Graphics Grab Bag

QUIDD

Collectors have gone digital. With Quidd, trading cards are no longer confined to shoe boxes under the bed. Now they are conveniently stashed on phones, ready to be pulled up and traded from any spot with internet connection. Quidd launched their trading app May 2016. The start-up creates digital trading cards, stickers, and 3-D Pop! figures for fan bases of shows such as Star Trek, Bob’s Burgers, and Breaking Bad to name a few.

A variety of themed card sets are created for each licensed brand. I helped design Quidd’s line of trading cards for TV series Firefly, a space western with nods to asian culture. The show gained a cult following despite being discontinued after a single season. Below are a few favorite card templates that I created.

Design for digital trading card set, front and back

There are many references to asian cultures in Firefly, so I was delighted to apply my limited knowledge of the Chinese language to this design.

I loved working on this set. We learned upon completion of the original design that we did not have rights to use the likeness of the supporting actors. We were in a bind. How do you visually portray a TV character without a picture of the actor that plays it?? Our solution was to omit the faces, but to illustrate the hairstyle and costumes designed for the show.

PRINT PRODUCTION WORK

Some clients know exactly what they want. They just need a production artist to pull their vision together into a sharp, professional design, maybe tweak their idea, and create mechanicals—or digital files—that the printer can output.

For example, bluegrass musician Sheriff Bob wanted an old letter for the cover of his next CD with a postage stamp of his face. I perused the web for an open-source image of aging paper to create the envelope, then pieced together the edges, so that the dimensions of the envelope matched those of the CD. I suggested hand-lettering (instead of type) and adding a postmark. He requested his birthdate for the postmark, and I researched the postage rates and the look of stamps from 1939. Below is the result.

And here’s a billboard he uses for the monthly bluegrass jam sessions he runs in the West Village. The Sheriff knew his design layout and had images. However each photo needed to be color-balanced and properly sized in Photoshop, the old logo needed to be updated and cleaned up in Illustrator, before collaging all the elements into one big InDesign document, which in turn was formatted as a pdf file for large-scale printing.

Below are a few more examples of production work, including pieces from my job in another lifetime. I got my start in graphic arts doing production design at New Video, a video distributor which has since been acquired by Cinedigm. The company gave me a great introduction to the skills I use everyday in serving my clientele.