kylegilbert

Of all the things I get to do as a website and graphic designer, one of my favorite tasks is working on logo design and branding.  I love working with companies to figure out how to represent their business in a small scalable image.

I recently completed a logo design for a translations business called TIN.  The graphic below shows the three major stages of the logo.  It started as a round speech bubble with the text on the inside.  After chewing on that for a while and thinking through how it would work on a website, on letterhead, and on business cards,  I decided to make it more sleek, remove the text from the inside (partly because of legibility in small applications – as you see here), and point the inside speech bubble in the opposite direction (like a back and forth conversation).  In the third round of design, I closed off the crescent shape and reversed the direction each of the bubbles was pointing (to help with eye flow when used in the top left of a website).

I think it turned out very nice.

Over the past couple of months, my life has been consumed with preparing for the launch of the new Faith Promise Church website.  I am thrilled to report that tonight we will redirect the name servers to point to the new website.

This has been a mammoth project, and even with a couple of us working on it almost daily for weeks, we still missed our desired launch day of Jan 1st (but not by much).

I want to thank all of the people who have helped see this project through.  Evan Crass got the ball rolling even before I arrived at Faith Promise by pulling together a bunch of people who were eager to see the site go to the next level.  From then on, I’ve been amazed at the talent and skill found at Faith Promise.

Special thanks to Jeff Lowe for tracking down all the DNS info and so faithfully uploading audio files to the site each week, and Brad Farrar for your excellent worship photography that is featured on several pages.  Toe, thanks for your encouragement and expertise, and Heather,  thank you for designing the amazing sermon series graphics and logos.  Thanks also to Josh for entrusting this project to me and empowering me with the necessary resources.

There are many others who have contributed, but none so much as my new friend Brad Roberts.  His skill and expertise as a developer is outstanding, and it’s been a joy to work alongside him on this project.  Meetings (both face-to-face and internet), phone conversations, and many late nights have been poured into this site together.

If you click the link and still see the old site, take a moment to look around and tell it goodbye (the name servers take up to a couple of days to update across the internet).  Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the new site.

The image above is the front of a postcard that I put together for Touch of Vintage last night.  I really like the way it turned out, especially close up (click image for detail).

Ben White introduced me to the love of fonts a few years ago.  I didn’t really understand the beauty at first, but that’s no longer true.  Fonts are pretty amazing in their ability to communicate, and they are amazing in their simplicity.  (Yes, I know I’m a dork.)

So I wanted to share this website I came across today so that it will either a) help you to love fonts too, or b) reinforce your understading of my dorkiness.

Here’s a new logo that I mocked up for a redesign of a jewelry site called “A Touch of Vintage.”  We will probably change the background color on the site, but I’m really happy about the way this is looking, and if everything goes according to plan, we should be launching her new site in the next couple of weeks.

If you haven’t taken a look at Tamra’s vintage jewelry, you really need to.  She’s got an amazing gift for bold and funky jewelry.

Several friends have decided to open a booth at a local antique mall, and I’ve been working on their web page for the past couple of weeks.  It’s been fun because it’s required me to learn some new elements of CSS to place the two backgrounds on top of each other (blue repeated wallpaper and the scrolls) while still not forcing the page to extend beyond the width of smaller monitors.  It’s also been my first time to use a CSS image replacement technique to force a text image in place of a normal heading font.

I’ve really enjoyed working on this.  Most of the time I don’t have the chance to make things with a “grunge” look, but I really enjoy it when I can.

I found out this afternoon that the Pastor is starting a new sermon series in a couple of weeks.  That meant I needed to pull together a concept for the series and send the stuff over to the printer so that we’d have bulletins on time.

Here’s the result.  Thought it turned out pretty nice (especially given the time crunch).

Well, back in the days before I started getting into graphic design, I used to draw and paint a little bit.  I was digging through some of my old stuff the other day, and here are some drawings and paintings that I made during Junior High and High School.