The Orange Wombat - Things Done - Graphic design handyman

What do we mean by Things Done? Essentially, we're talking about anything to do with graphic design, from compositing photos to designing logos or business cards.

Here are some examples of what we mean...

This portrait was cropped from a larger picture. Because it was taken under relatively low light, the original was all grainy and nasty looking. However, with just a bit of "touch-up," we now have a portrait that does a little bit more justice to its subject!

A reasonable subtitle to this section might be, Why won't kids ever sit still? or perhaps Why did cousin Jim have to show up at the wedding?

Compositing photos involves taking various elements and placing them in a photographic form or manipulating photographs. In this example, we start with the two photographs labeled Downward Facing Blond and Tipping My Hat to You. Neither of these is very useful for a happy portrait... if only the blond and helmeted girls were both looking up at the same time!

Downward Facing Blond

Tipping My Hat to You

Using various photo-editing tools, we can simply grab the blond's head from Tipping My Hat to You and place it into Downward Facing Blond. Of course, the shading is a little different between the two pictures, so we adjust for that... fill in a little background here and there... and we have the finished product, below.

Amigas del caballo!

Designing a logo for a business or organization can be delicate work. Not only do you need to summarize and capture the essence of the entity, but you also need to consider how it will work on letterhead, and other concerns. The example below was put together for the Somerset Woods Trustees, a land and water conservation non-profit group in Skowhegan, Maine (in Somerset county).

Somerset Woods Trustees Logo

The important elements are obviously the leaf (representing the woods and land in general) and the water (representing the many beautiful lakes and rivers in the area). I've always thought water ripples were full of suggestion, so I added those in white to suggest sun light reflecting from them. Then, I needed something to be causing the ripples, so I added the drop falling from the leaf.

In all, the logo shows the inter-relation of the sun, the land, and the water. I think it's called the water cycle, but that's not the point. The point is that the logo shows that by conserving one we can help protect the other, and vice versa, which is the message the Somerset Woods Trustees want to convey.