HellaMike.com!

As most of you know, a while back I entered some photos for a chance for them to be shown in an exhibit here in Houston and two of my photos were chosen!

Well the show, 600 sq mi: Houston, is coming up on Friday October 9th and I’d love to have everyone who can come there.

After the show we’re going to go to dinner at Gravitas which is right by the exhibit. If you’d like to come with us let us know as soon as possible so we can make reservations.

Directions: Take I-45 into downtown and take the Allen Parkway exit and continue on Allen Parkway (going away from downtown) until you reach the first light. Make a left there, at Taft Street. You’ll go through 2 lights, one at West Dallas, the next at West Gray. Once you go through the light at West Gray it is about four blocks up on the left hand side.

The street address is 2115 Taft Street, Houston, TX 77006 if you want to do a Google Map instead of following my lousy directions.

Click the above thumbnails to see larger versions.

Mark Richmond needed a logo, business card and yard sign for his Real Estate business. Mark’s client base is high-end urbanites and he wanted that to be reflected in his logo and brand.

The fonts are nice, clean sleek fonts that reflect Mark’s brand image. The use of green and black is a very contemporary and simplistic color scheme that makes the graphic elements pop.

The business card was printed double sided on high-gloss card stock. The reverse side was Mark’s logo along with his tag line “Real Estate for your lifestyle.” The decision to print the information side vertically instead of horizontally as well as rounding one corner was to make it stand out from other business cards.

Taking The Planet Partner Plus logo from the previous update The Planet needed large booth banners for an upcoming convention. These banners were created in Illustrator and Photoshop and were printed large scale 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall each and will be hung at either end of The Planet’s booth.

I will update this post with a photo of the booth once the event happens later this month.

The Planet logo had already been created but they needed a variant for the sub-brand Partner Plus program to use in branding and marketing of this new program.

#1 I’ve set up a Tumblr. Yes that’s right. a tumblelog. Tumblr is an easy way to share things like links, quotes, photos, videos and more with friends. It’s very basic. There are no comments (unless you use third party pluggins, which I won’t). To me, it’s going to be a way to share. I hope to see some of you there.

I am going to try and post there once a day, at the very least 4 or 5 times a week. I’m still going to blog here, but there will be where I post the cool things that I see online.

#2 I’m a big fan of The Houstonist, which is, in their words, “a website about Houston and everything that happens in it.” Almost anything Ali and I do or go to in or around Houston, we found it because of The Houstonist (Discovery Green, Lucky Burger, and on Friday we’re going to Little Big’s gourmet burger joint). There are similar sites for several cities around the country and the world, I highly advise you to check into seeing if your city has one.

They have a Flickr group where members can submit photos to, and each day they feature a photo on the main page. They also use photos for various stories and blogs they post and they used one of my photos in an article about what’s going on around town for Obama’s inauguration. That’s pretty cool.

#3 A few weeks ago I gave my website HellaMike.com a pretty major overhaul. I am still tweaking various pages but I am very happy with the way it all came together. I am also starting on another aspect of my site which I am very excited about. I’m not going to go into too much detail about it right now, but I will let you guys know when it’s live.

#4 I went back out to the Obama mural on Travis and Alabama street in Houston today to get the picture I wasn’t able to get when I first went out there before the election. I thought that’d be a good way to end this blog on the eve of Obama’s inauguration.

"Hope" on Inauguration Eve

You can see the older ones here.

My website(s) have gotten a bit of a facelift in recent days. One site is HellaMike.com, it was the main site before Sunday. Now it is the portal to everything I have online. It links to my blogs (more on this in a minute), YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter.

HellaMike.com has been updated to version 3.  Version 1 (December, 2004 via http://web.archive.org’s Way Back Machine) was a place holder. I needed web space, but not a site, so I put that up as a joke, and it stayed until the winter/spring of 2006 when version 2 went live. It was a portfolio site, used to host samples of my video and graphic work. Web Archive’s Way Back Machine doesn’t have anything of version 2 which kind of sucks, but version 2 sucked.

Yeah, version 2 sucked. It was up from February-ish 2006 until last Sunday (November 16th, 2008).

Long live version 3! This update has been a long time coming. My portfolio site needed to be updated for a long time and I was either lazy or lazy so it never got updated.

The blogs (yes plural), there is the Danger Blog (this blog, dir) which is my personal blog, but for a while I’ve had a professional blog set up at http://www.hellamike.com/blog that I have hidden from most of you. Well, that’s not true, I just never told anyone about it. But that is where I post the things that I have created, whether they are videos, graphics, or whatever I am working on, that is the place to see it.

It is much easier for me to update my portfolio using a blog then when the site was HTML. You can subscribe to it if you want, but there really isn’t a need to unless you want to see my stuff.

I also want to give a shout out to Raymond Krause at CSS Tinderbox who created the template I used for the main page. I’ve edited it to suit my needs, and I think it looks awesome. He has a number of other templates on his site if you need one.