Mass Appeal Designs

BOOK DESIGN COVER FOR MMA BOOK APPROVED

2010-01-29T02:50:00.000-08:00

I love MMA and have always wanted to design something in this field, when the opportunity came to bid for the design of a MMA Conditioning book I quickly threw open Photoshop & Illustrator and threw a few design together.

The brief was for the book cover to be a mixture between a vintage boxing style poster and the more modern UFC style poster designs with also an element of the simplicity of the original Rocky style posters from the late 70s and early 80s.

For the 1st design I made a textured background with jagged edges, dirt, and a subtle cage wire with a red gradient overlay

The client liked the ideas behind this but not the tribal elements and also wanted the images to be more conditioning based and less of the fighting elements. I had a rethink and went back to researching vintage boxing posters and also the original Rocky posters. I liked the roughness of the old boxing posters and obviously the roughness came from age, wear & teat but deiced I would try that effect, and also convert some images to vectors in Illustrator using the trace feature. I also changed the main text to be more like the vintage posters using similar layouts, fonts & stars.

Now the client loved this design and this got me the job, the client had some time to think about the next steps and decided to simplify the design by having a solid white background, we experimented with some images the client had on file, I also experimented with some photoshop lighting effects on the main text

After this the client wanted to stick with one focal image and for it to also be a plain silhouette, we changed some of the text and now the final version is ready to go to the printers and to hit all good bookshops in America and beyond. More of our work can be viewed at www.massappealdesigns.com

The Joys of Free Mock Designs

2010-01-13T06:08:00.000-08:00

Spent the whole of Monday pitching for work and producing free mock designs to go alongside my email pitches through Elance.com. The chances of getting work are slimmer than Kate Moss on Elance with companies in India doing the same for the equivalent of £10 but if you keep at it and your work is good enough to back up your pitch you get rewarded eventually even though your bid will always be considered too high by the majority of American clients.

I started Mass Appeal Designs by pitching on Guru.com and it must have took 3-4 months of constant pitching & free mock designs before I got my first client who just happened to be English too. After that the work started flowing, my portfolio got better and positive customer feedback help immensely.

Boring story to be honest

Air-Pro is Live

2010-01-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

New website for one of the biggest providers of working holidays in the UK Air-Pro. The job took around 3-4 months of blood, sweat, tears, rickshaws, trains, plains, visas, cows & Ahmedabad.

It was worth it though. The site is aimed at that 18-20 something market that I'm too old for but refuse to accept. Air-Pro also offer roadtrips across America, Skiing & jsut normal crazy partying holidays in Ibiza etc. Each section of the site was to have its own visually distinctive theme yet still tie in together with the Social networking feature that was built from scratch so travellers could meet each other before travelling together

Mass Appeal Designs were responsible for the whole look of the site and worked alongside a development team to make sure the graphics we designed were implemented correctly

The site can be viewed at www.air-pro.co.uk

New Blog for 2010

2010-01-12T05:30:00.000-08:00

Never really been into this blogging malarkey, I hate writing and I hate reading what I write even more because I always think if I was a neutral visitor and I read the crap that this guy is a 'Tool'.

Anyway, I always have pretty much something to talk or moan about so gonna keep this upfated weekly even though I would be shocked if anyone would want to read this boring nonsense