Another one from the sketchbook.
The client pulled the plug on this one.
The design features a simple, energy efficient main house, with a set back garage and an apartment on the upper level.
Its a bit of a shame…I really wanted to see this one through, I think it could have been a spectacular home.

Off for a couple weeks.
Here’s a doodle from my sketchbook. Apologies for the morbid theme. As a character, I always thought that General Grievous was pretty cool. Largely a robot, he has a hint of humanity and thus, some ultimate weakness. It stands to reason that he would be a significant foe to the Jedi, he has the advantages of an automaton, balanced with the reason/unreasonable qualities of a mortal. I think it’s his wheezing voice that really drives home his credibility as a character; clearly a powerful leader with some obvious frailty.

These are some shots of a recently completed project for a local IT company called Rove. The project involved a set of icons to be used in their soon to be released series of IT focused apps for mobile devices. The creative brief essentially required a set of icons that would represent the function of the app, adequately support the company brand and ensure a consistent look and feel across the products. The company is undertaking a series of these types of apps and needed to set an open yet adaptable guideline for future icons. Below is the finished series for the Notification, Exchange and VMware apps. Once the design is completed, its an entirely different task to create the finished assets in the appropriate sizes and for the different platforms. I suppose it would be a designer’s pipe dream to think that the different device manufacturers could settle on a standardized spec for graphic assets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a drawing that been lingering in my sketch book.

A proposal for one of two houses to be built on a split lot in Alta Vista. The owner is a car guy, and wanted to dedicate the main floor to garage and workshop space. The sentiment among the local community was that large garages on the front on infill houses were a sensitive issue. Given that we needed some relief from the zoning (min. lot width) to pull off this project, we worked up a tandem garage design (two cars front to back) with some generous workshop space as well. I think we were able to minimize the impact of the garage and still provided an oasis for the car loving owner. Otherwise, we were able to meet all the other requirements for development, including the max. building height.

I do a lot of work that I never talk about.
This is one of them.
A very good contractor I work with was planning to build a house. He hired a local (to him) part-time “draftsman” to draw up some plans. This “draftsman” was also a fulltime firefighter. Lets just hope that he’s better at putting out fires. The drawings that my friend showed me were horrifying. I believe that “friends don’t let friends design bad houses”…so I offered to “tweak” the design a bit. He left it with me and I came up with the above result. Needless to say, its nothing “avant garde”, and it doesn’t meet any of the criteria for the work I want to do as part of this firm. But sometimes you have to take a bullet and help out a friend.