First and foremost, we would like to announce that we will be slowly closing the doors to Ectomachine. What?! Yes. It’s true. You may be asking why? Well to put it simply it’s time to expand. At the beginning of this year all intentions were set to expand Ectomachine from much more than what it currently portrays. As some of you may know we have been working alongside the great team over at Sons Of Nero on quite a few projects over the past year and the projects between us just kept adding up and piling on. The next thing we knew we had a slew of great jobs and not really sure what name to put the jobs under considering both hands were in a lot of the projects. So the answer was obvious. Instead of trying to push Ectomachine from it’s current state why not take all the great things that it has given us and team up with another design powerhouse to create something purely magical and new in terms of design, branding, and the web as a whole. Well that is just what we are doing now.

With the approaching summer we would like to announce the coming of Forefathers. We will be unveiling a piece at a time and are in the thick of the wireframing and design of our official site with a hopeful launch date of July 04th, 2011. Forefathers will still be focusing on many start-up companies, corporate and local companies alike along with the fantastic addition of much more music and band related projects. For now you can check on our progress on the above mentioned link and also follow us on twitter @Forefathers and don’t be afraid to reach out, we are already taking new jobs.

There will be a couple of more work posts from the Ectomachine camp over the next month but they will slowly be winding down. The site will still remain but there won’t be many more posts this summer. It’s been an amazing 2 years with Ectomachine and it completely exceeded all expectations of what was meant to do. We had the opportunity to work on some beautiful projects with kick ass clients and I personally couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. Also thank you for reading this and keeping up with us. We promise we will not let you down. Here’s to the future.

Jonden / Ectomachine

Over the fall we got to launch a new fall tour site for a band called The Summer Set alongside our good friends at Sons Of Nero. The site implemented something we have never done which was feature a video blog, photo gallery, and ticket purchase for each stop on the tour. It really turned out great for the band and was very cool seeing it utilized to it’s full function. You can check out the full site here.

Also over the past couple of months we have gotten to explore some really cool new identity and branding pieces for clients. Our three newest for Van Harte, Sprowty, and Tackle Express have been featured in the Identity section of our site.

The Ecto blog has also been seeing lots of love lately with our two newest posts featuring our Logo Design Process of Sprowty and also our first tutorial, Create A Vintage Style Poster. So check them out!

In our latest endeavor we have created a Tumblr blog along with our own custom theme aptly titled Low Culture. This was our first custom theme creating and we learned alot about the functionality and flexibility of tumblr. Tumblr themes are also another service we offering now and they are great option for micro blogging or even as a small news site. So check us out on Tumblr.

We would like to wrap up stating that 2010 was an amazing year for us here at Ectomachine. We added some great talent to our team, learned a lot of new techniques, and most importantly had the chance to work on some amazing projects alongside some very like minded and great clients. Now that we are approaching a new year we expect the best has yet to come for us and we are just getting started. We are going to start off 2011 just right with a redesign of Ectomachine that we hope to launch in early spring so keep your eyes open. Until next time..

Happy holidays everyone!

Here is where Ectomachine came in. What we proposed is having 2 roles for members. Either be a Seeder or a Sprowter. The idea of the site would stay the same however with a fun theme of posting a job would be ‘Planting a Seed’ and doing a job would be ‘Sprowting a Seed’. With this very simple ideology the creativity just kept rolling and sprowty was born.

So now we had the name, the concept, and the site architecture. Now it was time to brand sprowty.

First, just like every logo we do, we started with some rough sketches. Some say sketching the idea of your logo is always the most valuable and important part of creating a good identity piece. It allows you to explore options and remove yourself from the computer entirely to focus on the sketching of ideas and really flesh them out. Now that the sketches were done I picked the top 3 that I thought fit sprowty the most.

My first instinct was to go with the budding seed. So I grabbed the sketch and went straight to vectoring the logo. Piece by piece it was starting to take shape.

For a solid presentation to show the client I explored a quick color option and went through some nice typefaces until I landed on a font I thought fit the theme. There had been no customizing to the type yet but I wanted to get the foundation.

After having the first concept done I moved straight to the second concept. This concept derived from the first sketch of the ‘S’ ambigram with leaves on each end of the S. During sketching I wanted to steer clear of a traditional S shape so here is what I ended up with. Also the ambigram shape looked a little lonely and stagnant by itself so I encased it in a circle and it really gave it a more balanced feel to it.

Again I found another font that I felt went with the theme of the brand and had good harmony with the ‘S’ symbol. This time I started customizing the type and spacing to get the feel right. I also threw in some quick color for good measure. At this point I felt that things were really starting to shape up and had almost abandoned the seed logo mock because I felt so confident in this concept.

