Mark’s Quality Cleaners is a large dry cleaning business in Miami Beach. They have a long, interesting business history in the Miami area> Recently the business split into two locations, West 51st Street and Alton Road.

Their website features:

• History of the company
• Price list embedded from a Google docs spreadsheet for easy updates
• Pickup & delivery form
• Garment care tips

This website was design and put in place in under two weeks. It was necessary to get the site up quickly because they wanted it to be live before they relocated. While not all websites go up that quickly, this project shows that misselhornMedia can get sites up fast, if needed. If the client has a good, workable idea of what they want and need on the site, a fast pace is definitely possible.

Each logo project begins with a logo design questionnaire, which provides information about intended audience for the logo, project goals, and initial design preferences and tastes.

Using the guidelines set forth by the questionnaire, misselhornMedia creates a set of initial logo concepts, trying to cover a wide variety of possibilities for the logo. The many ideas are honed down into a final logo. I think it has kind of a theme park, adventure ride feel to it which I hope got some of the children of the school excited about the event.

I’ve been a fan of science fiction movies since I was a little kid and saw Star Wars for the first time. Because of that, I tend to do a lot of designs and wallpapers that feature space and planets. Outer space is a pretty fascinating thing to learn about and check out.

Designing planets in photoshop is a fairly straightforward process:

1. Download a high resolution photograph of almost any interesting natural texture.
2. Cut it into a circle.
3. Spherize it.

To make things even easier, rather than go through all those steps any time you need a planet in your design, why not just use this free photoshop brush? Download it, install it, use it, and then leave a link to your work in the comments.

This brush looks pretty cool if you want to add some blending options to it as well – outer glow for an atmosphere effect, bevel or emboss for crazy terrain, add a gradient for a shadow, etc.

Go ahead and click the image (or here) to download the brush.

Btw, there are 16 brushes in all, named after the twelve colonies of Kobol from the Battlestar Galactica series plus a few named after the dwarf planets of our solar system: Virgon, Tauron, Scorpia, Sagittaron, Picon, Libran, Leonis, Gemenon, Caprica, Canceron, Aquaria, Aerilon plus Pluto, Haumea, Eris, and Ceres (did you even know there were 4 dwarf planets in our solar system?)

Enjoy. The truth is out there. Live long and prosper. May the Force be with you. So say we all.

If you enjoy this brush, please consider making a donation.

This wallpaper design was created in Illustrator. It reminds me a bit of Tron: Legacy with the light cycle tracks and all. First I created the simple multi-line pattern and a curve of the pattern with the same width, and copy-pasted them into a more complex overall arrangement, adding a background texture afterward.

Below I have some download links [right-click, save-as] for various desktop and mobile resolutions. I’ve also included an iPhone and iPad size for you Apple fans.

Other Wallpaper Resolutions:

• iPhone
• iPad
• 1024 x 768
• 1280 x 800
• 1440 x 900
• 1680 x 1050
• 1920 x 1200
• 2560 x 1440

Misselhorn Family Crest: Original Scan

The print is a large deer head with antlers, a shield featuring a lion or wild cat in an attack pose, an area with three mushroom-like designs, and an area of crosshatched square shapes. Below is a ribbon banner with the latin text “Virtute et Valore.” Now, I never took latin, but I am pretty certain we all are capable of translating that phrase.

Apparently, my father was given this a long time ago and was told it was the family crest for our family, the Misselhorn family. From what I’ve been told, we are mostly Swedish and German on that side of the family, so perhaps this design originated in one of those countries.

Being an enthusiast of both traditional and digital design, I was excited by this found object, and decided the appropriate thing to do was to take this woodcut print into a digital form. Hopefully these images will interest some other Misselhorns out there in cyberspace, or fans of family crests.

My first step was to scan into JPG form using my flatbed scanner. This scan appears above right. On top of this scan, I began to trace the design with Adobe Illustrator, building up layers until I had traced a completely digital vector version of it. It took an hour or two of the Illustrator pen tool to get all the details, but now it is available for any Misselhorns who might be surfing around for some information on their ancestry.

