 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. Adobe XD is a vector-based user experience design tool for web apps and mobile apps, developed and published by Adobe Inc. It is available for macOS and Windows, although there are versions for iOS and Android to help preview the result of work directly on mobile devices.Start a free trial, visit https://www.adobe.com/products/xd.html   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
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Marketing Events | SD Direct, SDX, AMA San Diego
 When you have pro wrestler as a friend, life can get exciting. I had drew and design this logo for a t-shirt a couple of years ago. He then re used the artwork and created rig attire for his come back. My friend took a year off and made his debut this weekend and won a title from Zealot Wrestling. I had to take some photos.
 This has been a crazy month. My company hired an agency last summer to rebrand itself and all of its product brands. I am part of implementing the updated look, almost evolving the brand and implementing it in our digital and print communications. At first I was not wild about the brand development but there is a slick cohesiveness and a sophistication I am enjoying. Here are a couple of projects I have been working on. 
             I was part of a really fun project! I had to create a fun and interesting ad for a thermostatic mixing valve. It is a device you place on a water heater where it increases the capacity of hot water without buying a new water heater. In essence, you can have more hot water. I tried to conceptualize the pain points of losing hot water in the middle of a shower but also the benefits. Here were my initial concepts:
I refined a bit more, changed up the branding and reformatted the creative for social and digital ads: Concept: Product Focused
 Concept 2: Singing in the Shower!
 I really love this ad!
 GoPo Selfie time! It has been a great start to the year! Yesterday I was out before dawn shooting and filming the sunrise in San Diego. I was at Spanish Landing by the airport with long time friend Neil Brouillette using my GoPro, Canon and even broke out my IPAD. It is so interesting to see the differences in quality and range. I was able to capture a timelapse of the sunrise with the GoPro that I'll be posting soon. I've already earned some frequent flyer miles, I visited Atlanta for Drupal training and a week later I was in Chicago reviewing a tradeshow booth I helped create. I can't say I miss the snow! I walked the show to do a competitive analysis and I was impressed by some of the larger manufactures but there were many booths that lacked design and missed the opportunity for branding. We revamped the way we showcased the products and gave a modern twist in how we showed plumbing behind the wall.  With Chris at the AHR Booth! I recorded a Facebook Live for AMA San Diego Content Marketing Special Interest Group. Frank Cowell of Elevator was the moderator and there was so much knowledge shared by the group. I picked up a couple of tips. It was fun to learn and network. The AMA San Diego is a great group!  AMA Content Marketing SIG. Two of my favs, Darlene Byrne and Frank Cowell. Whew! I plan on staying in San Diego for a bit, keep my feet on the ground and start building campaigns. I get my media calendar for the year next week so time to enter creator mode!  April was a busy month, I designed several campaign designs this month. We had a Content Marketing and Hispanic Marketing event with several job postings and a podcast promo. I was even a the guest host on one! Most of these were formatted for Facebook but I did several sizes for the different platforms. I was really happy how the Volunteer Appreciation week design turned out. I was able to pull the photo into Photoshop and mask out the background. Thanks for checking out my work!                           |
Mike MatamalaCreative Director, Archives
November 2019
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