flukeout luke pacholski's design & illustration blog

Last summer I played Softball on a team with a long-running history of hilarious team names. That year was no exception. I made our logo and we got these printed large and proud on our shirts and looked fab all season.

As co-founder and VP of Pixels of Zeep Media, I was in charge of basically everything visual. Here’s a roundup of some of what I made.

Name & Logo

The name Zeep Media came out of day-long brainstorming session (read: beating my head against desk). I think it references the sound of a cell phone when it both beeps and vibrates on a hard surface.

Website

I was in charge of designing and implementing the HTML/CSS layer of the website, as well as light front-end programming duties.

Homepage

The homepage was meant to get potential advertisers going right away. They could fill out their ad copy and move directly to the next step of creating their first campaign.

How it works

This is a step-by-step explanation of the campaign creation process. I included it to show some of the icons and illustrations I made.

Creating a campaign

This is one of the steps in our “wizard” style interface for creating a campaign.

A bunch of us at Vibes have entered the Chase Corporate Challenge race. 3.5 miles of pavement pounding in downtown Chicago. Here’s the logo I designed for our shirts. I’ll post photos when they’re printed.

Here’s how I made it

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  1. Sketch

  I made a few sketches using my running shoe as a reference. I chose this one and took a picture of it with the Photo Booth app.

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  2. Start a-Vectorin’!

  In Illustrator, I placed the scanned image as the top layer, set it’s opacity to 30% and it’s blending mode to Multiple. This let me create the vector shapes underneath the scan while using it as a reference.

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  3. BAD Vectors!!!

  So here’s a view of the finished illustration that shows all of the vector shapes that make it up. The negative shapes between the white parts of the illustration are actually strokes. This is kind of a disaster when trying to print on a shirt because you really only want one shape to describe the white image.

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  4. Ahh, that’s better

  After about an hour of cleaning up the vectors, I’m done. Check out the difference between this version and the one above it. Way cleaner and easier for a printer to interpret where the ink needs to go.

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  5. Halftone

  Because this is a one colour print (white on blue shirt), I needed to convert the faint speech bubble behind the shoe into a halftone pattern. This lets the printer simulate a fainter shade of the color it’s printing.

This is the logo, business card and letterhead I designed during my brief time at Verb Exchange.

The typeface is Cronos Pro.

For an internal app at Vibes.

Here are the sketches I built the final vectors from.

This is a logo for probably the coolest web project I’ve been involved with, a Facebook-driven social restaurant review site. I’ll post a link and screenshots later, but here’s the logo I made for it.

I went for a Vegas-themed logo both for the relationship to all you can eat buffets and that “Jackpot!” feeling of discovering an awesome new place to eat.

And here’s the web-app

This shows the main page of the app, where users interact with the map to discover restaurants.

Logo for a Revelstoke (small town in British Columbia, Canada) community blog and classified section. Love the mountain lifestyle? Check out thestoke.ca!

I had the pleasure of playing with some great folks on a volleyball team this past summer and we needed a logo. We’d met in a guitar class so this seemed fitting…

I printed these on shirts later, check out the printing process.

And here’s the team all dressed up.