Graphic Design

In various projects, I have found occasion to flex my graphic design muscles. My desktop publishing skills demonstrate the breadth of my skill set and complement my writing and editing abilities. You will require Adobe Acrobat Reader to view several of these documents. To install this program, go to www.adobe.com.

• At Cape Clear Software, I customized IBM Toot-O-Matic to generate branded online tutorials. I worked with several XML-based technologies like XSLT, XML schemas and Document Type Definitions (DTDs) to tweak this command-line tool's output to match our Web site. I also wrote the content for this tutorial.
  
  
• For both aesthetic and functional reasons, I re-designed MPS Development's technical bulletin template. Compared to the old style I inherited, the new look feels more contemporary and more accurately reflects the company's current style. More importantly, users had reported that the large graphics on every page slowed printing.
  
  
• When I joined MPS, the release notes that we distributed were in the traditional but difficult-to-read text-only format. When Internet Explorer became a minimum requirement for our products, I jumped at the chance to upgrade our "readme" and installation notes to HTML format. The new format not only organizes the information better, but uses DTP principles of colour and font style to emphasize the most important information. 

• After collaborating with a skilled illustrator (Darren Bockman at Fore Media) to create an appropriate source image, I modified the drawing in PhotoShop 6.0 to create enough white space for the text in this poster (this PDF is 1.6 MB) for Science and Madness, a play that my theatre company produced. Similarly, I let the striking image in this poster do the work for me.
  
  
• In my experience, a strong visual image goes a long way to effective graphic design. In this ad for the Vancouver Sun newspaper, I choose to emphasize the photograph to help sell the production.



• I created several logos for a new group at Cape Clear Software. The group did application integration, and wanted an abstract logo that reflected their role. They eventually choose the bridge, which I created in PhotoShop.
  
  
• After naming our theatre company "Epicentre Theatre", we needed a logo. We wanted something both suggestive of the tremors of an earthquake and indicative of our theatrical style--sharp and stylish. The resulting logo, created in Adobe Illustrator, proved both flexible and memorable.