Category — commercial

My friend, Leslie is a photographer, too. He specializes in sports photography over at Actionography. He called me up with an interesting project he wanted my help with.

The idea was to create and ‘end of the season’ poster for the Tassajara Giants. Apparently, the trophy the kids get is kind of generic and the team wanted something a little more personal. So, the poster would be a series of baseball cards laid out with some graphic elements, team name, etc..

Leslie already had the photography done. I would have to design the individual baseball cards of each player and fit them nicely into a poster. I found a major league baseball card and ‘borrowed’ the design. I integrated the that into Adobe Illustrator and made the various ovals you see here. All of the color and type was done in Adobe Photoshop. I added the team colors, a drop shadow as an inner glow and we were ready to go.

With the template now made, I could just drop in the original photo, change the player’s name appropriately, and it was done. So, now I had a bunch of players and coaches as baseball cards. Cool.

Next, I created a 20″x24″ document in Adobe InDesign. I made the background black and added the type elements and thought it looked pretty good. Leslie’s client wanted to add a baseball graphic and the actual SF Giants logo to the poster. This presented a few more challenges.

I found a nice graphic of a baseball on iStockPhoto that worked great. It was vector are so I could make it any size. I found a SF Giants logo online but it was very low resolution and would have looked pretty bad. I took it into Illustrator and traced it. It turned out nice and sharp. So, after a few rounds with the client, below is the final result.

What’s cool is that now we have a template for other teams. I can just change the colors and images and we’re done. We can also use the card templates for making individual cards or 8″x10″s or whatever.

As I was looking at other baseball cards for ideas, I noticed that most of the ‘classic’ cards used a ton of different typefaces on the same card. This is pretty much a design ‘no-no’. But, to get that classic baseball card look, I guess you have to!

The Soiland Heavy Equipment Repair shoot held some great challenges. First, how do we shoot their big, red trucks? And how can we get these images done to look great on a business card?

Greg Soiland is a good friend. He’s been repairing heavy equipment (caterpillar, bulldozers, and the like) for many years here in Sonoma County. He had run out of business cards and asked if I could help him. I thought this would be a great time to try out some photo ideas. We agreed to make these into ‘photo’ business cards.

The plan was to do the shoot at his shop. The upcoming Saturday was slated to have good weather. As I drove to the shop, it was a glorious, sunny, winter day. Since Greg needed his card pretty quick, I didn’t have time to scout locations so I didn’t know what to expect. As it turns out, his shop is smack-dab in the middle of one of the most idyllic spots on earth - the Alexander Valley. This valley is home to some of the best wine in the world, too.

Arriving at the shop, I found there was a perfect area to shoot: a huge, cement-top area with the vineyards and hills as a background. The downside was that there was a bunch of old equipment at the edge of the cement and the blight of the valley, an ugly casino in the hills. Yes, there would be Photoshop work needed.

We had a great shoot. Greg and his son, Shawn (also his service technician) had fun moving the trucks around for me. We also used a battery-operated lift to shoot with a different perspective.

So, here’s the 2 shots we liked before retouching:

Next, we had to remove the distractions you can see in the backgrounds. Also, I didn’t even see all those tire skid marks when we were shooting! Also, in order to have the trucks appear on the cards correctly, we needed to extend all around the the original image.

So, after a little retouching, here’s what I came up with:

Now that we had the final shots, I added some text and here are the final business cards: