Wow I haven't updated in a really long time, this month has been an emotional rollercoaster, for the past couple of weeks there hasn't been a day where I haven't had some serious personal issue to worry about. Things have finally calmed down a bit. This month has been really hectic and I'm kind of glad its coming to an end and I can have a fresh start and channel my energy into designing and finding a new job. Job hunting sucks but uh I'm receiving unemployment and its a nice sum so I'm not too worried about paying bills for the next couple months and its kind of nice to have the free time to just design all these projects I have stored in my head.
Although design trends in illustration are annoying me because you see all these busy compositions with a million things going on and all of it ends up looking the same bright neon stylized puke or something. I kind of can't wait until minimalism makes a comeback.




"Gothic rockers Versailles on the cover of purple SKY's final issue

After two and a half years, seven issues and a whole lot of Goldschläger, we are sad to announce that North Americas first all English Japanese rock magazine will be ceasing operations following the publication of our Winter 2008 issue."

Anyway the last issue of Purple Sky is coming out next month I believe, here's the ( press release )

For this issue I only designed 3 layouts, the style I used was totally different from the previous issue. Since the magazine design was so sporadic when I first started working for it I wanted to bring restraint and elegance and simplicity to its pages. But this time I didn't want to do the same thing because that would be boring for me and I was more inclined to have a lot of illustrative elements mixed in with the traditional editorial design elements, and I felt like being a bit more carefree with things and not so constrained and organized.


Melt Banana

I ended up changing the Melt Banana one a lot compared to the previous example of the design that I showed on here. This design is more in step with what the art direction called for, there's some organized chaos going on, a lot of the stuff I didn't plan on purpose but when I looked at it sometime after I designed it I noticed that a lot of things I did offhand ended up making visual sense. I usually design more by instinct rather than having a set of design rules at the forefront of my mind.




Grrl's Nite

This layout went through a lot of revisions on my part before it finally came to this version. I designed the mic-sperm illustration first and the amps and I really wanted to use those so I kind of designed the second half of the layout around those lol. Designing the opening spread took forever because I didn't know what to do, but there were these great pics of Gito Gito Hustler showing intensity and some great on stage female rock power; so I worked with those to give an immediate sense that the women featured in these bands put forth some ferocious rock energy.


Puffy Ami Yumi

I just noticed that one petal is a different color, I have no idea why o.O; I wish I'd noticed earlier before the magazine went to print but oh well. The imagery on this is the one they used for their recent album honeycreeper. I think hummingbirds and swallows are the two more ubiquitous birds used in pop illustration these days, they have great silhouettes and people immediately know what they are. For this layout I didn't wanna open the spread with an image and have text underneath so I choose to open with big bold text and illustration that told a story that alludes to the concept behind the name of their current album. The H is highly stylized to match all the textures and patterns in the promo photo.


Anyway currently I'm doing some freelance work for vk_emily, I'm putting together the brand identity for the new company she's launching. It sounds really exciting and should yield to some cool stuff for the jrock fandom in the future. I'll post the designs I did for that once everything is finalized.