Every so often, I get a little moment of happy when I get brought into a project that allows me to experiment visually. Luckily, my strengths are basically the exact opposite of everyone else in the studio. They’re all awesome at long documents, really structured grid stuff, etc. whereas I totally struggle with that sort of thing and absolutely *love* to fiddle around in Photoshop and Illustrator to come up with really illustrative graphic elements.

Today, my co-workers were struggling with a project where they needed graphic elements that were very abstract in appearance but still retained connotations of ‘change’ ‘fluidity’ and ‘motion.’ Since the document is dealing with water, someone suggested we set up a photoshoot, drop globs of oil in a tank, and photograph the result. The client wouldn’t approve the photography budget so they were going to abandon the idea. I spoke up and said that I could probably mimic the effect if they gave me 45 minutes.

Tada. :) So clearly the effect isn’t as refined as it will be in the end, but so far I’m liking it. I took it one step further by trying to suggest the shape of a fish (appropriate for the subject matter while still retaining the abstractness the client was going for) My co-workers are stoked because now they can go back to the oil in water idea, yet have a lot more control over the final image. We’re brainstorming ways to utilize the negative space and it looks like the project will be really rewarding in the end.

So yay. I like that I’m becoming known as the go-to guy around here for building graphic elements. It was driving me nuts seeing them all buy stock imagery for things when I could recreate in just as much time as it takes to search for the stock.