Recent Tech Writing, Illustration
&
Graphic Design Work
This project was done in support of a tech writer who was developing HTML 5 online documentation for a smart flasher module, which when correctly installed and configured, will detect rate of slowing and employ different flashing patterns to the centre rear brake light.
The crucial thing is to correctly relate the orientation of the module with the relevant setting on the module, as it's accelerometer based.
This was modeled in modo and rendered in modo - all annotation you see here were modeled in modo as well; final file was delivered to my client as an Affinity Designer file, with images all placed to artboards, and predefined annotation graphic styles and colours to visually match those I modeled in modo, with the relevant font included.
Do you like the car's logo?
This illustration was done sheerly as 2D vector art in Affinity Designer, allowing easy export as svg and a huge range of custom sizes for building Mac, iOS, Windows and Windows phone icons for this device for my client's use. These were deployed as icons for in-house developed device and configuration specific drivers.
I started from a photo reference.
This is another Windows OS icon design project - specifically for both at the eye-defyingly smallest size and all the relevant sizes for small medium and large "tiles" for Windows 10.
Our client publishes in-house pre-packaged versions of specific AutoDesk software, with special in-house assets, drivers and predefined workspaces and tools. Due to Autodesk's ongoing changes to iconography over the last few versions, their userbase wanted a simple, consistent way to identify the preconfigured applications, and further wanted these to be in accord with their own in-house colour guide.
I designed these to remain in overall accordance with Autodesk's own published graphic standards, whilst retaining their own individual character, using our client's in-house technical colour palette and in-house approved acronyms.
These icons meet a number of applicable standards: Microsoft, AutoDesk and our clients - there's "breaking of the box" to allow the letterforms to be easily discriminated, there is alpha masking allowing some translucence of the background flags, allowing user's desktops to show through, and I drew some inspiration from Google's Materials design system as well to help the letterforms stand above their flags.
As with the icon above, these were designed in Affinity Designer, which allowed for a wide range of export sizes and formats to be predefined (slices) and batch exported for each design iteration.
This is a piece of meta documentation, showing the various specifications of a logo developed for an in-house departmental team. To clearly illustrate the idea of the layer order inside the Affinity Designer file, I developed a quick iso illustration of this.
This next document is also more meta documentation, done just as much as a resource for internal process documentation as for being front-facing to our client, and describing our progress. The help documentation system I've been developing for our client uses a specific proprietary XML authoring system called MadCap Flare - it's a topic-based Help Authoring Tool (HAT) which can output good HTML 5 and nice looking PDFs and printed manuals all from the same source data - and being topic-based, single-sourced, it means we don't have to maintain multiple copies of data - it's tagged for use in specific conditions and with specific audiences, and so we can write once, but have multiple output documents at the end.
This takes, as I'm sure you can imagine, some significant system setup and forethought.
This was basically a pre-viz - letting our client know what their finished documents could look like - oh, look, 3D illustration tools can really help out with document design too!
Of course since then there have been more design and layout changes, but still...
Of course, there was a meta document for the early layout process and alternatives - you can see based on what I had in the previz render above which was selected.
We needed (per client input) an image of the John Ferraro Building in which we all work (it's a mid-century modern landmark and pretty amazing) which was to fade from a wireframe image to a photoreal image - their thought had been to go from a Revit model to a photo of the building it we could get the right viewpoint.
However... we didn't have the necessary authorizations to get hold of even just a render of the exterior shell of the Revit model... and at that time I didn't have Revit installed on my workstation - so I spent a little time roughing out a massing model in modo, on my laptop, and then giving us a happy wireframe and a photorender. In the end it was far simpler this way, as I would've had to do a fair amount of post-processing to isolate the JFB from its background, and the render quality is far better than I could eke out of Revit.
