I have run my freelance and consulting business for close to 15 years. I love helping people develop their brands visually. I'll never forget my first client, they never paid me. I had done a ton of packaging concepts and he didn’t like any of them, so he decided he was not going to pay for anything he was not going to use. I guess the hours I spent crafting my masterpiece, practicing my presentation and printing the artwork on glossy paper no less (looking at the designs now I would be embarrassed too show anyone) was worthless. That’s when I decided this was the industry for me! :)
 
My next client was a referral. I was designing automotive ads and mailers for dealerships on the West Coast. I designed for San Diego, Los Angeles all the way up to Oregon and Seattle. Then the recession hit and business took a dip. People were not doing mailers, postage was too much. Matamala Design (the name of my business at the time) was on the decline. Well that client, my referral decided to  do online advertising. 16 years later, we do emails, digital ads, E-books & website updates. The times have changed. They evolved with the times.
 
One of the hardest things as a designer is to design for themselves. I’ve had school projects where you needed to design your brand, design your identity & build your logo. I must have done over 100 different versions of my logo/brand and I’ve hated every one, until now.
 
I finally did it!
 
I love my new logo. Clean, modern, typographic, sexy (yes, I think typography is sexy)
And yes I did design it.

It’s based off of the typeface Museo Sans designed by Jos Buivenga. Years ago a junior designer introduced me to the typeface at an agency during my love affair with Proxima Nova, I always thought it was a great font. I manipulated the bar in the capital A to give the logo a little motion.  I adjusted kerning on the letterforms.
 
That’s my Identity until its time to evolve again!
 
 

I am an Adobe guy, I love their products and have been using them for the last 15 years. Recently, I've been doing some web development with UI/UX functionality . I've always used Photoshop & In-Design for layout but it was suggested to me to Try out Adobe XD. I am totally impressed with the ease of use. It was fun designing in the software. I am far from a power user, i still have to wrap my head around the plugin library. Here are some prototypes Ive been working on. 

It was the holy trinity of Photoshop, Illustrator & In-Design but there is a new kid on the block with Adobe XD.

My friend, Hector Ojeda has known me for over 15 year, when I served in the United States Marine Corps. Over the years we have been friends. He started doing some fantastic photography and I took immediate notice!. We started chatting and he is planning on opening up his own photography business. He does great work. I designed a business card as he develops his business. He has built quite a following on Instagram.

You can see his work on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hector__ojeda/
​Here is some of his work! ​

It was really cool on the same week I decide to do a type study on Tahoma and pair it with Anchorman, Ron Burgundy visited all 6 nightly talkshows. Tahoma was created by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation. Carter's name is one you might recognize. He is a 79-year-old British type designer who is known for creating Verdana, Georgia, Bell Centennial, Miller and Galliard fonts. He also co-founded Bitstream.

It is a san-serif font that I haven't used much of and I thought it would be good to explore the letter forms. I combined the typeface with a loud Magenta pop.

You can purchase the font at: ​https://www.linotype.com/339952/tahoma-family.html

I got to work on a great project! It was a huge digital sign. It was a 10 second video that looped. It was fun to see the design on the Vegas Strip. It was for a tradeshow and it drove traffic to the booth for a Yeti cooler give away. Below are a couple of photos:

Web Traffic

Marketing Events | SD Direct, SDX, AMA San Diego

San Diego Comic Con San Diego is an amazing event. I have been lucky to attend for 10 years with my son. One of the best booths every year is the Sideshow Booth. They have amazing sculptures and statues. My favorites were Captain America, Iron Man, Thanos and the Avengers.

Here is the link to SideShow:
https://www.sideshow.com/

Avengers... Assemble!

One of my favorite movie, Conan the Barbarian (Universal Studios, 1982) is a feature length film based on the character Conan created by Robert E. Howard and staring Arnold Schwarzenegger. With my typography studies, I took movie lines/ quotes and set them in the typeface. Kind of a silly project but it allowed me to really admire the letterform and pay closer attention to the movie. 

Trajan is a serif typeface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. The design is based on the letterforms of capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column from which the typeface takes its name. Trajan is an all-capitals typeface, as the Romans did not use lower-case letters. Twombly created the design taking inspiration from a full-size picture of a rubbing of the inscription. It is well known for appearing on many film posters.

Trajan was designed for display instead of printed text—specifically for use in large sizes. Twombly's digitisation of Trajan has become very popular, as seen in its widespread presence on movie posters, television shows, and book covers. A bold weight was added to Trajan when it was made digital.

​Conan the Barbarian is a 1982 American epic sword and sorcery film directed and co-written by John Milius. It is based on stories by Robert E. Howard, a pulp-fiction writer of the 1930s, about the adventures of the eponymous character in a fictional world of dark magic and savagery. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones, and tells the story of a young muscular barbarian warrior named Conan (Schwarzenegger), who seeks vengeance for the death of his parents at the hands of Thulsa Doom (Jones), the leader of a snake cult. Buzz Feitshans and Raffaella De Laurentiis produced the film for her father Dino De Laurentiis, with Edward R. Pressman as an executive producer.

I've been doing alot of experimentation with the letter form. I have created an Instagram account where I'll be choosing phrases or words and setting them to a typeface. Here are a couple of examples of a clean san serif typeface, with a dot of red violence. Controlled like the typeface.

The typeface used is Proxima Nova. It was designed by Mark Simonson. It is often described as a hybrid of Futura and Akzidenz Grotesk, combining a geometric appearance with modern proportions. This is one of my favorite go to typefaces.

Here is a link to his website: https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/proxima-nova

You can also activate the font using Adobe Fonts: 
https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/proxima-nova