CATALOG DESIGN

Catalog design is currently my bread and butter. I stumbled into the industry while in Chicago and walked away from the city with five years of design and direction experience. Three of those years I was lead designer for the National Geographic catalog.

The approach is simple—position products on a spread in a way that optimizes their sales potential. Build around a featured product, and give a spread a nice flow. Every once in a while, break the rules—we're not working with a set of cookie cutters here.

I am not an agency—more like a one-person art direction/design provider (of course add a dash of photography.) However if a project requires a team, I'm able to bring together production artists, hair and makeup, photographers, photo assistants, illustrators, writers, etc.—anything it takes to complete the task.

 

LOGO DESIGN

What designer worth his rocks hasn't cranked out a logo from time to time? I do full color work, but it's my opinion that a logo needs to function in one color first in order to be effective. Go to the link on the right to see some samples.

 

WEBSITE CONCEPT AND DIRECTION

I've discovered an efficient way to design websites: create a vision for the page, lay it out in a design program, but leave the code writing to the professionals. Of course there are those miracle people who can do both very well, but in my experience, good programmers usually aren't good designers, and traditional print designer are usually disastrous code-writers.

Not that I've abandoned all understanding of code—I do study XHTML and CSS, and occasionally find a fancy script to apply a particular function. It helps when I have to tweak and update sites rather than rely solely on the programmer. As a matter of fact, I designed Humanfiles exclusively myself.

But all that's boring— you just want a website that looks great, functions professionally and has cross-browser compatibility. In that case, let's develop a design savvy, well branded look for your site—then I'll pass the layout on to my programmer who'll make the site functional. This enables me to focus on the ascetics of the page, without worrying about stumbling through the programming.

 

Intrigued? Contact me at david@humanfiles.com and we'll get started on your next project.