Storm's Cellar: Graphic Goodness

I’ve been doing some graphics work lately for a couple of websites, and some photo editing just for fun, that I thought I’d share with you. John says I need to post more often, and since I don’t have anything to talk (complain) about today, I figured I could fill some space with pretty pictures. :D

A couple of months ago we started redesigning the website for the radio station that we broadcast Tommy D’s Nutz and Indie Playground on. A lot of the women I know who hang out there had been complaining about the previous design. Frankly, and no offense intended, it looked like a soft core porn site. I’m not sure what half-naked women on motorcycles have to do with radio, but there you are. It wasn’t a bad design, it just didn’t have anything to do with the content of the site, and that’s a little pet peeve of mine.

So, John convinced them to go to a PHP forum, which would allow the DJ’s to post content like up coming events and interviews, and would encourage interaction from the listeners as well.

I, of course, got the job of customizing the graphics. The station owner picked purple as a base color (it wasn’t his first choice, but we talked him out of that one), and I got to work coming up with a new logo for the station. Wicked Spins made me think of old vinyl records, and so I started with one as the base for the logo. I wanted it to be edgy too though, so I turned the record into a saw blade, and put the station name along with a skull on the vinyl. The owners wanted the word Radio in the logo too though, but it wouldn’t fit nicely on the record. My solution was to make it large, and have the saw cutting into it. So the final graphic is this:

Click here to see the rest of the site: Wicked Spins Radio

I love how it turned out! Yes, the site is purple, but if you look, there’s really not that much purple. It’s just a bright color, so it catches your eye.

I’m also currently working on a personal logo for the site owner who goes by the handle ICM. He’s a Harley guy (which is probably where the half naked motorcycles from the previous design came into being), and wanted something similar to the Harley shield, with his nick on it, tearing out of the background. Here’s what I have so far:

The tear on that is transparent, so it will take on the properties of any background it’s put on. That way, no matter where he sticks it, it will look like it’s supposed to be there.

Now, awhile back, John and I redid our business site; Storm’s Cellar. I made this banner graphic for the site to keep with the storm theme.

That’s a composition of about five different photographs from my favorite stock site, Stock.Xchng.

It’s not a logo though, it’s a web banner, and it doesn’t work very well on business cards. So John asked me to come up with a real logo for the business that we can use on printed materials. Keeping with the same theme, I came up with this two color logo.

It’s simple, but it looks pretty cool on a business card.

We also totally revamped the Storm’s Cellar site, going from a forum format, to a Nucleus blog instead. It’s easy to update, and we don’t have to worry about moderating spammers. John and I are getting pretty good at customizing Nucleus Blogs and Stargate Portals. John’s even thinking about re-doing My Favorite Pinups, because we’ve learned a lot since we originally designed it.

Speaking of, John got a Twitter account to help promote his blog, and I must say, his blog is doing quite well. He gets a lot more daily hits than any of my blogs do. It’s probably the half naked women that brings them in though.

So now on to some photo editing… Alexi wants to try some pinup modeling, and as long as she keeps her clothes on, I don’t mind at all. For her winter formal dance this year, she purchased a vintage dress. So when her and her boyfriend let me take some pictures, I decided to have fun with them.

Here’s the original:

Now you can see that my house is not a very pretty backdrop. The dogs ball is on the floor, the snake is looking for food in his tank, toys are all over the floor. It’s a cute pose though, so I had some fun with it.

Here’s Alexi’s favorite:

The background is a vintage sepia, and the subjects have a color wash which gives them a bit of pop. It’s a popular photo effect right now. The background photo is one I took when we were at the Cord, Auburn, Duesenberg festival a few years ago. I thought it worked pretty well for this comp.

Next up is John’s favorite:

Old school all the way with a vintage, distressed, sepia photo. They look like Bonnie and Clyde. lol

Here’s another one I did that’s a little different:

I don’t know what this one is. Vintage Paris maybe?

And the last one I put together is something resembling a prom shot":

I wanted one without the terrible background of my door, but that hadn’t been edited too much.

I’m happy with them. I’m not entirely crazy about my extraction, but her red hair is almost the same color as my door, which makes it really tough to pull out of the background. I ended up cutting out some fly away hairs that I would have normally kept for realism. They still turned out pretty cute though.

In that vein, I got a new background creator for Photoshop that’s pretty darn cool. Inspired to play with my new toy, I did this one of Jack: