Welcome to my Blog

Hello everyone, I'm Dan Beauchamp and I'm a Graphic Designer. Most people will ask themselves "what the heck does a Graphic Designer do?".  Contrary to what some believe, we do a lot more then just make pretty pictures.  Graphic Designers are taught to be critical of every single element they use in a composition and always have an underlying reason for their choices, we use good process coupled with trial and error to create eye catching graphics that are effective at conveying a message. A Graphic Designer is someone who is thorough with their research and has great attention to detail and aside from being able to create pretty pictures, maintains a solid line of communication with clients. We budget our own projects, expect the unexpected, decipher clients ideas, work under tight time constraints, doing long hours, using both sides of our brains at once. So when someone asks you what a Graphic Designer does next time, just tell them "They do it all!".

So this is my design portfolio, this site is meant to highlight the work that I have done through out my Educational career and beyond. Most of the design work currently uploaded is from my experience at Canadore College, where I spent 3 years refining my graphic design skills. Updates will be made to the site as my portfolio grows. Enjoy and feel free to comment!

Gumroad, The best platform for selling online merchandise

So today I stumbled across a post while reading through design forms, I believe it came from an article on Smashing Magazine. If you're interested in giving it a read here is Part 1 and Part 2.

The article gives you some pretty useful information on how to sell materials that you have already created, maybe in the past for a client or just for fun on the side. It gives you insight on the tools that the author used to create a stable passive income that they are now supporting themselves with, and they don't even have to lift a finger once it is all set in place, they literally watch the money roll in. It sounds too good to be true but it actually can and does work. With a little planning and understanding of how markets work and how to entice your customers you can actually earn a comfortable income without having a full time job.

The main reason I haven't given much thought to selling digital content online yet, was because of how confusing and difficult it is to get a marketplace up and running. Gumroad makes that whole process a breeze. I set up my account in about 10 seconds by just linking my Facebook and Twitter accounts,  after that i filled out the information to receive payments to my PayPal account. An awesome feature about Gumroad is that they don't charge to process payments to your PayPal account.

That's It! Your account is set up in minuets and you are ready to sell to your hearts content! Don't have anything to sell yet? Gumroad allows you to create a test product so that you can see the whole process from start to finish.

Luckily I had a poster that I made for fun one day after seeing a cool piece of reference online. It was so simple to upload the files, I had a number of files that I wanted to include so that people could use the poster however they would like. Instead of uploading multiple files, I was able to compress them to a zip and upload the zip file instead.


Hope that this article peaks the interest of a few and introduces them to the world of online digital content sales. If you found this post helpful or would like to purchase a copy of my poster Check it out here.

Giant Tiger Photo Challenge

So this week Giant Tiger, my current employer,  hosted a photo challenge for all the stores across Canada to compete in.

The theme of the photo challenge was 7 modern wonders of the world, they presented the stores a photo of some very nice architecture and asked which county that the photo was taken. This being a photo contest they also asked the stores to create the flag of the country where this wonder resided and take a photo with the location of the wonder clearly visible.

Below is the photo that the Giant Tiger stores were sent and had to base their guess off of.  Take a minute before reading on and see if you can figure it out too.

Photo submitted by Giant Tiger head office for the 7 wonders of the world photo challenge.

At first glance this photo reminded me of a shot from a third world country. Almost immediately i guessed Israel as being the country of origin. The next day at work sure of my answer I went up to a co-worker and asked if she had guessed the location of the photo yet. She said "yep, it's Canada". I was surprised that something like that would exist in Canada so i decided to search it on my iPhone, and to my amazement she was right! The name of the building complex is "Habitat 67" located in Montreal, Canada.

Habitat 67, or simply Habitat, is a model community and housing complex in Montreal, Canada, designed by Israeli–Canadian architect Moshe Safdie. It was originally conceived as his master's thesis in architecture at McGill University and then built as a pavilion for Expo 67, the World's Fair held from April to October 1967. It is located at 2600 Avenue Pierre-Dupuy on the Marc-Drouin Quay next to the Saint Lawrence River. Habitat 67 is widely considered an architectural landmark and one of the most recognizable and significant buildings in both Montreal and Canada.^[1][2] It has been reported many times as one of the top 10 ugliest buildings in North America and the world.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67 

So to my surprise, the designer of the building was Israeli-Canadian. Ha! I wasn't too far off after all.
Anyways, enough with the history lesson.

 So after finding that information out it was time to compose our photo to submit. I came up with the idea to design the flag out of Giant Tiger branded candy. We used a real flag as a stencil to lay the candy out, Once we had the shape of the flag we began to lightly trace out each area with pencil on to white bristol board. We then used white cake icing to glue red candy to the bristol board to make the side banners and maple leaf, for the white space we decided to use our GT branded marshmallows.

