:: ryan christopher lord :: blog ::

What’s up with this blog?

ryanlord — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:59:11 +0000

I’m actually not sure. It’s seem’s to have become mainly a design blog, but I don’t seem to put enough effort into updating it regularly. I might make into some kind of comic strip site… not sure.

For now, check out these sites that I actually update:

Portfolio Site:

www.lordstudios.com

Webcomics Site:

www.registrationcomics.com

Rocktober

ryanlord — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:56:22 +0000

Here’s a couple of banners I designed recently that I kind of liked. They’re for a local music store and are meant for mainly foot and car traffic. The rock hand is the store’s “logo”, and their colors are blue and orange, so that was my starting point. They’re a little stereotypical of what’s been done lately in rock music design, but I liked their energy.

Connected to people… with arrows

ryanlord — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:19:13 +0000

This is a logo the client actually liked. It was for a local church for there life groups, basically a group of people of diverse ages who meet every week to discuss their lives, how they’re doing. Basically a mini-community within the larger church community. Anyway, they call them Connect Groups. The only thing they wanted was people in the logo somewhere, so I went with silhouettes of a diverse group of people: women, men and a couple. The arrows encircling them are there to represent these people coming to together as a group in community, “connecting”… yeah.

Anyway, the wordmark was the hardest part. The logomark is so chunky, so I tried to balance it out with a thicker san serif, and interconnected the letters to reinforce the name. Trying to get it balanced and legible was tough, but I think it came together pretty well in the end.

Rejected Logos

ryanlord — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:18:59 +0000

Here’s a couple of rejected logo concepts for a steel building construction company. All the client said was he liked green, so that’s the reasoning behind the vastly different styles. We’re meeting again on it in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll post the final whenever that gets done.

The company has three different “sections”: Site Planning, Foundation, and Building Install. Each of the rhombus shapes represents one of these three, and when combined they create the logo mark, just like the three actions create the steel building. That was the concept anyway. Each one has a different color so that, say you were a Install worker, you would a have a dark green shirt as part of the visual identity. Maybe a little too ambitious and expensive for a Louisiana business, but I think it would have been cool.

This one was much more straight forward. The mark is a stylized steel building enclosed in a shape to imply safety , sturdiness, etc. I used a slab serif because I thought the client would probably respond better to it than the san serif in the previous logo. Apparently not. I also made a bubbled web 2.0 version just because people usually like shiny stuff. Ooooo… Shiny.

Really quick logo design…

ryanlord — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:16:32 +0000

Here’s a couple of logos I did this week that I thought were okay. The first was for a local plumber who wanted something “modern,” which is what people say when they want something that looks contemporary. I may have gone a little too sci-fi, but I think it would definitely stand out from other plumber’s clip art.

About 30 minutes in Corel Draw:

This next one was a little bizarre. They wanted a frog catching oil dropping from their text with its tongue. It has definite stacking and space issues, but I liked the frog Illustration.

About an hour, mainly spent on the frog:

Thanks for looking!

Post-it Note Whackiness!

ryanlord — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:03:36 +0000

Whenever I’m waiting on something at work, I’ve started doing post-it note sketches with a ballpoint pen. Pretty challenging with the small size and the fact that the ballpoint pen is the least artistic of all writing devices. They look kind of terrible, but I still like them for some reason.

Spider-man Triptych:

Conan! (In case you haven’t noticed, I like Conan… a lot)

The Sentinel of Liberty, Captain America:

Invincibled!

ryanlord — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:12:50 +0000

Did a marker sketch of the comic book character Invincible last night. Invincible features one of my favorite comic book artists of the moment, Ryan Ottley, and is worth checking out if you like superhero books.

Anatomy is a little funky, but it was fun to work on:

Going to surf city cuz it’s two to one…

ryanlord — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:03:23 +0000

Here’s some Silver Surfer for your Saturday. Just a quick marker sketch.

Conan… not O’Brien

ryanlord — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:07:32 +0000

I did a little marker sketch of everyone’s favorite Cimmerian, and liked it enough to post.

What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!

XTREEEEME!!! X!!!

ryanlord — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:00:12 +0000

Here’s a rejected logo design. Nothing too special, but I just liked the way the all the orientations, type and mark worked together. I wanted something a little bit brighter and more colorful to stand out in the company’s intended market, and be different enough from XM satellite radio stuff that the similar names didn’t confused the viewer. So here it is, never to be seen or heard from again. Oh, and apparently it’s still okay to spell ‘extreme’: ‘xtreme.’ I thought Mountain Dew exhausted that well in the 90′s, but apparently not.

Logo mark:

Vertical Orientation:

Horizontal Orientation: