3D MODELING

Deciding to learn Maya (and later Cinema 4D) was a very big, very smart decision. I had heard about it as the program used to create the Ice Age movies, and was at the time working on an intensive freelance job alongside a 3D modeler. Watching his screen, I knew my brain would be good at it.

Paths from Illustrator can be extruded into shapes in Maya, textured and lit and flown back into Photoshop

Maya is the type of program that I doubt any one person could ever master in its entirety. People specialize in small slivers of the program, and therefore it is one of the most daunting interfaces around. Once I got up and running on it, though, and with the safety net of having Photoshop expertise waiting at the other end of the render queue, I was able to create a whole new kind of graphic.

It’s an impressive 1-2-3 punch having Maya, Photoshop and Illustrator at my disposal. Carefully drawn paths from Illustrator can be extruded into shapes in Maya, textured and lit and flown back into a Photo composite in Photoshop. And that’s just the most straightforward workflow. There is no end to the ways 3D modeling can be used.

I could never be a font designer – it’s just not in my constitution. That said, I have always loved projects like this, where it is necessary to create text within some kind of pattern or scheme.

This design was based precisely on an actual Lite-Brite that my wife has owned since she was a kid. We used it for years as a New York City fireplace (that design project – creating flame out of whatever color pegs she still had – was another challenge altogether), and one day I looked at it and decided to make something fun and inspirational.

Another personal project I undertook to strengthen my modeling and texturing skills.

The spherical Rubik’s Cube never really got its due. Sure it was a knockoff, and nobody every really loves knockoffs, but the design was ingenious and whoever was in charge deserves a hug.

Vanity Fair really went for it with this project. Not only did they lob ten fully fleshed-out book ideas at me to design, they used language for Anne Coulter that just had to have offended somebody. I’m just not sure if it was her fans or the people who hate her.

The biggest challenge of this project, and one that I honestly did not see coming, was the putting of the cart before the horse. No designer would ever design a book spine before designing the cover, and it felt incredibly strange having to jump in without having a foundational design to draw from.

This was the first 3D modeling job I ever got, and I’m frankly amazed that it came out as good as it did. The likelier scenario would have been to wind up with something I can’t bear to look at now, but this completely holds up.

It was also my first stint working on a Vanity Fair project, and as was always the case, they were incredible people to work with. They had come up with this quirky, funny concept for an e-reader for the Used Book Store set, complete with old fabric binding (pre-stained with a ring of coffee) and marginalia.

My father gets an assist on this, because I scanned some of the notes he had scribbled in the margins of his old copy of Moby Dick. They pull everything together.

These awards had been something of a fixture at Salon for years, but I was asked to create a new look for the project, and decided on trophies. Everybody loves trophies, probably because none of us ever won enough as kids.

These trophies had to evoke a retro feel, and another thing everyone seems to love is antique televisions. You know, the kind from back when it was furniture.

The What To Read trophy was a bigger challenge, though, when all was said and done. Figuring out how to make a trophy based on books took me a lot of trial and error, but the addition of the marble for the pages pulled everything together nicely.