It’s called the Hotty Toddy fight song, and it features a call and response between the Rebels and their fans:

“Are you ready?
Hell yes! Damn Right!
Hotty Toddy, Gosh almighty
Who the hell are we, Hey!
Flim Flam, Bim Bam
OLE MISS BY DAMN!”

At no point does this text appear in the book, however. Probably too many “damn’s”? Regardless, it’s about school spirit. The key idea of the book is that Hotty Toddy is not just an exclamation of fan affection, or a delicious beverage, but two students so masterful in their school spirit that they inspired future generations to love Rebel sports.

If you guessed this means the girl was named “Hotty,” you guessed right.

Above: Maybe too hot?

Above: Toddy. Not as hot, but what a chin!

This project came with its own particular set of limitations (as all good projects do) that forced me to find a particular style that would work. I had previously toyed with a sort of Bruce Timm style for a project a few years ago, and that kind of simplified abstraction of characters into basic shapes, with generally flat shading, led to a nice, almost Golden Books-like art style. I say “almost” because I respect Golden Books too much to draw myself in equal to them at this point.

Here are a few samples from the finished project. You can see more in the Illustration Gallery.

Thanks for stopping by!

We developed the logo, meant to fit cleanly into the new world of post web-2.0 marks like twitter, vimeo, mobileme and others, simultaneously with the mascot character. (It’s worth noting to other designers here that this client originally tried working with those logo-on-demand services and came away completely unsatisfied with the experience.)

After a short style-research phase (above), we chose a contrasting-type system based on two high-quality typefaces available through Veer, Skolar and Bree:

After choosing our typefaces, we set the name of the site to give priority to “Agile” (the methodology for development), and set about sexy-ing up the mark with color and graphic stylings. At this point I happily abandoned pretty much every lesson I was taught in design school about blends, transparency, and gradations of color; that they are useless special effects used to hide poor design. I’ve come to realize (as has most the rest of the world) that if the underlaying structure is solid, you can layer on about anything you want without the design falling apart.

First, color options were set against neutrals…

…and it was decided to utilize a more active color system (Agile is a very dynamic method of development, we didn’t really want any part of this mark to feel like it was “at rest”). Once we settled into our colors, I mocked-up several samples of effects to choose from, some subtle, some purposely over-the-top, but none I would have been uncomfortable sending out into the world.

And the final mark was parsed out of those:

I often feel that type-only logos get a bad rap. While I often feel that a designer should alter the type after setting it to ensure a mark that is unique enough to withstand easy reproduction, in this case I felt strongly that the letterforms were just perfect the way they were. The lowercase letter “g”, set in Bree Bold Italic, just makes me want to give it hug.

While all of this was happening, we were creating the mascot. Several sites have these little guys running around the margins, like Social Media Examiner, and AgileScout wanted the same feeling. What we didn’t want, however, was a little bug-looking guy from a PBS cartoon. It was decided to aim for an older target, and to key in on a dynamic character design based on agility (right?) and movement.

Through a series of sketches, we slowly honed in on the design:

I hope you can tell how much fun I was having at this point.

After narrowing-down the character’s clothing and posture, body-type and accessories, we picked a head and went to final. I chose to stick to a mostly-flat, Saturday-morning anime shading style, and added some ink-blot flair to the backgrounds. We wanted a very dynamic character that could be used in a variety of settings and contexts, and always felt like he was a second away from leaping off to some great adventure. I’m very happy with where we ended up. You can see more examples in the Illustration Gallery and, of course, at AgileScout.com!

So we turned to the power of illustration and our imaginations to create trucks that couldn’t be topped.

Well, trucks and limos…

and trucks…

For a guy who grew up on Transformers and M.A.S.K. cartoons in the 80′s, this project couldn’t have been more fun. Thanks for checking it out.

A bit earlier this year I was contacted by SarcasticGamer.com to illustrate a shirt for their annual charity event called Extra Life. Extra Life is a 24-hour gaming marathon where gamers all over the world raise money that is donated to their local Children’s Miracle Network hospital. That’s right. You play games and save lives.

Clockwise from left: Zangief (Street Fighter series), Marcus (Gears of War series), Wrex (Mass Effect series), Kratos (God of War series)

Of course I jumped at the chance to illustrate the shirt, and after a little back-and-forth to land on a family-friendly yet gamer-savvy idea, we landed on the superstars of modern gaming jamming out on Rock Band (and it is Rock Band, never Guitar Hero). The thought of these overblown and muscle-bound characters going to town on tiny, tiny plastic instruments puts a smile on my face.

The shirt was produced by SplitReason, but is not for sale and can only be obtained by raising $192 or more for Extra Life.

Hello everyone! Welcome to the super-spiffy WordPress-based Vossome.com!

