Ads by Hand(ycock)

There's something really refreshing about taking the time to actually PLAN an ad rather than just slinging it together out of stuff some else has already done. Such is the nature of the corporate ad world, however. It takes approximately 7.3 minutes to churn out an ad for any of our monthly publications. So we do that. Over and over again. Then, when we decide that that campaign has run its course, we spend a couple days on a new ad campaign and then generally wind up recycling parts of the old campaign and we never come up with a COMPLETELY fresh ad. Since I'm speaking from an in-house perspective only, let me explain to you why doing an ad by hand is like walking down the street with Megan Fox: blissful

We sit down and brainstorm. Ideas are flowing, nothing is off limits. We choose an ad idea that seems to be the best option and we run with it. Pages of notes and sketches are made. "We can do this..." and "Oh, that would be cool..." And then, once everyone's had their idea pooled collectively into one ad, they hand all the notes off to me and say, "Make this." Where do I begin?

Most people tend to jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and just start churning something out in the digital realm. I'm a much better freehand artist than I am an Illustrator genius. Combine that with the fact that I HATE 2gig Photoshop files, and you can see why my obvious first step is to grab a couple sheets of paper and start drawing. I spend about 15min on two different comps. I look them over and decide they need some more detail. So I jump on iStockPhoto (one of our image providers) and browse the lists for pictures relevant to our ad concept. After finding two that I like, I download lowRes versions and go back to my sketches and change up the sketches to match the photos I found.

This is the end of my sketching stage. At this point, the roughs are finished enough to see (in your mind's eye) what the final ad will look like, so now I head into Photoshop and Illustrator to do some heavy lifting. First, I grab the pen tool and make an exaggerated clipping path. I mean, more points than you can count. Its complex and intricate, but when the final image is masked, it looks good. From there, I take the image I clipped, which happens to be a person, and I put it on a fresh white background that is already sized to the ad that I'm building. Now I head back to iStockPhoto for more images. The ad concept is supposed to be a centralized figure with some different things happening in the background, mosaic-style. The image search is the hardest part for me. Finding the right image to fit the ad (subject wise) is tricky at best. I find several images that appeal to me and begin compositing them in the ad. At this point, its not a copy and paste job. It's a format image, feather the sides, mask the left, apply gradient, re-feather, tighten the mask, apply color filter, apply curves, re-apply curves because I hit cancel instead of "ok" and so on and so forth. Once I get all this done, the image modification for ONE image is finished. Now I gotta do that for 3 other images and the central character (that I clipped, remember?). Once all the images are set and the ad looks viable, I move on to what I call Finishing.

I hit up my personal collection of vector art and peruse iStock again for their's along with a few of my favorite sites. I pull some vector pieces into Illustrator and start making some things up. I look at my drawing, decide that the way I drew things is too complicated for me to make, so I start redrawing. What's a good way to do this? How can I make this look better? I can I do this easier? All of these are viable questions.

Once I've got my layout down and my general design in place, I have to take it to the Big Wigs and let them praise it or tell me to blow it out my butt. Either way, they mostly don't care about the sketches and usually never know that I even do them. But thanks to those little works of art, I'm able to maximize my time and get a lot more done.

And so ends my blog on how to sketch your way to happiness in 11 easy steps. OUT!

Lunch Goodies

Top Ten Tasty sandwiches (aka samwich)

Ah, lunch, the sweet (and savory) science. It was not until I became a member of the full time work world that I found out just how important lunch is to my everyday life. Lunch divides my day, and keeps me sane. Lunch cheers me up when I'm down, and keeps me warm on a sub-freezing afternoon. Lunch has some many key components, it's hard to single out just one. But I have chosen the samwich as the subject of this, the first food CSS blog.

*My definition of a samwich is as fellows, two pieces of bread and some kind of filler in the middle. Under this set of rules burgers are indeed samwiches, while hotdogs and tacos are not.

