[Cadaverous Pallor]

More photoshop jobs for work! In spoiler boxes since I want to post them in a decently large size.

The Young Adult Librarian approached me asking for some signage help in the Teen Zone. The area had been neglected since we opened. There's a nice big neon sign to beckon teens so it wasn't vital. They did need signage to mention that the area was for teens only during certain hours of the day, and those signs were slapdash awful ones that I didn't have a hand in making. To be honest, they had been making me cringe.

The librarian didn't have any preconceptions whatsoever in terms of design. I asked him to send me websites or imagery that inspired him, or even point to fonts and colors, but all he could muster to send me was a website by librarians about decorating teen areas, with all the usual lameness that accompanies such attempts to reach kids. He gave me free reign to try things.

I'd been inspired by things like Etsy and other art sites, especially current t-shirt design (like threadless. There is some cutting edge stuff happening out there in t-shirts and I did a ton of googling. I love googling art at work!

After lots of looking I decided I wanted a birds-congregating motif to represent the Teen Zone.

Spoiler:

This is an original image I found on flickr. I have to say my pics of power lines have seeped into my choice.

Spoiler:

I also found some art that I liked. It was vector based but photoshop (at least my version) doesn't work with vectors, so in order to use this I had to redraw a bunch of it. I was reminded of a fad when I was in 1st grade. Everyone would put paper over cool drawings and trace them and pretend they could actually draw that well.

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First try. I liked this but the librarian didn't.

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Cutting things up and putting them back together is my specialty. This banner would be about 7 feet long. Again, I really liked this one but they wanted me to try the other design. I guess it was a bit too arty for them to be writ large.

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It took a lot of messing to come up with this. I tried many color combos. This one looks a bit too greeny on my current screen but our large poster printer tends to mute colors so you have to go bold. This is the final design, though we have yet to figure out how to stick the damn thing on the crappy matte paint (details, details.)

Spoiler:

Yeah, mostly stolen, though I did have to trace the damn thing. This one is up and looks fabulous. Sending people over to the librarian is much easier now with this obvious sign. Yay, usefulness! (I don't know why this specific green printed well, but it did.)

Spoiler:

This is the final on a letter-size flyer we put next to the computers. I'm so glad the birds on a wire made it into use.

Anyway, thanks for indulging me. I'm so happy to spend my work time on fun projects.