NOTES ON THE WORK — Dean MacDonald

SITE SPECIFICS

The work on this site was hung in a salon style so you could get a quick overview of my range. The work is presented uncluttered by descriptions (other than the brief notes on this page) so you can browse without getting bogged down in details. Hopefully the examples stand on their own and are fairly obvious as to what they are. OK, so you might not know if it was a small banner ad or 10 foot environmental signage, but hey that's part of the fun! I like to think of it as a conversation starter rather than a thorough archive, so if it sparks questions, that's a good thing! (and what that Contact Me page is for!)

The work is divided into eight different galleries so you can go right to the area that interests you, but I would encourage you to browse through all of them to really get the full effect!

And, just for the record, I probably did 100% of the work on 90% of the examples shown (and at least 80% on the other 10%!) I will call out exceptions to those rules, and anything else that comes to mind in the sections below.

LOGOS AND BRANDING

I love the challenge of designing a good logo. Whether it is for a new animation channel, a mobile game, school mascot or a waste water treatment company the approach is the same, to tell a story as simply and eloquently as possible. When designing visual systems to tell those stories, I like them to have what I call "flexible consistency", parts that can be moved around and combined in different ways and colors to be more adaptive to different situations.

I think the first taste I got of "designing" for a client was when I designed the "Farmington Falcons" elementary school sweatshirt in the sixth grade. (I'm pretty sure I ripped off the Atlanta Falcons' logo for part of it) so It was especially rewarding to develop completely original school mascots for two different San Francisco schools and see them incorporated in so many different ways all across the campuses and integrated into student life. It was very cool to see the kids playing on the Lion in the center of the basketball court on the Brandeis school gym floor. That will be part of their school memories now, like it was just always there, and probably will never think of the fact that someone had to design that! What was your school mascot? Let me know.

CHARACTER DESIGN

The first set of characters you see on the page was a fun project. These were called "audibles" for Yahoo, short little animated greetings, salutations, quips and good-natured ribbing to your instant messages to life. Basically, they were early talking emojis (but they didn't get their own Hollywood movie!). We brainstormed the lines, then I directed the voice acting, and I designed and animated all of these particular ones myself. They're kind of addictive, I can show you them animating, just mention it in the form then hit submit! But I warned you, you're going to want to keep clicking on them!

NOTE: I did NOT do the modelling on the 3D Centipede game characters. I did, however, design all the characters for that game and directed the 3D team that modeled, lit and animated them.

PRINT, MERCH & MARKETING

Remember DVDs? I do, and we did quite a few of them in the Happy Tree Friends hey day. These were great fun to do and a good example of coming up with an aesthetic theme and trickling that down from the title to the menus (some seen in the "interactive" section) all the way to the disc art. (and the fun little reveal you got to see when you removed the disc from the package!). I directed, designed and wrote everything on the packages. It was particularly fun doing the back of Third Strike DVD package, riffing on all those ads from the backs of the old comics. (Design corporate logos like these!) I can bring the actual products to that meeting you want to set up so you can hold them in your hands (and maybe spin the amazing hypno-disk on your finger.)

Doing the brightly colored banners for SDJA was an interesting exercise. They wanted to really brighten up their campus, so after a bit of research, I found out that the campus was once home to a native Indian tribe that did a lot of weaving using geometric designs. I took the different geometric shapes from the SDJA logo to weave together the big bold patterns you see across the sets of banners that were hung all over the campus. The Holiday banners were ten feet wide! (I don't think the indigenous folks worked that big!)

It was a blast doing the early email marketing for Happy Tree Friends shows, events and merch. For a while there, I was cranking out a couple of these emailers a week. The marketing director would give me the basic concept (like a T-shirt sale for 4th of July) and I would write them in the HTF voice (Celebrate Your Right to Bare Arms!) design em and out they'd go. I have tons, if you want to see more, mention it when you drop me a line about working together on something similar (or better yet, something completely different!)

NOTE: I did NOT design the various Happy Tree Friends characters on any of these projects (or other mondo show characters you see on most of the other mondo stuff) I would sometimes tweak, alter or pose them to suit my needs though.

INTERACTIVE

Menus and Buttons and Forms oh my! I guess they call it UI/UX now, but it was always about figuring out how to best enable users/fans to access content in an easy to use, intuitive way.

I remember, in the early days of making interactive kiosks, how excited I got when we figured out a way to create a "glow" around a button when you rolled over it with your mouse and another glow when you clicked it. (this was before Photoshop had "layers", so yeah it was a cool hack at the time) It was so satisfying, I couldn't stop doing it. When we added a simple click sound it really brought the screen to life and added a discernible "weight" to the experience. The screen was really reacting to and confirming my interaction with it. That simple thing kicked off a long term love affair with designing interactive experiences.

Besides the DVD and game menus, I have included a few "minisite" projects. These were stand alone branded interactive executables that were essentially precursors to "apps". These allowed the users to get immersed in an experience including games, and trivia (and even solve murders) that deepened their relationship with a given show or brand.

Interestingly, among the extensive interactive projects presented, one of my favorite pieces is just a simple little gadget that generates random colorful excuses for you when you need one. So if you need a good excuse to get out of that next interview, get a hold of me and I'll hook you up!

