Signed up to Mailchimp during the week to manage the forthcoming Wax Botanical newsletter list. I’d glanced thru they’re site before when helping clients set up they’re own lists but had’nt gone thru the full feature set till now. Well impressed with the functionality on offer and the quick start video guides. The form options are excellent too, as there’s a ‘naked’ version that once added to a page automatically inherits your theme styles. I added a simple form to the Home page of the upcoming WB online store, twas a doddle to do. Am glad I went the DIY route instead of paying for the more limited mailing list functionality of Topspin or Nimbit.
Had an interesting commission to finish off earlier in the week; a logo for a local archeology field school. Its probably the most amount of revamps I’ve had to do for a logo but as they wanted something that would work on letterheads, t-shirts and sides of vans it was important we ended up with something that stood out. I had the black and white outline of the image pretty much sorted before so I spent a few mornings trying to emboss the design and make it look like a worn medieval coin. Had to do alot of brush work in Photoshop but the result is pretty damn close to an image of a real coin they’d pulled off ebay. The ‘metal’ish is’nt quite there yet, I found creating shadows with the brush made the image too soft and blurry but using a dry brush eraser on an embossed layer created a dimpled look which was more auld’er looking. Not sure how it’ll look enlarged on a t-shirt but as there is now plenty of shades in the image it should work well in black and white when converted to wood cut (via this nifty plugin found on Codecanyon for just such a purpose).
