Customization project for Kyle Groves

Learn Magic with the Party People!

From Kyle Groves theater in Colorado.

I just finished customizing a Learn Magic book for Kyle Groves, it will be available on Amazon in a day or two. He also needed a logo. I enjoy designing logos.

UPDATE! The stores are live now...

CreateSpace

Amazon

Kyle and his father "Mr. E", run a really nice little theater in Pueblo, Colorado. It's a great idea for an event facility. Check it out... www.ColoradoMagician.com

He wanted a logo that was classy and fun. Kyle sent a lot of photos to me via DropBox. I was looking thru them getting ideas when I saw this photo.

That was a big help. I quickly came up with this logo...

Back to Design Work

October and November were busy, and painful!

It's been awhile since I've updated anything on this blog. My work (performing) schedule picked up quite a bit during October, which is usual for that season. There's also exciting news coming soon about Circus Camp, but it's all hush-hush for now until some deals are finalized. Really looking forward to announcing it when ready!

Lately I've had problems with kidney stones. I do NOT suggest anybody get these... very painful. A few days ago I had a kidney stone making it's presence known while I was in the middle of a show. Not fun, but the show ended up being one of the best I've done. Go figure.

Anyway, I have not updated my portfolio site, not even added the new logo. I'll do that in the next day or two, perhaps even today.

I will be updating the promo materials for my friend Charles Watson in West Virginia, "Tricky Chaz". He's a magician, juggler and balloon twister working very hard to support his family. Nice guy.

Here's a banner I did for his website (Click on them to embiggen):

www.TrickyChaz.com

I designed the banner, not the site. I also put together other materials, here's some of them...

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

---

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!

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!

Circus Camp Logo Design Notes

Logo for our 20th anniversary - www.CircusCamp.ORG

Circus Camp is an Atlanta based summer (and winter) camp for children age 5 and older. We teach all manner of circus skills, including trapeze, web, silks, lyra and other aerial equipment. Also juggling, clowning, magic, acrobatics, tightwire, theatre and lots of other fun stuff. It's a very popular camp, and the kids have a blast!

This type of font has been overused in my opinion, but it's still a good font.

The colors work well in a circus theme, especially kids oriented, but I wanted to avoid the standard circus font. It's good, but we've been using it for a long time, plus so many other circus schools and camps us it. I wanted to give the logo an up-to-date look. However, that old font really said "circus", so I needed something else to make that statement. That's why I used the tent top. I've seen something similar used on a couple of other circus logos, and I liked it.

Another property I wanted for this logo was flexibility. It looks good just about any way it's scaled, whether proportionally, stretched vertically or horizontal. That's a very useful trait when laying out a page.

The "20 Years" is just for this years version, of course. The logo still works fine without it, and other text can be inserted either to the left or right of the tent top. Or both, although I prefer to the right because the flag is a helpful pointing device. Of course, the flag could just as well be pointing to the left to help guide the viewer's eyes that direction on the page.

I also designed a version that better fits a horizontal space, such as a web banner ad.

I've been using this one more and more.