- Designed a logo and a business card for SecurePac.

- Working on creating a new ecommerce website for Premier Merchandising.

Each label includes Vietnamese on one side, and English on the other. The type selection is simply VNI-Times and VNI-Helvetica, a free font. To get the Vietnamese characters to show up on the website was quite an ordeal. The process is as follows:

• The client sends over a Word document with all the information in VNI-Times.
• I use a free Java application called UnicodeConverter.jar, to convert the Word document from VNI-Times to Times New Roman. This is necessary because:
  • For the Vietnamese characters to show up correctly on the website, the characters have to be in Unicode format. It doesn’t matter if it’s converted to Times New Roman or what; it just has to be in a Unicode format. In the head of the website, the meta is set to charset=UTF-8.
  • For the characters to store correctly in the MySQL Database, the database has to be set to UTF-8.

They loved it.

Now that the project was officially mine, I started getting really excited (which I normally do at the beginning of every project). I was most excited because it wasn’t going to be a typical Photoshop collage; It was going to be something ‘in real life’, that would later be incorporated into the computer. It reminded me of being in the 4th grade, in Art class, when we would get a new assignment: my mind would race in a thousand different directions, and with each thought, my heart would either give its approval or disapproval, to the proposed creative solution.

The point of the project was to give high school students a quick reference guide to all the Tech Prep AAS Degrees that Lone Star College offered. It was to be a poster that would hang in the high school counselor’s office. The student could simply scan the poster to find their area of interest, and then see which LSC Tech Prep AAS Degree they could get for that field.

Some of the items in the collage that I am dying to elaborate on are:

• For the Hospitality & Tourism category, I used real photographs and a postcard of Ponce, Puerto Rico, from when I visited there back in circa of 1999.
• For Information Technology, I am so proud of my CAT5 and RJ-45 dude. I have RJ-45s as his head, hands, and feet, and I have his head plugged into a NIC (Network Interface Card).
• For Law, Public Safety, Corrections & Security, I used a Schedule Of Acceptable Fines paper, which I received along with my speeding ticket, a couple of months prior.

To my dismay, the project was eventually killed, but I leave with you today the remnant below:

… and just for kicks, here is the original photo of the collage.

(Click the image for a larger view)

• The multi-page function of Illustrator CS4 is a much needed option. You can layout a client’s logo, business card, letterhead, and envelope design, all in one CS4 file. Very useful!
• Photoshop CS4 now has Open GL support, and the only function for that that I like is the page rotate tool. You can rotate the entire page, as you would during free transform.
• InDesign CS4 has it’s own preflight panel, giving you constant, up to date information on potential print errors.

So after finally upgrading to CS4, CS5 is rumored to be released next month. Maybe we’ll skip that version …

Hoa Da Herbal Medicines is up and running with their new e-commerce site, complimented by their new product labels and marketing material. Creating all their new branding material was a lot of work, but very rewarding.

Finished a very fun business card project for T&M Illusions. This took several hours (10+) to accomplish, because each rhinestone was strategically placed to create the outline effect.