I recently found myself gabbing with friends about an old project I worked on years ago: a roleplaying game that I helped conceive, write and illustrate, based on a fictional cosmology that I’d dreamt up back in my school days.

It got me thinking about whether the book was available anywhere, and I was amazed to find that it still has a listing at Amazon.com. It got poor reviews there, I must confess, and not entirely undeservedly so. Sadly, it was a rushed affair, with Rod and I taking on too much work in too little time for no money. In the end, it came out as a failed experiment, and I’ve never completely gotten over it.

One thing I did last year, while in a similar mood, was create a vector version of my classic LINK logo. However, I was surprised to find I hadn’t posted it in the CvS gallery. I probably did more or less what I’m doing now, blogging about it and forgetting to put it where folks need to see it. Anyway, here’s what the basic LINK logo looks like these days:

The basic design can and has been reused a number of times in different simulated mediums to suit the genres it was matched to. I’m happy to say that it is a very versatile piece of design work, which I created way back in 1993, long before my first home computer. So often, the old fashioned way is still the best way to come up with new and interesting ideas.

Well, that’s it for show and tell today. Thanks for joining me.

This is based on an old emblem idea I haven’t toyed with in many years. I’m not settled on it. I’m just trying it on for size. If not, I go back to the original idea and rework that one. However, I have stuff to go write, so I’m stopping for now.

There was a recent logo submission contest thingy for the Toronto Area Gamers group. I was too busy to enter it, and I’m pretty sure it’s past due now, but I figured I’d show off the results of what I did:

Just a little fun. They’re not particularly polished. But these were the ideas I had when I read the req’s, doodling them on my day planner before trying to work them up in Illustrator.

So there you go.

Something I’m playing with for another private project. It’s not what I call finished, but it’s one way of doing it. Not sure if monochrome is what I’m after, but I don’t see it in colour yet.

Did a quick fix for the CvS logo for stationery applications:

I’ll be showing off more stuff in the days to come. Just winding back up into working for myself.

Lee.

Toying with the idea of working on my cartoon strip, and testing out a new feature Illustrator has included. I’m not 100% sold on the results, but it it pretty good looking. Here’s the result of my latest balloon test:

Not actual dialogue I have in mind for the strip, though I may do one with a similar punch line. Still, it’s a pretty respectable look for a cartoon ballon that isn’t hand drawn.

More productivity coming soon.

Credit this gag to my wife, and the t-shirt templates (with a bit of modification) to deviant Madnessism:

In other news, there won’t be any more samples of my work from the printshop. This is perhaps an issue for my pocketbook, but my nerves are already thanking me. Now I hope to get back to work on all of the stuff I’ve been meaning to do for my own little company.

Hasn’t been much going on in the last couple of months. Been so busy at the print shop, just haven’t had time to polish up much work for show and tell time. I AM working on interface tools for a friend’s game (which I should really get finished), but it’s not ready, and I’m not really doing any of what I call design work at the print shop, so, no goodies today. Soon, hopefully.

My wife has a coworker who recently learned that I do graphic design, and mentioned to Dawn that she was thinking of buying her husband a new logo for his birthday. I started workingon a couple of ideas as soon as my wife mentioned it to me, but I didn’t really take another swing at it until today, whene I knocked out another handful of logos and settled on this batch:

I haven’t set a price, as I’m letting Dawn handle the necessary arrangements on this one. From my point of view, it’s a favour to her, really, and I’d do graphic design for my wife for free if she asked.

And now it’s time for bed. Good night.

Something my old buddy Rod might get a kick out of:

This was actually a logo I doodled up a couple of times back in the mid-to-late 80s, but never really formally designed. I didn’t really have graphic design chops in those days, though I was always messing around with logo designs.

This one was created for a comic book superhero universe that I created with the help of a couple of friends at various points. I found collaboration stimulating back then, and found that the ideas came pretty fast when I had someone else to bounce ideas off of.

As well, my art skills as a whole weren’t the greatest; I could certainly draw, but I was terribly slow and fussy and didn’t really enjoy redrawing things multiple times, (which is why I would have flunked out of animation if they’d taken me). As a consequence, I used to get like-minded artists to draw for me. I never really got to work with anyone I’d class ‘the artist of my dreams’, but I still found the experience very exciting.

Eventually, I put the comicbook universe away when I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get my ideas polished up enough to go pro. A few years later, the market was flooded with stuff very similar to what I’d been doing anyway, so it was just as well. I wouldn’t have stood out nearly as much as I thought I might, and I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m not quite as scary-brilliant as the likes of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis, so I’d probably have gotten stuck writing somebody else’s creations a lot (assuming I ever made it into the mainstream comics business), which I’m pretty sure would have worn me out in time.

In recent years, my buddy Rod has considered reviving some of that old comic stuff for an RPG manual we were discussing doing for the LINK Continuum, but in the end, we never got around to it. So this logo is probably the only piece of evidence on my computer that I ever had aspirations to write superhero comics.

Oh wait, no, that’s not true. I think I still have the Full Moon Memoires logo on here somewhere…

Yeah, there it is. Mind you, that was actually for my planned adult graphic novel series (which I was going to publish in my own indie graphic novel magazine, The Sunday Afternoon Matinée), so it’s a bit more ‘serious’ than writing superheroes in tights, which is what Nova was all about. I actually haven’t given up on this idea.

Nova is something of an embarrasing relic, actually, but I’m in the mood to confess sins of the past. So there you go. I once perpetrated an epic superhero saga. Thankfully, it never saw the light of day. Don’t say I never did anything for you.