One of the funnest designs I’ve been tasked to do was this flyer for a local bar’s Green Bay Packers vs Chicago bears game (Sept. 25th, 2011). I thought it would be cool to have two skulls facing off (no pun intended). I started sketching from a reference photo.

Reference photo upon lightbox

Stylized skull sketch

Initially I wasn’t very happy with the sketch. Something seemed off, especially around the cheekbone area. I kept it, but started over a few times to no avail. A friend suggested to just remove some of the detail around the problem area, which helped a lot. I scanned the sketch, and went to work in Adobe Illustrator.

Plotting a basic path for vectors

I start by in a way, connecting dots. You place one point, then another and it automatically connects the line. I start out rough, and can then curve and fine tune them as needed.

The vector path in progress

Several hours later, the skull design vectors were complete, and a huge relief!

Vector outlines

Eventually, I moved on to the helmet. Originally I wanted to use a modern NFL helmet, but found it obscured too much of the cool skull design. So I opted for the pre-1950s leather helmets.

Leather helmet

The stitching detail was also a path (line), set to dashed with a particular gap between. A duplicate was made and changed to a transparent white to give a little more depth.

Stitching detail

Below you can see some of the layers in the Photoshop document that were used. Going clockwise, the starburst effect was achieved with a basic star shape and blurred. This was placed atop a splatter texture I changed to yellow. Next (top right), a little more splatter, then I continued on with the other elements like the type. In the bottom right portion, you can see how textures were used to give the design more depth.

Various elements put together

Altogether after between 10 to 12 hours of work (!), the final poster was finished and ready to promote throughout the week.

The completed flyer, 11"x17"

» www.bryssis.com

Aside from design, I have also been involved with music for over a dozen years. In 1996, I picked up an old acoustic guitar and started teaching myself. 1997, I bought my first electric guitar (Fender Stratocaster). Having grown up in the 90′s, the majority of my influences and favorite bands involved the likes of Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. In 2003 I started to break out more into ambient and electronic music and purchased a Roland studio keyboard. Eventually, I decided to go back to my guitar roots and began Bryssis (“bree-sis“) in 2010. My inspirations now stemmed from bands such as A Perfect Circle, Ashes Divide, Type O Negative and The Cure.

While I’ve had numerous personal music projects over the years, their logos were nothing more than the project name in a font that fit the sound and atmosphere of the music in some way. With Bryssis, I thought to challenge myself a bit and develop my own typographic logo.

The name Bryssis was inspired by a former friend of mine, whose last name was Vrissis. From what she told me and from some research, I found this to generally mean “water fountain” in Greek, stemming from the word “brysi” (fountain). I changed the spelling a bit to form something a bit more unique. I thought it made a great name for a band, with the definition implying some kind of catharsis or new beginning.

Logo concepts (click for full-size)

I started to sketch out some rough ideas while at the bar. I wanted to create something that was perhaps interpretive, without exhibiting any cliches of typical genre typographic logos (i.e. metal being hard-edged). I also thought something interesting could be done with the two S’s in some way, but I wanted it all legible.

Final concept (click for full-size)

Somehow, the stem of the R and the Y seemed to have an interesting aesthetic together, so I extended them. Off to work in Illustrator…

Beginning vector work in Illustrator (click for full-size)

The curves of the S’s was challenging to get just right, so I started to experiment with other shapes. The final S character design looked much more consistent and still easily read.

Final logo in black-and-white (click for full-size)

For the website and other materials, I gave the logo a radiating, blue glow appearance which tied in with the color of water (thinking back to a metaphorical rebirth or cleansing). At the end of this project I came away quite happy and proud for not just sticking to picking a font, but developing an actual brand for the band that no one else has.

Stop by www.bryssis.com and checkout some demos, or “Like” us on Facebook!

Colored logo

I’ve been designing flyers for band performances at a local bar for the past few months. For the Bobby Evans flyer design, I decided to show you the whole process behind the result.

1. Guideline Pencils

Working from a rather small greyscale print of a web photo, I started drawing on a letter-size sheet with blue pencil to get the rough guidelines down. Here is where I draw the the foundation, and once it’s finished I’ll start going over it with a normal pencil and fill in details. You can see this in progress in the following image:

Click for full-size

2. Final Pencils

Eventually, all the pencil work is done. My intent with this was to draw in a comic-book style, which would then be inked and colored.

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3. Inks

Now, it’s onto the inks. A seperate piece of paper is placed over the penciled sheet on top of a lightbox, so I can see what I’m inking over, without adding to the original sheet. I used a variety of Pigma Micron pens, mostly 08, 03, 1 and a bit of brush pen for the hair.

Click for full-size

4. Cleanup

Now I scan the image at 300 DPI and in an 11″ x 14″ document. Here I’ll clean up some parts that need some help. The frets that were drawn were crude, so I filled in the fretboard black and made some perfect white lines in Photoshop for the frets.

Click for full-size

5. Coloring

I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo Pen tablet — it’s a wireless pen and tablet you plug into your PC and you can draw as if you were using pencil and paper, except you’re viewing everything on your monitor. It takes quite a bit to get used to, but I think I did a decent job on maybe my 3rd attempt coloring in Photoshop.

Click for full-size

For the jeans, I painted blue and added a “Reticulation” filter to get the texture:

Click for full-size

6. The Final Outcome

After all the coloring is done, I placed the rest of the flyer elements in such as text and background. I’m not sure how long it took me, but it was several hours of work in less than a week.

Detail