The Nob Hill Spa was an attempt by the Huntington Hotel to take advantage of the huge rise in spas and spa resorts. The attempt was successful - very successful. Not only is it a beautiful spa, with gorgeous feng shui design throughout, but it takes full advantage of it’s location at the top of San Francisco’s famous Nob Hill by having one entire 30 foot wall built of glass.

With all of this to work with I was very glad that they asked me to create a brochure for them. I was even happier when they agreed to let me take most of the photos for the brochure. It was a dream assignment.

In fact, I started with a daylong photo shoot which included a bunch of impromptu shots around the spa and three setups. One setup was a couple getting a massage, another brought together four women in robes with champagne and food, and the last was a quick little setup with a woman soaking her feet.

When design time came I just sat with all of the photos and let the colors and textures of the spa inform everything. For hospitality it is very important that the piece give a feeling of being in the venue. Looking at the piece and looking around the venue should be seamless - we should feel the same.

So I chose a portion of one photo I took of a lighted wall in the spa, chopped and blended it in Photoshop, then used it as a background for an architectural photo of the spa interior. The colors were naturally complimentary and I never even considered a different cover. Fortunately, the client agreed with me!

The rest of the layout came quickly, as I again used colors, shapes and textures from the spa interior to create framing elements for information. Clean, sans-serif fonts were used (except for the philosophical quotes) and I also created a very subtle asian frame for the photos which seemed to carry the feng shui theme through to the brochure.

Very few changes were made to the final layout. This was one of those rare projects which simply flowed together with speed and inspiration.

cd booklet panels

Cover of the Slowrush CD

Way back when, I was a marketing executive in the music industry. Yep, that’s right, glamorous Hollywood! The fact that I left that career after hacking my way into it might tell you something about how I felt by the time I’d been a music man for a few years.

Having said that, I did meet some great people in that business and one of them, my dear friend Steve Walker, gave me a design job when one of his bands signed with Sony Music.

Slowrush was a very modern band, very post-apocalyptic, Bladerunner meets Children of God sort of thing. That’s how I heard them anyway, and when I went to design their packaging that’s what I had in mind.

First thing to do was talk to the band. They agreed with what I was hearing and were happy to let me run with a couple of ideas. My main idea was to use single frames from video to give the piece a kind of paranoid, Big Brother, security camera vibe. Something about those grainy images just makes you feel that someone is watching.

So one night I had my wife drive me around San Francisco while I jumped out at various spots and took footage of anything I saw that looked sort of super-modern or otherworldly. I tried to shoot things in a way that took the object out of context, so that its function was no longer obvious.

Then I took the video and just grabbed frames that I thought would be cool. Those frames are low resolution for printing and when you blow them up they get that grainy, video look to them.

The cover was the most interesting shot. After I’d grabbed all of the other images, I asked my wife’s friend to let me exploit, er, I mean, utilize her son. We took him into a BART station in San Francisco and had him do various things while I shot him with the video camera. Eventually, he got worried and turned to run toward his mother just as the train was pulling out of the station. That is the image you see.

The logo idea was to create the feel of a separate, alien alphabet. In this case I wanted something more organic than the usual rigid, computer generated look. I wanted it to look like beings from an ancient, off-planet civilization had created this handwritten text. Not sure how well that worked but the guys liked it.

lyric sheet detail

I carried this “other language” idea into the lyric sheet by adding strange markings alongside the English lyrics to make it seem as if they had been translated.

As for the band, well things worked out just as they do for a lot of bands - which is to say, pretty lousy. The record got crummy promotion, went nowhere, and the guys broke up not long afterward. So it goes in the glamorous “business” of music.

Postcard for Buddhist Course on Death and Dying

Buddhists are always talking about impermanence. In this case, the subject of the course was the most intense experience of impermanence we know, death, but I didn’t want the card to be dark or foreboding in any way. So I started thinking about the “bright light” and the “white tunnel” that you always hear about from near-death experiences. And, since it’s a Buddhist talk, I figured the most appropriate central image would be a Buddha.

When I started creating the image I just had a circle, the tones moving from light to dark grey at the center. I added a bit of noise and some texture with one of the Photoshop filters, but the image was looking rather dark. So I took the image into curves and pulled some blue into it. Then I started cutting wedges into it and copying it into more layers. Each layer was then treated with some simple opacity settings and a couple of blending options to create some subtle color shifts. Finally, I added six white wedges and put the whole thing into a white, oval vignette to soften the edges.

For the little Buddha, I cut his image out of a larger Buddhist tangkha using bezier curves and dropped him into a separate layer. A light, bluish drop shadow was added to give him a little added presence.

For the text I wanted something clean but compelling for the headline. I looked around a little and found this cool typeface called Kameleon. That worked for me. The rest of the information is set in Optima and Gill Sans, which is fairly typical for my typesetting.

Hi, my name’s Reed. I’m just getting started with my new site so bear with me as I add pages and media. I’ve decided to use WordPress because it’s simple, quick, and I don’t need some of the community-building and ecommerce capabilities of bigger CMS software packages like Joomla and Drupal. This is just me showing folks my design and photography and talking a little about the process of developing each piece.

Thanks for stopping by and welcome to my world!

Cheers,
Reed