Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I’m still ready and available for offsite freelance and consulting.  If you need it done, and you need it sounding pretty, I am your man.

BRADAN

All content, including their company mission statement, was handled by yours truly. Very happy with how it all came out; when I was researching similar businesses, I couldn’t find one website that didn’t sound like it was written by a spammer in 1999. I feel like we presented something with a little more polish and class.

These guys are great; they’re friendly, professional, and know their stuff inside out. We have a few other interesting projects coming up together, but I’ll hold off on writing about those until they’re done.

My most recent freelance project was a fun one.  Jon and Matt, the graphics / branding masterminds in charge of Onetwentysix Designs, had a few big potential clients that they wanted to woo with some nice fancy proposals. One was a major corporation’s upcoming (top-secret) rebranding, and another was a viral video campaign that they needed scenes written for. Working with these guys is always great; very smooth, very professional, really nice guys. If you need any branding, graphics, photos - anything visual - I suggest checking them out. Anyway, this is the first page of the nearly 30 page branding proposal we put together. The image is kinda blurry, so check out the PDF version linked below it.

An aside before I get into the meat of this post:  This blog was never meant to be a regularly updated, well nurtured piece of internet.  Rather, I meant for this to be a sort of stand-alone job-interview-in-a-box.  Just my work and some musings on my thought processes involved in the creation thereof.  Still, I’m a narcissist at heart, so here’s a brief update on the last few months.

Back in August 08, I landed this crazy awesome freelance gig that should, by all means, have gone full time.  Then the whole world sort of cashed out in September, and by November 08 I was sans-employment and out on the job market again, along with half of New York and 90% of the rest of the world.   I applied to the dwindling pool of jobs I found, but ended up deciding it was for naught for the time being and started writing a novel in December (which I’m still working on).  Then came March, when I decided that full-time novel writing, though fun, was not helping my resume much.  I decided to take on an internship with the good people at Fifteen Minutes NY, who are great and I had an fabulous time working there until the LA office decided to shut us down.  They couldn’t pay for my travel anymore, so by May it was time to move on.   

Whatever doesn’t kill you, right?  I mean, I’m broke, but who isn’t now? 

And all this “working for free stuff” isn’t so bad - I’m trying to take on a Copywriting Internship at this other company which seems pretty perfect aside from the indentured servitude thing.  I’ll update this again if I get that, and in the meantime I’m still plugging away at freelance - currently in talks for a pretty awesome viral campaign, which should be solid stuff if the proposal goes through.  Exciting times.  Excruciating sometimes, but exciting nonetheless.   

“May you live in exciting times” - Chinese insult.    

The answer is yes, and it is FABULOUS. A real Gibson quality guitar that can TUNE ITSELF.

If you couldn’t tell by my enthused response, I’m something of a guitar nerd. And yes, I will admit, with my spec work, I’m guilty of bringing in a lot of my personal interests and loves as fodder for my advertisements. But I don’t see this as a sin necessarily. It’s important to show diversity in spec work, but I also feel spec work is a place to really let your work show who you are in real life: Your interests, your passions, and your personality can all shine through in creative ways with good spec work.

As for this particular piece, I would say this is one of my favorites, if not the best one I’ve done, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, this is the first piece I attempted to art direct for myself. I will always say, I’m not an artist, but I am a very visual thinker.  I’ve been teaching myself Adobe Photoshop in an ongoing attempt to improve my ability to communicate with art directors and graphic designers. I can’t take all the credit for this, because I was given some help by Dan Berkowitz on this one, but for the most part this was designed and constructed by me. It was an interesting experience, and I’m making a continuing effort to improve and refine my design skill.

Secondly, I just think it’s a clever concept. The moment I began thinking up concepts for a Robot guitar ad, the first things that popped into my head were the Terminator and HAL. From there, the ad just flowed naturally. It’s a guitar that senses tone, essentially hearing your strings. So “It’s listening” came immediately to me. From there, I took the guitar and realized, from a certain view, it has a kind of anthropomorphic structure. So I put it down in the corner, and it all clicked. It looked like a mischievous little robot eavesdropping. It’s a little creepy, but it’s almost like a humor time bomb; your first response is a little yelp, and then laughter. At least, that’s the intention. Take a look and tell me what you think.

We got back together and had a meeting with him and his partner the next weekend. I asked them a bunch of questions, and helped them lay out on paper exactly the type of business model they wanted. I helped them come up with both a company and a software name to brand them with, and helped them focus their target audience. After I gathered all the information from them I could, I went and wrote up this informational brochure for them, as both a point of internal reference to all the ideas we came up with, and as a pre-launch promotional tool for them to use to get potential customers interest up.

Gravity Commerce is currently in the final stages of launching. Keep an eye out for them if you have any small business needs, the stuff they’re doing is gonna be pretty great.

Thanks for your interest though!  If anyone has any business opportunities to discuss, my contact info is at the bottom of the page <3