creative briefing

Like visiting your old high school. Like looking back at your photo albums. Like cleaning out your closet. It’s always great to revisit the past and see where everything started. There’s just something about dousing yourself in memories of what used to be that suddenly makes what is make so much sense. And for a moment, you catch yourself feeling like a kid again - and enjoying every moment of it.

For me, it started with drawing. Before marketing, entrepreneurship, web design, the internet even - there was just drawing. Unfortunately I sort of fell out of it midway through highschool and traded in my 2B pencil for a mouse, keyboard, and 56k dial-up connection. It was a natural evolution for me, but still, it’s always fun to get back to the basics.

A few weeks ago, in preparation for the much-anticipated Game 4 of the Raptors vs. Magics NBA playoff game (which we scored tickets to), my girlfriend and I got the kooky idea of making a sign. Not just any sign though, a legendary sign. For me, it was a chance to dust off the old artist wings I put away so long ago and really get back into what has essentially shaped me into who I am today.

We took pictures along the way and because I’ve always been fascinated at “the making of” processes, I thought I would share them with you. And plus, we were both fairly proud of our work at the end of the day, so we thought it’d be something worth showing off a bit. :)

Enjoy! Drawings by yours truly, coloring by the lovely and talented Cheryl.

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A quick update on the upcoming weekend. I’m absolutely stoked that I’ll be heading down to FITC Toronto for the yearly 4-day (April 19-22) design and technology conference. Not only do they have about a jillion amazing speakers lined-up, but I’ve heard from past attendees that I should be prepared to be knocked off my feet with inspiration.

This will be my first design-related conference and I’m really looking forward to putting faces to some of the big names in the industry. I’m also happy to be attending and meeting up with a few brilliant people as well - namely Nick of N.Design and Damian of Depthskins. If any of you are planning on heading down as well, get in touch with me and maybe we can grab a drink and share some oohs and ahhs.

I’ll be armed with my camera and an itchy trigger finger so I should have a good dose of photos and footage from the event, which I will try to share with all of you as the days go by.

Stay tuned!

A few days ago, I wrote about the making of Creative Briefing and touched briefly on how the notepad sketches that you see on the top left of this site came to be. I’ll now go more in depth and offer a quick and easy tutorial on how I produced the image using Adobe Photoshop.

It should be noted that much of the work in this tutorial can be replaced by simply purchasing stock photos of notepads. However, if you’re not into spending money or aren’t able to find a stock photo that suits your needs, then this tutorial is for you.

The Goal

Here’s what this tutorial will help you achieve:

Let’s get started!

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Freelancers and entrepreneurs love free stuff. It’s in our blood to be frugle and get as much as we can while paying the least we can. Asians have been known to share this same nature. So fortunately or unfortunately for me, my love for free stuff is multiplied.

That’s why when I found out about the Graphic Design Group Writing Project, I got a bit excited. Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design recently launched an initiative to get design geeks like me to write on the topic of graphic design with hopes of bringing the community a little closer through exposure and link love. As we write more articles, Jacob adds links to our articles from his site to share it with everyone else.

And to add some extra incentive, he’s giving away $5000 worth of prizes through random draw. What does the $5000 include, you ask? Some pretty kick-ass stuff. For example:

• A Squier Strat by Fender electic guitar and a crap load of accessories is being donated by mohdrafie.co.uk.
• Go Media Vector Packs and an Adobe Photoshop Brush Pack. PLUS 55 iStockPhoto credits from PJ of Premium Wordpress Theme showcase.
• Everyone’s favorite logo designer and blogger David Airey is offering his brain to help improve your identity and its integration into your site.
• Jacob Cass himself is going to pimp your logo or your blog.
• Advertising space on Estetica Design Forums (donated by Toon) and on Just Creative Design.

And those are just some of the prizes that are up for grabs. Tons of sponsors have already signed on to help this initiative out so big props to them as well: Vivien of InspirationBit, Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips, Audee from Graphic Identity, Bloggeries, JasMate from Digital Point Forums, Freelance Folder, Jillian of The Minty Ferret, Lauren of Creative Curio, Ruchir of Technomoney, Meryl, and Design Sojourn. Wooo. That’s a lot of link love.

So how to you win some of these bad boys? It’s simple, you write a graphic design-related post and you send it in. Jacob also has a handful of other easy things that you can do right away that will immediately get you some free entires. All the contest details can be found here. The contest ends March 4th.

If you know me, you know I have my eyes set on the Fender guitar. I’ll try to control the drooling while I work on my entries for the contest.

I hope some of you will take some time and get some entries in yourself. But if you don’t, I’ll forgive you. :)

Over the Christmas holidays is when it first struck me that maybe it was about time that Creative Briefing got a little bit of a face lift. It took me awhile to really set this thought into motion but when I finally did, the ideas started flowing. I made sketches and mock-ups, and finally after one long and cold December night’s work at the Photoshop factory, I had a new masterpiece. One week later, I hated it. So I scrapped it and started all over again.

Fast forward a month and we’re at last week when I finally launched the new face of this site, which fortunately has been met with a lot of positive feedback thus far. But let’s rewind the tape a bit, and let me fill you in on some of the process that’s led me here.

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