10.) Peanut butter - HOME - I love peanut butter, there I admitted. I may even love it too much, to the point of having a problem. Oh and jelly is for biscuits, NOT samwiches.

9.) Grilled Cheese - HOME - melted cheese and a toasted piece of buttered bread. This is the samwich that will save you in the winter months when you work out of a 100 year old house.

8.) Turkey and Ham (toasted) - Subway - All I can say is, 5 dolla, 5 dolla foot long. I know their turkey is boring, but that's a lot of samwich.

7.) Fried Baloney - HOME - Fry some baloney and throw it on some bread. A southern favorite that will not disappoint.

6.) Stack Attack - Wendy's - This is my value selection, if you want some lunch without a lot of hassle, then this is your choice. It's actually a lot of meat for 99¢ (that's what she said). Wendy's is the best fast food burger out there. There are others that come close, but you'll end up spending more money.

5.) Spicy Chicken - Wendy's - What can I say, I like Wendy's. While their chicken can be hot or miss, the spicy is always right on. This samwich will also help you out in the winter time, but at much higher price.

Now here is where the list starts to split hairs, one can not go wrong with any of the top four choices.

4.) Roast Beef - Jersey Mike's - num num num are the words that come to mind when thinking about this samwich. Jersey Mike's makes their own bread and roasts their own beef. Throw some pipping hot roast on some bread, still warm form the oven, and you have one winning samwich. BTW you have to get it's mike's way, at least once.

3.) Turkey Bravo - Panera - This one holds a special place in my heart. This samwich brought me out of the dark ages. Before I tasted one of these, I thought all turkey samwiches had to be boring. Oh and this was my lunch spot pre CSS.

2.) Original Chicken samwich - Chick fil a - this is one unbelievable samwich, so light and crispy. The brightest star of this samwich is the chicken, but don't overlook the bun. Their bread is high quality, which it needs to be because this is the most simple samwich on this list.

1.) Bacon Cheese Burger - 5 Guys - The best burger I have ever paid for. It was everything one would want or need in a burger. It was juicy on the inside and crispy on the outside. They even put the cheese on the burger while it is on the grill. The toppings are so fresh too. All around, it's so hard to find faults with this burger.

So, there we have it, my first CSS blog. I'm so happy, I'm going to put my head on my desk for the rest of lunch break.

The Strangers: simply terrifying

A few thoughts on The Strangers which we went to see Saturday at Opry Mills. First of all, I'm not a huge fan of scary movies, never have been really- mainly the gory ones. As we were walking in the theater I thought to myself, wtf am I doing here? as I knew this was most likely going to scare the b'jesus out of me, but hey- if the boys are down, I'm down.

It was scary- almost unwatchable at times as they taunted those of us watching just like the victims on screen, but it was not gory- at all. In fact there's more blood in a Die Hard movie to be honest. No, the main point of this was just to terrorize people all night and then murder them. It was so simple that it became even scarier to me. Just thought of random crazies stopping because your porch light is on, scaring the shit out of you all night and then stabbing you to death is enough to make you unscrew your lightbulbs. Hate to spoil the plot, but that's what you're getting. I knew that going into it and I still went, everyone did. The fact is though, that when you throw a score that's downright sick (seriously impressive) and add simple terror, you've got yourself an original picture. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone that wants to be scared, it's a good film for that. If you want big budget camera tricks and gore, you probably won't be satisfied at The Strangers simple, rural terror. However, my opinion is that it's far scarier being "lower budget"- no actors you know pretending to be villains. nothing else at all to take your mind off of things, it's almost real-time, and you're trapped in the theater watching it go down, like they are trapped in the middle of nowhere. These masked people have no faces, no souls, and no identity in or out of Hollywood and that is extra scary to me. You almost feel like YOU survived when walking out of the theater. So make sure you see an early show so you can stop by the shotgun store on your way home.



End scene screenshot. [Eeeek!]


blog by: lee