Have you ever seen the giant mural banners hanging on the buildings all over the City of Louisville depicting people such as Muhammad Ali, Pat Day, Diane Sawyer, and others? You can thank Hometown Heroes, a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the word about extraordinary people from Louisville, KY.

I was chosen to design and build this website for them in effort to help them share more information on their project to a wider audience. I went for a minimalist, grid based approach so the images and information could stand on their own in a clear, structural way. The newest features available to modern web browsers such as webkit transition affects and box shadows were utilized to create a fast, very responsive, beautiful design. You can check out the site first hand by visiting www.LouisvilleHeroes.org.

I designed this map to accompany the Hometown Heroes website. It works as a simple locator map for the various commemorative mural banners that the organization has put up all over the City of Louisville.

Dan Boyarski recently gave a talk and presented his new work at The University of Louisville. In this new work, Boyarski began by creating a grid based off of a quilt pattern. He then inserted a set of photos into the layout that became cropped according to the grid. The results were stunning so I decided to take the same idea and apply it to one of my own photos. I then took the same grid ( a 3×3 set of squares) and used it on a facing page to layout the relating text.

This logo was created for a local newspaper as a design exercise. I choose to bring together a strong serif typeface with a more modern looking font to try and combine the trusting, solid feelings that come from a good paper with the younger, more spirited culture of this new organization.

The client for this project, Quality Auto Glass, was looking to expand its presence onto the web but they didn’t have a lot of content or a huge budget to work with. To solve this dilemma, I decided create a simple, yet elegant website that would save on development time and still do a great job at representing the company. Where many sites have sprawling menus taking you to countless pages, I instead combined the home, contact and services pages into one. I also utilized some of the latest CSS properties such as box-shadow, text-shadow, and rounded corners to cut back on photoshop production time and to increase page loading speeds. The result was a beautiful website that both the client and I were very please with.

I designed this poster in class as an advertisement for a mathematics conference. I definitely had some inspiration from Herb Lubalin’s Families logo but the idea really developed after I had been staring at the numbers in my layout for so long that I began to see them as forms instead of numbers. When this context disappeared, the resemblance of the number one to a person just popped out to me. I decided to bookend the central figures with consecutive numbers to make sure they would be still be recognized as ones and not just as people.

This design developed from the fact that just about all of my most creative ideas seem to just appear. I do brainstorm, sketch and constantly think about different design solutions but all of these things seems to simply warm my mind up. It really isn’t until my mind is clear of thought that I truly get quality results.

It reminds me a bit of something I read once, I believe about Benjamin Franklin although I could be wrong. Whoever it was, the story went that in order to come up with new ideas, he would hold a set of keys in his hands as he sat in his chair for a nap. Franklin would also set a metal plate on the ground below his hand so that just as his mind settled and he began to drift into sleep, he would drop the keys and be jolted up when they hit the plate. The hope being that he would awake with something new and creative.

This was an intaglio print made from one of my drawings. The process started by taking a copper plate and covering it with a ground. I then etched the drawing into the plate and placed it into an acid bath where the drawing became embedded into the copper. Afterwords, I rubbed ink into the resulting crevasses and ran the plate through a press.

As with several of my other works, the idea for the drawing just kind of showed up in my head. I had been using the little men shown in some of my other drawings at the time I illustrated this one and the stylized tree developed from a design I did on one of my first websites. I’m not really sure why I decided to bring them together but it just seemed right and so I ended up with this result.

I’ve been thinking about redesigning the Kentucky Scenic logo for a while now as I’ve realized that there were a number of issues with the original mark. The main problem was its lack of versatility due mainly to the gradients and enclosure of type within the mark. The new design solves this and works in a much more elegant, simplistic manner.

I took this photo for a recent post over at my site KentuckyScenic.com. You can check out the rest of the photos in the post here: http://kentuckyscenic.com/a-winter-lake/.