Today, September 4th, is three29’s birthday! I’ve been in business for one who year and learned a hell of a lot in this first year…

I have not studied graphic design or business when I was in college as I started using Photoshop when I was in my 2nd year of college. I studied film studies, product design (wood work) and psychology – but I do have a independent study ‘Graphic design and working with clients’ which I received an A in. And no, I’m not a Uni person. So it’s all very new to me and a learn as I go along. I’ve learned how to deal with clients, filling out my first self assessment, money management, time management, new programs and so on.

In this first year of business I have done a lot of interesting projects which have pushed me further, and it’s the projects that have you biting your nails at the start which usually come out best. I’ve also met a lot of awesome people, whether they’re clients or designers/illustrators. There’s a few things I need to start doing differently though. Like allowing more time for personal projects, so I can try out new things and learn. As many clients don’t really like something knew appearing on there project. Also… a bit more time off to avoid burn out!

All in all it’s been a great year. I’m so glad I didn’t go to uni and chose to try something completely new out. I hope it continues to go as well Would like to say a big thank you to everyone I have worked with and everyone whose ever given me feedback so I can improve! You are appreciated.

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Finally got round to framing a few pieces and having them on my wall for a little motivation. The rest of the pieces on my wall are ones which I find inspiring from various different people Sorry the pictures are a little dark, couldn’t use the flash.

Here’s the A2 poster I did for To The Republics ‘Drown EP’ release show. It was my first A2 poster, plenty of very slow photoshop moments whilst creating this before I gave up and did all the text in illustrator and just did the background, and placing everything else in photoshop. Printed awesome

Read on for two more.

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Recently there’s been talk about myspace scrapping their CSS in the page designs. I know I’m not the only one a little frustrated about this purely because it’s going to cause me a lot of future problems. A lot of people create myspace designs for their clients, and those clients have paid their hard earned money in return. So what happens when myspace decide to scrap the CSS and therefore loose the custom designs people have paid for, or just spent a lot of time creating?

Back when I was around 14/15 myspace was buzzing! A lot of people I knew ended up learning code and/or a bit of photoshop in order to make their profile how they wanted it to look. It made people be creative and learn new things. I bet a lot of coders and/or designers started because of myspace. Now because of the popularity of facebook, myspace has most definitely died down when it comes to friends ’socializing’ on the network. However it’s still very much alive for recording artists. Where else can you make a social profile look like an actual website, without having to worry about hosting fees and so on? Myspace… you’re really digging your grave a lot deeper with this stupid idea. Are you not happy that people make money off doing peoples designs? Your also making a lazy generation, we learned the code and photoshop to customize ours, a lot more rewarding! Now you’re handing it to people on a plate…

If you just sorted out all the spam that’s on there, blocked the bots and cleaned the place up a bit it’d be better. A new profile style isn’t needed. 2.0 was absolute ass, god knows what 3.0 is going to be like. Oh and if you stopped nicking parts of twitter and facebook it’d be better too. That goes out for all three of those networks though, all trying to steal something from the next site. Smh… Don’t worry though, give it a few years or so and facebooks golden days will be over too. Then twitters…

I would like to point out that if the profiles which have been created go to sh*t because of this myspace change over, then please direct your complaints to myspace.com itself. There is nothing anyone who created your layouts can really do until we sus out the new way of customizing.

I hope the BETA tests fail miserably

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To see the first post on this piece, head over here.

Right… I think after doing a few finishing touches this piece, my first color vector is a wrap! I ended up doing two versions, ESQ. (the face!) named it There Goes The Neighborhood and I liked it so used that and placed it on the second version, in an old school style font (read more to see the text version). This piece along with the M-4 piece I did have made me want to learn illustrator more. Before I found it very annoying as Photoshop has been my primary since I started, and I only opened illustrator for the odd job but I find it quite relaxing, and even though they’re a long process it’s worth it when you see the end results

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Click the image for a larger version

I started working on this piece a few weeks ago, purely for practice on Adobe Illustrator. I’ve started trying out illustrator more these days, I find it quite relaxing and a nice change to what I usually do. My aim was to make a pretty aggressive looking rifle look a little more innocent, by using bright colors and breaking it up into softer shapes (bare in mind I changed it a lot). That was inspired by my anti-gun mum, and because I’ve always liked the look of the M-4 and I think it’s a nice rifle to shoot bar the heavy battle trigger. I ended up altering the piece a fair bit to fit in with this ‘If I weren’t a Designer, I Would Be…’ project, which I was going to submit it to as it linked into the Armed Forces. The version you see above is how it would look but without the ‘I Would Be’ text.

…However

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