Monstrously Creative Design and Me
I’m sure you’re wondering why Monstrously? Monsters are bad right? Nope. Not at all.
Monsters to me are things that are gigantic, demand your attention, and bring a life of their own to things, and that is what good design should do. So if being monstrously means all that… GREAT.
So I’m sure one of the first things that popped into your mind upon visiting my site was “what the heck is up with that little monster?” Right? Well. I call them Lok’thaire, or Lok for short, they’re a personification of my creativity, and while most of the time I keep the little booger in check like on a couple of the pages, sometimes they can’t quite help but go on a creative rampage as you were introduced to on the home page. But, hey, that’s how creativity works sometimes and we are all familiar with it not workings or working.
It took me a long time to get to that point to let the creative rampage happen and just let the little booger go free and do what they please. What do I mean by this? I would often let Lok go and go what Lok wants, but when ever happened to be created from that free reign wouldn’t get the right reaction.. leading me to lock well… Lok up. What it caused me to do was create what I thought people wanted to see. Which often lead to pieces and designs that were less than stellar or something really restricted looking. One night it just happened I had a shift in thinking and Lok broke loose from the cage they were in and just made me go on a creative rampage myself. Doing what I wanted to do. It felt good, really good. I didn’t care that it didn’t garnish the reactions I thought it should of got, it got what was needed. That’s perfectly fine. my portfolio still reflects some of that “what people want to see” and restricted thinking, I’m working rapidly to fix that and do things the way I think they should be done.
MY PROCESS
This is a little about my process when it comes to getting to the final design of my work. It's a lot of sketching, lots of messy, and lots of looking at images as well.
Meddling Liberals
Although This project never took off and got anywhere, the core concept was for a youtube channel that liked to disrupt and cause chaos, their mascot was a cat, as cats are pretty tame, but they can cause a lot of chaos. I tried to capture that by using cats "yelling" as sometimes they just seem to like to yell at you, getting tangled up in yarn, but having fun, and innocuously knocking things over - in this case the S at the end of the word Liberals.
Simpsons Tattoo
This was a tattoo commission for someone using the Simpsons, and a barrel of monkeys. Homer was to be hanging from a doughnut and everyone else hanging off him as if you pulled them out of a can of Duff beer which would be the barrel.
I started out as a literal idea of converting the Simpsons characters to the monkey you would see in the game, but the design of them didn't click with the commissioner, I think switched to the characters, sketching them out in various poses hanging off each other, or in Barts case falling.
Walks With Woofs
Walks with Woofs was a dog walking business that was looking for a new and updated business logo. The owner loved poodles and wanted to incorporate one in some way shape and form. My main objective with the design was to stay away from anything overly used and associated with dog walking. My approach to it was what are other things associated with dogs? Muddy foot prints, happy tippy taps and happy tails, the owner of the business also had some very unique dog breeds they walked that I had considered incorporating into the card/logo as well.
Various Designs for a Poster
This was my process for a poster design. I tried out some various concepts for layout and ones I think could work out for it. Some of them were a little too plain and others were a little to extreme, after I decided on a couple ideas I thought would work I plotted out how the information could lay out on the page and how it could possibly look like.