NOTE: I did NOT design the characters for the progressive insurance game screens or any of the Happy Tree Friends projects.

DIRECTING, EDITING & MOTION GRAPHICS

In this section, since they are time based pieces, I do have specific notes under each video so you kind of know what you're getting into before hitting play. (and making that 30 second to 3 minute time commitment) But, of course, I do have some general thoughts below, so you can read both, or just one or the other or live dangerously and read none of this nonsense and just press play.

It's always an interesting creative challenge to cut together segments of different shows that vary greatly in tone and style into one unified flowing piece. It involves an intimacy with the content that can only be achieved by watching it over and over again to see what snippets will lend themselves to the overall conversation and move along the "narrative". I found that after putting together lots of these teasers, trailers, promos and sizzle pieces that now, anytime I watched a show anywhere I would automatically note the gags or bits that would work well on their own or as part of a montage. There, I said "montage" I'll put a dollar in the jar, but you'll have to contact me directly to find out if I know what the difference between a teaser, a trailer and a sizzle piece is.

Besides cutting together other peoples stuff, I also love making fun original content. We were the go to shop for doing 3D cinematic work for video games. Game makers would come to us to make the movies that set up the narrative of the game, as well as interstitial animations between levels, and victory/end game movies to celebrate success. We provided the narrative and the rewards for a job well done!

We would also design entire games including all of the cinematics. I was creative lead on most of those projects and I have included a few of the movies I designed and directed even though the resolution of the video is pretty low. (but hey, pretty soon HD is going to seem low res.) So please excuse my chunky pixels and artifacting, or if you have a favorite tool for up-res-ing small video files, hit me up and let me know!

PAINTING & DRAWING

Check out the outfit and hairdo on me in front of the "Budget Cuts" piece! That was part of my MFA show. I wanted someone in the shot for scale and this was the only shot of it before the show started and they started selling. There were 348 paintings, one for every $100 of student loan debt I was to owe. (ha that doesn't seem like a lot now does it?). When a painting sold, it was taken down from the grid and replaced with a copy of the check made out directly to the student loan servicing department, paying down my loan. For a little extra flavor, a lot of the "models" for the paintings were from my high school yearbook, (others done live of family and friends) I particularly like the two "bald" ones! Why just the hair and what does that imply? Well, we can talk about that over some coffee! I'll show you my brain, if you show me yours.

And, Yeah, I put some figure drawing in my portfolio, I'll put another dollar in the jar.

MEZUZOT

Mezu-what you say? Mezuzot is just plural for Mezuzah, there, does that clear things up? Well if you have one in your doorway you know what they are. If you don't, chances are you've seen one and didn't even realize what it was. Mezzuzot are those little tall rectangular-ish things you see hung on an angle in the doorways on some Jewish homes. (Now that I have pointed it out you will start seeing them everywhere, just you wait and see)

A mezuzah is basically a piece of parchment inscribed with the Jewish prayer, "Shema Yisrael" usually contained in some sort of encasement. (usually what you are seeing in the doorway is the case, with the scroll protected inside). I have been exploring the world of ritual object making starting with these mezuzot. I like the idea of bringing the scroll forward and exposing it while still keeping it safe.

One particularly interesting challenge was when I was given the broken glass from a Jewish wedding and commisioned to incorporate it into a mezuzah to be used as a gift for the newlyweds. I really wanted to use ALL of the broken pieces of that glass, but it left me with a scale problem. Trying to fit that much glass onto a door frame without it being too cumbersome and in the way, was proving a difficult task.

This problem lead to the breakthrough idea of actually just including a piece of a door frame into the base of the piece itself, so that wherever it hung, it would essentially be hanging in a doorway. Booyah! That opens up a whole new freedom of form and scale that I cant wait to explore further.

If you want to know more about these pieces, reach out and let me know. If you really really want to know more about mezuzot or ritual objects in general, let me know, and I'll bring my wife, she's a Rabbi!

SCULPTURE, INSTALLATIONS & BOOKS

It's a sculpture, it's a book, it's a sculpture, it's a film! I love blurring the line. Some of these pieces show my fascination with light and some with time and some with both. Some of them apparently just show my fascination with tying things up!

A few of these are what I was call "time based paintings". The full meaning of these free standing multi-panel paintings can only be experienced over time, after having to move through physical space to see all of the sides of the story.

The last shot is one of my favorite pieces. It is called "the Carp". the Carp was the name of an old Toyota corolla wagon I bought from a wharf fisherman and it stunk of fish. This car had been stolen from me three times and recovered, then it was stolen the fourth time and disappeared for good, from this very spot.

This site specific installation consisted of a "crime scene" chalk outline of the car where it was stolen. A car battery powering a car radio cassette hooked up to speakers playing a tape of us driving around in the car that I just happened to have recorded just days before the car got stolen) All of these components were placed where they would be in the car (the radio used to be the thing that got stolen from a car!) And an image of the gold plastic "carp" (we used to use as the mascot for the car) was projected onto the middle of the outline. To add a "chance" element into it, I hung a sheet of used car classified ads just off center of the projector beam and when the wind blew, it would intermittently make the carp disappear.

If you are intrigued or just think it's just a bunch of art school BS, challenge me to a duel! and we can decide this once and for all. Oh, and did I mention that for any other inquiries, I have a contact me page?

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