural pop-rocks; now with no trans fat! I’ll have seconds!

It was either this or stealing my mom’s cookie tins and pitting the black and red ant tribes against each other in a battle of epic proportions. ohh, how they did hate one antoher. And i’m convinced the black ants were either the gatherers or just plain wussies, because the red ants won every time. Even when we stacked the odds with a 1:4 ratio the red team was triumphant. Now, don’t flame me for ant cruelty, this was years ago, i was a little kid. Thanks again boredom!

Incredibly affordable, these diorama kits will most likely give enjoyment long after assembly.

‘Tatebanko is the forgotten Japanese art of creating amazing dioramas and scenic perspectives from paper. Tatebanko was popular and widely admired from the 17th century (Edo period) to the early 20th century. Then it all but disappeared. “It’s a Beautiful Day” has now revived and reinterpreted this simple and elegant Japanese art with two new paper craft kits. The kits feature the works from two famed Edo artists – Hiroshige’s Kambara, Evening Snow and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Beautifully designed and printed in Japan with elegant metallic accents, the kits are nicely packaged A4 size and make a diorama that is 7 1/2” W x 3 1/2” D x 4 7/8” H. Each kit has a playful secret and interesting details that make assembly fun. With these kits, Tatebanko will undoubtedly enjoy a well-deserved renaissance.’

Hokusai (left): $9.95, Buy it here.
Hiroshige: $9.95, Buy it here.

Thanks Why Me? via Better Living Through Design.

The relationship between agency and client…

Luke Hodsdon — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:26:58 +0000

Any designer who knows their place in the word of agency living knows that there’s that ugly separation between sales, design and management. There is always going to be someone trying to make the sale and promise aspects of design to clients at the minimal cost, because, hey, they need to make the sale. There’s always going to be management telling you that now the sale is made you have to manage to deliver in the time frame that they also promised client X. And lastly there’s the designers who have to take the foot of sales and management and deliver on the goods. In a perfect world there would be a great seamless line of open communication, but in the REAL world everyone’s “too busy” to make time to find out exactly what a client wants, which leads us to our good old friend “revision”. How ya doing buddy??

Thanks again Justin at Big Head Design. You never fail to deliver the goods! Must have been a slow morning for you.

Creative advertising: concept to execution

Luke Hodsdon — Fri, 30 May 2008 06:08:45 +0000

Every designer has heard the tired old expression “form follows function”. Well, the following designers took that and tossed it out the window. This is more Function follows form. Every one of these was designed with surroundings in mind, materials accounted for and logistics calculated. The agencies that produced these must have made a buck or two in their days of glory.

To read more about these advertisements check out Big Head Design and Toxel. Thanks again for another great post Jusin at BHD.

3 more images after the jump.