If you follow me on Twitter you might have caught wind that we’re moving into a new building. Between traveling, we’ve started building out the new spot in deep SE Portland. It’s closer to my house, and we’re the only ones in the building, so we can make noise and use all the strong smelling solvents we want.

The deep SE part of Portland is affectionately known to long-time residents as “Felony Flats,” but it’s come a long way over the years, even in the short four year period I’ve been here. Shit, now there’s even a hip food cart pod called “Cartlandia” that sits along a bike path walking distance from our new shop. We’re hoping to take that progression one step further — we’ve been jokingly referring to the area as the “Flavel Arts District.” Portland’s prosperous “Alberta Arts District” was not so long ago a not so nice neighborhood. Some developers looking to make a few bucks added the “arts” and away things went. So we’ve taken the same approach and we made a logo (above). We also used the word “historic” which we feel also adds class. If nothing else, we found a cool building that works for us, and we think we should even have some skateable surfaces inside it.

I’m a day or two away from moving my desk and some of my stuff into the new place. We’ve still got a lot of work, and building, but my studio area is painted, and the trim is in, so hopefully tomorrow I can start loading into that section. We’ll slowly be moving everything over throughout the month, and should be in there on a full-time basis by the end of February (though likely before). More pictures to follow, but we’re excited to have more space. We are going to miss the Sweetpea coffee though (and Lisa).

I’ve been doing design work for Woodward Camp since 2006-ish. I do the catalogs every year, as well as a lot of the advertising, collateral, shirts, etc. They’re growing constantly, even expanding internationally, and there’s always something new going on, so it’s fun stuff. We work with a number of different brands in our office, both big and small, but Woodward is one of the most consistent. This year’s print and web look started with a sheet of steel in my garage, a few stencils, and some muriatic acid. The resulting rusty steel textures got used as subtle elements in the catalogs this year, but they take on more of a roll in the ads. Essentially, I quick-rusted the area around the stencil with the acid and water, then shot photos of the result to use in the designs. The textures got worked in with some provided action photography (I shot the BMX ad of Morgan Wade) and we were off and running. We also worked QR codes into the print campaign this year, to direct readers to the various Woodward web portals by simply scanning them with their smart phone. See the ads after the jump.

Woodward did a larger online marketing push this year than in previous years. We used the tagline “Come Ride With Us” and “Come Skate With Us” throughout the online campaign. Here’s a small sampling of those ads, which are currently running in a number of sizes and iterations.

Just got the last of these back from the printer. This is much of September and October around the studio. This is the fifth year in a row we’ve produced the catalogs for Woodward Camp, the largest Action Sports, Gymnastics and Cheer summer camps/training facilities in the world. This year it was five catalogs in total (three for Woodward in PA, two for Woodward West). We’re designing for a broad, young audience on these — about 7-17 years of age. It’s a relatively quick turnaround for the scope of the project (five forty-page catalogs in two months), but the quick pace and deadlines keep things fun. You can check out a few details after the jump.

Been shooting a few things with Ben Hucke for a magazine interview. Sitting on a lot of good stuff right now waiting for that to materialize. Not posting some of the bangers we’ve got is no easy task. But in the meantime, here’s a portrait outtake from the studio yesterday. You can also download a desktop for your computer of Ben here, as if we’re in 2004 all over again! Keep your eyes peeled at Dig BMX mag soon for some of the stuff we’ve been shooting. They have an iPhone app.

In Honor of Festivus, a holiday dedicated to and created by the prophet Frank Costanza, a donation has been made in your name to the Human Fund.

Click to see larger. It’s a Festivus Miracle!

My studio site (souneymedia.com) has been horribly outdated for the last couple years. Old work, old functionality etc. I think the last time I rebuilt it was 2005. I added a bit of work since, but otherwise, it was dated. I got a BETA invitation to try out the Cargo Collective CMS platform recently, and used this as an experiment to see how the platform worked. So I spent the last few weeks digging through work, shooting images of it, and getting things together. I’ll be adding more stuff as time goes on — Cargo makes it really easy to do so. But for now there’s a lot of old and new stuff up there to look at. You can click the commercial portfolio link on the right to get there, or just click here.

My regular updates will continue to be on this site, and the commercial stuff will continue to live over there.

A big box of new business cards arrived from the printer today. I needed some new standard size cards (as opposed to the postcard style I also use. The cards were inspired by the old layout boards we used to use before computers took over and everything went to press on a disk. I liked the “hands on” approach of that time. Type and various elements got waxed onto layout boards, which in magazine publishing typically had a grid of cyan squares. The cyan wouldn’t show up when photographed by a Stat camera to make the negatives for printing plates.

Printed on uncoated stock with Cyan and Black inks on both sides. Type is set in Interstate and Mrs. Eaves, which I use on all the stuff around the studio.

In contrast to the old printing inspiration, I’ve also included URL’s for modern networks like Twitter.

Studio holiday email card above. It is snowing in Portland. We’ve had several inches today already, and it’s been constant flurries for the last few days. Global warming appears to have missed a spot. Click on the image to see it a bit bigger.

Back in 1999 I started doing my business cards styled after Polaroids. Since then I’ve done a bunch of different “Polaroid Cards,” some of which I’ve attached after the jump. As you’ll see they’re designed and printed to look just like a polaroid photo (down to the large black square and type on the rear, which I use for contact info). When I started doing them, Polaroids were still widely available, and it was more of a visual pun. Clients tend to hold onto them, and it’s always been a more interesting way to display work, than a stock 4×6 card. Now that Polaroid has discontinued their 600 films, it’s more of a historical nod than anything. Come to think of it, the background image of the header graphic at the top of this very site is a polaroid 600 image of some old letraset press type I have kicking around. Two dying breeds for sure.

Recently Polaroid dropped an online Polaroid generator. It’s a great, fun little tool that makes something old new again. You have to download an application from the site, and from their you can drag and drop photos into it. If you start with a high resolution photo, you end up with a decent quality photo (1392×1692 pixels).

The sample above is one I had on my desktop of Axel Jurgens that was taken for a Profile Racing advertisement. It made the perfect guinea pig for the generator. While it’s no substitute for a tactile polaroid that you hold in your hand, it is a fun little tool and one that I’m sure will see tremendous overuse in the future. For now, you can still find Polaroid film out there if you try, so get it while you can.

Below are some samples of the business cards I’ve been doing since the late ’90s. A few of the early cards were actually shot with Polaroid 600 film, however many of the more recent cards use images ranging from 6×6 film to digital.

I first met Snotty a decade or so ago in New England, when he was just a wee grommet that rode the Mounds of Doom trails in Dracut, Ma, and some of the local skateparks. When I moved to Portland I ran into him at one of the parks here. It turned out the screen printing shop he works at (run by BMXers) is right across the street from my studio, and I didn’t even know it for a couple months. They’ve got a rad/crazy bowl inside their shop, and it’s handy to have a printer that close, especially BMXers. This photo was shot at an abandoned school right across the way.