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! 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:
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 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. Last year was HellBoy's 25 anniversary. HellBoy is a character created by Mike Mignola, HellBoy fought Nazis occultists. Comic Con San Diego was celebrating by showcasing the character in their Souvenir Book and had a contest for artist to do their renditions of the character. My son who was 13 years old at the time, entered the contest. It was a proud Dad moment. I grew up reading and drawing comicbooks. I took his artwork, created vector artwork and made T-Shirts for us. Being in the creative field I love encouraging kids to express themselves through artwork. I think the shirt was bold and keeping the illustration red made it really stand out.
![]() I designed artwork for merchandise for a friend who is a professional wrestler. He is gearing up to go back on the road and wanted new a new t-shirt for promotion. I take on fun projects like this to experiment. It keeps me loose and lets me try out techniques I wouldn't normally use. I took an event photo taken in Arizona and emphasized the the flying knee with vector elements. The best part of the design process for me is to do the mock ups.
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Mike MatamalaCreative Director, Archives
November 2020
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