Happy Halloween

I'm a sucker for cool logos and pumpkins. It only makes sense that Obama is my guy this election with his awesomely designed website and kick ass logo. Oh yeah, and his policies. Remember to vote, regardless of who it's for!

Noir Stationary Set

I posted my business card on the last post so this post adds the letterhead and envelope to the stationary set.

Noir Business Cards

I just created new business cards for myself sporting the new name and logo for Noir and to advertise my new online portfolio. It's difficult to create a unique or memorable card without paying extravagant amounts of money for spot colors, UV coatings, die cutting and the like. Although I was fortunate enough to be turned on to a website called 4colorprint.com that produces a very unique silk business card. It's pretty much a matte, silk laminate over the card that has a very smooth feel to the touch. It's not a cheesy gloss laminate that you would see on cards thrown all over the floor outside some club advertising some horrible rock band or DJ playing some embarrassing college theme night. The card looks normal but when you hand it off to someone, the response you get is usually, "Oooh, that feels interesting." And for $49 for 500 2-sided cards, it's a steal. A subtle way to make an important impression.

4colorprint.com

The Decline of Western Televisation

I'm the first to admit that I never would have thought I would be a weekly watcher of One Tree Hill but, hey, it kind of just happened. My girlfriend, Ana, bought the first season awhile ago and the next thing you know I'm Tivo-ing season 6. It's not the best show on TV but it's entertaining. I've invested so much time in it already that I can't just walk away. I'm going down with the ship. Although recently a new character emerged on the show who looked mighty familiar. Why yes, it's John Doe from one of my favorite bands, X! Apparently he's also an actor on top of a musical genius. So if John Doe, the LA punk icon of the 80's, is on the show I feel a little less ashamed watching the show. Crisis averted. Masculinity in tact, although pay no mind to John Doe's mesh shirt above. Here's a clip of X from the punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization.

Fata1ity USB Headphones Review

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I built a gaming system for my friend Chris because he fell head over heels for BF2142. So now that he's getting into PC gaming I now have (finally!) a teammate to play online with. So I bought the Fatality headphones/mic combo so we can discuss politics and gush online whilst we hoopeth thy ass. I've been playing the Battlefield series since BF1942 and it always been fun, obviously, but never as fun as teaming up with a friend. It changes the dynamics and strategy of the battlefield. You become more effective when you can just say to your team mate, "Hey! Come pick me up. I'm stranded," or awesome cliche lines like "I need backup! I'm surrounded. Watch your back, he's coming around the left side. Did you see him!? Where did he go?" Fun times for all.

On to the headphones. They're comfortable and they work--sort of. Ever since I installed the drivers and updated my X-fi sound card, which by the way the headphones are considered X-fi as well, my computer started acting like an asshole. BF froze with graphical glitches and it even locked up my entire system on a few occasions leading me to believe that something in my tower was overheating. After a lot of frustration, I nailed down the problem. Without the headphones plugged in, my X-fi soundcard enables me to set the audio quality in the game to Extreme High Quality Uber Awesome settings when running off the hardware (card). When the headphones are plugged in, the settings downgrade to medium running off software only. If you try to put the settings any higher the game and even your computer will freeze or shutdown. That seems pretty harsh for a set of headphones. The Uber setting is called "X-Fi" so why doesn't it work with "X-fi" headphones? Oh, and the mic doesn't work in game with BF's mic settings. It does work however with X-Fire, a third party app. But that is a BF/Vista problem. The only reason I'm not extremely pissed is because I can't really notice a drop in audio quality with the headphones on. In fact, I actually hear alot of sound effects I've never heard before. Audio quality is great, the mic works, and they are comfortable. Minus 1 star for pissing me off for 2 days straight though. It shouldn't require so much effort to plug in headphones.

We Were A Bunch Of Saps Back Then

I was looking through some of my projects to decide which one I should post for today when I came across some photos and flyers from my old band days in high school. Above is a picture of us hooligans back in the day. That's me, Jess, Sean, Matthew and Brian. We went through 3 band names, a few lineup changes, put out 3 E.P.s, a live album, numerous demos, wrote dozens of songs, played probably 100 covers and was the best memory I had of high school. I think we could have gone somewhere with it. I moved to college, our drummer joined the Air Force, and we all pretty much got "real" jobs. We played punk rock and were heavily influenced by 70's and 80's bands such as Stiff Little Fingers, The Adolescents, The Ramones, The Clash, The Misfits and X. We didn't write aggressive punk rock, it was more musically inclined.

I love music and I love graphic design so as long as I'm doing one of those, I'm made in the shade. Once I figure a way to post some songs on the blog, I will. Below is a flyer I made back when I was 17 before I discovered Photoshop. We were going by The Saps back then.

Anywhere Ad

I figured that I would start posting random pieces of work that I have done personally and professionally. This ad is the first in a series (that have yet to be created) that showcases the new visual branding of LKQ. What was once very corporate and safe in regards to color and design has changed with a splash of green, a new tagline and a bit of an edgier look.

I've also incorporated this new visual identity to the tradeshow booth that will be on display at the International Autobody Congress and Exposition (NACE) in Las Vegas. It's the biggest collision repair autoshow of the year. I'll be there for a few days just after election day taking pictures and will post images of how the booth turned out. Above is a floor plan but we'll see how it looks in real life.

You can see my official online portfolio at noirgraphicdesign.com

Abit AB9 Pro MotherF*****board

Over the weekend I built a computer for my friend and future brother-in-law Chris, A.K.A. Ultimate Photon System (see post below), and man, what a pain in the ass and awesome joy it was! I built my tower and have upgraded it here and there over the past few years so this was my second complete build. I got him hooked on PC gaming via Battlefield 2142 so now I have a gaming buddy! So we shopped on Newegg.com for all the components and ordered them about a week and half ago for just over $700. It’s not a water cooled quad core triple SLI sonuvabitch but it gets the job done. The beauty of building it yourself is that you can always upgrade down the line, the reason I convinced him not to buy say a proprietary HP or Dell system. His specs are:

Cooler Master Case

Intel Core 2 Duo E7200

2gb GSkill RAM

500gb hard drive

550 watt PSU

Vista Home Premium 64-bit

NVIDIA 7800GT (a hand-me-down from yours truly. His first upgrade will be the GPU but it plays BF2142 smooth as silk so he’s happy for the time being)

ABIT Ab9 Pro Motherboard <----POS

The motherboard. This picky piece of shit caused so much frustration that we ordered new RAM thinking that it was the reason it wasn’t booting up. Investigation into the matter from the hundreds of other people who had issues with this board indicated that it needs certain RAM from certain vendors with a particular voltage and specific timings. The new RAM didn’t work so I thought it was the video card. I swapped it out with my 8800GTX and still no dice. I then discovered online that the E7200 was troublesome on this board too. So F that, it wasn’t worth anymore time or frustration. We ordered the a board from Gigabyte and boom bam it’s up and running. So watch out for HawlendRion and...em...JellyBean2142... to frag yo ass! See you online.