I decided to bring in my Nikon D60 with custom white balance to shoot the photo as it was in really bad fluorescent light. I took the photo home for a little post processing and to add the location and name of the wonder at the bottom. Take a look at the finished product, fingers crossed. We find out this Saturday which store won the challenge.

Portfolio Website up and Running

Finally, I made the jump and purchased my domain name, thank god it was still there.  I was a little unsure at first because we never really took our websites past the design stages in school.  This was the first time I had ever used a hosting provider.

The one that I went with in the end was DreamHost, they had an amazing deal going at the time. $29.95 for the purchase of a domain name and hosting for one year, and after that 119.99 a year for the hosting, not a bad deal if you ask me. I heard about this offer on Gizmodo in the Dealzmodo section. Definitely a worth while place to check out daily!

The site is just basically a skeleton right now to promote some recent work and give people a more professional outlet to contact me with. Check it out at www.danbeauchamp.com

The Scale of the Universe

Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn about everything in between. This is an amazing interactive map that gives you an idea about the scale of everything. You have to check this out it will open your eyes to more than you thought possible. Check it out Here!

TSA WASTE INFOGRAPIC

This Info graphic has some pretty interesting facts, thought I would post, love the style that the artist used.

Created by: Online Criminal Justice Degree

Interview With A Web Designer: Phil Cowcill

Photo shot with Blackberry Bold 9780

During my time at Canadore, my class was tasked with conducting an interview with a professional in the field that you hope to work in the future. My ideal position would be designing functional, eyecatching, and leading edge websites for clients, So this lead me to a man who has been self taught for years and is still on the forefront of the industry, making time to share his knowledge with designers and progamers all over Canada and the United States.  Phill Cowcill a.k.a @canadianpacman (twitter) Coordinator of Mobile Application Development program at Canadore College.

Interviewed by Dan Beauchamp

Dan- How did you become a Web Designer?

Phil- “I started actually at multi-media back in 1984, well before the web was public knowledge. I started mixing video and doing some computer programing and computer graphics and did a lot of work with that. In 1993 the internet started to make its presence known within the school.  In 1995 I was hired on as a coordinator and when I got into working with websites I realized that this was going to be a huge trend, so right away I picked up every tid bit I could find out. Back in 1994 I had started learning a lot about developing for websites and keep in mind at this time there is no Google and there are no search engines that we know of today, so finding information wasn’t as easy as today. So in 1994 I started teaching myself by opening up different web pages and looking at the source code to see what they did. I would then go in to note pad and start to create my own websites using those formats.”

Dan- What do you enjoy most about Web Design as a career?

Phil- “I find it’s a lot of fun in the way that web design is restrictive but if you can arm wrestle the code then you can make it do what you want it to do. It’s like it’s a computer game for me, the website wants be very blocky, very straight forward and very plain. My job is to figure out ways to make it interactive, engaging, and make it look nice, and have a nice clean layout and make sure it loads very fast.”

Dan- What is the most challenging part of a Web Designer Job?

Phil- “I think that the most challenging part is understanding the technical aspects of web design and also graphic design and user interface. You need to have all three to develop and create a rich experience and it is very difficult to get a good balance of all three.”

Dan- If there was a list of essential skills that a Web Designer should have, what would they be?

Phil- “One is to have a very good understanding of graphics and how to re-size properly. I find a lot of people when they make websites if they are a Graphic Designer they don’t pay attention to size, when you’re streaming things online size really does matter and the smaller the better. The other thing is you have to have a very good eye for understanding the flow the layout and you have to understand how people will access your content, the other thing is you need to understand the code you have to get into the code, even with Dreamweaver you still need to be able to understand the code enough that you can go in and make alterations within the code.”

Dan- Is there a particular area of graphic or web design that you prefer?

Phil- “There are all sorts of aspects I really like when you start build in the dynamic content so you tie it in to a database. For example I can create one web page and have thirty people come to the website and it’s different for all thirty people. To be able to create that dynamic content that’s a lot of fun because people look at that and say how did you do that? It’s actually not that difficult to do, it’s just a matter of understanding the technology and the background.”

Dan- Where do you tend to look for inspiration?

Phil- “Ah, excellent question. There are a couple of websites that I go to; one is coolhomepages.com, to take a look at what some of the best websites designs are. I also while surfing around if I notice a good website I make note of it. There are also other sites that provide very nice free style sheets, because a lot of the good sites are designed with well documented and well created style sheets, so I take a look at what they are doing. A lot of it is just surfing around and seeing what some of the best designers in the world are doing.”

Dan- Alright Phil, thank you for your time and insight.

Phil- “Not a problem at all.”

Check Phill out at https://twitter.com/#!/canadianpacman

Or if Your interested in learning a thing or two check out his multimedia site.
http://www.pjrules.com/canadianpacman/