A progression of the tracing steps are shown in the renderings below.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

I have compiled a download pack of the Misselhorn Family Crest which includes the following files:

1. Vector Versions
2. Color & Gray-scale JPGs
3. Backgroundless PNG files
4. Photoshop Project Files
5. Photoshop Brush
6. iPhone/iPad icon, for who knows

Download the Misselhorn Family Crest. If you are a Misselhorn and/or know anything about this crest, please contact me or leave a comment.

St Ann Catholic School is located in West Palm Beach, Florida. Located on Olive Street, which is just a few hops away from the downtown Clematis Street area, St Ann’s has been a school since 1923.

This website project differed from other websites misselhornMedia has worked on in that it was offered pre-built. An initial website design was created. Content, mostly text about the history and programs of the school and photos of the students, was migrated from their former site and put in place in the new website. The completely fresh, redesigned site was then presented and offered as a fixed price purchase. St Ann’s was pleased with the new look of the site and happy to learn that the content on the site could be easily changed on their end via the WordPress Dashboard, which is misselhornMedia’s preferred method to offer a Content Management System (CMS) to clients.

Some features of note:

• Simple contact form which delivers to multiple recipients
• Mobile website version, styled for all the most popular mobile devices and smartphones
• Easy-to-use content management system

Take a look and please let me know what you think:
St Ann Catholic School

Please contact misselhornMedia if you are interested in a new website for your company or organization.

This photoshop brush consists of a set of dancers, ballet shoes, and ballerinas. The brush is free to download and use for any graphic design you’d like: posters, flyers, event notifications, invites, whatever. If you do use this photoshop brush, I’d like to see your final artwork so please send me a link to your design.

Ballet and Dancer Photoshop Brush [click to download]

The dancer images are leftovers from a logo project I worked on for the Florida Dance Conservatory in West Palm Beach, FL. Florida Dance Conservatory gives instruction in ballet, tap, jazz, hip-hop, and modern dancing, as well as piano and voice lessons.

Florida Dance Conservatory
3014 S Dixie Hwy
West Palm Beach, FL 33405

If you enjoy this brush, please consider making a donation.

Here’s a lil quickie flyer design I did for Djwillroc of Orlando, FL. Djwillroc provides an eclectic mix of music, ranging from dark 80′s to newer indie rock. He is especially good at picking those retro pop songs from the 80′s that you never thought you’d hear again, but then say “Oh yeah, I remember this song.” Djwillroc, aka Will Blanton, has been a long time friend of mine, so I have done quite a few flyers for him.

This particular flyer was based off a photo he took of his DJ equipment at night, and I then layered and blended in some famous characters from the Star Wars movies: Darth Vader, a Stormtrooper, Boba Fett, the Emporer, as well as the Death Star and a Tie Fighter. Of course, the text mirrors the style of the Star Wars opening credits.

The Peacock Room is a cool lounge in Orlando, FL that, in addition to drinks, live music, and DJ’s, also features work by local artists.

Check it out. This is Wilson. He is grungier than Soundgarden. He is grungier than Eddie Vedder’s regrets of how grunge he used to be. He is a chunky font, good for any grungy design:

1. Rock Posters
2. Album Covers
3. Ransom Notes

Some notes:

• Most glyphs are different heights, as it is a grunge font and doesn’t care about you.
• Lowercase keys yield uppercase text.
• Uppercase keys yield uppercase, inverted text.
• Numeric keys grow apples.

How to Install Fonts

Windows

• Click an image above to download the wilson.ttf file
• Find the file on your computer
• Right-click ‘install’

Apple

I don’t know – make a reservation at the Genius Bar.

Only do cool things with this font; creative typography posters and love letters. Don’t use this typeface for corporate training manuals or anything lame-o like that.

Enjoy,
mgmt