This website
is dedicated to show off my ad designs, a particular
graphic speciality of mine, as well as a few of my other
projects, freelance, and art work.
I didn't do many ads during
our time in Austin, TX aside from some freelance. I mainly
slaved away in the publishing mines doing delightfully dull
proofreading and minor editing with light re-designs in
what can only be described as the most searingly dull
flex-time job on the planet. The people I worked with,
however, were quite delightful. The last job with HRW was
fabulously stimulating, but very draining. Going to
meetings half the day and pounding out page layouts and
translating french text to figure out what you're supposed
to be designing leaves no time for Jill to be a dull girl.
It'll suck your soul right out of your body and all those
out of body experiences make you wish you were doing ad
layouts instead.
I am
accustomed to taking designs from fragile abstract concept
to thumbnail to computer to pre-press to print.
I have drawn, sketched,
painted, built, improvised, mocked up, conceptualized,
compromised, fussed over, tweaked, and art directed nearly
every piece I've ever done all myself. Anything of mine
that's not that tight or is a little too busy in my opinion
involved some compromise or I only had five minutes to work
on it. But in 100% of all cases, the client was so excited
they could just pop wide open. That's what I live for, not
just doing good design, but giving clients more than they
thought they'd ever get, and giving them exactly what they
didn't even know they wanted, and saving them money in the
process.
It's all
about making clients happy, and somewhere in there,
having a lot of fun doing that voodoo that I do.
Most of these ad samples were
designed with some amount of compromise, primarily for
newsprint in a weekly rag. I have zillions of ads, and
these are just a small few. I have a lot of other samples
from other jobs like postcards and catalogs from Hayes
Marketing, but they're rather old, as well as samples from
other freelance that I'm just not very fond of that was
either blandly utilitarian or fraught with aesthetic
injustice.
I'd say I
was doing somewhere in the range of 50-100 ads per week
just at my branch office where I was the sole designer.
Even with so much to share, I
have resisted the call of the great internet wastelands for
years, but in the past year have made up for lost time by
creating a Gallery Website for my paintings to keep people
updated on my exhibitions (http://homepage.mac.com/dhincher),
and also a co-opted website to test-market my art and
collage designs on Cafe Press
(http://www.cafepress.com/fairylandstudio). The grackle
girl and squid head baby designs are top sellers and odd
favs.