I’ve been building this site for a few weeks, er, months (my last update was in November. Embarrassing!) and I felt like it was high-time I put it out for the rest of the world to see. I simply have too many things to share to not publish anymore!

Previously, this website was created via Blogger, but a few months back they made a switch that removed support for people like me who publish via FTP, meaning I host my files for this site on my own server space, not theirs. Once that change took effect, my website was essentially dead in the water.

Over the past few weeks I have been studying up on programming in WordPress, and using that as a free content-management tool. Turns out, WordPress is every bit as as powerful and bendable as everyone has said, and I have really been enjoying my time working with it.

This site is still technically under development as I work out some programming kinks and add Featured Content over the coming weeks. Again, I have lots of new work that I can’t wait to share, so I hope you’ll stick around and see what’s coming!

—Nate

I am thrilled to finally be able to unveil the work behind the Meet the Pros 2010 poster! This is a project I have taken on twice in the past (you can read about the last one here) and this year I was ready to bring something really special to the table.

The initial sketch of the poster, with notes on typography.

The concept started out with the viewpoint of the mid-to-late eighties looking at the year 2010 as the far-flung future. Anyone who lived through this time knows nothing but disappointment anytime the idea of flying cars is mentioned, because we were all certain we’d have those by now. Due to my upbringing the movie Tron, soon to receive a big-budget sequel, came immediately to mind. The first step to presenting the concept—unlike previous years, this was the only concept presented—was to flesh it out with a mood-board and tighter sketch.

The mood board was comprised of retro-styled graphics, some from the time period in question, but many from more contemporary designers. This set the tone of the piece, and was coupled with…

…this much more refined sketch of the idea. Basic ideas for tag-lines, composition, and typography are roughed in.

The committee behind the event loved the idea, and I was able to enlist superstar Omaha photographer Scott Dobry to shoot it. I’ve worked with Scott before, and we always seem to get to collaborate on the coolest projects. He’s got a fantastic eye and is absolutely terrific when it comes to working with people.

Liz, the heroine of the poster, gets ready to strike a powerful pose. Note the lack of a Tron-suit and blue leggings at this point.

Liz gets touched up before her next shot.

We spent a long night shooting our three stars: Liz, the heroine of the poster, and Jon and Kim, the two big heads for the background (required of almost any Hollywood poster). We set Liz up in a skin-tight runner’s shirt and blue leggings; due to a time-crunch, we weren’t able to create a full-blown Tron suit ahead of time. After the shoot I did a rough composition to play with an off-balance placement of the big heads and try some of the suit effects on our main character. These effects were done freehand with a Wacom tablet, and proved I’ve have to create the suit in Adobe Illustrator to get the right visual.

Also, way too many lines. This rough used a different big-head version of Kim than appeared in the final design.

Here’s the suit, drawn in Illustrator, without lighting effects.

To capture the right look, Cindy Morgan’s suit from the movie Tron was referenced. Many callbacks to the original design appear on the outfit, with some new additions as well.

Once the images started coming together, the rest of the poster had to be built. For the conference logo I wanted to reflect that eighties motion-graphic look so perfectly captured in the video for DVNO (kudos is you remember any of the originals lampooned in that vid).

The logo, in progress. Here you can see many of the building blocks used to create each character from scratch.

The first draft of the logo was deemed a bit too wild for the committee behind the event, and some of the more experimental bits were removed in favor of greater readability. There was definitely a trade off between style and substance at this stage. While the final logo definitely conveys the information, I miss the way the letters moved in and out of each other and the way the numeral “2″ just goes straight off to the southwest and never looks back. I’ve put the before and after below.

Before (above): Daring and experimental. After (below): Usable for the real world.

Then we were finally prepared to bring it all together. Subsequent drafts of the design reigned tighter and tighter on the details, for instance; the first draft that contained body copy (the information needed by students to register for the event) was largely unreadable. You can even see my transparent attempt to keep the old logo alive by repeating the title “Meet the Pros 2010″ in the copy area (if your designer ever does this, he’s cheating and he knows better). Once the logo came to its final form, the size of the poster was adjusted and the copy was balanced.

Top Left: First rough, no type or effects. Top Right: First appearance of body copy, unreadable by almost anyone. Bottom Left: Near-final design. Bottom Right: Resized poster, with a greater emphasis on registration information on the bottom half.

And here we have the finished poster (click on it for a much, much larger version). This has been mailed out and will be hung soon — if not already — in schools across the midwest. Thanks to everyone who helped make this poster a reality!

I’m honored and humbled to announce that the benefit print I helped create with Justin Ahrens, Donovan Beery, Steve Hartman and Christine Taylor (along with the amazing folks at Spark Stationery and Neenah Paper) has been accepted into the Chicago Design Archive by the Society of Typographic Arts. Only 44 entries out of the hundreds submitted were accepted.

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