Giants (and A’s) Divisional Preview —

Hi everyone, it’s me again. I know, long time no see. It’s not that I haven’t done anything interesting … in fact, I’ve done a TON of super cool fly shit. It kind of boggles the mind. The only down side, of course, is that it leaves no time for blogging. Anyway, I make no promises — all I can say is this is most recent piece of work I feel like sharing — although, I felt like sharing that (1) not too long ago,  I did one of the most awesome 10-day stretches of music EVER! EVER! Yes, Outside Lands is included in that. But so is Cafe Tacvba, Enanitos Verdes, Ozomatli, and, wow, mega wow, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anyway. matters of business … Giants, A’s, playoffs. This is how I rolled for that …

I know. I like it, too. This one actually started while I was daydreaming in my American Literature course. I have the sketches, just not right now. The original idea was two pages, well, 1 3/4, but space was at a premium — so I was told that if I wanted to design something, I’d have a page. So, I packed as much important information as I could while preserving my original vision. It’s not a great vision, but a vision all the same …

Before I forget, an explanation for the infographic’s headline … well, there isn’t a good one. But in order to SORT OF understand it, you need to see the banner that was designed for the A1 of the Weekend’s Daily Journal.

Get it? Are You Ready? We’re Ready! Yay! OK … back to the sketch …

There are like, nine different sketches, but this one is probably the cleanest and gives the clearest view of what I was thinking about. Anyway, once I was told that we didn’t have enough space for this monster (which turned out to be a great thing considering the time that I didn’t have) I got to plugging away at a 1-page hybrid. The toughest part, is the main artwork. I’m not an artist, not even close (!!!!) … so I started to play around. The original photos were these …

Combined vertically and strung together like I THOUGHT I wanted, they looked like this …

I swear, the hardest thing I’ll ever deal with for the rest of my career is the idea of properly blending images together with a blank background in an attempt to make them look like one piece, as opposed to four or five different ones — I’m just, super anal about sharp lines that are abrupt. The problem here? The A’s dark uniforms. There is no real good way of making them gradient into a light background. Believe it or not, it took me an entire night to figure that out. Once Monday morning rolled around, and with lighter A’s photos, I went back to work. I went with a reliable background texture, used a familiar font and got to plugging away. I kept the Facebook friends updated on the progress … because, well, I wanted to and I’m a tad vain.

    

I was definitely on the lucky side with this one considering that almost all of the information used in the graphic was from the Associated Press NLDS capsules they filed through the wire on Thursday. It was great stuff and it saved me a ton of time. Also, a somewhat of a cheater’s tip: When you need small cut outs, like the ones for Votto/Verlander/Cabrera/Chapman, a quick google search for “Athlete’s Name” Fathead is awesome. Because you don’t need anything huge, the cutout works great.

Anyway, it’s great to see the Giants in the playoffs again. Hopefully we get to design other fun stuff. And it’s good to be blogging again. Hope y’all like the graphic. Cheers. — July