I presented both options to the client and the feedback was positive on both but the overall decision was to continue on with concept 2. I wholeheartedly agreed, except with this next round the client wanted to explore a thicker ‘S’ shape and bigger leaves but still keep the ambigram idea. I knew I didn’t want to change it too much but rather enhance it from the original idea. Here was the outcome:

I was most confident in this version of all the concepts and really thought it encompassed everything we were after. Strength, Simplicity, Fun, and Memorable. There was only one thing that didn’t feel quite right with this version. The circle. So I simply removed it!

Now it was time to add the new symbol with the customized type. I reverted back to the same customized type I used for concept two and did a few new spacing adjustments to the letters to really get the feel right. I presented this finalized piece to the client and we both knew we had ‘The One’.

Now it was time for some color options for the brand as a whole. I really wanted to focus on a kind of 70s Technicolor vibe but also incorporate colors that come to mind when I think of farms. Yellows, greens, browns, and creams.

After going through more greens than I care to remember I landed on one that I thought was perfect for our logo.

So that’s the breakdown of the sprowty logo. We hope you enjoyed it and be sure to look out for a special look into the site design in the next coming months. Below is the logo mixed with some of the site elements and a quick stationary example.

First we will want to download the source files, simply click Download to download the .zip file.

Below is an image of what we will be creating

1. Well to start off, lets look at the basic print aspects associated with this poster job. Posters are often, or commonly, 11″x17″ …so we ought to set our canvas parameters for this size. However, lets give it at least a .25″ inch bleed, so add a .125″ buffer to each side of the poster. Of course, we also want to work at 300 DPI. Now, mass printers often run all their prints in CMYK, but it is relatively difficult to work in CMYK layers, so we’ll work in RGB till we have a finished design, then convert to CMYK.

2. Now that you have your canvas (which may be white, depending on your preference settings), lets pick a color. I’m going to go with a random one, a raw pea or dirty lime green color. not the most comforting of colors, but why not. let’s be edgy and grotesque.

3. Next up, a healthy gradient running a nice, ghastly blue-grey birthed from the warning signs of an oncoming storm into a particularly vile green color of choice. Let’s use a gradient fill that is just the blue color going into a transparency of that blue color rather than the white transparency photoshop automatically supplies you with in most cases.

4. Lets grab a photo of choice, in this case, the one supplied which i shot randomly one day.. it has some decent color about it.. go ahead and drop it in there. Now the file i provided you with, I added a bit of black to the top of it to make up for some empty space it created. Now, if you just dropped it in there, what would be the point of the background colors we mustered up? well, go ahead and set that photo layer to “hard light” in the blending mode drop-down menu.

5. Now as you can see in the two screen shots above, a good bit of the color is blacked out in a portion of the photo.. create two layers, and shade in some more black color space. the first layer, set the blending more to soft light, and leave a good amount of the blue color visible overhead of the plant. for the second layer, set that to normal, and halo the black in a good bit more. This way we create a bit of depth and “spotlight” to the image.

6. Here we feed the poster a bit of texture. The texture you’re provided with is an edited version of a photo i took of bubbles in a bathtub believe it or not. This texture can similarly be achieved with spray paint as well. Anyhow, set this layer in appropriately and place its blending mode in “screen.” Now, you may want to erase, burn, or mask out any areas that you feel are a bit over the top for aesthetic stake.. or you may want to add more in with the cloning tool.

7. Now, with using the same blending mode, Screen, drop the other scenic photo into the upper negative black space of the poster.

8. In this stage, we drop in a layer of bland yellow and set the blending mode to “color” for the desired monochromatic effect, but we’ll need to mask out with a moderate and opaque brush setting to allow some of the base color to come through as seen in the screenshot.

9. For the added vintage look, a reddish brown layer set to “lighten” will be used to replace the darker areas of black.

10. To give the upper portion added glow and highlight, we’ll put in a a gradient layer of orange to black, and set that to “screen” to allow the orange fade
through.

11. We’re getting close to completion, and with that being said, lets work in some additional design and color traits. Using the circular marquee tool, create a rather large circular area to which we brush in some light colors. Play with the opacity of the brush a bit to gently work in the highlights and hues. Also play with the blending modes to get it where you want it to be.

12. Here I threw in a border, the logos, and some text. Again, play around a bit with masking, blending modes, and layer order to achieve the placement and look you want to obtain.

13. Last but not least, take the last texture provided, and set the blending mode to “color burn” and let it sit on top of the layers to give it a more worn, and paper-styled / weathered photograph appeal. Now you have yourself a fancy, vintage style’d poster with a modern kick!