Magician Problems

More funny stuff at www.Zazzle.com/MagicTrickShirts

The Classics of Magic... Bring a Towel

Here's a fun little comic panel I put together using a stock photo (probably from istockphoto.com) and a funny idea.

Years ago I used a rabbit in my act. Named Sebastian. Wore a spiked collar. This was very early in my career as a magician, so I didn't have very many gigs. Sebastian got to appear maybe 4 times before I sold him to an older more experienced magician.

The biggest show was at a magicians convention in northern Ohio, maybe Massilon. I was booked to appear in the close-up contest, very exciting. My act consisted of a card trick with my pet rock finding the chosen card, a dice matrix routine set to music, cups and balls and a cut & restored rope. I ended the routine by producing Sebastian from a crumbled up paper bag (which had been used earlier in the show). I did the performance and everything went fine.

Until I was told to move over to the next table and do it again...

Designing for Fun

Work in progress of the Ludlow Theatre logo

This is just for fun

I'm in the midst of designing the website for the Ludlow Theatre in Ludlow, KY for Circus Mojo. They have a person already working on the logo, but while waiting for him to finish it I went ahead and started designing one myself. It's an old theatre that they are renovating, and it's really cool. I did a show there back on September 14. Lots of fun!

Paul (the owner) and myself liked the idea of incorporating a theater marquee in the logo. The theater is on a main street in Ludlow, so many people will see the marque as they drive by. By making the logo match what the residents see will help to connect the two images.

I looked at lots of photos of marquees, until I found one at just the right angle. I wanted to logo to really give the impression that you were standing right there outside the theatre looking up at the marquee, or driving by.

A little tuck here, a snip there

Draft 1 from 10-3-2012

Draft 2 from 10-5-2012

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Draft 1 from 10-3-2012

Draft 2 from 10-5-2012

Sometimes it's the little things

Yesterday I let the logo settle into my head, churn around in the back of mind and prepare itself to be updated. Which it was. As you can see from the before/after images, I lightened the logo a lot. It was just way too heavy. Just click the image to zoom in.

I adjusted the blue in the color palette to a lighter saturation, but I may have made it too light. When the logo is small it's kind of hard to read the word, especially the one with my photo. I'll play arond with that to fix it.

Once I got rid of the overpowering black borders, the dark blue looked too strong. I kept the outline for "Designer" dark for better visibility and to highlight the hand drawn feel of the font. It's called Caitlyn and even though it looks hand drawn it's also carefully done, letting clients know that I put a lot of attention on their projects right from the start.

The font for "Magician" and "Greg McMahan" is called Blox. I use it in my Mister Greggy logo, so I used it again to add that connection. It's a little less childish here so clients will feel they are dealing with an adult.

Of the two, I prefer the one without my photo because it's simpler. However for larger applications I can see how the logo with my photo would work well.

I will continue churning the ideas for this logo, and see what else I come up with. Looking forward to what happens!

Tomorrow I'll show you a logo I'm playing around with for the Ludlow Theatre in Ludlow, Kentucky. That's where Circus Mojo is based, and I'm also in the process of designing their website. Right now it's just an image and a few links I slapped up there until we could plan out the  rest of the site. I did not design the image there or the Circus Mojo site.

I Like to Start with the Logo

Tossing around some logo ideas

Here's a couple of 1st drafts I came up with today. I like to start with a logo when I'm designing a site, or just about anything for that matter. Logos are so important. I use them to set the style of the design I'm working on, the color palette, font, text effects, etc.

These are first drafts, I'm sure I'll change them as I go along. But it's a start. I like the colors, a softer look for the primary colors. Since most of the design work I do is for children's entertainers, I tend to use primary colors a lot so I figured tey should be a part of my portfolio's look.

My original ideas involved retro and vintage images. That silly magician character from my previous post is a good example. I'd like to include a bit of that, but not the overall theme as I had originally intended. As much as I like that look, it doesn't represent what most of my designs are.

One idea which I pursued for awhile was to make the site look like the back page ad of an old comic book, selling everything from fake doggy-do to smoke pellets and of course a fair amount of cheap magic tricks. I'll keep my clip file on that, because I think it will come in handy some time for another magician looking for that type of image in their marketing materials.

Please let me know if you think I'm on the right track with the logos above. Any and all comments are welcome!

Site Update Status - Looking At Layouts

This magician needs a name... any ideas?

So far so good!

Here's a funny image I found on a public domain site recently. I would love to use it in my site update, it's just so goofy! Maybe I'll replace the bunny with a steampunk iPad that has my face on the screen.

I found a very useful flexible grid system on which to layout my updated portfolio site. My favorite feature is it's flexibility. Hence the name. What that means is it adapts to any size screen. When viewed on a regular size computer screen it has a nice layout. When viewed on a smaller screen (like a smartphone), it rearranges itself to make more efficient use of the space available. It even adapts well to a very large screen.

It's based on this page I found. When you load it, re-size your browser window and you'll see how it adapts. Pretty cool huh! However, it's more difficult to work with and requires a lot of fiddling with the CSS to get everything looking good.

Another option is a fixed size grid system. There are lots of them available, mostly based on a 960 pixel width divided into 12 or 16 columns. I use a similar system with my existing sites, keeping them to 960 pixels (or is it 940, I'd have to check) which scales well on a smart phone.

If I stick with the 960 grid system I'm using now, it will speed up my work a lot. However, taking the time to learn the flexible grid will be a good step towards developing more skills to offer future clients.

I'll think about it tonight, play around some more with the various frameworks and figure it out.

My Portfolio Needs an Update

I'll be updating my portfolio
at www.GregMcMahan.com

I Can Do Better!

I've been looking at my design portfolio recently. It's a decent looking site, easy to navigate, but a bit boring and it contains too many samples.

My tagline is "The Magician Designer", but except for my top hat nothing really emphasizes the magician part. Being a professional magician and a designer is a good image to use for branding my services, so I'm going to re-design my site to take advantage of that.

When I create a new design, I prefer to start with the visual. I've been scanning as many images of "magic" and "magician" I can find, online and in my collection here at home and office. Lots of ideas, including some fun unobtrusive HTML5 animations to add a bit of fun to the site.

I've also decided to simplify the back-end procedure for updating my portfolio. Right now there's a lot of steps involved, and I want to make it much easier to do. Upload an image, update a file and I'm done. Let the coding take care of the rest, including the thumbnail creation.

The new site will showcase fewer samples of my work so I can focus on the ones I feel best show my strengths as a designer. Here's one I'm really proud of that I'll be placing up front: www.SunshineIslandShow.com. I was so happy with the way it turned out I used the same basic layout, with Mike's permission, when I updated my entertainer site. It may be best to stick with that basic design to create consistency. Or not. I'll research that.

My plan is to use PHP, jQuery, HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. I like these languages and I'm comfortable with them. Not an expert by any means, but there are so many open source/public domain scripts available to choose from that I'm sure I'll find exactly what I want that require the minimum of editing. Why reinvent the wheel?

I'll keep you updated as the site is progressing... this will be fun!