New work in wild

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Bunch of our work currently on Nike, INC. Fun projects too I might add.

Danklife at Nike World Basketball Festival.

Check out the work we did for the Nike World Basketball Festival. The big white athlete imagery was all done by us. Swapped out the backgrounds, the uniforms, the numbers on the uniforms, the socks and the shoes. As always, fun stuff.  Big thanks to everyone at Nike for the great direction and work on a very complicated project. Over 30 images were completely built from scratch.[gallery link="file" order="DESC" columns="1"]  

Thanks goes out to Dina, Corey, David, Jeremy and George!

7 Reasons Why I Can’t Do “Free”

I worked my butt off to make it through business school. I had to work full-time in conjunction with school pretty much from my teens. I’ve been in business for over 20 years. I’ve paid my own dues. I am a professional. My knowledge and expertise, even if it simply a matter of answering one question – has value. It may have taken me over 2,000 working hours just to have the knowledge to answer a brief question skillfully.

Amen... AAAAAAAAAAAAMEN....

New Nike work live

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Some new Nike work is live on their website.  The smoke stuff was a lot of fun.  The shoes had to be colored up for over 20 NFL teams. I attached a full image without the tongure graphic so you can see how big it was built.  Shoes were shot on a white sweep, fully illustrated the background.  It looks like they cropped tight, darkened them and removed a shoes after we were done.  We will try to get before and afters live in about 6 months after embargo.

You can see them live at this link here.

New work for Nike

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Some recent work we did for Nike recently went live.  Check out the shots at Nike.

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity

Odds are that you’ve been doing this for months, if not years, probably at the expense of your family life, your exercise routine, your diet, your stress levels, and your sanity. You’re burned out, tired, achy, and utterly forgotten by your spouse, kids and dog. But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs. This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot. ’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits -- starting right now, today -- is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Airbrushed make-up ads banned for ‘misleading’

Well, that is interesting. I have to say I am all for it.

Swinson said it was "shocking" that the ASA was not allowed to see the pre-production pictures of Roberts due to contractual agreements with the actor. "It shows just how ridiculous things have become when there is such fear over an unairbrushed photo that even the advertising regulator isn't permitted to see it," she added.

In the case of both the Roberts and Turlington ads the ASA said it was not provided with enough information to evaluate what impact the digital enhancements had on the final image.

"On the basis of the evidence we had received we could not conclude that the ad image accurately illustrated what effect the product could achieve, and that the image had not been exaggerated by digital post-production techniques," the ASA said.

"Pictures of flawless skin and super-slim bodies are all around, but they don't reflect reality," said Swinson. "Excessive airbrushing and digital manipulation techniques have become the norm, but both Christy Turlington and Julia Roberts are naturally beautiful women who don't need retouching to look great. This ban sends a powerful message to advertisers – let's get back to reality."

Beauty retouching is in a fairly unrealistic place, hopefully this will temper some of the crazier Art Directors out there.

Two Illustration tips

So I have a large collection of Photoshop brushes here. So large in fact that it can crash my system. Because of this I have deleted most of them from Photoshop.  Now I use this awesome little plug in that allows you to use the Mac's Quick Look function to preview them. Select one in the finder, hit the space bar for a preview and see if you want to load it. Life saver. BrushView QuickLook PlugIn.

Free of course. Saves me a ton of time.

I also tracked down a pretty amazing set of AI brushes doing research for another project. Colorburned has posted a set of 105 retro brushes that are amazing time savers and very functional. Bringing these into Photoshop make me a happy camper. You can copy and paste between all Adobe apps now in case you did not know.

Yeah, this is the stuff that gets me excited....