Jay Weets Graphic Design & Illustration

10/26/2022

I’ve been absolutely swamped this month with my job, side jobs, and board related work. Never even found any time to do Inktober… again… What is it about this month?

Aaanyhoo, I wasn’t going to post this, it’s something simple I did for work at the Transportation Technology Center near Pueblo. Then I decided, hell with it, and now I’m going to explain why.

There’s nothing overly creative about it, you start out with something with a bit more punch, and sometimes all the creativity gets carved down to the basics. So why am I posting it? Because sometimes design is just function over form. As creatives we always want to show off the “cool” stuff, the work that’s pushing the boundaries of creativity, the work that’s gonna win that next big award. Sometimes it’s just about the technical ability, the spacing and arrangement. During the install I got nothing but compliments from employees as they went about their day. They all loved it, so why was I making such a big deal about posting my work? Is it portfolio worthy work? Probably not. Is it I mportant work that made people happy and served its intended purpose? Absolutely.

10/18/2022

Been a hectic month. A co-worker commissioned this for her son to put on a shirt. Can’t remember what sport it’s for… 😏

09/13/2022

This job was utter horse crap!

Hmmm, I should probably explain.
Richer Lands Compost is a family owned and run compost supplier located here in Colorado who uses horse manure to make their compost. Jon and Roger Whetstine came to me requesting a compost bag design and I sweet-talked them into a new brand entirely while we were at it. (The bag design shown in the slide is still a work in progress, so more to come on that.) We wanted to focus on the green/growth side of the business rather than the, well… you know, side of the business. The illustration was meant for the bags, but everyone liked it so much we incorporated it into versions of the logo and other designs as well.

08/24/2022

Some stickers I’m working on to pitch at work for tradeshow giveaways. What do you guys think?

I decided to start adding in the pages from my sketchbook to show how I get started and where it ends up. Sometimes the sketch is pretty close to the final, sometimes not so much.

06/20/2022

As a new tradition, this year I decided to design some tshirts for our yearly weeklong camping trip. Just arrived!

04/20/2022

I was asked to design a T-shirt for a group of nurses here in Colorado Springs. They do a new design each year for themselves.

The other is an unused portion of the design. Currently they call themselves 5 North Surgical Trauma (North Tower, 5th floor), but may be moving to the 6th floor, or to another tower entirely, so it may go unused. I had way too much enjoyment creating it to sweep it under the rug though, so here it is. I even designed it for each floor up to 9. 1, 4, and 7 are a stretch, but also moot.

04/15/2022

Meet my Manics, aka my disturbing emoji friends. They want to be your friends too!!!

08/24/2021

Just finished a 50 icon set for business development. A lot of these are pretty specific to the company I work for, but many of them could be of general use.

It was fun doing a more detailed, colored set of icons for this project. Usually I’m doing simpler line icons in one color. Always nice to stretch the creative legs.

08/10/2021

So I’m working on a set of 48 icons for a 100 page BusDev presentation. I’ve been pondering and sketching like crazy lately, even during a wedding I attended over the weekend. As you can see in my sketchbook, some keywords are pretty similar and some just downright obscure, so it’s been fun trying to differentiate them all. There are 5 sections so I put different backgrounds to match their section color. I think I’m about a third of the way done.

I keep my sketches quick and loose until starting them in Illustrator. Some come quick and others take a few iterations. Sometimes I think I have what I want only to change it as I’m creating it. I also have a very large file full of old logos, artwork, and icons to draw from. Sometimes an old icon element gives me a leg up on starting a new one saving a lot of time.

07/16/2021

07/01/2021

Looks like it’s official, they like my new logo design for our Architex software! They thought the previous colors looked to “Google” so I decided to just stick with blues.

After ENSCO bought Exostrategies I started noodling and sketching a new logo design, and once I had something I liked, I decided to show it to my boss and then we moved it along to the Software Director. It NEVER hurts to be proactive. If you only ever do what you’re asked to do, you won’t advance as far as you’d like.

Just might have something to enter in the AAF Addy’s this year… 😬

03/19/2021

What’s in your Design Toolbox?

Got this one finished up last night. Trying to get back on my backlog of personal projects, it’s been a busy/stressful last several months. Time to get back at ‘em.