NEO ACNM

The North East Ohio Chapter of the American College of Nurse-Midwives (NEO ACNM) was looking to create a new Web site, but at the same time, they needed a new logo. My wife, a member of the ACNM, volunteered me to participate in the selection process. I submitted the following three designs, the first of which was eventually chosen as the organization's official logo.

In an attempt to combine the outline of the state of Ohio with a more modern look, I combined letters in such a way that the NEO became the full extent of the logo. This also had the effect of emphasizing the NEO portion of the local chapter's acronym, without sacrificing the fact that this is a chapter of the ACNM.
Here, I went for more of a "community support" idea, with the rows of hands "holding" the embryo. While the organization liked the look, it was felt to be a little too much like the logo of a nearby organization of which I was previously unaware, and so was not chosen.
This first attempt was also fairly well-received. The idea was to combine a simple outline with simple text characters, leading to a logo which was easy to use on the Web or in print. The color gradient was added in the final design phases to add interest, but may have actually lessened the overall impact of the logo.

Web Standards Project

Shortly after joining the Web Standards Project (WSP), but before being asked to join their CSS Action Committee, I created the following buttons with the intent that they would be added to the WSP's Bannerama.

The idea here was to create an 88x31 button which supporters could add to their Web sites. I'm probably the only one to actually use it on a Web site, since I'm the only one who ever knew it existed. Creating it was an interesting exercise, as I experimented with a number of transition effects before settling on a simple fade. The version shown here, however, features one of the more ambitious transition effects.
This was intended to be used in places where ad banners usually go, perhaps as a filler when no ads were available, or where a site was willing to donate a little of its ad space to support of the WSP. The slogan ("Maybe it's time...") is my own.
This simpler banner uses only the last frame of the animated banner shown above. It was meant for those sites which wish to avoid animated graphics, either to save on download times or for aesthetic reasons.

Ranier Outerwear

This design was done purely to prove to myself that I could-- no client, and no impetus other than my own desire to try my hand at "real-world" graphic design.

A low-resolution mockup of a full-page magazine print advertisement for a fictional hiking-gear company, shown here at 25% original size. After some experimentation, I settled on a "zoom blur" on the background, but no blur on the hiker, in order to make him stand out. About two weeks after I finished creating this image, I picked up Prodigy's The Fat of the Land and discovered that they'd used the same effect. Oh, well. (You can see the full-size version of the ad as a GIF or a JPEG, if you like.)