What do Island Cowgirl Jewelry, Related Grey, Innovative Results and Carl Warren & Co. all have in common. This cover of course! Sheesh, sometimes I just gotta spell it out for ya. Shot by the ohh-so-talented Challenge Roddie, this cover pulled 4 very different industries together in one studio to hit a home run concept. Plus, the little dog, Dexxy, didn’t poop on anything, so there’s that!

I probably should have marked this with ‘mock’ or ‘concept’ because as you may have noticed this doesn’t actually appear in the 3-2011 issue of OCMETRO. What’s that? You don’t have the March issue of OCMETRO adorning your coffee table. For shame! I digress. Sometimes the limitations of dense stock photo heavy pages is the bland, “I’ve seen this before” quality you get with the available choices. So, when a gem like the above comes along the opportunity is not to be missed… or so I thought. Silly me. Not living in the ‘I’m the king, me, me, me’ world I wish I lived in as a creative director, there’s always someone higher on the food chain that has the power to veto, and veto they did. Luckily concept can live on in blog. HUZZAH!

New design, check. Fresh event look, check. Convincing the powers that be to let me use a spot UV for the first time, check. The sales pitch was tough, because you can only show non-artistic people a sample of something and get the idea across. There’s always that need of “well, what will ours look like?”. Luckily, they left their trust (and probably some held back fears) in my hands and the final product was perfect. Smooth black matte finish topped with a nice thick coat of UV.

OCMTERO’s annual “Women in Business” cover design. In an attempt to pull off an elegant, Vanity Fair-esque look, we enlisted the help of South Coast Plaza for wardrobe, Solmas for hair & makeup and our amazing freelance photographer, Challenge Roddie, for capturing it all. This cover design was quite the departure from our standard business type covers, but with each of the women on the listing being the top of million-dollar plus companies, we had to do something special.

Hang tag design for Mulberry Lane. Submitted on 99Designs.

Concept logo design for Center for Business Ethics. Submitted on 99Designs

As the tradition continues, the Churm challenges/competitions forge ahead. As seen here [Big Bad Wolf], and here [der Rattenfänger], this piece moves into the portfolio file as a mock ad design, despite it not being submitted for consideration. I’d designed a couple of ads and had gone with a second choice for the competition, though really liking the cleanliness of this “ad”.

As mentioned previously, the design group over at Churm media likes to have some creative fun in our “downtime”. Given nothing more than an objective and a few “must use” image files, the designers are set free to explore whatever they can come up with to achieve victory. This round the objective was simple, to create an ad using whatever theme you want and a selection of 4 must use images. And if memory serves me correct, I took the win this round with the ruling judgement of our awesome colleague judges.

My first year designing the annual “40 Under 40″ for OCMETRO and Churm Media, and I wanted to make a mark. Inspired by a design I’d seen on one of my frequented design blogs, I undertook the arduous task of manually typesetting each and every name to fit the shape of the ’40′ … even despite the editorial blunders of misspelled names that I later had to reformat and fit into an already tight, finished piece. Despite the grief and “woe is me” moments, the finished piece really stood on it’s own and was a big hit at the event and with our readers.

Photography has been a growing passion of mine since I purchased my T2i almost 2 years back. Working for a media company, I’ve been given some great opportunities to hone my skills and take some photos of some OC elites. In 2010 I was hired as a freelance photographer to shoot the OCMETRO Green Team event at the Great Park in Irvine. Event photography is never really where I saw my talents being utilized, but a paying job and a passion to shoot makes any opportunity a growing experience.

This “movie poster” design was sparked from an in-house design competition we started at Churm Media to help keep the down time productive and the design minds moving. The goal is to present a challenge with some ground rules and regulations, and then let the designers minds run free. My design was for “der Rattenfänger”, which loosely {and probably poorly, thanks Google translate) translates to the pied piper in German.

April 2009′s issue of OCMETRO was it’s annual “Marketing Matermind” featuring Jon Gothold, Executive Creative Director at Santa Ana’s DGWB, an advertising agency.

Working with a freelance client, ripeorange inc., on an event for an upcoming media travel showcase led to the design of many collateral items. This menu was created in InDesign CS5 and printed on recycled card stock for each of the guests.

The concept was to keep a very clean, easy to navigate design with a “high fashion” feel to it. Using the modern, duochromatic colors and accentuating singular letters with the complimenting colors we were able to accomplish the task with much praise from our client.

In the world o’ publishing, sometimes we don’t always get the cream of the crop when it comes to image selection. For whatever the case may be, we might be given lemons. In particular, I was given this image as a high res option for our cover story layout, and ended up making due with it as a cover image. Interesting enough in it’s own right, dabble in a little bit of typography and clipping paths, BOOM! Cover!

Prepping my team at Churm Media for the big switch from Quark 8 to InDesign CS5 (Hallelujah!), I assigned the project for everyone to design a magazine cover using exclusively InDesign and supporting Adobe products, for photo retouching/manipulation. They were given free reign, with the one caveat being that it had to look like a magazine cover, not an art piece. Being a team player I to took part in this exercise. Drawing inspiration from, quite possibly, the best news site on the internet, I set my goals at creating a cover for slashdot. Their tagline says it all, “News for nerds. News that matters.”. Being a long time follower of the site, and getting 90% of my conversation topics their as well, I knew that I wanted a cover subject that would ‘fit’. John Stewart immediately jumped to mind and my search of google images began. Maybe not the obvious choice for a “nerd news” magazine, but the guy has brains and wit to match … I knew the fit would work. Once I had the idea, the rest was a breeze.