Shopify Propaganda Poster

At Shopify, we have “design challenges” every now and then. This week’s challenge was to create a propaganda poster. Below is the poster that I designed, I’m pretty proud of it

FITC Toronto 2011

This year I attended Flash In The Can 2011, a conference in Toronto on Design and Technology. I was always under the impression that this conference was mostly about Flash, but my friend Grant Lucas convinced me otherwise. He went to FITC last year, and told me how it was more about design, workflow, and inspiration, and little to do with Flash. This got me thinking about going to FITC 2011, but when he told me that McBess (one of my favourite artists in the world) was going to be doing a talk I immediately booked tickets to the conference.

In this post I’m going to talk about the three speakers that resonated with me the most.

Move Your Mountain Logo

A long time ago, I was hanging out with my bandmates Kevin and Chris, and we were talking about the kind of artwork we could eventually make for Move Your Mountain. The first thing that came to my mind was a cartoony, rockin’ Mountain-Man.

Inspiration

The “Meekrab” logo that I remember seeing from Harold and Kumar was my biggest inspiration. I never really knew what the Meekrab logo was for (according to Urban Dictionary, it’s for a band formed by the directors of H&K) but I always thought it was cool and memorable.

The Process

I first started with a simple sketch. In fact, I drew this really quickly on the bus in my notebook.

I later scanned the doodle, and brought it in to Photoshop. The sketch was far from perfect, but the idea was there. Basically I wanted a Mountain-Man with his arms in the air, with the text “MyM” below it. I needed the design to be in a circle because the first thing I wanted to do was make pins.

The Birth of Boomi

You may be wondering, “what the hell is that Boombox thing on the top-right corner of your site?”. Allow me to introduce you to Boomi.

The idea for Boomi spawned from a picture of a boom box that I saw on Flickr. The boom box kind of reminded me of a robot head, so I started doodling on my notepad. After a few sketches, I decided to use him for a music video project that I had to do for Audio/Video class back in 2007. His debut was in the following music video (WARNING: my animation skills are laughable).